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--:-- Noelle King: Among the thousands of state ballot measures that passed during the 2022 midterms was Oregon's measure 114. It's a gun control bill. It passed narrowly, 51 to 49 more or less. But it's the law. It requires people to get permits when they buy guns, ensures police keep a database of gun owners, and bans some high-capacity magazines.
--:-- Noelle King: But after the law passed, some sheriffs in Oregon made a declaration. I don't want people that currently have those types of magazines with their guns to be fearful that we're going to just start pulling people over and confiscating them and arresting them for it. They don't like the law. They aren't going to follow it.
--:-- Noelle King: Elected officials, which sheriffs for the most part are, saying they're only going to enforce the laws they feel like enforcing sounds outrageous. But it's happening more and more in the U.S. We'll tell you why coming up on Today Explained.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp. Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not. Why don't you try BetterHelp.com slash Explained? Absolute truth.
--:-- Noelle King: As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Find the one with BetterHelp. The one is not me, guys. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash explain. That's BetterHelp.com slash explain.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Layering is an art form. All it takes is a bit of intention, style, and of course, the perfect cold weather staples. So find the perfect look for you with the help of Macy's Fall Fashion Guide, your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts.
--:-- Noelle King: From leather to denim to cozy knits, find everything you need to piece together your new fall look. Explore the Macy's Fall Guide for yourself and shop in-store or online at Macy's.com. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Maurice Shema is a staff writer for the Marshall Project. He's been looking into the precise role that sheriffs play in a country where most places also have police forces and police chiefs.
--:-- Maurice Shema: A sheriff is different. They've come to have this very distinct role in American law enforcement where almost every county in the United States has one. There's a few states that don't, a few cities that don't, but mostly every county has one.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And then within the county, their role can vary. So in some cities, they're primarily running the jail. They are the kind of warden of the large facility where people who are under arrest are held pending trial and sometimes after they've been convicted.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And then in a lot of America, including, I would say, especially rural areas, the sheriff really is the chief law enforcement officer and is in some ways effectively the police chief, he or she is overseeing the deputies who do the bulk of the policing in the community.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And that's everything from traffic stops to homicide investigations.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Maurice has been tracking the evolution of a group of people who have come to be known as the constitutional sheriffs.
--:-- Maurice Shema: The constitutional sheriffs, there has been a movement that has adopted that term in the last 10 or so years. And they essentially believe that their power and their authority within their counties is greater than that of the state legislature, the governor, Congress, the president, etc., any other level of government.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And they, because of that, argue that their duty is to the citizens that elected them and then to the Constitution.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And what that means at a practical level is that they are choosing to enforce laws based on what they think the Constitution says.
--:-- Maurice Shema: But it comes down to the term meaning essentially sheriffs who police based on their own interpretation of the Constitution.
--:-- Maurice Shema: In early 2020, a lot of governors started to issue lockdown orders. Moments ago, I signed an executive order directing Arizonans to stay home, stay healthy, and stay connected.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And often, you know, the legality of the lockdown orders was contested. People were filing lawsuits. It was a very chaotic time.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And you started to see a number of individual sheriffs in states across the country come out on Facebook, on Twitter.
--:-- Maurice Shema: They often have a really direct line of communication to their constituents because they are effectively politicians.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And they said, I am not going to enforce this law. The governor is saying, you know, close your businesses, close your barbershops, et cetera.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And we're not going to do that. We're not going to arrest anyone who is opening up their shop to customers during the statewide lockdown.
--:-- Maurice Shema: We are not going to ticket anybody who is not wearing a mask.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And they functionally made their own law within their counties when it came to COVID-19 restrictions.
--:-- Maurice Shema: I have no problem informing the governor that I am not going to arrest people or cite him over his illegal orders, unconstitutional orders.
--:-- Maurice Shema: It's not going to happen. The majority of my job is to protect the citizens, civil liberties and their God-given rights under the Constitution.
--:-- Maurice Shema: That's the sheriff's job. And I take it serious.
--:-- Noelle King: Maurice, that's a lot of people. What is the evolution of this? Who does it start with?
--:-- Maurice Shema: It all goes back to a man named Richard Mack.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Richard Mack is a former sheriff from Arizona. He was the sheriff of Graham County.
--:-- Maurice Shema: In the early 1990s, the Clinton administration passed laws that were essentially aiming to restrict access to firearms.
--:-- Maurice Shema: This day is the beginning, not the end of our effort to restore safety and security to the people of this country.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And one provision of that law, which was called the Brady Bill, asked that sheriffs and other local law enforcement officials play a role in performing background checks on people who wanted to buy guns.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And Richard Mack says, I don't want to do that.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And he, in fact, teams up with several other sheriffs and the National Rifle Association.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And they mount this lawsuit where they sue the federal government, and it goes up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court sides with the sheriffs.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Listen to this. This is the order of the court. The federal government may neither issue directives nor command the state's officers to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And basically, Richard Mack in that moment develops a reputation as the sheriff who was willing to stand up to the federal government in court.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And he isn't reelected, but he parlays that Supreme Court victory into a speaking career where he's going around to various conservative groups.
--:-- Maurice Shema: This is around the rise of the Tea Party movement in the late 2000s.
--:-- Maurice Shema: He starts to appear in all of these conservative forums and over time comes to found the Constitutional Sheriffs of Peace Officers Association and become the primary mouthpiece for this idea about sheriffs on their own power.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And so he starts carrying out trainings for sheriffs.
--:-- Maurice Shema: A few states start to say that he can be allowed to train their sheriffs for continuing education credits, to remain, you know, licensed as a law enforcement officer.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And his brand over time builds and builds to the point where you start to hear his rhetoric showing up in all sorts of forums and sheriff elections, debates, what have you.
--:-- Maurice Shema: The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. It has been since it was ratified in 1789.
--:-- Maurice Shema: I don't understand why it would seem radical to uphold the Constitution and abide by it.
--:-- Maurice Shema: We have to trust our law enforcement, our peace officers to protect our rights.
--:-- Maurice Shema: That is the sole purpose of government.
--:-- Maurice Shema: I have seen Richard Mack speak. I've interviewed him over the phone at some length, watched a lot of videos of him talking.
--:-- Maurice Shema: I mean, he is charismatic and he's a good speaker and he's a great deliverer of his message.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Do you know the president of the United States cannot tell your sheriff what to do?
--:-- Maurice Shema: Do you know who your sheriff's boss is?
--:-- Maurice Shema: It's you and only you.
--:-- Maurice Shema: He doesn't report to anybody else.
--:-- Maurice Shema: The governor is not your sheriff's boss.
--:-- Maurice Shema: He only answers to his constituents.
--:-- Maurice Shema: There are many communities where you have a sheriff that feels like they don't have enough resources to do their job properly.
--:-- Maurice Shema: They are the kind of local spokesman for the community.
--:-- Maurice Shema: You know, they try to really keep up with what the community says that they need.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So they're really at the heart of community sentiment.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And then you have a conflict with the federal government and there are going to be conflicts.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So, you know, a lot of land in the Western United States is owned by the federal government.
--:-- Maurice Shema: There are often conflicts with ranchers about grazing rights let say
--:-- Maurice Shema: So these conflicts are inevitable
--:-- Maurice Shema: They often pretty low stakes
--:-- Maurice Shema: But I think that Richard Mack came along at a time and took those conflicts and gave them a more distinct partisan flavor.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So at the same time that these conflicts exist, there's increasing partisanship in America.
--:-- Maurice Shema: There's increasingly no way to see any political figure from sheriff to secretary of state to dog catcher as beyond partisanship.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And Richard Mack was sort of the man who swooped in at that moment and helped give language to these frustrations and sort of bestow these sheriffs with a rhetoric that could help them see their own role in a more partisan and more righteous path.
--:-- Noelle King: Is Richard Mack a dangerous person?
--:-- Maurice Shema: I think that his rhetoric is absolutely dangerous in the sense that he, whether or not he actively thinks that his rhetoric is going to lead to violence, it frequently feels as though it is edging towards it.
--:-- Maurice Shema: You know, when you're talking about ideas and rhetoric, it's easy to call something dangerous, but it's also easy as a speaker to just stay on this side of preaching violence.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And Mack, for his own part, actually claims to preach nonviolence.
--:-- Maurice Shema: He will say things that I think he knows liberals or people on the left would want to hear.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So he'll say that when George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis a couple of years ago that a sheriff in his movement or a sheriff's deputy trained in his way of seeing the world would have potentially intervened and saved that man's life because they would have seen that, you know, the Constitution doesn't condone escalating a situation and killing somebody with a chokehold in the street.
--:-- Maurice Shema: This should have never happened. The peace officers of this country have got to re-examine the way we are trained.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Because this should have never happened to Mr. Floyd and his family.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And of course, it's always easy after the fact to make these claims.
--:-- Maurice Shema: But then on the other hand, he's constantly warning that if our, you know, election system isn't secure, very much repeating Trump's rhetoric here, that you may see more violence because people are so fed up.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So there's this sort of like rhetorical move of almost predicting violence, but not saying you're condoning it yourself.
--:-- Maurice Shema: But it's also ginning up this picture, this sort of apocalyptic picture that violence could be coming down the pike.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And so in a way, I think it's fair to say that it edges awfully close to condoning violence.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for today's show comes from Adio.
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--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained. We're back with Maurice Shema, a writer for the Marshall Project who's been reporting on sheriffs.
--:-- Maurice Shema: which seem like a uniquely American phenomenon, but in fact, they're not.
--:-- Maurice Shema: We inherited sheriffs from England originally.
--:-- Maurice Shema: The term goes back to the phrase shire reeves.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So you imagine a shire being like an equivalent of a county in England at some point, and this was a person who was appointed by the king to collect taxes, do some forms of law enforcement, etc.
--:-- Maurice Shema: That role then came over the United States.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And as we were trying to gain independence from the British crown, we started electing sheriffs to give them more independence from the crown.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So baked into the role at the very outset is a sense of independence and a sense of being closer to the members of a community than people at more sort of higher levels of government.
--:-- Maurice Shema: and over time that develops culturally.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm sure you and I can settle this little matter. I hope you're reaching for a comb or a handkerchief or something because we take a very dim view of bribery in Mayberry.
--:-- Maurice Shema: See, bribery is one of the things we like to watch on account of there ain't much else to do.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So even people who have grown up in cities, if they have any sense of a sheriff, they're maybe imagining John Wayne.
--:-- Maurice Shema: You can keep your guns, Colorado. Thanks, Sheriff. I don't want any trouble.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Well, then don't start any. I won't. Unless I tell you first.
--:-- Maurice Shema: That's good enough.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Or, you know, I grew up with the film Toy Story, Woody, the main character in Toy Story, is a sheriff.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Reach for the sky.
--:-- Maurice Shema: This town ain't big enough for the two of us.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And you have these little folksy phrases you associate with sheriffs, like, you know, get out of my town or grab a rope.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And sheriffs, I think, come to play this uniquely American role that is baked into how Americans see ourselves, which is to say, as very locally oriented.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Tell me, Sheriff Taylor, why don't you carry a gun?
--:-- Maurice Shema: Oh, I don't know. When a man carries a gun all the time, the respect he thinks he's getting might might really be fear.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So I don't carry a gun because I don't want the people of Mayberry to fear a gun.
--:-- Maurice Shema: I'd rather they would respect me.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Perhaps the pinnacle of this culturally is the Andy Griffith show, you know, from 50 plus years ago.
--:-- Maurice Shema: The kind of kindly local figure who, yes, is law enforcement.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Yes he got a badge and gun Yes he incarcerating people in his jail
--:-- Maurice Shema: But the image is also somebody who resolving local disputes you know in a nonviolent way and is the guy you call if your loved one is in some kind of, you know, bad situation, domestic violence, let's say, or severe substance abuse, that the sheriff is the kind of kindly figure who is going to step in.
--:-- Maurice Shema: I will say that I often feel like that image is very white and it's very attached to a gauzy 1950s image of the United States, right?
--:-- Maurice Shema: So frequently you will have these sheriffs who say, you know, I am very close to, one sheriff told me, you know, the heartbeat of my community.
--:-- Maurice Shema: I'm very clued in on what people think.
--:-- Maurice Shema: If, you know, someone's causing a crisis, they call me up just like Andy Griffith and I help.
--:-- Maurice Shema: But because sheriffs tend to be white, they tend to be male and they tend to be conservative.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And And so they're often maybe getting those calls from white conservative constituents.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And at the same time, they often will be policing different communities to different levels.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Chuck Jenkins, the sheriff of Frederick County, Maryland, told me he still watches the Andy Griffith show and really clearly saw himself as like attuned to the local dynamics of what people in his community need.
--:-- Maurice Shema: But at the same time, his department has been sued for racially profiling Latino people in traffic stops and has been accused of being extremely aggressive in teaming up with federal agents to carry out immigration, you know, stings and raids and incarcerate and help detain and deport undocumented immigrants.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So what's presented to us in pop culture is compelling, even you're saying for sheriffs themselves.
--:-- Maurice Shema: But it's not the real story or it's not the whole story.
--:-- Maurice Shema: That's right.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And let's zoom back to the 1960s.
--:-- Maurice Shema: It was sheriffs who were violently and vigorously beating civil rights protesters and pushing back on desegregation efforts.
--:-- Maurice Shema: You go back even further and there are countless examples of sheriffs playing a key role in lynchings.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And going back, you know, 100 years, there are plenty of examples of sheriffs being active members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And now some sheriffs are saying they won't enforce the laws.
--:-- Maurice Shema: They're the laws.
--:-- Maurice Shema: What is the justification for this?
--:-- Maurice Shema: When confronted, what's their answer?
--:-- Maurice Shema: Sir, you are not following the law.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And the sheriff says what?
--:-- Maurice Shema: The sheriff says, well, the law violates the Constitution and I have a higher fealty to the Constitution.
--:-- Maurice Shema: What they don't say is sort of in parentheses, my interpretation of the Constitution, right?
--:-- Maurice Shema: because the Constitution often has very high-flown abstract language.
--:-- Maurice Shema: It's been picked apart and debated.
--:-- Maurice Shema: We have a Supreme Court and a court system that aggressively picks apart the language and all of these pieces of the Constitution and helps us understand whether individual laws violate the Constitution or not.
--:-- Maurice Shema: But the sheriffs sort of curtail that whole process and say, no, I read the Second Amendment as saying no gun control, and that means I'm not going to arrest anybody for owning an AK-47 or something.
--:-- Maurice Shema: I can speak for the sheriff as well as the entire Roosevelt County Sheriff's Office, and we will not enforce any executive order gun ban.
--:-- Maurice Shema: It's the oath of office, and we take it seriously, and we try to live by it at all times.
--:-- Noelle King: Are there places in the country where a sheriff has said, I won't follow the laws, and some higher authority has stepped in and said, no, as a matter of fact, you will.
--:-- Maurice Shema: You are overreaching. It is not your job to decide what laws you will and will not follow.
--:-- Maurice Shema: The movement to resist it is pretty limited.
--:-- Maurice Shema: There was a ballot initiative, actually, that cut the other way in Kansas this year, where basically local county officials would have gained the right to oust a sheriff that they thought was abusing their power in some way.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Now, here are the results.
--:-- Maurice Shema: A vast majority of Kansans say they want to keep electing sheriffs instead of having them hired.
--:-- Maurice Shema: The opposite result happened with a comparable ballot initiative in Los Angeles, just the county of Los Angeles.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Residents of Los Angeles voted to give basically a county board the power to investigate and push out a sheriff that they felt was abusing their power.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So you're seeing a few counties around the country, you know, consider and adopt policies whereby local county officials could exercise some power over the sheriff to sort of push back on abuses.
--:-- Maurice Shema: But it remains very hard to oust a sheriff who is abusing their power in some way.
--:-- Noelle King: How do we fix this problem? What is the solution here?
--:-- Maurice Shema: There have been a handful of solutions proposed.
--:-- Maurice Shema: One is not having sheriffs or having a much more curtailed version of a sheriff or a sheriff who is not elected.
--:-- Maurice Shema: So I think one way of thinking about this problem is the fact that because sheriffs are elected officials, as the country grows more partisan, there's increasingly incentives for any elected official to bolster their ability to get elected through partisanship.
--:-- Maurice Shema: To take one recent example, the sheriff of Bexar County, Texas, which encompasses San Antonio, came out and said, I'm not going to enforce any kind of abortion provisions that the state legislature passes.
--:-- Maurice Shema: I'm not going to, you know, basically police people seeking abortions or providing them.
--:-- Maurice Shema: You can see that he's incentivized in this hyper-partisan moment to kind of score points with his liberal base by saying these sorts of things.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And then flip side of the coin, you have conservative sheriffs basically ginning up their support by casting doubt on the 2020 election.
--:-- Maurice Shema: And in both cases, it strikes me that when you have an elected law enforcement official and you have increasing partisanship, it's just a inevitably toxic mix where policing is going to get infected by partisan ideology to a greater and greater degree.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's show was produced by Hari Mawagdi and edited by Matthew Collette.
--:-- Noelle King: It was engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey.
--:-- Noelle King: Today Explains Fact Checker is Laura Bullard.
--:-- Noelle King: And I'm Noelle King. Thank you.
