Four years ago, I drove to a small town in rural Missouri to meet the parents of Billy Ames, who were suing the St. Francois County Sheriff’s Department over his death. An autopsy said the cause of death was a meth overdose, and jailers admitted they had strapped Ames to a restraint chair. While reporting on the case, I learned that other facilities had banned restraint chairs, medieval-looking devices that experts say can make it harder to spot a medical crisis.
I visited the jail and it felt like a dungeon, with moldy walls and little sunlight. The man in charge, Sheriff Daniel Bullock, once joked this place was his personal bed-and-breakfast. He denied wrongdoing and said if I published anything false I shouldn’t come back. I watched my speed as I drove out of town.
St. Francois County has about 67,000 residents, and soon after my story came out Bullock won his 2020 Republican primary with 6,185 votes and cruised to reelection. The Ames family ended up settling for $1.8 million, and former detainees brought a class-action lawsuit over the jail conditions. Then, this past August, Bullock lost in the primary, after more than three decades in power, with just 1,981 votes. The winner received 3,800.
Those numbers reflect voters’ typical lack of interest in sheriff elections. But we ignore sheriffs at our peril. They wield tremendous power over investigations, arrests and policies that can mean the difference between life and death. A CBS News investigation found that in 2022, “more than 27 people died in the custody of sheriffs” for every 100,000 arrested, compared with fewer than 10 in the custody of the police.
Police chiefs are usually appointed in cities, while sheriffs are often elected in counties to be chief law enforcement officers. They can have a vast range of roles, from running the jail to patrolling the streets and securing the courthouse. “In rural areas they are often medics, marriage counselors, and coroners,” writes journalist Jessica Pishko in her recent book “The Highest Law in the Land.”
After reporting in Missouri, I teamed up with political scientists Mirya Holman and Emily Farris on a survey of sheriffs and we heard back from 500 of them — roughly 1 in 6 in the country. Holman and Farris draw on the survey in a new book “The Power of the Badge,” to argue that sheriffs shape how laws around immigration, guns, health and much else play out at the local level, by deciding how aggressively to enforce those laws. Sheriffs determine, for example, whether their deputies check the immigration status of the people they pull over.
Americans inherited the office of sheriff from England, where kings appointed them to enforce orders and collect taxes. The colonists decided to undermine the crown’s power by holding elections. Sheriffs were often among the first elected officials in newly settled territories, and some still evoke the Old West — or at least John Wayne movies — by donning cowboy hats. Less romantic are the shameful chapters when sheriffs facilitated violence against Native Americans and chased Black people escaping slavery.
Sheriffs made a splash in the 1990s, when several joined the National Rifle Association to fight a federal requirement to run background checks on people buying guns, and the Supreme Court sided with them. One of those sheriffs, Richard Mack of Arizona, expanded on his victory by starting the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. The group argues that sheriffs have more authority within their counties than the state or federal government. Scholars call this belief fanciful, but it was held by nearly half of the sheriffs I surveyed with Holman and Farris. Mack’s group has “successfully radicalized a generation of sheriffs to believe that the office has seemingly unlimited power and autonomy,” Holman and Farris write.
This may explain why many sheriffs refused to enforce COVID-19 lockdown orders in 2020, even as some of their own jails became hotbeds of infection. Some later joined former President Donald Trump’s effort to prove that the 2020 election was stolen. According to Reuters, Michigan Sheriff Dar Leaf unsuccessfully asked the courts to let him seize voting machines and “assigned investigators to grill local clerks.”
Trump is a big fan of sheriffs and often appears with them at rallies. While in office, he brought them to the White House, and encouraged them to help the federal government arrest, detain and deport undocumented immigrants. If Trump is reelected, he will likely try to reinvigorate these partnerships.
Many sheriffs — who remain disproportionately White and male — appeal to conservatives through aggressive rhetoric on immigration. Recently, a few have been trying to court progressives: A couple of Florida sheriffs told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that they won’t help Trump deport undocumented immigrants.
Two years ago, Sheriff Javier Salazar of Bexar County, Texas — which encompasses San Antonio — responded to the overturning of Roe v. Wade by announcing on Facebook, “I will not persecute Texas women.” As more states pass laws criminalizing reproductive health care, sheriffs will undoubtedly play a role in deciding who faces investigation and arrest at the local level. In states where abortion remains legal, they already exert control over whether people can access such health care from jails.
So it’s worth your time to look up your local sheriff and see whether he or she is up for reelection this year. Given how many people ignore these races, your vote may have outsize influence over how all sorts of policy questions play out in your community. Consider that Bullock won his first primary race in St. Francois County, in 1992, by just 22 votes.
