Biography - Sheriff Gil Gilbertson
Gil Gilbertson, Josephine County Sheriff
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Gil Gilbertson has approximately thirty-years of national and international experience as a law enforcement officer, trainer, advisor, and senior administrator, in both military and civilian police units.
A veteran of Viet Nam, he has served in the U.S. Navy, Air National Guard, Army National Guard, and the Army Reserve.
From 1975 to 1991 Gil was patrol and traffic officer, member of the special weapons tactical team, bomb squad, field-training officer, recovery diver, dispatcher, and jailer for the Waterloo, Iowa Police Department.
Between 1975 and 1996, Gil also served as a professional law enforcement instructor and advisor for the Special Tactics Association and the International Law Enforcement Training Group. He was certified as an instructor or expert in 53 areas of law enforcement, including testifying as an expert witness in "Use of Force" litigation. He has trained literally thousands of police personnel in universities, colleges, police academies, and in military units worldwide. He is also the author of several training manuals and the creator of a policing evaluation software program used in the development of police departments.
Beginning in 1996, Gilbertson served as the senior liaison for the International Police Task Force at Task Force Eagle, the American contingent of troops supporting the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This was a country suffering from anarchy and a bloody civil war. Gilbertson later took charge of an intelligence fusion center sharing information between the International Police Task Force and N.A.T.O.
In October 1998, Gilbertson was sent to Kosovo under direction of the U.S. Department of State. He assumed the position as Chief of Operations for the United States Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission. His responsibility was to monitor police and military activity in accordance with the Dayton Peace Agreement. Recall that Kosovo was also a country in the midst of a violent war of ethnic cleansing.
Later, Gil took command of one of the four police stations within the capital city of Pristina, a city that exploded from a population of 250,000 to 750,000 within months. Anarchy and crime were the norm, not the exception. Despite this chaos, civil order was largely restored within two years. In this capacity, Gil supervised approximately 350 personnel.
From 2002 to 2004 Gilbertson took command of Kosovo’s National Highway Patrol as Chief of Traffic supervising 500 officers who patrolled an area three times the size as Josephine County with a population of over two million.
In 2005, Gil spent a short tour in Iraq advising the local bomb squads, and a national highway patrol. Later Gil joined a tactical team in New Orleans to secure and defend hospitals that had come under sniper attack in the chaos immediately following hurricane Katrina.
January of 2007, Gil was elected as Sheriff of Josephine County.
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