This is how it happens. You think you will work on your book and provide people with a meaty newsletter, but then people get sick and you spend your time rescheduling appointments and you’re busy reading W.H. Auden, and then it’s time the newsletter is due. So, for this week, I offer up a charcuterie board of sheriff news and thoughts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to take other people’s stories and write them in a way that is, at its root, self-serving. I don’t mean that I write, or anyone else does, (I think) stories to be mean or cruel on purpose, but rather that in this profession we call journalism, there is something extractive. There’s value in looking from the outside, but when does the scene become spectacle?
So as a result, I am often thinking about other ways to tell stories. One model I am inspired by is the Incarceration Transparency project out of Loyola University Law School in New Orleans. The project involved dozens upon dozens of narratives about people who died in the New Orleans Jail since its construction. The stories are reconstructed with pictures and quotes from family members, not just news or death reports. There’s both specificity and a cumulative effect, which is what interests me the most. The power of the narrative isn’t just from an individual story, but the collection, candid photo upon photo.
I was going through records to make a spreadsheet, which is something I don’t like doing. These were records of people who died in jail, and each one elicited a kind of horror but also a sad sameness. The repetitive motion of entering data, I thought, could be seen as a kind of memorial, a witnessing, a prayer. This person was here and this happened and now they are gone, reduced to administrative paperwork. And I don’t know what people wanted for them or what they wanted for themselves; nor am I much help. But I feel a quiet finality when I finish their entry in a spreadsheet no one will probably see. I read what happened, and I witnessed, and then I closed the tab to move on to the next entry.
Sheriff Sex Crimes: In February, ex-Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain was sentenced to multiple life sentences for multiple counts of rape and incest related to acts committed before he was sheriff and starting from when Strain was a teenager. Testimony from victims alleged really horrific, long-term acts of sexual abuse and rape of people Strain was close to, including relatives and friends. Strain was also found guilty of bribery and fraud related to a kickback scheme involving the labor of incarcerated people -- a plan that basically involved creating a puppet company involving friends and relatives to “purchase” the labor people incarcerated in Strain’s jail and provide Strain personal profits from the arrangement. (He will be sentenced for this case on March 9.)
Strain was sheriff from 1995 through 2015, which means people elected him four times. One local outlet framed it as a “rise and fall.” Is it though? Or is this a story that is more about the people attracted to sheriffs’ offices and law enforcement more generally?
Strain did after all say that suicidal people in jail needed to be “caged like animals.”
In addition, local Memphis news told the story of a white Shelby County sheriff’s deputy named Brian Beck charged with the rape of a 14-year-old, who was granted a plea deal with no prison time. This came from the same Shelby County District Attorney, Amy Weirich, who had no problem charging a Black woman who accidentally voted despite her ineligibility – because of incomplete and missing paperwork; Pamela Moses lost at trial and was sentenced to six years in prison.
In light of multiple other sheriff/ sheriff deputy sex crimes, I idly wondered, how common is this, and thus I Googled “sheriff sex crime” and got pages and pages of this.
Originalism for me but not for thee: The Post and Courier – which has regularly reported on South Carolina sheriffs who have been accused and convicted of fraud and other crimes – unearthed an 1830s statute that provided the attorney general the power to “examine into the condition of the offices of … the sheriff …and ascertain if such officers have discharged the duties which now are, or shall be, required of them.” The law was facing a repeal, even though nobody could recall using it in living memory. I did a quick Westlaw search and found almost nothing. But the law could be useful, I think, as an originalist argument for sheriff oversight.
Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva: Villanueva has managed to lose control of his own personnel as the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors prepares to fire deputies who refuse to get vaccinated. In late February at a “community conversation,” the sister of Frederick Holder, an unarmed Black man shot 33 times by LASD deputies, confronted Villanueva as captured on video by Cerise Castle. A meaty piece in The Hollywood Reporter covered Jessica Meisels, Villanueva’s new media liaison, appropriately placed for a sheriff who seems more concerned with style than substance. While the LA Times mourns that the time has passed to impeach Villanueva (the election is June 7), reform-minded national and grassroots organizations are pushing a charter amendment that would give the Board of Supervisors more advisory power over the sheriff. Commissioner Nika Soon-Shiong provided evidence at the last Public Safety Commission meeting that the LASD was overcharging West Hollywood for policing services; Villanueva, unsurprisingly, disputes. Rather than adjust department policy, Villanueva thought it prudent to also offer up an entirely revised form of county government, which includes expanding the Board of Supervisors and adding a County Executive, who, presumably, would be on his side.
And, on Ash Wednesday, Villanueva greeted East Los Angeles students when this happened.