Some More News - SMN: Maybe We Don't Need Sheriffs

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

Hi. In today's episode, we talk about who sheriffs are, what they do, why they face so little oversight, and propose that we maybe don't need them. Get your MAYBE COPS SHOULDN'T HAVE GUNS merch here: https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/254... Check out our new compilation series, CODY COMPS here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... Please fill out our SURVEY: https://kastmedia.com/survey/ Check out our new series SOME THIS! - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... Support us on our PATREON: http://patreon.com/somemorenews Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/some... SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh Executive Producer - Katy Stoll (@KatyStoll). Writer - Lon Harris (@Lons). Directed by Will Gordh (@will_gordh). Edited by Gregg Meller (@greggmeller). Graphics by F. Clint DeNisco. Head Writer - David Christopher Bell (@MovieHooligan). Producer - Jonathan Harris. Researcher - Marco Siler-Gonzales (@mijo_marco). Associate Producer - Quincy Tucker (@quincyrashard). Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqego... Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-mo... Stop wasting time and start saving money when you use http://stamps.com to mail and ship. Sign up with promo code MORENEWS for a special offer that includes a 4-week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Maybe We Don't Need Sheriffs Source list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s... Support the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

are you ready for news oh yeah news hold on i have misplaced the news where do you live news where are you going okay loose weed loose weed loose weed loose weed loose we, loose weed. Ah! Ha ha! This must be news. Just gotta brush off whatever this green stuff is. And dear God! It's my least favorite type of news. A brief note to me.

Dear Beard Baby, we have your news. I don't believe it! It's that notorious outlaw Mickey and his early rider gang. They rustled the news, or possibly wrassled it. Damn, my criminal nemesis that I've always had this whole time. You know, it's true what they say without backing it up with statistics

or factual information. Crime is on the rise. I blame violence in movies, but only one movie. I won't say which one, but we all know the one. Clearly the police are not going to intervene and help save our news, nor do I want to call them, what with all these other crimes lying around my home. So if we're gonna clean up News County,

I'm afraid there's only one thing to be done, and that is take the law into my own hands. No, not by becoming a vigilante and dressing up in a costume and going out at night to strike fear into the hearts of criminals before being confronted with my own culpability and escalating the lawlessness. I'm talking about becoming a legal vigilante, AKA a sheriff.

I mean, yes, I'm aware that whenever we report news about sheriffs, it's almost always something terrible, like sheriff's deputies joining criminal gangs and then covering it up, or molesting and forcibly baptizing people during routine traffic stops, which that was a real thing. That's not a nightmare I had

after smoking too much loose weed, apparently. Oh, damn, that is really bad. But look, surely there are also some benefits to having some local law enforcement that's not part of the police department and doesn't answer to city bureaucrats. Sheriff's departments traditionally help out in smaller towns that don't always have access

to big city police for a low level crime or like if a shark attacks on the 4th of July or a different shark attacks years later and you have to electrocute it, or a really big shark attacks your son at SeaWorld or follows your wife all the way down to the Bahamas. The point is that sheriffs are often depicted in film and TV as an intermediate

between an uncaring law enforcement system and the local community. They are portrayed as one of us, simply trying to keep the peace despite the derision of the townsfolk. They're your Sheriff Bartz, your Rick Grimes, your Seth Bullocks, and of course, Woody. You love Woody! He's Inferno's Thomas Hanks, the most Captain of Phillips. He fought a volcano! So surely there's some value to the position of a sheriff.

I mean, I've never finished one of my own episodes before because they're so long, but I assume whenever we tackle one of these decades old systems of government control and bureaucracy, it usually turns out that they reinforce and incentivize positive behavior that benefits everyone, right?

Right. So even though it might seem like a sheriff is just a chief of police with a near total lack of oversight and extremely vague broad mandates, I bet if we dive a little bit deeper, we will find a lot of compelling evidence of the value of sheriffs and also a lot of good reasons

that I, as in myself, should become sheriff. You know, after a lot of hard work, of course. I'm sure the training is rigorous and thorough and there's some kind of bootcamp or, You know, after a lot of hard work, of course. I'm sure the training is rigorous and thorough and there's some kind of boot camp or, you know, let me just, I'm just going to look it up right now. I'm so pumped for this. You can just apply online. Oh, they do not have a lot of requirements. They do not have a lot of requirements. Maybe we don't need sheriffs. Okay, well, Mickey and his early rider gang can wait

because we have to talk about sheriffs now. And like, what are they? What do they do? Are they any good or are perhaps not good? As it turns out, it is very easy to get extremely basic and one-sided information about this job because current sheriffs love to talk about how being sheriff works

and the history of sheriffing. Hey, did you know that the term sheriff comes from a combination of the word shire, meaning local community, and reave, meaning an official who collects taxes and enforces the king's orders? Turns out, this is the number one favorite sheriff fact among sheriffs. To understand the origin, we must travel back to what is known today as England,

where the term reef referred to a chief or leader, and the term shire described groups of hundreds of people banded together, which is what we would today call a county. The word sheriff is derived from the shire reed, which hails back to England, where the land was divided into geographical areas called shires. The history of the office, we can go back at least to the year 890 A.D. So we're talking 1,100, 1,200 years ago. King Alfred was on the throne, and he wrote this document called the Book of Dunes. It sounds like some kind of modern-day video game or something.

But really, it was about crimes and punishments. Cool, history, I got it. Things are named, time goes forward, et cetera. But generally speaking, the image they want to invoke the most is old Western sheriffs protecting townsfolk by shooting the hats off of bad guys' heads. It's weird they're going back to like medieval Europe in these videos, considering that there's a single specific sheriff we associate with those times.

You know, the Alan Rickman types, who in the absence of any real accountability, consolidated an entrenched authority before openly abusing it for personal and financial gain until they were shanked by a forest squatter. Anyway, the point is that learning about sheriffs is probably not best done by looking at resources from sheriff departments.

But if you want to, you could check out the National Sheriff's Association homepage. They have a whole resource section with tips on how to stay safe on social media, right next to an article about why it's not their fault when they shoot people with mental health problems. So typically, depending on the county, sheriffs tend to run local jails, handle courtroom security,

enforce court orders, and serve court processes. But their duties can also include basic law enforcement tasks, especially if the county is rural and has a lot of unincorporated areas. And this changes a lot from state to state, depending on what's outlined in the constitution. In California, the sheriff also serves

as the county coroner. And in Colorado, the sheriff is also the county's chief fire warden. Most state constitutions require that every county elect a sheriff, which of course is a big difference between sheriffs and police chiefs, who aren't elected, but usually appointed by the mayor.

And while the chief of police answers to the local government, the sheriff answers directly to the voters. In theory, all caps. Also, there's a difference between an office and a department apparently. A sheriff's office is a totally independent law enforcement agency that's run exclusively by a sheriff

with no input from any other agency or official. A sheriff's department, on the other hand, is part of the executive branch of county government. It still has some independent authority, but not total. This is all to say that while perhaps, theoretically, there are good sheriffs out there, the real problem is that the entire sheriff system is incredibly bad and is seemingly set up

to encourage them to act with total impunity. And I'm going to explain why with my mouth and tongue and maybe some other parts of my body, depending on how furious I get. When the nipples come out, shit gets real. For starters, most states initially wrote the power of their sheriffs into their constitutions, making it nearly impossible to actually change their duties

or eliminate them entirely. Also, remember how I said a moment ago that they aren't appointed but voted in? Well, because of that, it's actually really hard to get rid of a sheriff if they do something wrong. In California, for example, you either have to amend the county charter to allow a vote, do a recall election, or trigger a grand jury trial, which takes a while to do.

And since they aren't technically affiliated with the political party, even though they absolutely can be, foreshadowing. Most of the time, there's no huge pressure for them to step down. Not to mention that news of corruption rarely makes it to the national stage. But also, even if they do cause a national scandal

or have a lot of people asking them to leave office, if a sheriff simply doesn't want to resign, more often than not, they just refuse to. Seriously, they can just stay put like they're James Cromwell glued to a Starbucks counter, a thing we did not make up. Even in counties like Los Angeles, which has a sheriff's department, not an office, the actual Civilian Oversight Commission

is still just purely advisory. In 2020, the board unanimously called onversight Commission is still just purely advisory. In 2020, the board unanimously called on current LA Sheriff Alex Villanueva to resign. And not only did he not do it, he ran for reelection instead. And that, it's the opposite of resigning. Sheriff Alex Villanueva was the first Democratic sheriff

in over 130 years and campaigned as a progressive reformer. One of his big promises was to create a truth and reconciliation panel for citizens injured by sheriff's deputies. But that turned out to just be a way for him to rehire shitty cops who were fired for things like domestic violence. In fact, since his election in 2018, he has been accused of removing his department's constitutional policing advisors, allowing violent deputy cliques and gangs to operate with impunity in his department while dismissing them as people who go to the river

and party, violating the first amendment rights of protesters and journalists covering protests and pursuing a criminal leak investigation against an LA Times reporter who was investigating an incident in which a deputy kneeled on the head of a handcuffed inmate for three minutes. In the same year Villanueva refused to resign,

LA County voters overwhelmingly turned out to support Measure R, which gave even more power to the Civilian Oversight Commission to investigate misconduct by the Sheriff's Department, specifically the ability to issue subpoenas. The state of California also passed Assembly Bill 1185 later that year, which did this on a larger statewide level. That former measure got 72% support from the voters,

but ultimately, neither of these measures do enough to remove a sheriff from power. And in the case of Bill 1185, it's still up to the counties to even create an oversight commission in the first place. And the same story played out in San Francisco. In 2020, voters approved the creation of a civilian sheriff's department oversight board,

but they're not actually empowered to discipline the sheriff or deputies. I guess they can just leave them passive aggressive notes or something. And even that only happened after three deputies were accused of staging gladiator style combat between inmates at the county jail, which is just like making them do regular combat,

but you give them a dramatic thumbs up or thumbs down when they finish. Also Ridley Scott directs the action. Ha ha, fuck the police. By the way, as of this year, there are only 160 civilian oversight committees in the United States, which is roughly 17,840 fewer

than what we need. And of those committees, only 6% actually have the power to impose punishment on officers that do harm. And so most often when a sheriff does something fucked up, most counties have no idea who can even punish them. Is tar and feathering not an option? Maybe the most problematic detail to this complete lack of accountability,

the crux of why sheriff's offices are naturally inclined toward corruption, is that we amazingly have zero oversight as to how these offices are spending money. In Alabama, for example, there was a super old law that allowed sheriffs to spend $1.75 a day to feed their prisoners. And while that number was already criminally low, what state auditors and advocate groups

found was that there was no way to know how much of that money was actually spent on food and how much was simply pocketed by the individuals in the sheriff's department. They simply didn't know, but heavily suspected that many were sacrificing that food budget to make extra money on the side. In Morgan County, for example, the sheriff made an extra $212,000 from the food fund over the course of three years by buying corn dogs and other shit food in bulk and feeding them to inmates. Amazingly, the sheriff that took his place

used $150,000 from the same food fund to pay for a crappy used car dealership, just in time for the Honda days, we hope. They've since passed a measure creating a specific food fund to prevent this, presumably stopping the next sheriff from using the money to buy a couple of bowling alleys. But this is just one of many instances of money

passing through sheriff's offices that there's simply no oversight for. Just in that Morgan County example, the sheriff there oversees more than a dozen discretionary funds that simply no oversight for. Just in that Morgan County example, the sheriff there oversees more than a dozen discretionary funds that have no oversight. Also earlier this year, the Philadelphia city controller found that Sheriff Rochelle Bilal

was spending tens of millions of dollars a year completely at her own discretion. There was no way for any other agencies or offices to even see how much money was being raised or how it was spent. So to quote Myria Holman, a political scientist who studies sheriffs, "'A combination of large budgets and little information

"'provides an environment where corruption "'is certainly possible, if not probable.'" So says the sheriffologist. But hey, at least when the next election comes, these shitty lawmen can be voted out is what I think people are hoping. But oh, how fleeting is hope, like a fart in a tornado for you see gentle watcher of Cody.

It turns out that about 60% of sheriffs in this country run completely unopposed during their reelections. And of course, people generally just don't pay attention to these elections, probably because they have a lot of other shit to worry about. In San Diego, undecided voters outnumbered supporters for any of the sheriff candidates.

In Massachusetts, 83% of registered voters couldn't identify their county's current sheriff in a recent survey. Because of this, one Harvard study found that sheriffs have a ridiculously high level of job security compared to other law enforcement positions, their average time in power being 11 years compared to a police chief's average of four years.

In one case, that level of power is so entrenched that a single family has functionally run law enforcement in an entire county for three generations unopposed over the course of 90 goddamn years. That's longer than the television has existed. Meanwhile, sheriffs aren't even close to reflecting the demographics they represent. In 2013, around 78% of sworn officers

in US sheriff's departments were white, and only 14% were women. 11% were Latino, and just 9% were black. In fact, according to the National Sheriffs Association's own numbers, as of 2016, less than 60 sheriffs nationwide were women. Nationwide! Women are better represented in Reddit's

waifu pillow community at this point. Trust me, I counted. That's of course not to say that more representation would actually change this corrupt system, but rather give the veneer of progress while perpetuating it. See, literally the story about Rochelle Belal I just mentioned.

There are just so many tools at their disposal for the purposes of corruption. Like it's not enough that the job is constitutionally designed for misdeeds. There are a ton more examples of sheriffs doing absolutely bat dick things and completely getting away with it. So let's explore all the fun ways

that sheriffs can abuse their power in a moment. Because of ads, which are the sheriffs of YouTube. I don't know, just watch them. Or not, skip them, don't skip them. Die, mates. Do you like taking flat things and sticking them into slots? Well, I sure do. Oh my God, I just love sticking sticky fingers

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Stick your stickies onto flat things and stick them into slots and peace, mate. Okay, and we are back. We were talking about the supreme lack of oversight that sheriffs have in this country. And we're going to give some examples of sheriffs abusing that power in wild and systemic ways. Also, I think I was gonna run for sheriff

and there's a gang I was gonna round up. Yeah, that sounds like a bit we would do for this. So we talked about how sheriffs like to use prisoner food funds to make a little extra cash. And generally speaking, one of the biggest sources of corrupt money comes from exploiting the people they have in custody. The telephone system in jails, for example,

comes up all the time when you're exploring corruption on the sheriff's level. Since a lot of sheriff's offices keep a portion of the money collected by private companies when inmates make phone calls, they're incentivized to choose services that provide them with the highest fees rather than those providing inmates

and their families with good deals. In 2011, Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson's office entered a deal with the private telephone firm, Securus, which agreed to pay him 48% of the gross revenues from all calls made within his jails, plus annual payments of over $200,000. His office banked more than $1 million from inmate phone calls between August 2011 and June 2013. But hey, listen, you know, come on folks, don't worry. He totally got away with it. As the chief justice overseeing the case notes, had the legislature intended to put an end

to the sheriff's practice of collecting inmate telephone revenues, it could have done so. Meaning that this action of squeezing prisoners for phone calls is allowed because no one has made a law stopping it. Good point law person, that is technically legal to do. Seems like we should change that.

And this is another big factor in why sheriffs are extreme hotspots for corruption, which is that they can be easily purchased by outside influences. A 2021 study from Common Cause found that businesses with an interest in expanding local prison systems can spend relatively little money to establish positive relationships

with sheriff's offices, which are then incentivized to jail more people and look the other way when inmates are harmed or abused. This is unlike regular cops who while still absolutely can get money from corporations, have to do it through shady foundations. But with sheriffs, not only do they have no oversight, but since they have to campaign for the job,

they also get political donations. And so when a prison reform coalition looked into donations from a sample of sheriffs from 11 different states, they found that 40% of those contributions came from companies that present a clear conflict of interest, such as construction companies that build jails, telephone companies that provide service in those jails, or fucking legal firms that specifically represent sheriff's offices undergoing misconduct accusations. And boy, that is shady. That is shadier than a willow tree selling drugs to teens.

That is shadier than an umbrella huffing paint at work. That is shadier than third thing. And then of course there is healthcare in the jails, which sheriffs have slowly been turning over to private companies who are primarily concerned with their bottom line. This decision, the cost of taxpayers, is absolutely killing inmates.

According to that Reuters investigation, jails with private healthcare companies had death rates 18% to 58% higher than jails with publicly managed healthcare. The reason is very clear in any of the countless horror stories about a prisoner dying due to medical neglect, which is that contracts made between these jails

and companies set very specific limits to things like offsite care and staffing, creating a situation where hospital visits, even in extreme emergencies, get denied. These are terrible, evil deals made between sheriff's offices in charge of these jails and the companies sending them cop tons of cash. Sometimes illegally, like when last year a sheriff

was caught accepting bribes, dinners, vacations, and a I do not shit you, Richard Petty NASCAR driving experience in exchange for a prison contract with Correct care solutions. That correct care being defined as 140 lawsuits and a handful of prisoner deaths. Wowee, geez, can't imagine why people don't like police in this country or private healthcare.

I am stumped. Tree jokes for some reason today. I could do a whole video on prison healthcare, but we have to keep moving. We haven't even talked about how multiple fossil fuel companies have paid sheriff's offices millions to crack down on pipeline protests. In North Bend, Oregon, the Pembina Pipeline Corp

spent at least $2 million to create a corporately funded wing of the Coos County Sheriff's Office, devoted to investigating protests against a potential pipeline project in the area, including paying for riot gear. This isn't a secret, but a completely open relationship that they have. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the exact same deal has been created

between the pipeline company Enbridge Inc. and the local sheriff. Once again, paying for riot gear and training in order to crack down on any protests, which if you're not following along is a thing protected by the first amendment. Protesting is kind of a thing we're traditionally allowed to do, you know,

but I guess so too allowed our major companies paying cops to whack environmentalists with batons. As this proud tradition dates back to at least the 90s, when Weyerhaeuser Timber tried to put an Oregon sheriff's office on the payroll for protecting their logging operations. For you new kids, logging was like the cool 90s version of pipelines when America didn't know and or care

about the full extent of our climate hell. How retro! Anywho, that is just one of the ways that sheriff's offices make extra money. Weird that they make extra money at all, considering that in most jobs, you don't just get to make side deals to sell off the desks or some shit like that.

But of course, there's a second, also terrible way, that these law enforcement ghouls get extra cash. And that is civil asset forfeiture. If police corruption were the Avengers, civil forfeiture would be their Hulk and Thor, the heavy hitters on the lunch boxes. This is the police's weird right to seize any property they suspect was involved in a crime, even money.

And so abuses of civil asset forfeiture are very common. After all, you're seizing property from people who have been charged with a crime, even money. And so abuses of civil asset forfeiture are very common. After all, you're seizing property from people who have been charged with a crime, or very often people who were never charged with a crime. The amount of property taken doesn't have to be proportional to the crime committed, nor do the sheriff offices feel obligated to return anything if nobody ends up being charged,

which means you have to hire a lawyer, pay for that lawyer, and then fight like hell to get your shit back and be repaid for the lawyer you just hired. It's just, it's theft. And the reason that these cops don't feel the need to return the items is because they directly make money from this process.

Under a system called equitable sharing, if a sheriff seizes property that was involved in a federal crime, they can go around any local governments, share the assets with the department of justice and get a chunk of that money back to keep themselves. And the sheriff's office often gets to keep their cut. Even if they never legally established that the property was involved in an actual crime, which may sound like stealing, but let me assure you,

sometimes it is just stealing. To the tune of $68 billion worth of property stolen from the American people in the last 20 years. Take the case of armored car company Imperial Logistics, which transports money for legal cannabis dispensaries around Kansas City, Missouri. Remember, legal. I said the word legal.

You can hit that jump back 10 seconds button and check if you don't believe me, but I said it. Five times in 2021, sheriff's deputies pulled over imperial trucks for flimsy reasons and seized all the cash inside, even though no one had been charged with any actual crime because everything they were doing was legal. On one occasion, deputies made away with $165,000. That money goes right to the federal government, skipping the state of Kansas entirely, and the Kansas Sheriff's Office ultimately

gets to keep up to 80%. And while MP Regal was fighting this in court in Kansas, it happened again with a different sheriff's department in San Bernardino, California. It's functionally legal highway robbery. You know the things sheriffs were traditionally supposed to stop? This is literally street gang shit.

A completely reputable and legal company being robbed repeatedly by the police. And so again, I don't know, maybe before cops want to whine about people being mean to them, they could stop fucking robbing people on the street. I don't care how many dog men cop mascots you have, it's not cute.

Also, who is impregnating all of these dogs with human sperm and letting the hybrid babies go into law enforcement? That seems like a crime too. At least against nature, that's for sure. Of course, in 2015, Obama tried to close the civil asset forfeiture loophole, but wouldn't you know it,

AG Jeff Sessions brought it back under President Trump. We could have gotten to reverse the policy again, but no one knew how to say his name backwards. That impish little scamp, he tricked us, ah! But hey, maybe that new guy can change it back. Under our forfeiture statutes, you can, the government can, take everything you own, everything from your car to your house, your bank account, not merely what they confiscate in terms of the dollars

from the transaction that you just got caught engaging in. They can take everything. Now if America's prime problem is worse than it ever was, it's not because the Congress has failed to give the president the tools. Oh right, it's the guy who sucks. Well, maybe he'll have a change of heart. Or maybe he'll put out an executive order way too late

that only mentions forfeiture once and doesn't directly address it at all. Thanks, Joe. Anyway, forfeiture is another issue we could probably make a video about and we have discussed it in the past, but we're talking about them sheriffs, baby! Or babies, if multiple infants are watching,

in which case turn this shit off. Just because there are puppets doesn't mean it's good for you. So this combination of zero oversight, ridiculous profit opportunities, and a general feeling of unwavering power, all kind of points to a series of absolute nightmare stories where entire towns are held hostage by law enforcement.

In Monroe County, Mississippi, Sheriff Cecil Cantrell vowed to bring law and order when he was elected in 2011, but locals may not have known about the intensity of what he had planned. Monroe County is a community of just 35,000 residents, but Sheriff Cantrell nonetheless subjected them to a nonstop anti-drug harassment campaign. Though the office didn't keep good records,

exclamation point, deputies estimate they carried out hundreds of no-knock searches, most of them based on warrants issued by the same judge, a guy named Robert Fowlkes. Now, you may be assuming that Judge Fowlkes definitely went to law school in some capacity, but silly you! Like Sheriff Cantrell himself,

Fowlkes was a justice court judge who had specialized in things like officiating marriages before moving up in the system and becoming a go-to warrant guy. During one of these no-knock searches, 57-year-old Ricky Keaton was shot six times by Monroe County deputies. He didn't realize that the people entering his home at 1 a.m. were law enforcement and pulled out a pellet gun on them. Before resigning in 2019, Cantrell was also accused of abusing the civil asset forfeiture system,

because why not? Get in there! Hashtag side hustle, grind set, mind set. Hashtag resign set. On the subject of judges, there is of course the fact that cops, not just sheriffs, lie all the fucking time under oath and get very little punishment for it.

And yet judges tend to take a cop's testimony as the ultimate truth. And of course, sheriff deputies often double as bailiffs, even in large cities like Los Angeles. And so this all leads to a situation where the line between the people enforcing the law and the people handing down judgments based on the law is extremely blurred.

Not only because of what I just said with my supple lips, but for an entire other terrifying reason, which is that there's an absolutely chilling pattern of sheriffs using their authority to change laws or refuse to enforce certain ones. A pattern of political ideology leaking into this already leaky as fuck system of corruption. So it's kind of

wacky to say, but it sure would be great if the only problem with sheriffs was that they were corrupt, sadistic, and had no oversight. I mean, I would much rather have none of that. Put me down for zero corruption, sir. But there's one more notch in this shit pickle that we have yet to address, and that is the constitutional sheriff movement. In short, a constitutional sheriff is someone who believes that the position of sheriff is not only to enforce the law, but actually interpret and shape the law however they see fit. They believe their authority to do this outranks literally every other authority, including the president. According to its supporters,

this idea dates all the way back to the historical definition of sheriffs from medieval England. Hey, remember how they really love defining what a sheriff means? Seems related. See, back then, sheriffs were actually entrusted to interpret the law,

a tradition we then brought over here to the States. Of course, time exists. So we have since progressed to a kind of different system. However, back in the 1970s, a white supremacist Christian minister named William Potter Gale wrote a series of articles laying out the theory that sheriffs were actually the only legitimate law enforcement

sanctioned by the US Constitution. Gale argued that the power of sheriffs was largely vested in forming a posse of citizens and militias to push back on encroachments against personal freedom, also known as posse comitatus. What encroachments did he list? The federal income tax system, gun control,

federal education, and civil rights laws, of course. Gale also proposed common law courts that would try public officials who were accused of violating the Constitution and recommended hanging anyone who was found guilty. His posse comitatus pitch, a group of heavily armed citizens who you can just trust to do the right thing

and shoot the right folks, in particular, really took hold and ended up inspiring a lot of today's patriot movement style groups like the Sovereign Citizens Movement and the Three Percenters. In fact, Richard Mack, the head of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, is also on the board of directors of the Oath Keepers,

that anti-government extremist group that helped to organize the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. Here he is saying totally normal stuff about his job. We have to know that we are the guards of the Republic. We are the protectors of liberty. We are the last line of defense for the citizens against tyranny.

And let me tell you this too, it is a peaceful and effective process. Ah yes, peaceful and effective. Mack has appeared on the Alex Jones Show as well as the White Nationalists Show at the political cesspool. Back in 2014, he called for sheriffs to help county clerks refuse issuing marriage licenses

to same-sex couples. When three sitting sheriffs were present to support Cliven Bundy's standoff against the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada, the peaceful and effective Richard Mack was amongst them. But of course he is but one amongst the truly infamous sheriffs who make national headlines when they buck trends and federal policies,

such as Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in Arizona. You remember Joe? He's the guy who looks like the officiant at a plantation themed wedding, the Voltron of racist cops. Joe, of course, also subscribes to this general philosophy behind the constitutional sheriff. It's also, and this is pretty key, not real. What I mean is that to quote a professor

at Georgetown University Law Center and former employee for the US Department of Justice, after searching in vain for any legal basis for sheriff supremacy and checking with several others who have studied law enforcement and civilian oversight, I can confirm that a constitutional sheriff with unique autonomy is not actually a thing. But despite this movement being totally bogus,

we've amazingly seen a terrifying pattern of sheriffs acting as if they have free range to ignore the law. In 2020, the Alameda County Sheriff's Office started allowing ICE agents into their jails to arrest any undocumented immigrants who might be in there for unrelated crimes, despite the fact that, under California state law, local law enforcement agencies are barred from communicating or cooperating with ICE to carry out immigration enforcement. Assistant Sheriff Tom Madigan defended the practice by saying that it was okay, despite being illegal, because the inmates had been charged with serious crimes and

quote, it's in the sheriff's discretion and he chooses in those limited situations to cooperate. In 2018, Washington voters approved a package of firearms restrictions known as I-1639. This does a lot of the usual stuff like raising the minimum age to buy semi-automatic rifles, expanding background checks, and criminalizing a failure to safely store a weapon this later used in a violent crime.

About a dozen sheriffs from across the state not only came out against the law in principle, but just said flat out that they didn't intend to enforce it, as was the case of a lot of sheriffs in the country, one of those being Richard Mack, of course. Many sheriffs, including Snohomish County, Washington's Adam Fortney, similarly refused to enforce stay-at-home orders

and other attempts to limit the spread of COVID-19. Fortney similarly refused to enforce stay-at-home orders and other attempts to limit the spread of COVID-19. Fortney said that the governor's order intrudes on our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which he definitely knows is from the Declaration of Independence and not the Constitution. We must assume. Now, you might be noticing that the laws they choose to reject and embrace coincidentally align with the far right. And so it's probably not at all surprising to hear that a lot of far right politicians don't really have a problem with this situation.

And in some cases, just support it. For example, Georgia gubernatorial candidate, Candace Taylor has been on the campaign trail this very summer demanding that her state's sheriffs adopt the constitutional sheriff philosophy or face a firing squad. They're the highest constitutional officer in their county and they're gonna do the will of the people. I don't mind handcuffing them either. So I mean it. I've heard it from sheriff corruption all over the state.

We've got some awesome sheriffs and praise the Lord for them. Pray for them. Even if you have a corrupt one, pray for them. And pray that they're replaced really quickly if they're corrupt. But I don't care. I don't mind handcuffing any single person

who breaks the law and goes against our government. The Constitution says when you commit treason, it's death by firing squad. I didn't write it. It's in there. It's serious.

When you swear to God to uphold a document that says you'll do the will of the people and you will honor every single thing in that constitution, you do that. Hey, good news, she fucking lost. Like really lost with only 3% of the vote, which in fairness is still 3% more than I'm comfortable with much like the three percenters.

We just mentioned Joe Arpaio, who of course Trump pardoned after he was convicted of criminal contempt for defying a federal judge's order for him and his deputies to stop racially profiling Latino drivers. And so again, this bold stance of defending the will of the people that these sheriffs are taking and being pardoned for is just being a fucking racist, which I guess you could argue is the will of some people,

not the good ones, but some. But because these two groups are so closely aligned, we're very clearly seeing a symbiotic relationship form. For example, a Republican sheriff in Berry County, Michigan named Dar Leaf plotted to seize voting machines during the November election while in communication with Trump attorney Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn. He later enlisted a private investigator

to look into local election officials. Meanwhile, David Clark, the constitutional sheriff of Milwaukee County from 2002 to 2017, most recently made headlines for urging January 6th participants not to cooperate with federal investigators. Clark was infamous for saying on his radio show that we should suspend habeas corpus and arrest millions of Americans

for secretly working with ISIS and for also spending $75,000 of public funds on 565 Glocks with glow-in-the-dark sights, enough to give each of his 275 deputies two of them. But his real claim to fame was overseeing the deaths of his own inmates. In 2016, inmate Terrell Thomas died of dehydration after the water had been turned off

for seven days in his cell. The county medical examiner declared it a homicide, leading Clark to pursue a public harassment campaign against him. Yes, one of his own staffers, for calling attention to a homicide in his own jail. Though the Wisconsin Department of Corrections and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have outlawed the practice,

Clark was also repeatedly accused of shackling pregnant inmates in restraints. In 2014, a woman sued the county claiming she was handcuffed and shackled for 21 hours while in labor. In 2016, the newborn baby of a pregnant inmate at Clark's jail died. She later sued the county and claimed that guards had laughed at her and taunted her when she went into labor. Fun fact, Clark was apparently considered for a job at the Department of Homeland Security when Trump was president.

Huzzah, good luck, buddy. Glad it didn't work out for you. So yeah, you see the situation that's brewing here, right? We have a branch of law enforcement that is highly susceptible to corruption and abuse of power, a history of horrific misdeeds, and absolutely no oversight or system of accountability, who are beginning to believe that they are the final say in interpreting the law

and who happen to be mostly white, far right-leaning and are now dabbling with the idea of interfering with the democratic process and receiving encouragement and help from a former president's goons. Richard Mack often says that he envisions that sheriffs will quote, "'Take back America' in what he describes

as a peaceful event." But again, dude doesn't seem to actually know what that word means. Hang Mike Pence, but gently. Boy, I am starting to think that perhaps I shouldn't apply to be a sheriff after all. And maybe instead we should just get rid of sheriffs altogether.

Not that I'm particularly excited about the regular police, but I guess we're less likely to have our government overthrown by beat cops, which is the very low bar we've established. Like at least fucking Vic Mackey isn't gonna try and overturn the election, which again, low, low bar. Also he might, and a lot of real cops definitely would and literally did.

But while the position of sheriff is baked into a lot of state constitutions, it's not impossible to limit their power. It actually worked in Connecticut, which eliminated the office of high sheriff back in 2000, presumably for sounding too dorky. But they integrated the sheriff's office staffers into the state's judicial department.

In West Hollywood, they voted to remove funding from their sheriff's office staffers into the state's judicial department. In West Hollywood, they voted to remove funding from their sheriff's office and channel that money into public safety resources. In a note for the 2018 edition of the Virginia Law Review, academic James Tomberland points to two ways that states could theoretically rein in some of the power of their sheriffs, either ensuring the county government has the authority

to hire and fire them, or at least giving the county control over the sheriff's budget. But even these simple steps aren't possible in every state, nor would they solve every problem we have laid out in this video. The one thing everyone can do starting today, even without legislators getting on board, is to just start paying more attention

to who your sheriff is, if you have one, and encouraging others in your area to do so as well. And if more voters start paying attention to sheriff's races, there will be more media coverage and focus on these candidates. And we can maybe sniff out some of at least the worst of these bad actors before they get into office

and start spending all of our tax dollars on glow-in-the-dark tassel hats and dabbling with treason. So I guess I just need to handle Mickey and his early rider gang myself. You know, it shouldn't be too hard. They're easy to spot on those early rider bikes. Although some of them have Huffy bikes, they're children. And yes, I'm currently losing that fight, but not for long.

Unless they have those BB guns again, then it's not gonna be so great. I'll just probably stay inside, smoke my loose weed. My life is great, you guys. Can't I can't, where is my moose weed?

I usually have, oh, some. Howdy y'all, it's me, the version of Cody in the universe where he became a sheriff. And let me tell you, racism is good. Human rights abuses, pew, pew, pew. Anyway, thanks for watching the video. Make sure to like and subscribe to the channel and leave your comments and make them fucking good this time, you bad commenters.

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some fucking piece of shit puppet on it uh and like other stuff I've rambled enough and so I'm gonna puppet on it. And like other stuff. I've rambled enough and so I'm gonna ramble on. That's a cowboy joke.