Washtenaw County’s pansexual sheriff plans to combat violent crime with a new Environmental Crimes Unit that will focus on “air pollution, water contamination, and hazardous waste management.”

Sheriff Alyshia Dyer, a former road deputy turned social worker, told the Daily Wire in an interview she plans to prioritize protecting her community “from the negative environmental and human health impacts of pollution and climate change” as well as officer wellbeing during her first term, and she expects those efforts will have a cascading impact on crime.

“It’s all connected,” Dyer told the news site. “Looking at, number one, I talked a lot about officer mental health and wellness. Officers can’t effectively do their jobs if they’re not taking care of themselves. Looking at the environment, looking at corporate polluters, looking at the quality of life for residents, it has a really big impact on wellbeing.”

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The county’s first female sheriff argued a focus on environmental justice and “creating better environments for the community” will help address a crime rate that ranked 10^th among Michigan counties in 2021.

The Daily Wire notes “in each of the following years, the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office reported over 1,000 assault offenses, over 900 larceny/theft offenses, and more than 100 sex offenses.”

In just the first four days of 2025, the county’s Sheriff Data & Information Dashboard shows there was already 14 assaults and six larcenies.

“The sheriff’s office historically hasn’t been necessarily a strong champion in this work, but there’s no reason we can’t be,” Dyer said of her focus on environmental justice.

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Despite the persistent crime, Dyer plans to fix her attention on replacing and upgrading patrol cars, with a potential transition to electric vehicles.

“We have the largest fleet in the county,” Dyer said. “So we’re thinking about moving toward reducing vehicle emissions. There’s another sheriff’s office, I believe it was in Santa Barbara, California, and they put idling reduction systems in their cars, saved 260 gallons of gasoline. Also adding remote starters so deputies aren’t leaving their vehicles running all day, so it’s easy to turn them on and off — things like that.”

Dyer acknowledged the department is short on road patrol officers, who are currently overworked with forced overtime that “has hurt morale, hurt staff, and in turn, has hurt the community.”

She plans to “help reduce vehicle crashes” and “lower stress” for officers by pairing them up in patrol vehicles, effectively cutting the number of vehicles on patrol in half.

“The last thing I want is officers out here sleep-deprived with a gun, angry, driving around,” Dyer told the Daily Wire. “No one wants that.”

Dyer prevailed over two fellow Democrats in the August primary by 400 votes, before winning unopposed in November, making her both the first woman and first pansexual to lead the department of roughly 420 staff and 120 sworn officers.

She was sworn into office in December, when she promised to bring big changes to the sheriff’s office modeled after progressive policies implemented in Ann Arbor, though she did not officially take over until January.

“We must acknowledge the flaws in our system rooted in colonial histories that often promoted using our legal system for racist, classist, and sexist practices which we are still grappling with as a profession today,” Dryer said following her oath of office last month, WEMU reports.

Work is already underway with new community policy teams that will vet potential changes that prioritize inclusivity and social justice. Dyer plans to bring back in-person jail visitation, and create a unarmed community crisis response team to “deescalate potential threats with trained personnel,” Michigan Daily reports.

Other top priorities listed on her campaign website include strict limits on solitary confinement, a gardening program at the county jail, creation of a “Corporate Accountability Crimes Unit,” installing LGBTQ+ affirming policies, an end to “unnecessary traffic stops and ticket quotas,” and measures to “protect our environment.”

“Alyshia has supported Drive Michigan Forward to advocate for undocumented people to be able to get driver’s licenses, signed on to national policy recommendations to protect immigrants, will take hate crimes seriously, and will ensure proper training and policies are in place so our local Sheriff’s Office is not collaborating with ICE,” her website reads.

Dyer told the Daily Wire she’s looking forward to partnering with leftist Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit, who was first elected in 2020 following riots over George Floyd’s death in police custody.

Like Dyer, Savit has promoted a focus on “environmental initiatives in Michigan and across the country” and a soft-on-crime approach to criminals, according to Bolts Magazine.

Both are also big on “wage theft” and “tip theft,” Dyer noted, arguing the corporate crimes align with her focus on environmental justice.

“Hand-in-hand with the environmental crimes is also the corporate crimes,” she told the Daily Wire.