In 80 percent of US counties, white sheriffs wield unchecked power, aligning with militias and influencing elections. Democracy hangs in the balance
America’s sheriffs, often seen as small-town peacekeepers, are becoming a major threat to democracy.
In a country where 80 percent of counties are red, and 90 percent of sheriffs are white, a shadowy world exists where these elected officials wield unchecked power, often aligning with far-right militias and potentially influencing the 2024 presidential election.
In her new book, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, journalist and legal expert Jessica Pishko reveals that many sheriffs believe their authority supersedes federal and state laws, a movement gaining traction across rural America.
She details the sheriffs’ roles in perpetuating mass incarceration, their involvement in the “crimmigration” system, and their influence on local elections. She highlights the difficulty in removing sheriffs from office, even when they are accused of wrongdoing.
As the 2024 election approaches, Pishko raises urgent questions about law enforcement accountability and the future of US democracy in the face of this often-overlooked but powerful institution.
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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Putting aside the electoral college in the popular vote, a striking fact emerges: 80% of the counties in the US are red counties, each with a highly influential sheriff. These sheriffs, 90% of whom are white conservative, wield significant power in their jurisdictions.
The extent of this influence was starkly illustrated just this past weekend in Portage County, Ohio. There, the sheriff urged residents to collect addresses of homes displaying signs for Vice President Harris, implying that these households might assist in locating an anticipated influx of undocumented immigrants should she win the presidential election.
In the complex tapestry of American law enforcement, the office of sheriff stands out as a unique elected position. It exerts enormous influence, not just over our communities and justice system, but increasingly, over the electoral process as well. Despite its far-reaching impact, this thread of our democratic fabric has remained largely unexamined, even as it holds tremendous sway over our daily lives.
For many of us, our perception of sheriffs has been shaped by classic western movies: Gary Cooper in High Noon, John Wayne in Rio Bravo. These films painted a romanticized picture of the sheriff as a lone heroic figure standing tall for law and order or a darker picture of the sheriff as an abusive authority wielding unchecked power for personal gain: characters like the corrupt sheriff in Unforgiven or the tyrannical Sheriff Cicero in The Quick and the Dead.
But as my guest today reveals, the reality of modern sheriffs in small towns or in cities, like Los Angeles, is a far more complex and potentially troubling story. My guest, Jessica Pishko, has gone deep into this shadowy world. Pishko is a journalist and lawyer and has become the nation’s leading authority on sheriffs. In an era when debates about policing and justice reform dominate our national conversation, Pishko’s investigation exposes a troubling undercurrent in American democracy.
From the rise of what’s become known as constitutional sheriffs to their influence on immigration enforcement and election integrity, this often-overlooked office has become a flashpoint in our current political landscape. What exactly is the constitutional sheriffs movement, and why is it gaining traction? How have sheriffs aligned themselves with the far-right militia groups, and what are the implications for our communities? And perhaps most crucially, how has the historical role of sheriffs allowed this office to accumulate more power while evading accountability?
Jessica Pishko is a journalist and lawyer. She’s been reporting on the criminal legal system for a decade with a focus on the political power of sheriffs. It is my pleasure to welcome Jessica Pishko here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about the highest law in the land — how the unchecked power of sheriffs threatens democracy. Jessica, thanks so much for joining us.
Jessica Pishko: Happy to be here.
Jeff: It is a delight to have you here. Talk a little bit about the historical role of sheriffs, first of all, something that’s been with us, really, this is almost the very beginning of the republic.
Jessica: It’s true. So when I was researching the book, one of the things I was very curious to find was what was the actual history of sheriff? Most of the sheriff histories that are out there are written by sheriffs themselves. You can find a lot on sheriff websites, and they read a bit like a list of kings. They have a list of all the sheriffs that served in the county and their various exploits.
It turns out that the history of the sheriff is both a little more nuanced than that and also, I think, perhaps much more wrapped up in the history of the United States and its history of racism and colonialism that many people think the sheriff is an office that came from England. So many people point out it’s shire-reeve — from the shire. And the sheriff has always been a local officer. Their main job, to be honest, before the 1800s in the United States was primarily to collect taxes. So if you’ve read the stories of Robin Hood in The Sheriff of Nottingham, he was out there collecting taxes for the good people in order to give them to the king.
In the United States, the sheriff pretty quickly became a symbol of Jacksonian democracy. So, during the 1800s, there was a push to make many more offices, especially local offices, elected. And one of them was the sheriff. And the idea was to let all white men vote for their local sheriff. And as the United States became larger, part of manifest destiny taking over vast laws of territory to the West, the sheriff became more important as a quasi-military official.
The sheriff has crossed a lot of lines, both as a civil official doing things, like still collecting taxes, maintaining property records, also helping people vote. So they were usually in charge of collecting ballots door to door and that sort of thing. And they also began to serve a role both as jailers for holding people up until the point that they might get picked up. So this was an important role for holding enslaved people who might have escaped as well as being a militia force in the West for Anglo settlers who were taking over Native American land.
They did a great deal, especially in California, a lot of work “fighting off” Mexicans who were already living in California and also protecting Anglo settlers from other types of immigrants, especially in the San Francisco area: Chinese immigrant communities, who were very large in doing a lot of labor. And that was how the role of sheriffs became something more like police.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the nexus between sheriffs and police departments as it’s evolved here.
Jessica: The sheriffs are elected by county, which means that they are tied to the land in a way that police departments aren’t. So police departments, when a place forms a city, they can, if they choose, form a city police department. Now, not all cities can afford to set up their own police department, perhaps because of tax base or other reasons. And so, if you don’t have a city police department, you are automatically policed by the sheriff’s office, which I think is something that a lot of people don’t necessarily think about but means that in a way, sheriffs are everywhere. They’re your default policing.
The other thing sheriffs do is that they maintain the jails. So when you have even a city police department, when those police arrest people, they end up bringing them to the jail. And the vast majority of them, around 85% of jails, and in California, every jail is run by sheriff. So those people that end up getting arrested end up in the custody of the sheriff, anyway. So you could think of the sheriff almost as this funnel, where everybody who enters the criminal legal system in essence eventually ends up.
Jeff: One of the other aspects of sheriffs, as I alluded to in the introduction, is there’s tremendous mythology that has been built up around them, both good and bad.
Jessica: That’s right. It’s interesting because I think when you look at sheriffs, first, a lot of people think of fictional sheriffs is the first thing that comes to mind. They think of, as you said, something like John Wayne or they think of Andy Griffith: the friendly sheriff. And the idea of the sheriff being both really good or really bad has been in the culture a long time. So a character like Wyatt Earp, for example, with both an outlaw and a lawman. And I think even today, if you look at current fictional representations of sheriff, some of them are the bad guy who does good anyway. So the sheriff who doesn’t really follow the law but does enact something that looks like justice.
So that can sometimes look good. Sometimes people crave the lawman who doesn’t follow all the technicalities of the law but ends up doing the right thing. And then there’s also the sheriff who doesn’t follow the technicalities of the law and ends up in self-dealing or corruption. The sheriff in The Dukes of Hazzard is the example of the corrupt southern sheriff.
Jeff: One of the unique things about sheriffs, and you talk about this, the idea that they’re elected locally. That in so many cases, they really are reflective of the local culture of the community in which they serve — more so than police, for example.
Jessica: Yes. So this is really important to the mythology of the sheriff: the fact that sheriffs are elected and as a result derive their legitimacy from the people. Now, it turns out that that’s actually more complicated than it sounds, in part, because we know, looking at the results of those elections that over 90% of sheriffs are white men. We know that over 90% of the population is not white men. And second, by looking at the fact that most sheriffs are elected over and over, many serve for decades; overall, they have much longer term than chiefs of police. So I think that this points to the fact that while sheriff claim to derive their legitimacy from these elections, in fact, these elections seem to keep the sheriff stymied in the past and in essence, prevent it from modernizing and being more representative of the people than perhaps some people think it ought to be.
Jeff: One of the things that breaks this mythology is that many of the inherent problems with sheriffs and some of the realities we’ve been talking about are true not just in small towns but even in communities and counties, like Los Angeles.
Jessica: That’s absolutely true. The Los Angeles sheriff… So the recently unelected sheriff, Alex Villanueva, was certainly an example of a sheriff who took the law into his own hands. You might think he was a hero, or you might think he was corrupt, depending on your point of view. I think that’s absolutely correct. And that’s a very large sheriff office with millions of dollars, tons of equipment, lots and lots of people in small cities under his direct control and also to point out: incredibly violent. I think it’s worth pointing out that we do know that sheriffs and their deputies kill a disproportionate number of people compared to city police.
Jeff: And why is that? Why do we see so much more violence in sheriffs’ departments, even than in troubled police departments?
Jessica: Well, I mean, the first say I hesitate to make a strong line that’s like, police are good and sheriffs are bad. So I want to first say I’m not trying to advocate for that. Like all law enforcement, violence is a problem in many places among many types of departments. I don’t want to draw this firm line. I think that what we see in sheriff’s offices and the reason why there is a sense of lawlessness: We do see both, I think more corruption, more systemic violence.
So, like the LASD gangs, that kind of behavior, in addition to what we might call petty corruption as well as this violence, comes from the fact that one, because the sheriff is elected, it is difficult for many counties to hold them directly accountable. So unlike police chiefs who have to report to a city council or mayor, sheriffs report to the county commission — but indirectly. They cannot force the sheriff to do something, and it tends to be rather hard to remove sheriffs.
I also think that sheriffs get to control a great deal of what they do. They get to control hiring and firing to an extent that police don’t. They have control over county jails, as well as other civil functions, which give them more power in terms of the financial benefits that the sheriff’s office gets. And honestly, I also think there’s just a culture of quasi-impunity in sheriff’s offices.
We recently had the sheriff of Riverside County. Well, he said he’s running for governor on the GOP ticket, but he also endorsed Donald Trump for president. And that’s normally something I think that we don’t expect our policing authority to do. And so I think there’s this idea that sheriffs are able to do what they want, and that is highly mythologized and admired. And a lot of officials are honestly worried about going against that for fear of backlash. And we see that in Los Angeles: When county officials tried to hold Villanueva to account, they were harassed, arrested, and had their home searched. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that that would happen.
Jeff: And talk about this constitutional sheriffs movement. What is that? What does it mean?
Jessica: The constitutional sheriffs movement is a group of currently serving sheriff that in essence believe the sheriff is the highest law on the land, as the title of my book implies. They are directly connected to the far-right and the GOP at the moment. And they believe, honestly, quite a lot of what the far-right believes. They’re anti-abortion. They support a lot of ideas of QAnon. And the root of their idea is that the sheriff is the individual who can decide what laws are constitutional and how to enforce those laws.
And the way we see that in day-to-day life for people, for example, might be something like if the sheriff decides that he does not feel like enforcing state gun laws, for example, in California, he might decide that he’s going to issue, let’s say, concealed carry permits to as many people as he feels like it. Or he might issue concealed carry permits to his friends. And in those instances, there might be very little that other citizens can do about it.
If the sheriff in your county decides he does not want to enforce red flag laws, for example, which are laws that remove firearms from domestic abusers or other dangerous people, the sheriff will just opt not to remove those firearms. And there might again, if you are that individual seeking protection, there might be very little that you can do about that. You might not even know that that’s what your sheriff is doing.
Jeff: And we have seen further and further alignment with a lot of sheriffs with far-right militia groups. Talk about that.
Jessica: So there is a direct link between far-right sheriff and militia groups. Much of it comes from a shared history and this what I would call worship of firearms. This is a very important factor to militia groups: the idea that people can own firearms and whatever firearms they want. And the same ideas of constitutional sheriffs, the value, and I think really, like, worship of firearms. And for both groups, the idea becomes in essence, the person who has the most firepower is the person who gets to define liberty.
And indeed, one of the important things I think about constitutional sheriff is not just that they’re in places, like Nevada or Arizona or Louisiana: places where I think people already think, like, the state is rather conservative.
But again, states like California, states like New York, places that are run by Democrats, and yet you have these sheriffs who are very important locally because they support these far-right fringe elements in their county, and they provide a lot of important support and legitimacy to these militias who honestly, when they know the sheriff supports them that makes it easier for them to go into the streets and have open carry demonstrations or protest Black Lives Matter or whatever it is that these militia groups feel like they need to do.
Jeff: Are there fundamental cultural differences in regions in the country? And we look at southern sheriffs a certain way, sheriffs in the West a certain way, in the East. Talk about that.
Jessica: There are important cultural differences in how sheriffs, in essence, came about and their role. This really, and again, this comes from just the great diversity of land in the United States. In the West, there are very large counties, vast swaths of land, and also a lot of land that’s owned by the federal government. And because of that, the sheriff there, I think especially far-right and constitutional sheriffs, have represented a lot of libertarian values. So the idea of private land ownership fights against federal ownership of land, the desire to own firearms, and this what I paint as like a quasi-military quality.
California, when the state was first formed, policing was done by what they called vigilance committees. So a group of people would get together in the local saloon and decide what people needed punishing, like what poor thieves or whatever people were the outgroup at the moment needed punishing. And then the sheriff would collect a posse, go out and take care of those people they thought were a problem.
This was immensely popular in the West. In the East, we have a lot more smaller towns. Sheriffs serve roles alongside a lot of constables and other local policing. So in some ways the role of the sheriff was not as great in terms of policing, and sheriffs have more importance there in running jails. And in the South, of course, we have this idea of the racist southern sheriff: the sheriff who runs their jail, who enforces Jim Crow. And again, well, a lot of this is true. Sheriffs were extremely important in the South and enforcing Jim Crow laws and maintaining segregation and in preventing Black people from voting.
Jeff: We have seen of late a lot of involvement of sheriffs with respect to immigration. What’s happening there?
Jessica: Sheriffs have long been involved in immigration in the past few decades, but this was not something I think that was originally intended. But they have taken over a lot of immigration enforcement. Some of this is because sheriffs run jails, and jails are an important contact point for everybody, as I mentioned, who enters the criminal legal system. When people enter jails, they’re automatically backed to see if they are in some database. They look to see if you have previous warrants or other issues. And one of the things they will look to see is whether either you have been previously deported or if there is a concern with your immigration status.
And some jail sheriffs voluntarily agree to do more immigration enforcement, so they might ask people or do further investigations into people’s immigration status. And then alongside that, sheriff can hold people and then send them directly to ICE. The other thing sheriffs have been doing with the support of the federal government is more policing on the border, especially the US-Mexico border, also the US-Canada border.
And they receive funding from the federal government. It’s a program called Operation Stonegarden that in essence gives money to border sheriffs, even nonborder sheriffs. Actually, you don’t have to be directly on the border to get this funding. And it allows sheriffs to do what they call joint missions with border patrol. And this is because, quite honestly, border patrol doesn’t have enough manpower to do all of the policing that it might like to do. And so sheriffs tend to provide this extra manpower to help police and patrol parts of the US-Mexico border in particular.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about how these sheriffs that in many cases, as you’ve talked about, see themselves as pretty unaccountable, think that they derive this power, that they derive this constitutional power. Where does that come from?
Jessica: In my book and in researching my book, one of the things I argue is that the constitutional sheriff movement really comes from the history of sheriff generally. The constitutional sheriff movement, while not large, has had great success in presenting sheriffs an idea of their own power. The constitutional sheriff movement has emphasized that sheriffs are and can indeed do what they want, that they are a populous form of law enforcement, and they see that reflected in what they do.
Every time Alex Villanueva did something and was not stopped, often, he did things, and no one did stop him. Sheriffs see that and think, “Oh, well, that’s a really good idea. I think I have that power too.” And then it becomes reflected in their day-to-day actions, particularly in their resistance to very normal and typical types of police reform. So an example is something like setting up civilian oversight. In California, there is a specific law that says that sheriff can be subject to civilian oversight in every county.
But we saw sheriffs really resist that. They consistently say, “I don’t need oversight,” or they sued over the law: “Oh, you can’t have oversight over us.” And I sometimes think that this is one of the greatest achievements of the constitutional sheriff movement is to give every sheriff the confidence to say with certainty that they are the highest law. That people cannot make laws that regulate them. This is not true, of course, but it gives them this perception, and for a lot of people, it may or may not be worth their time to counter that perception.
Jeff: We saw a lot of activity on the part of sheriffs during the pandemic when it related to things like mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Talk about that.
Jessica: So during COVID in 2020, this became a great recruiting tool for the far-right sheriff movement and for sheriffs generally because they suddenly found themselves with what they felt like was the power to say that they wouldn’t enforce mask mandates or business closures. With an unusual instance in which sheriffs were able to rise to the fore as the officials most tasked with these health measures, it’s unusual and interesting that sheriffs would be tasked with this.
In part, it’s because as county officials that was part of their role, and in part, it’s because in some counties in California, sheriffs also serve as coroners. So you also had a large number of sheriff-coroners who were spreading misinformation about vaccines and various COVID deaths. And so there was this combined role in which sheriffs were suddenly serving as both political figures and quasi-health officials in which they could both spread misinformation about COVID and vaccines and also claim that they weren’t going to enforce these various health measures.
Jeff: What role do sheriffs play in elections?
Jessica: So under normal circumstances, sheriffs don’t play any role. They sometimes serve as law enforcement. And the most common thing that sheriffs might be called to do is, let’s say, you have an unruly individual at a polling place. You might call the sheriff or other local police to tell that person to calm down or arrest them if they’re committing a crime. When I looked at when people call law enforcement, that is the most common thing. And that makes sense.
What has happened is that as elections, and this issue of election fraud has become more popular on the far right, many sheriffs have started to claim more authority over election investigations than they have. They have started to claim that they not only have authority to generally keep the peace, prevent people from being harassed, but also to serve as some kind of election police, so ensuring that ballots are passed properly, policing ballots, taking it upon themselves to self-police various types of voting procedures, especially early voting or drop boxes.
This is all kind of a myth of the far-right sheriff movement, but sheriff have eagerly taken this on for many of them, again, similar to the ways in which sheriffs were able to make bold claims during the COVID pandemic because this is a popular issue on the far right. It’s something that a lot of voters care about, especially in more conservative places. And the sheriffs have eagerly taken on the idea that “Oh, sure I can police elections too.”
Again, the issue with something like a sheriff’s office that is so flexible and has so much general power is there’s not a whole lot to keep them from taking on more power if they like it, like a mission creep. If they’re already doing all these other things, then why shouldn’t they be policing elections too? A lot of it is, again, just purely political, but it is something that I think is worrisome and dangerous to people because they may believe that their sheriffs have authority. A lot of far-right groups are doing vigilante voter policing, and they tend to go to their sheriff as the most sympathetic individual.
Jeff: One of the things we’ve seen with respect to incarceration is that more and more of their jails become profit centers for their community, for their county. And this creates a whole different set of incentives in terms of incarceration.
Jessica: Yes. So jails have become great sites of lots and lots of people, and we’ve seen in many states as they have tried to decrease their prison population that jails have instead become extremely full and overcrowded. As a result, sheriffs have used that as an opportunity to both A, build bigger jails. And as they say, “If you build it, they will fill it.” So they build bigger jails with the idea that they will either fill it with more people or fill it by renting out the space.
So in many states they can rent the space either to the state to hold people who might otherwise be in state prison, or they can rent that out to the federal government and hold either people who are in immigration detention or people who are being held by the US Marshals for various reasons. And so when they do this, they make money. In some places, sheriffs can also charge a per diem. So they essentially charge like a hotel. If you stayed in a hotel, they charge a per diem to people who stay in the jail.
And some jail sheriffs charge people a per diem to have an upgraded jail day. So if you want your Marriott rewards or whatever, [both laugh] you pay more money to the sheriff to have a nicer jail cell. And this is a way that sheriffs, honestly, they make money via the jail. It gives them quite a lot of power. It makes them also profit centers in the county. For many counties that might be cash strapped, the fact that the sheriff can fund his own department and fund his own jail through charging these per diem amounts is something that makes the sheriff really appealing. It also adds to the power of the sheriff, and it also disincentivizes county officials from getting in the sheriff’s way.
Jeff: The other thing that it does is it allows them carte blanche in terms of abuses at some of these jails as we have seen from one end of the country to the other.
Jessica: That’s correct. At this point, I think that county jails are among the most dangerous places for people to be. We know that people go into them extremely distressed and that people die at very high rates. And quite frankly, jails are where people go because they are in distress. When you get arrested, you don’t get asked for your medical history. You can’t go home and get your medicine if you’re a diabetic.
And a lot of people do go into jail. They may or may not have substance use issues, and they might have other medical problem. And there are unfortunate stories across the country of people dying, giving birth on jail cell floors, people going into withdrawal, people having problems because they don’t have their insulin or other medications that they require, and people in mental health emergencies.
Jails are truly becoming this place that are very, very dangerous. And quite frankly, sheriffs are just not the people most equipped to handle it. In one county, I think Fresno County in California, reporters asked the sheriff about why people were dying in the jails, and she just said, “Well, that happened. People will die.” It’s accepted as something that happens. And I think, in particular, sheriffs as law enforcement have a really gimlet eye towards people suffering in jail. They don’t take their complaints particularly seriously. And again, sheriffs don’t have training in medicine. They don’t have training in maintaining hospital-like conditions or even management. And so you have these sites of people in great distress that are run by unqualified law enforcement officials.
Jeff: Well, one of the things about it is how accepted it is. I mean, it’s no surprise to anybody that follows this even in a tertiary way that places like Fulton County Jail, Cook County Jail, LA County Jail, that these are such dangerous places and yet nothing ever gets done about it.
Jessica: Yes, it is. I agree they are extremely dangerous. I think for one thing, because the sheriff controls the jail, they also control the flow of information into and out of the jail. So in the first instance, it can be very hard to get that information. In the second instance, as we pointed out, it is very hard to force sheriffs to change because they are an elected office. It can be hard to force them to change their jails and the way they run their jails. And I think, unfortunately, the view of jails among many people is that the individuals in jail somehow deserve to be there.
And to that I will point out jail is a place where you go if you’re arrested. A lot of people have not been tried; they have not been found guilty yet. And a lot of people are in jail, quite frankly, because they can’t afford cash bail because they are unlucky. And many of them who are serving perhaps time in jail, they are serving time for misdemeanors and other nonviolent felonies. And they really are not… There are people that maybe shouldn’t be there and that are grossly taken advantage of by sheriff who ultimately are using their jails as a form of profit as a way to enhance their position within the county.
There’s a lot of contracts in jails. You pay for medical care, for linens, for construction, for building maintenance, for HVAC. There’s so many contracts that the sheriff can dole out from the jail, and the sheriff has complete control over how these jails are run. Everything from whether people are permitted to visit their kids or whether they’re required to use video visits.
The sheriff decides if you can hug your children while you’re in jail, to whether you are searched, what kind of searches you have to endure when you’re in jail, what kind of healthcare, and, for example, whether you can go to the hospital if you’re in jail. That’s all decided by the sheriff.
Jeff: Is there any kind of movement, any kind of serious push for reform in a broad sense to the power that these sheriffs have gained from coast to coast?
Jessica: I think that what we’ve seen is that the desire to reform policing has trickled down to sheriff. We have seen across the country, for example, a move to change the office of sheriff through election, for example. So we have seen in places like Los Angeles, where there was a move to vote out the county sheriff who seemed to be abusing his power. This has happened across the country.
And I also think there’s been a push to impose what I would consider basic law enforcement reforms, like civilian oversight on sheriff’s offices. I do think that one of the issues has been that some of these reforms have proven not as successful as people have hoped,. So, for example, voting in a new sheriff, while it does certainly change policies right away, in many places, when you vote in a new sheriff, they can’t just fire everyone in the office. It is hard to make change. And we have seen also that sheriff’s offices and the people in them are very resistant to change. Policing overall is resistant to change and sheriff’s offices even more so.
So I think that it’s been a really difficult road for reform. We’re in this moment where police reform is stagnating to some extent, and we really see that reflected in sheriff’s offices, particularly in places where people are far to the right, and they really see their sheriff’s office as a way for them to assert power, especially in states that are run by Democrats. So there’s this movement locally in a lot of rural areas that look to their sheriff as the politician most likely to support far-right politics.
Jeff: Have we seen sheriffs’ departments large and small gain more and more power as the country has become more polarized?
Jessica: In my view, yes. So I think some of this is part of the spread of the constitutional sheriff movement, which has empowered sheriff to believe that they have more power. One of the things that the constitutional sheriff movement has done throughout the country is they go on the road and have something like a traveling tent revival in which they invite sheriffs and sheriff supporters to come to these various trainings and “teach them how to be better constitutional sheriffs.”
These have been pretty successful in rural counties, often because one, to be honest, trainings for sheriffs are pretty poor in most states. They don’t have actually robust training. And as already pointed out, in most states, there’s almost no requirements to be sheriff. So you do have a group of untrained elected officials to crave information, and then they get this information, like how to support the constitution, which sounds good to most of them.
The second thing is that because sheriffs are on a county level, a lot of these sheriffs are in places with low populations. So you’re a sheriff in a county of two billion people, or you’re a sheriff in a county of 200. And all of them get an elected sheriff equally. So it creates something like the electoral college, a kind of reinforcement of rural power. When you think about it, some 80% of counties in the United States voted for Trump. That’s not 80% of the population, but that means about 80% of sheriffs in the country are in counties where most of the people supported Trump.
So that means you have a lot of sheriffs in places that are pretty far to the right. And even when those sheriffs may not come into office that way, they have people in their counties that are pushing them to support far-right policies. So one of the things you see over and over and over is militia groups or other far-right groups pushing their county sheriff to support these policies, like, either post militias, post various constitutional sheriff, say that they believe in far-right ideas, say that they’ll do election policing. This is something that happens on the local level. Again, because these sheriffs are very accessible local officials in a lot of rural places.
Jeff: Jessica Pishko, her book is The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy. Jessica, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Jessica: Thank you so much.
Jeff: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
