It’s a recent bright winter morning and Steve Ziegler is driving down a neighborhood street just south of Sierra Vista.

“You’re looking side to side, keeping an eye out for anything that might be out of place, but basically you’re showing the flag,” Ziegler said.

These daily patrols in more than a dozen neighborhood watch areas across the county are one of several duties of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Assist Team, an all-volunteer group that, for the last decade, has donated tens of thousands of man-hours to supporting the sheriff’s office.

“People look at this car and they rarely notice that it says assist team on the rear window. They see a sheriff’s unit,” said Ziegler, who is also the operations manager for the assist team.

The dozen or so assist team volunteers that work on patrols are outfitted with decommissioned vehicles formerly used by sheriff’s deputies, minus the sheriff’s emblem on the side and computer terminal on the interior. While assist team (or SAT) members are...