A rather scary report in our estimation
Opposition to stay-at-home orders is the latest example of a history of powerful sheriffs, which stretches back to the end of slavery and the settling of the frontier.
After weeks of closures due to the coronavirus pandemic, New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said Wednesday that retailers and churches in the state may open at partial capacity, but that gyms and salons must stay closed, and that residents must wear face masks in public.
But the 65,000 residents of Chaves County have little to fear should they violate these orders.
“My department will not be out citing anyone for not wearing a mask,” Mike Herrington, the county sheriff, told The Marshall Project on Thursday. “I will not be enforcing any of those orders.” Herrington has already allowed at least one gym, among other businesses, to reopen in recent weeks.
Chaves County—which has reported 30 positive diagnoses of COVID-19, and two related deaths—encompasses Roswell, the town famous for its association with a debunked-but-widely-believed UFO sighting in the 1940s. It’s also one of many rural communities hit hard by the recent economic shutdown; the cancellation of the annual UFO Festival this month potentially deprived local businesses of a million dollars in revenue, according to KRQE.
Herrington is one of at least 60 sheriffs nationwide, spread across more than a dozen states, who are publicly opposing restrictions issued by governors, according to a Marshall Project analysis of news reports and official statements. There are likely many more quietly declining to enforce them.
All law enforcement officers have a great deal of discretion, but the power of sheriffs in particular stretches deep into American history, to the end of the Civil War and the settling of the frontier. This history can help us make sense of their increasingly central role in partisan battles about public health and economic recovery, as they clash with governors through viral Facebook posts and media appearances.
While police chiefs are appointed and thus insulated from politics, sheriffs are elected and many have built their reputations by defying state and federal laws in areas ranging from immigration to gun control. The best known sheriffs in America in recent years, Joe Arpaio of Arizona and David Clarke of Wisconsin, used racially charged criticism of President Obama to become high-profile allies of President Trump.
The stay-at-home orders are just the latest opportunity for sheriffs to get noticed, particularly in states with Democratic governors. (Seventy-five percent of the sheriffs in the Marshall Project count were in such states.) “Very rarely are they able to do things that voters know about,” said Zoe Nemerever, a political science graduate student who studies sheriffs. “Everybody knows about COVID.”
But to truly understand the role that sheriffs are currently playing in the political conversation, it’s necessary to go back much further—all the way to Reconstruction.
After the Civil War, sheriffs assumed the power vacuum left behind by slave owners, according to Douglas Blackmon, author of the 2009 Pultizer-winning history “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” They were empowered by Black Codes to make arrests for congregating in public and being unemployed, and they oversaw the leasing of black prisoners as laborers in an economic system that in effect continued slavery. “Arrests surged and fell, not as acts of crime increased or receded, but in tandem to the varying needs of the buyers of labor,” Blackmon wrote.
Gilbert King, author of two books featuring Willis V. McCall, a violent, racist sheriff in 1950s Florida, found that throughout the civil rights era sheriffs were known members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1960s, Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County, Alabama, famously oversaw the beating of black voting rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. Giving power to sheriffs was in the interest of pro-segregation Southern leaders because it would be much harder for the federal government to track the actions of hundreds of individual counties.
The idea that a sheriff could stand as a bulwark of local control against state and federal laws shifted in the 1970s, from opposition to civil rights to the more arcane intellectual sphere of the Christian Identity movement. Minister William Potter Gale “preached that the Constitution was a divinely inspired document intended to elevate whites above Jews and racial minorities,” journalist Ashley Powers wrote in The New Yorker. This thinking underpinned the “Posse Comitatus” movement of the 1980s, which violently clashed with federal law enforcement while promoting the idea of “sheriff supremacy,” and which, Powers wrote, “cross-pollinated with other kinds of right-wing thought.”
The open racism receded while the idea of the sheriff’s power remained. Although sheriffs generally enforce state laws, in 1994, a group of sheriffs in Arizona and Montana sued the federal government, challenging a law that required them to perform background checks on people who wanted to buy handguns. The Supreme Court ruled in the sheriffs’ favor. One of the sheriffs, Richard Mack of Arizona, went on to found the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which advocates that sheriffs not enforce all laws they believe to be unconstitutional. In 2016, Mack was a prominent supporter of the Bundy family during their standoff with FBI agents over their right to let cattle graze on public lands.
Read more at the Marshall Project
