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Charles S. Blackwood

Charles S. Blackwood

Sheriff, Orange County

Sheriff Blackwood is a 43-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Office. He was elected as the 47th Sheriff of Orange County in 2014. After becoming Sheriff, he graduated from the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association’s Sheriffs’ Leadership Institute, a course for newly elected sheriffs that he helped develop. 

Blackwood serves as the Chairman of the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association’s Executive Committee and previously served as that Association’s President. Governor Roy Cooper appointed Blackwood to the North Carolina Governors’ Crime Commission, named him Vice-Chair of that Commission in 2020, and appointed him to the Commission for Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services. Blackwood is Vice-Chair of the North Carolina Justice Academy Joint In-Service Training Committee, serves on the North Carolina Responder Assistance Initiative Technical Advisory Committee, and was named to the SBI Center for the Analysis of Police Use of Force and the Advisory Committee for the Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice. Blackwood serves on multiple local committees. He is an advocate of the recovery community and works to examine and develop innovative ways to address the opioid epidemic, drug misuse, and mental illness, and received the Dogwood Award from Attorney General Josh Stein for this work. In 2012, he was awarded the Order of the Long Leaf Pine.