My nomination for “2023 best moments in sherriffing stories,” both in the sense of being well-reported by Nebraska Public Media and others and for being one of the few having a non-appalling ending, is the saga of (now-former) Dundy County, Nebraska, Sheriff Clinton Smith (“C.J.”), a self-styled “constitutional sheriff” who maintained that he was being targeted and driven from office earlier this year because of his strong support of the Second Amendment (and definitely not because he lacked state certification as a law enforcement officer or any other reason). The Ur-constitutional sheriff himself, Richard Mack, even took notice of the situation, apparently agreed with Smith’s assessment, and called it “an outrage.” On Nov. 7, the citizens of Dundy County, took a different view of what was an outrage and what was not, and bade farewell to Smith by voting him out of office 712 to 63, well out of mandatory recount range. As a coda, a month or so later, Smith was arrested by the Nebraska State Patrol in connection with their investigation of allegations that firearms were missing from the Dundy County Sheriff’s Office. After executing a search warrant at Smith’s residence and allegedly finding one of the missing firearms, they arrested him on suspicion of theft by unlawful taking and possession of a stolen firearm. A little something for eveyone in there.
The “bad moments in sheriffing” category had too many candidates to count but the “Goon Squad” of Rankin County Mississippi has got to be in the top 3 at least. I won’t even attempt to summarize it.
I have been watching the Dundy County sheriff event with interest. I actually have an outstanding public records request for the state investigation documents. If you have any additional information I would love to know moe.
In Klickitat County, our 78 year old sheriff is full on MAGA and a self-declared Constitutional Sheriff. Bob Songer fear mongers regularly, calling Democrats "brain dead liberals" and consistently issuing alarms about immigrants, BLM, and homeless people coming to the county to bring their problems to our peaceful county. He is currently promotins that our county become a Constitional County. He has refused to enforce voter-approved laws and interprets all laws through his "Constitutional" lense. Dawn Stover is a free-lance reporter who lives in our county and has done several articles on the sheriff's sudden interest in wildlife management.
For my own purposes I am so ill-disposed toward placing any public official in the same sentence with the word 'good' (it only encourages them) that the idea of a 'good' county sheriff in Oklahoma seems both an obvious non-sequitur and a tasteless farce.
Like the local-boss system each and every one of them serves and benefits from across the State, the question of which individual sits in which office in which region is almost entirely beside the point. It's about the office itself, not the man or occasional woman who occupies it.
The alignments and distributions of power between district attorneys and sheriffs are as traditional to Oklahoma life as college football, another needless and costly over-rated public institution which manages to do more harm than good, and whose individual players are essentially interchangeable.
Our sheriff out here in Texas County strikes me as just another good-ole-boy in a uniform, for whom rule of law itself is as much an abstract nuisance as it clearly is to his counterparts in the DA's office. I've caught them all in so many obvious falsehoods in the course of their duties these past fifteen years I've dwelt hereabouts, that all I take them seriously as is just more apparatchiki to steer clear of, in a lifetime of making precisely that a primary mission. Manufacturing casework to suit their own ends and stuff their own pockets is what they all do all day, and woe to that innocent who ends up being railroaded by them.
Our sheriff may or may not be among the ranks of that medieval cult calling themselves 'constitutional sheriffs', probably is, and who cares? A boss is a boss, and they're all equally the enemy.
I agree that the term "constitutional sheriff" tends to imply that one is or is not one, which misses the point.
In terms of good reporting, I meant accountability reporting, not necessarily praise! If I was vague I am sorry. But would love to hear if you think anyone has done a good job holding OK sheriffs to account.
My views on such things may be too jaded or cynical for you to appreciate them as any form of common cause: most of my life I have been disposed for cause to regard anything to do with the public sector as a threat, a nuisance, an enemy, and a needless indulgence of the laziest among us by employing them in it. The idea that I should be charged a fine for making a living in order for these parasites to bask in ease and comfort is for me the fatal discrediting of the entire project of western civilization.
But that's just me. I have my reasons: they began early in life and have not ceased to increase in my purview ever since. I am as apolitical as it gets because no faction I've ever heard from is going to do what is needed, which is to dismantle government altogether.
As for these 'constitutional sheriffs', you may have been misled by my not having capitalized the term. I choose not to because I am incapable of extending such an honorific to that sort of people. But such an organization enjoying nationwide membership of hundreds if not thousands of county sheriffs and their deputies (they don't make their membership numbers public, but offer some very bizarre guidance on how to find out if one belongs to their cult) very much does exist, and exerts some unknown degree of influence upon the sheriffing industry day in and day out, mostly by virtue of the fact that it is a cult and not a serious lobby or professional association.
Look them up, I'm a tad disappointed to have to even inform you of something so rudimentary in the assessment of sheriffs in the USA, which I'd have assumed you already knew about.
I write about the far-right sheriff movement all the time? I am well aware of the organizations and their membership; my argument is that the ideas have leaked into many other sheriff departments even if they don't consider themselves true believers."
I am sorry, I think something got lost in translation here.
I can emulate your tact and restraint here and offer my own apology: it isn't your fault that discussions of anything to do with government and its powers puts me in such a state and incites me to speak in such a tone. I live primarily according to one rule: love thy neighbor as thyself. For me the entire human species is nothing but one great big neighborhood, and each human I encounter has every prerogative to treat me first, last and always as their neighbor just as I undertake to treat them. Public employees at every level have exhibited zero capacity over my sixty-three years to treat me as their neighbor and leave all their hollow posturing and lazy Nuremberg Defenses out of the exchange, and so this means to me that they regard me as something else, and for reasons which disregard and diminish my humanity in their eyes. If this is how they choose to behave I cannot stop them. But I have zero use for the lying, profiteering, worthless pack of them, from heads of state down to the local dog-catcher. Even to discuss any aspect of what they so fallaciously might refer to as their 'jobs' is so challenging to my emotional well-being that now and then I get kind of rude about it, mea culpa.
Feel better Jess! Thanks for all your hard work and hope you heal up soon. Mucho love and happy holidays, my friend. <3
Thank you! I hope you get some well-earned respite.
My nomination for “2023 best moments in sherriffing stories,” both in the sense of being well-reported by Nebraska Public Media and others and for being one of the few having a non-appalling ending, is the saga of (now-former) Dundy County, Nebraska, Sheriff Clinton Smith (“C.J.”), a self-styled “constitutional sheriff” who maintained that he was being targeted and driven from office earlier this year because of his strong support of the Second Amendment (and definitely not because he lacked state certification as a law enforcement officer or any other reason). The Ur-constitutional sheriff himself, Richard Mack, even took notice of the situation, apparently agreed with Smith’s assessment, and called it “an outrage.” On Nov. 7, the citizens of Dundy County, took a different view of what was an outrage and what was not, and bade farewell to Smith by voting him out of office 712 to 63, well out of mandatory recount range. As a coda, a month or so later, Smith was arrested by the Nebraska State Patrol in connection with their investigation of allegations that firearms were missing from the Dundy County Sheriff’s Office. After executing a search warrant at Smith’s residence and allegedly finding one of the missing firearms, they arrested him on suspicion of theft by unlawful taking and possession of a stolen firearm. A little something for eveyone in there.
The “bad moments in sheriffing” category had too many candidates to count but the “Goon Squad” of Rankin County Mississippi has got to be in the top 3 at least. I won’t even attempt to summarize it.
I have been watching the Dundy County sheriff event with interest. I actually have an outstanding public records request for the state investigation documents. If you have any additional information I would love to know moe.
Also, yes to the Mississippi stories. Thank you!
In Klickitat County, our 78 year old sheriff is full on MAGA and a self-declared Constitutional Sheriff. Bob Songer fear mongers regularly, calling Democrats "brain dead liberals" and consistently issuing alarms about immigrants, BLM, and homeless people coming to the county to bring their problems to our peaceful county. He is currently promotins that our county become a Constitional County. He has refused to enforce voter-approved laws and interprets all laws through his "Constitutional" lense. Dawn Stover is a free-lance reporter who lives in our county and has done several articles on the sheriff's sudden interest in wildlife management.
https://columbiainsight.org/?s=dawn+stover&post_type%5B%5D=any&search_limit_to_post_titles=0&fs=1&apbct__email_id__search_form_63540=
Dawn is a wonderful reporter and this is absolutely a story of note. Thank you!
For my own purposes I am so ill-disposed toward placing any public official in the same sentence with the word 'good' (it only encourages them) that the idea of a 'good' county sheriff in Oklahoma seems both an obvious non-sequitur and a tasteless farce.
Like the local-boss system each and every one of them serves and benefits from across the State, the question of which individual sits in which office in which region is almost entirely beside the point. It's about the office itself, not the man or occasional woman who occupies it.
The alignments and distributions of power between district attorneys and sheriffs are as traditional to Oklahoma life as college football, another needless and costly over-rated public institution which manages to do more harm than good, and whose individual players are essentially interchangeable.
Our sheriff out here in Texas County strikes me as just another good-ole-boy in a uniform, for whom rule of law itself is as much an abstract nuisance as it clearly is to his counterparts in the DA's office. I've caught them all in so many obvious falsehoods in the course of their duties these past fifteen years I've dwelt hereabouts, that all I take them seriously as is just more apparatchiki to steer clear of, in a lifetime of making precisely that a primary mission. Manufacturing casework to suit their own ends and stuff their own pockets is what they all do all day, and woe to that innocent who ends up being railroaded by them.
Our sheriff may or may not be among the ranks of that medieval cult calling themselves 'constitutional sheriffs', probably is, and who cares? A boss is a boss, and they're all equally the enemy.
I agree that the term "constitutional sheriff" tends to imply that one is or is not one, which misses the point.
In terms of good reporting, I meant accountability reporting, not necessarily praise! If I was vague I am sorry. But would love to hear if you think anyone has done a good job holding OK sheriffs to account.
My views on such things may be too jaded or cynical for you to appreciate them as any form of common cause: most of my life I have been disposed for cause to regard anything to do with the public sector as a threat, a nuisance, an enemy, and a needless indulgence of the laziest among us by employing them in it. The idea that I should be charged a fine for making a living in order for these parasites to bask in ease and comfort is for me the fatal discrediting of the entire project of western civilization.
But that's just me. I have my reasons: they began early in life and have not ceased to increase in my purview ever since. I am as apolitical as it gets because no faction I've ever heard from is going to do what is needed, which is to dismantle government altogether.
As for these 'constitutional sheriffs', you may have been misled by my not having capitalized the term. I choose not to because I am incapable of extending such an honorific to that sort of people. But such an organization enjoying nationwide membership of hundreds if not thousands of county sheriffs and their deputies (they don't make their membership numbers public, but offer some very bizarre guidance on how to find out if one belongs to their cult) very much does exist, and exerts some unknown degree of influence upon the sheriffing industry day in and day out, mostly by virtue of the fact that it is a cult and not a serious lobby or professional association.
Look them up, I'm a tad disappointed to have to even inform you of something so rudimentary in the assessment of sheriffs in the USA, which I'd have assumed you already knew about.
I write about the far-right sheriff movement all the time? I am well aware of the organizations and their membership; my argument is that the ideas have leaked into many other sheriff departments even if they don't consider themselves true believers."
I am sorry, I think something got lost in translation here.
I can emulate your tact and restraint here and offer my own apology: it isn't your fault that discussions of anything to do with government and its powers puts me in such a state and incites me to speak in such a tone. I live primarily according to one rule: love thy neighbor as thyself. For me the entire human species is nothing but one great big neighborhood, and each human I encounter has every prerogative to treat me first, last and always as their neighbor just as I undertake to treat them. Public employees at every level have exhibited zero capacity over my sixty-three years to treat me as their neighbor and leave all their hollow posturing and lazy Nuremberg Defenses out of the exchange, and so this means to me that they regard me as something else, and for reasons which disregard and diminish my humanity in their eyes. If this is how they choose to behave I cannot stop them. But I have zero use for the lying, profiteering, worthless pack of them, from heads of state down to the local dog-catcher. Even to discuss any aspect of what they so fallaciously might refer to as their 'jobs' is so challenging to my emotional well-being that now and then I get kind of rude about it, mea culpa.