From Minnesota to Maine, Ohio to Texas, small towns unable to fill jobs are eliminating their police departments and turning over police work to their county sheriff, a neighboring town or state police.
From Minnesota to Maine, Ohio to Texas, small towns unable to fill jobs are eliminating their police departments and turning over police work to their county sheriff, a neighboring town or state police.
The part about sheriffs scares me as someone not well-versed in American affairs because I read previously that some sheriffs don’t believe that federal laws should apply to them and that could be good, I guess? But could also be really bad.
Sherrifs straddle the line between law enforcement and politician, and their positions often have questionable accountability protocols.
However they are 100% subject to local, state, and federal laws if investigated and charged by any of those bodies.
If the state and feds are also corrupt locals?
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Yep.
Mostly the second one.
The “some sheriffs” thing refers to so-called Constitutional Sheriffs (https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/constitutional-sheriffs) which is a fringe movement which isn’t representative of that type of LE group by itself. And they can pretend to be above the law in a way normal law enforcement isn’t, but they’re brought back to Earth when they’re sued.
Alas in general, police, sheriffs, and state troopers, in this country have very little accountability thanks to issues unrelated to that movement (“Qualified immunity” is the main reason, a doctrine that says that a government employee can’t be held individually accountable for something they did as part of their job, even if they’re not allowed to do it as part of their job), but the Constitutional Sheriff movement is largely orthogonal to that and there’s nothing inherent about sheriffs that make them less accountable than city police.