Grand Traverse Sheriff's Office lieutenant promoted

Elizabeth Brewer, The Record-Eagle, Traverse City, Mich.
·2 min read

Jul. 9—TRAVERSE CITY — After serving Grand Traverse County for 22 years, Brandon Brinks is now officially captain of the sheriff's road patrol division.

Brinks first joined the department in the summer 2001 as a part-time marine deputy. He has never worked for any other agency.

After working as a road patrol deputy for nine years from 2002 to 2011, Brinks said he was promoted to the role of sergeant. Then he was promoted to lieutenant of road patrol division in 2022.

"Having been a supervisor for 12 years — being a sergeant, lieutenant, dealing with the marine division for awhile — I've just had a lot of experience in terms of the patrol aspect of our department," he said.

Brinks will take over his new role from Capt. Chris Clark, who will now be the sheriff's detective bureau captain.

"I have big shoes to fill," Brinks said. "He's been here a long time. He's really really good at it."

These new positions come after longtime sheriff's office detective bureau Capt. Randy Fewless retired at the end of May.

With this new position, Brinks said he hopes to continue offering classes to the community "to, hopefully, do some more interaction with the community and more education."

As a lieutenant for the department, he introduced a series of fraud awareness classes taught by community police officers.

Now as a captain, he said he'd like to introduce classes that will focus on safe driving techniques for high schoolers, especially after the new hands-free cellphone law took effect.

"There's a safe driving program that one of the deputies has gone to training for, I think it's something that would be good for educational [programing]," he said. "I think it would just be helpful, education wise, to be able to sit down, face-to-face, and have conversations with people, and allow people to ask questions in a group setting."

By doing so, he said these course will hopefully make the roads a bit safer in the community.

Looking ahead, he said he's excited for what his new role will bring and helping the department plan for the future.

"This department has been great to me," Brinks said. "It's been a great career, and it's not even a career that I aimed to get into from the very beginning, but I have absolutely zero regrets."