For the second year in a row, Audrain County was awarded a Blue Shield designation.

Communities with a Blue Shield designation are eligible to receive reimbursement grants for the purchase of equipment, training and technology for law enforcement agencies. The Blue Shield Program was created by Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe in 2025. In the program’s first year, 201 counties — including Audrain County — qualified and were awarded a $50,000 grant.

“The Audrain County Commission commends the fine work the men and women of the Audrain County Sheriff's Department provide for our residents day in and day out,” Leslie Meyer, Audrain County associate commissioner, said in an email. “They are committed to Audrain County, and that commitment is reflected with a designation such as this one.”

Audrain County Sheriff Matt Oller said law enforcement agencies must prove they are focused on public safety and taking steps to improve it by working with city and county governments.

“We’ve been very fortunate through the years that our commission and our elected officials and the sheriff’s office have had a really good relationship,” he said.

During the application process, Oller used the municipalities meetings as an example of a community-based program in Audrain County.

“One of the things that the county commission did was they established the municipalities meeting program where they got all the municipalities together,” Oller said. “Whenever a law enforcement thing came up, the Sheriff’s office participated in that.”

According to Oller, the Audrain County Sheriff’s office used some of the grant money to replace body-worn cameras last year. He estimated approximately $20,000 was spent replacing 35 body cameras.

“Some of those were getting end of life into service, some of them were starting to have problems, so we decided that a good use of that money would be to upgrade our decade-old body worn cameras,” Oller said.

Another big portion of last year’s grant was used to pay data transfer fees with the National Crime Information Center. Oller said the NCIC is a “criminal justice information-sharing system,” and it allows officers to run queries from the mobile data terminals in patrol cars.

“It’s just like your cellphone — you’ve got to pay a cellphone bill,” Oller said.

He estimated $21,000 was spent on those fees that normally come out of the county’s budget.

The rest, Oller said, was used for digital forensic evidence-gathering tools, specifically Cellebrite, which is the machine the sheriff’s office’s dedicated digital forensic detective uses to extract data from cellphones.

This year, the replacement of aging portable two-way radios for deputies is at the forefront of Oller’s mind. In the last six months, three radios sent in for repairs were returned because the parts are no longer available.

“It’ll be over multiple years, but now we need to look at starting to replace $4,000  and $5,000 pieces of equipment that just cannot be fixed,” Oller said.

There are always projects going on in the background, but Oller said the grant money is more of a maintenance thing. When he knows how much the Audrain County Sheriff’s Office will receive from the grant this year, it will discuss the best use for the money.

Beyond the grant money, a Blue Shield County designation also gives Oller peace of mind.

“I think it gives me the satisfaction of knowing that somebody looked at our sheriff’s office, our county commission and our relationship as a whole and said, ‘You guys are doing it right,’” Oller said.

“Becoming a Blue Shield County means the sheriff's department has reached superior levels of service and works as a team across the board with all county and local offices,” Meyer said. “We are proud to be a Blue Shield County and are extremely proud of our deputies.”