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A leading authority on sheriffs in America investigates the impunity with which sheriffs act in policing their communities, and the troubling role they play in American life, law enforcement, and, increasingly, national politics. What should be of grave concern to us all is that sheriffs are wholly unaccountable. They do not report to state executives, and sheriffs’ duties are enshrined in state constitutions. Sheriffs have become a flashpoint in the current politics of toxic masculinity, guns, white supremacy, and rural resentment. They played a role in the January 6 insurrection, and their anti–federal government stance having aligned both with far-right militia groups and with former President Donald Trump. The Constitutional Sheriffs movement of acting sheriffs sees themselves as the last line of defense of freedom in this country, and they are embraced as such by white nationalists, the far right, and parts of the GOP, who want to attain and maintain power at all costs. More than 95 percent of America’s three thousand sheriffs are white men. They employ 25 percent of sworn law enforcement officers. Nearly 60 percent of all sheriffs run unopposed, and because they have no term limits, many serve for decades. They patrol the streets, make traffic stops, execute arrest warrants, and investigate crimes. They run county jails that admit 4.9 million people every year. Journalist Jessica Pishko has a real gumshoe reporting style and prefers to be “in the room” to get her story. She’s spent hours with the sheriffs she reports on. She’s attended far-right rallies where prominent sheriffs keynote to get a sense of the audiences they’re reaching. She has signed up for Constitutional Sheriff training programs to immerse in the rhetoric. The result is a ground-shaking revelation as to the way this militant and unchecked law enforcement contingent sees itself and sees the rest of us. A must-read for fans of Timothy Snyder, Jonathan Karl, Gilbert King, and Michelle Alexander....
About the author
Jessica Pishko is a journalist and lawyer with a JD from Harvard Law School and an MFA from Columbia University. She has been reporting on the criminal legal system for a decade, with a focus on the political power of sheriffs since 2016. In addition to her newsletter
Posse Comitatus, her writings have been featured in
The New York Times,
Politico,
Rolling Stone,
The Atlantic,
The Appeal,
Slate, and
Democracy Docket. She has been awarded journalism fellowships from the Pulitzer Center and Type Investigations and was a 2022 New America Fellow. A longtime Texas resident, she currently lives with her family in North Carolina.
Summary
Shortlisted for Columbia Journalism School’s J. Anthony Lukas Award
A Publishers Lunch NonFiction Buzz Book| Named Most Anticipated by Los Angeles Times
A leading authority on sheriffs investigates the impunity with which they police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in American life, law enforcement, and, increasingly, national politics.
The figure of the American sheriff has loomed large in popular imagination, though given the outsize jurisdiction sheriffs have over people’s lives, the office of sheriffs remains a gravely under-examined institution. Locally elected, largely unaccountable, and difficult to remove, the country’s over three thousand sheriffs, mostly white men, wield immense power—making arrests, running county jails, enforcing evictions and immigration laws—with a quarter of all U.S. law enforcement officers reporting to them. In recent years there’s been a revival of “constitutional sheriffs,” who assert that their authority supersedes that of legislatures, courts, and even the president. They’ve protested federal mask and vaccine mandates and gun regulations, railed against police reforms, and, ultimately, declared themselves election police, with many endorsing the “Big Lie” of a stolen presidential election. They are embraced by far-right militia groups, white nationalists, the Claremont Institute, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in mass deportation and border policing.
How did a group of law enforcement officers decide that they were “above the law?” What are the stakes for local and national politics, and for America as a multi-racial democracy?
Blending investigative reporting, historical research, and political analysis, author Jessica Pishko takes us to the roots of why sheriffs have become a flashpoint in the current politics of toxic masculinity, guns, white supremacy, and rural resentment, and uncovers how sheriffs have effectively evaded accountability since the nation’s founding.
A must-read for fans of Michelle Alexander, Gilbert King, Elizabeth Hinton, and Kathleen Belew.
