Counties across the country will elect their top law enforcement officers on Tuesday.
It’s a unique system: While communities in the U.S. and in virtually every nation appoint their police chiefs, experts say, most American communities with a sheriff elect someone to hold the position. In fact, some state constitutions even require it.
Sheriffs’ duties vary: Across the South and in rural counties, sheriff’s departments are traditionally the main source of law enforcement. In suburbs and cities, they often run county jails, serve court papers and perhaps are in charge of an ambulance squad.
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Supporters of electing sheriffs say the process makes them more accountable to the public, upholding the American tradition of checks and balances by providing a counterweight to police chiefs and the politicians who appoint them. Detractors, including legal scholars, contend the system makes sheriffs too susceptible to the whims of public pressure and voters’ fear of crime, especially each election cycle.
All but four states either mandate or allow for the election of sheriffs, but standards for the job vary county to county and state to state. With voters headed to the polls and Sheriffs Joe Arpaio and David Clarke perennially in the headlines, U.S. News looks at how this way of doing things came to be — and what it means for the justice system.
Where does this system come from?
British colonists brought the concept of sheriffs to the American colonies. Around 1,000 years ago, “reeves” were charged with patrolling and collecting taxes in British shires. These shire-reeves eventually became known as sheriffs.
The elected position appears to have officially taken root stateside in 1651, when colonists in Virginia first chose a sheriff. The practice of electing sheriffs spread from there.
If towns and cities are appointing police chiefs, why should we still be electing sheriffs?
The National Sheriffs’ Association, which represents some 3,000 sheriffs, “strongly supports the concept of an elected office of sheriff,” says Greg Champagne, the association’s president and the sheriff in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, where voters re-elected him to a sixth four-year term last year.
“We don’t want anybody to have too much authority,” he says. “So as opposed to a sheriff being appointed by a mayor or city council and being beholden to that city council, we are beholden to the people. We see our bosses as the citizens that elect us.”
Being forced to think about re-election every few years, Champagne adds, is “not necessarily a bad thing: We know the public’s going to re-elect us if we do our jobs in a fair and constitutional manner.”
What do critics say?
There’s little to no research that examines elected versus appointed sheriffs, partly because there are so few appointed sheriffs for comparison. But there are things we do know that concern some scholars: For one, just 41 sheriffs are women, according to the National Sheriffs’ Association.
And while the association says it does not keep track of sheriffs by race, legal scholars believe the vast majority of elected sheriffs are white — reflecting the broader makeup of law enforcement generally, as well as the ranks of sworn personnel in sheriff’s offices, which federal statistics show were nearly 80 percent white in 2013.
That also closely follows the trend among elected prosecutors, 95 percent of whom were white in 2014, and 83 percent of whom were men, a report by the left-leaning Women Donors Network found.
Other trends among elected prosecutors and judges may offer insight into sheriffs, too, suggesting elected law enforcement officials get more “tough on crime” as re-election approaches.
In re-election years, for example, judges are more likely to “impose longer sentences, affirm death sentences and even override life sentences to impose death,” according to a 2015 analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
Defense attorneys, likewise, are more likely to accept a tougher sentence during a plea bargain when their case is assigned to a judge who’s facing re-election, a 2013 analysis of elected prosecutors in North Carolina showed.
The same analysis found prosecutors are more likely to bring a case to trial, rather than seek a plea deal, in the year before their own re-election.
“The evidence seems to suggest that judges who are elected feel the pressure from being elected, and feel they might not be able to support certain types of causes or stand up to the public when there are some difficult cases,” says David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University in Minnesota. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we found something similar among elected sheriffs: that they feel they may have to do certain things to get re-elected the next time, which may be more supportive of majoritarian interests than of minorities and people of color.”
But, he adds, “This is partly speculative, because we don’t have enough controls here.”
There are examples of how potent public sentiment and the fear of crime can be: A looming primary election for Mike Nifong, the district attorney who prosecuted Duke University lacrosse players on false rape charges in 2006, was cited as a factor in Nifong’s wrongdoing by the head of a disciplinary panel that ordered him disbarred. In Wisconsin in 2008, a challenger for a seat on the state Supreme Court unseated the incumbent — who is black — after falsely suggesting the sitting justice had helped free a black rapist.
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“They’re less protected from public opinion,” Schultz says, referring to elected judges and prosecutors. “There’s no reason to feel that sheriffs don’t feel the same types of pressure.”
But Champagne, of the National Sheriffs’ Association, rejects that suggestion. Police chiefs might be appointed, but the mayors and council members that appointed them still have to run for re-election, and that exposes chiefs to just as much pressure, he contends.
“We have an old saying in Louisiana: You can’t take politics out of politics,” Champagne says. “We all have to deal with those pressures.”
Yet while elected justice officials theoretically are held in check by needing to maintain the support of their constituents, some experts argue that voters — perhaps not well-versed in even the most prominent political issues and campaigns — can often also be ignorant when it comes to more localized, nuanced races.
“You don’t get popular control out of this,” Steven Schier, a professor of political science at Carleton College in Minnesota, told T he New York Times in 2008. “When you vote with no information, you get the illusion of control. The overwhelming norm is no to low information.”
What qualifications do sheriffs need to have?
Some counties require sheriffs to have the same certification as police officers. Others mandate a certain amount of law enforcement training, and perhaps set fitness requirements. Yet others set no standards at all. In Oklahoma, candidates for sheriff in all but the largest counties by population don’t need to undergo training until after they’re elected. In Virginia, a candidate merely needs to have been a Virginia resident for a year, live in the county where he or she is running and be a registered voter.
Sheriff’s deputies — the officers patrolling the streets or working in jails or serving papers — still go through police academies and rigorous training. But allowing someone with no law enforcement background at all to run a department worries some.
“They’re responsible for the jails, for bringing the prisoners to court,” says Maria Haberfeld, a professor of police science who specializes in law enforcement training at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “It’s not just about checks and balances. To be accountable to the public, it’s about knowing what to do, and what you have to do. How would you know what to do? All the balances go out the window, as far as I’m concerned.”
Champagne disagrees. For better or worse, even the most powerful elected offices have the barest minimum requirements, he contends. Why should sheriffs be any different?
“At the National Sheriffs’ Association, we obviously promote the highest standards. We promote training. But as far as the minimum qualifications for office, we haven’t weighed in on that, because I have seen sheriffs with little to no training who have surrounded themselves with great people, and sheriffs with all the training in the book who are terrible,” Champagne says. “The most important thing is integrity and ethics in the profession.”
A former assistant district attorney, Champagne himself had no formal police training before he was elected.
“Sheriffs kind of look at it like civilian control over the military,” he says. “We have to trust the people that they’re going to look at the choice of candidates and pick who’s the best qualified. We all know the public makes mistakes sometimes, but it’s a democratic process.”
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Joe Arpaio, David Clarke and Why the U.S. Still Elect Sheriffs originally appeared on usnews.com
