It’s The 21st Century And County Sheriffs Are Still A Law Unto Themselves

The Wild West we all imagine contains two forms of law: the brave people who’ve decided to be sheriffs. And the vigilantes who perform frontier justice when not cashing in bounties while ignoring the enshrined civil rights (the Constitution came out ahead of the Wild West, non-American folks) of the people they beat, tortured, threatened, and (if my movie recollections are accurate) tied to the back of their horses and drug to the nearest town.

A couple hundred years later and nothing’s changed but the entities performing the majority of rights violations. Bounty hunters still exist but rarely make headlines. Sheriffs, however, are still treated as kings among men, capable of doing all sorts of evil while rarely being subjected to even the very low bar of accountability we apply to regular cops.

In most locales, sheriffs are elected. That means they can’t be fired, only voted out. And if voters either don’t care how awful they are or just like placing a checkmark next to a name they recognize, they’re able to hold power for years, if not decades.

They don’t get better with time. Most people who hold jobs for years tend to get at least a little bit more competent. The zero accountability system sheriffs are (um) subjected to tends to result in increased corruption and misconduct on a year-over-year basis. When the only threat to your job is the occasional opponent every few years (and lots of sheriffs run unopposed), there’s almost nothing preventing a sheriff from becoming the worst version of themselves.

This is only a small sampling of abuses performed by sheriffs and their employees we’ve covered over the past several years at Techdirt:

• Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio became famous for forcing inmates to wear pink clothes, routinely violated rights of anyone not immediately appearing to be white, and facing multiple criminal charges ranging from contempt of court to obstruction of justice. Even after he was voted out of office, Arizona taxpayers were still paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements on his behalf.
• Alabama sheriff Todd Entrekin was caught buying a house with funds meant to be used to feed inmates. He responded by having the tipster who provided this information to journalists arrested.
• And he wasn’t even the only sheriff in Alabama to do this. Sheriff Greg Bartlett spent years making himself richer by taking control of unused prison food funds. While in court for basically starving the inmates he was overseeing, the sheriff paid the grandson of one his biggest critics to install a keylogger on her computer.
• The Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department — the biggest in the United States — has spent years employing self-avowed “gang members:” deputies who pride themselves on breaking laws and violating rights. It has been overseen by a succession of supposed “reformer” sheriffs who have yet to affect any meaningful reforms, which means “voting the bastards out” just means voting a different bastard in.
• Sheriff Thomas Dart made a name for himself by pretending to be a force multiplier in the war against sex trafficking. On a far more granular, far less glamorous level, he was violating rights en masse by refusing to release people who had actually made bail.
• Georgia Sheriff Jeff Hobby cost his constituents $3 million by performing illegal searches of 850 high school students.

As I said, that’s just a sampling. There’s plenty more abuse and horror to be observed here at Techdirt. But we’re going to move on to this report from CBS News, which details even more abuse and horror while tacitly questioning why we, the people, continue to accept this sort of thing as an acceptable byproduct of both the legal and electoral system.

The headline makes the biggest point before it delves into the details. What’s the ultimate rights violation? The unjustified killing of a person. According to the data gathered by CBS News, sheriffs offices have pulled far ahead of other law enforcement agencies when it comes to ending people’s lives.

CBS News gathered and analyzed federal law enforcement data that showed while more people died overall in encounters with city police, deaths in encounters with county sheriffs occurred at a significantly higher rate. For every 100,000 people arrested, more than 27 people died in the custody of sheriffs, while that number was fewer than 10 for police officers in 2022, the most recent year of available data. 

To be fair (a phrase I’m pretty sure I’m misusing here), sheriffs offices have far more opportunities to kill people. Unlike other US law enforcement agencies, sheriffs offices also tend to run the local jails. So, perhaps it’s not surprising county sheriffs are killing more people than regular cops. Not that this makes it OK. But it would explain some of the distance between the steady killing performed by beat cops and the comparatively exorbitant death rate racked up by sheriffs offices.

On the other hand, people being held, detained, or imprisoned are just as deserving of staying alive as random people out in the free world. However, this nation has also accepted the steady abuse of inmates as part of the cost of doing criminal justice business, so these deaths tend to be overlooked unless they’re especially horrific and/or result in large monetary settlements.

As the CBS report points out, sheriffs offices (and officers) are twice as deadly as they were a decade ago. Perhaps the only thing that explains this jump in deadliness (compared to regular cops killings which have remained pretty much flat over the same time period) is the realization of certain law enforcement officers that the employment option with the least accountability is working for the county, rather than the city or the state.

The other thing contributing to this jump is the fact that sheriffs offices are handling even more of the law enforcement workload in recent years. As smaller communities cut staff and/or disband police departments, sheriffs offices are patrolling bigger areas with greater frequency.

But it’s unlikely the workload of sheriffs offices has doubled over the past decade. So, the real answer is probably the other thing: an area of law enforcement that has been allowed to be a law unto itself pretty much since its formation and one that is in no hurry to give up the power and discretion that comes with that leverage. As even the former head of the nation’s largest sheriffs union admits, sheriffs who are convicted of crimes cannot be forced to leave office and will often continue to do so until voters actually vote them out.

Given this dearth of accountability, it’s unsurprising sheriffs offices and officers are responsible for most of the killings by law enforcement officers in America.

It’s also unsurprising that it has led to horrors like the ones detailed by CBS News:

In recent convictions: A South Carolina sheriff and deputies arrested a man under false pretenses, stole from the county then falsified records to cover it up. A Georgia sheriff abused pretrial detainees. A “Goon Squad” of white Mississippi sheriff deputies tortured Black men. A Nebraska sheriff deputy ran a multimillion dollar fraud scheme. A Northern California sheriff accepted bribes to grant gun permits to political donors. There are also ongoing cases that involve charges ranging from excessive force to unlawful restraint and sexual assault, gang activity, kidnapping, obstruction of justice, and harrassing a racial minority in order to drive them out of the county. The list goes on with countless other allegations, like in McCurtain County, that have not been charged.

Here’s what happened in McCurtain County:

In McCurtain County, Oklahoma, Sheriff Kevin Clardy was caught on audiotape in March of 2023 talking with other county leaders about how they might kill and discreetly bury the bodies of two local journalists who had written stories about alleged corruption inside his office, among others.

So, what’s the solution? Well, the most immediate fix would be to convert the position of sheriff into one that’s answerable to the city or county employing them. Sheriffs would be hired, rather than elected. Admittedly, this would only place them on the same playing field as other law enforcement officials, which means accountability would still hover near zero, but at least would provide options to remove someone from their position that would not require waiting for the next election cycle and hoping for the best.

But that’s something that would be hard to put into place given the long legislative history that created and pretty much enshrined the elected position of sheriff. But it can be done. Two states have already eliminated this elected position. And they did it for exactly the sort of misconduct detailed in this investigation:

Only Alaska and Connecticut don’t have any sheriffs; the latter abolished the position two decades ago due to high-profile corruption scandals.

The other option for reform and accountability is the Department of Justice. But it has gone after local law enforcement agencies for years with limited results. Settlements have been made and agreements put in place to reform misbehaving police departments, but there’s always another one out there just begging for the same sort of consent decrees. While reform may eventually happen under years of federal oversight, the deterrent effect — if there is any — is completely undetectable.

The best bet is to rewrite the laws to make sheriffs accountable not just to voters, but to the other people voters have elected, like city officials. Otherwise, we’re just asking allowing sheriffs to pretend it’s still the Wild West, where they’re free to kill people at an alarming rate and violate their rights on the regular without experiencing anything even remotely approaching a repercussion.