On Sheriffs and Hurricanes

On sheriffs and hurricanes — sort of a nonsequitor by not really. Some sheriffs around the country manage to inflict as much personal trauma as a hurricane.

Oct 21, 2024

Letter From The Villages, Florida

October 20th, 2024

Eric Ryan Anderson, candidate for Sumter County Sheriff this November. Photo credit: S. Poux 10/18/2024 1:33 p.m.

Dear Mel,

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to sit down to write without a whole bunch of distractions grasping at me. Like Hurricane Milton. We came through it just fine, despite the scariness of the night as I listened to wind and rain lash my windows and the dog trembled next to me. The winds had diminished a lot by the time the storm reached us, but we still lost power for about twelve hours. Most of the outage occurred while we were sleeping.

When I went outside in the morning to inspect the house the first thing I noticed was the neighbor’s roof across the street. A number of shingles were missing. As the dog and I progressed down the street minor roof damage was the worst of what we saw. No one’s house flooded. No windows broke. Nothing terrible befell any of us. We were very lucky that way.

We’d parked our RV in the driveway in anticipation of lost power. I made coffee out there because the coach batteries were fully charged and there’s an onboard generator we could use if needed. My neighbor took a cup. I also had hurricane cookies on hand for breakfast baked the previous afternoon — oatmeal, chocolate chip with dried cherries — that I passed around as others came out of their houses to look around.

There was a lot of plant debris and some bent trees about. Folks were checking to see if Waffle House was open. It was. Not all of Sumter and Lake Counties were without electricity.

Everything is back to normal now, except the golf courses are still closed. They play a big part in flood management. It’s quite amazing, really. The retention ponds on the courses prevent heavy rains from flooding homes. That water gets pumped out through the irrigation systems in The Villages. The work of drying out the courses is taking some time. Some greens remain submerged and cart paths are washed out.

If closed golf courses are the price for preventing flooding in homes, we have it a zillion times better than the people devastated by this year’s hurricanes. It’s almost unbelievable how unscathed we were this year. Gratitude overwhelms me when I watch the news.

I’ve been reading Gilbert King’s book, Beneath a Ruthless Sun, his follow up to Devil in the Grove, chronicling the gross injustices in Lake County that took place under Sheriff Willis McCall’s rule during the age of racial integration. Beneath a Ruthless Sun is the shocking story about how, in 1957, an intellectually challenged white man was railroaded for the rape of a white woman and sent without trial to a state hospital for the insane, where he was trapped for fourteen years while his mother and a local journalist tried to get him out.

The real hero of this story is Mabel Norris Reese, the owner and editor of the Mt. Dora paper called The Topic. Mabel believed in Jesse’s innocence from the beginning, and took on Willis McCall until he was finally removed from office. McCall had the Klan firebomb her house in an effort to get her to drop the story.

The racism, sexism and gratuitous cruelty portrayed in this real life story is almost too much to digest.

The rape victim was married to a man who’d eventually become mayor of Leesburg, the town near my house in Lake County. The evidence suggested she was actually raped by a Black man. Initially she herself claimed it was a Black man but later changed her story, after her husband pointed out how he would look bad, socially speaking, if people believed his wife had been violated by a Black man. So, he and the sheriff found a way to make this problem of Negro violation go away.

An elaborate scheme that included manufactured evidence and a denial of the accused’s civil rights sent the disabled teen, Jesse Daniels, to Chattahoochee, a notorious mental hospital first established in 1876, without a trial. That way, the rape victim would never have to testify in public.

While confined in the criminal wing at Chattahoochee, Jesse wasn’t permitted to go outdoors, poorly fed, and beaten regularly by other inmates and guards. For fourteen years. It was a staggering miscarriage of justice for which he received little compensation when he was finally released.

The question that I couldn’t get out of my head after I finished reading the book was: How could McCall continue to run for the job of Sheriff and get re-elected until 1972 even though everyone knew he was a murderer, racist and corrupt, making money from illegal gambling, graft, and forcing inmates to work his ranch?

I understood from Gilbert’s books that no one seriously opposed McCall out of fear for their lives and their family’s lives. But couldn’t the governor do something about it? The answer is the governor could do nothing unless McCall was convicted of a crime. No jury in Lake County or Marion County would convict the man. Not for the murder of Matthew Shepherd, one of the Groveland Four, nor the killing of Tommy Vickers in 1972, whom McCall kicked to death while he was in McCall’s custody.

It was shortly after he was acquitted in the killing of Vickers that McCall lost re-election.

“McCall was said to have bragged that he had been investigated 49 times and that five different governors had tried to remove him.He liked to say ‘I've been accused of everything but taking a bath and called everything but a child of God.’ He retired to his home in Umatilla, Florida." (Wikipedia)

The day after I finished Beneath a Ruthless Sun, the October 3rd edition of the New York Review of Books arrived in my mailbox, and to my great interest it included Linda Greenhouse’s review of Jessica Pishko’s new book, The Highest Law in the Land: How the unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy.

Here were the answers to my head scratching questions about Lake County’s most famous sheriff, such as why did McCall have more power than anyone in the county, even the state? How was he able to get away with his crimes in pursuit of that power and also his personal fortune?

Most people who, like me, have always lived in cities where the presence of a county sheriff is invisible have no idea how the system creates a branch of law enforcement that isn’t just above the law, it becomes the law itself.

City police departments are subject to civilian oversight by boards, mayors, and city councils. County sheriffs have no such oversight.

Yet, they not only enforce laws within their jurisdictions, according to Greenhouse, they are also responsible for county jails that admit some 10 million people across the country per year. In that capacity they transport prisoners between courts, state and federal penitentiaries.

“These jails, under the control of sheriffs, operate with little oversight or staff training and without requirements for medical care.” (Greenhouse).

All sheriffs are elected county officials, some of them representing places with fewer than a thousand people, and others with populations in the millions. Not all sheriffs are corrupt and the situations vary because the circumstances of each county in the country are highly individualized. But no sheriff reports to the local police chief or any other elected official. It’s no wonder they can become a law unto themselves, teaming up with vigilantes and other bad actors in pursuit of their personal power and agendas.

All they need to do is get re-elected. It turns out this is remarkably easy. Most elections for sheriff are uncontested. Where there is competition, the incumbent is re-elected 90 percent of the time.

Consider Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona who was convicted of criminal contempt for randomly arresting anyone suspected of being undocumented without evidence. Voters kicked him out after his conviction, but he’d held the job for 24 years. He was one of Donald Trump’s first pardons.

Or the recent story of a small town in Oklahoma in which the long-time sheriff was manipulated by his lover, a deputy who worked for him, into committing many crimes, including threatening to murder the people who ran the town’s local newspaper and were investigating his office. He was never charged. Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, decided to leave it up to voters to decide whether the man should continue in his job rather than trying him for threatening journalists with death, as well as unlawful search and seizure. Voters defeated the sheriff in 2024, a year after the story broke nationally.

Fun fact: Gentner Drummond is related by marriage to Ree Drummond, star of “The Pioneer Woman” on Food Network. She is his second cousin’s wife.

Just this week U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a civil rights investigation into policing in Rankin County, Mississippi. This following a case in which five sheriff’s deputies and a former Richland police officer were convicted last year in Brandon, Miss. for the torture of two Black men in a no-warrant house raid. The deputies called themselves “The Goon Squad” and behaved like a gang of vigilantes with police shields for years.

“I wish I had known, for example, that in one third of US counties the sheriff’s office is the largest law enforcement agency. Sheriffs employ a quarter of all sworn law enforcement officers and control 85 percent of local jails. Their offices are responsible for 30 percent of killings by law enforcement, and at least one thousand inmates die every year while in sheriffs’ custody.” - Linda Greenhouse

“Sheriffs, 90 percent of whom are white men, commonly believe that their elected status puts them above police chiefs.” - Linda Greenhouse