Prior to the 2024 presidential election, Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski of Portage County, Ohio, posted a message on his personal and campaign Facebook pages with racist references to Vice President Kamala Harris and immigrants, adding that people with Harris lawn signs should have their addresses recorded. That way, he continued, when migrants arrive, “we’ll already have the addresses of their new families…who supported their arrival!” Sheriff Zuchowski’s actions were widely condemned, and county commissioners relieved the sheriff’s office of the duty of maintaining security for the November 5 election, as Michael Rubikam of the Associate Press reported. But there is a long history of sheriffs using their office in partisan, corrupt, and sometimes violent ways. Sheriffs have been involved in the suppression of evidence, threats against federal agents, and armed militias. Sheriff Zuchowski narrowly won reelection and posted a second Facebook message telling his opponents that there wasn’t enough room “on my a**” for their lips, as journalist Diane Smith noted in the Ravenna Record-Courier.

Sheriffs occupy a strange place in American politics. Distinct from police chiefs, sheriffs are elected by voters in the county they represent. But similar to other law enforcement agencies, it has proven stubbornly difficult to hold sheriffs accountable for corruption, incompetence, and violence. In The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States, Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman make two central claims. First, despite being elected, sheriffs operate with little political accountability, and they exercise virtually uncontested control over their offices, practices, and, sometimes, even their pool of potential challengers. Second, sheriffs have been central to the reproduction and maintenance of the racial, gender, and class status quo in the United States. In making their argument, they draw on an impressive array of data, including two original surveys of sheriffs conducted in 2012 and 2021, with over 500 sheriffs responding to each distinct survey. They also construct and analyze a large database of sheriffs from websites, social media posts, and media coverage of sheriffs’ departments. To analyze elections, partisanship, and ideology, the authors use the California Elections Data Archive, the Cooperative Elections Study, and public opinion data from Chris Tausanovitch and Christopher Warshaw, and they supplement their analyses with information from a range of government agencies (e.g., Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics), and data compiled by nonprofit organizations, such as the Sentencing Project.

Chapter one provides a history of sheriffs’ offices and discusses the various ways that sheriffs’ offices were deployed in service of status quo interests. Chapters two through four address the first claim about a lack of political accountability, exploring data on who sheriffs are, how sheriffs’ elections work (or don’t work), and how sheriffs shape the authority and policies of their offices. Women only make up 2% of sheriffs, compared to 20% of U.S. congressional representatives. (This figure appears to be comparable to women police chiefs, at roughly three percent, according to data from the 30 × 30 initiative at NYU Law’s Policing Project.) More surprisingly, Black and Hispanic people account for barely 8% of sheriffs, even as they make up nearly 19% of members of Congress and 31% of the population (p. 38). It is worth noting that roughly 38% of police chiefs in municipalities with over 250,000 residents are Black, according to Sean E. Goodison’s analysis of the 2020 Bureau of Justice statistics. Sheriffs are also substantially more likely to identify as Republican than the general population—almost none identified as strong Democrats, compared to 25% of the population—and they are far less likely to strongly disapprove of President Trump (8% compared to roughly half the population). Farris and Holman find little evidence that distinguishing between urban and rural offices explains these differences.

This profound skew in sheriff demographics and ideology is hard to separate from the dysfunction of sheriffs’ elections that Farris and Holman describe. Sheriffs often run unopposed and enjoy a very high incumbency advantage when there are challengers. On average, they serve longer terms than police chiefs. The “scare off” effect (p. 56) is particularly acute in sheriffs’ elections because so many candidates come from within sheriffs’ departments themselves. The need for law enforcement experience as well as a general preference for close ties with the community also makes the eligibility pool very shallow. A large majority of sheriffs (77%) worked in their own office before running for election. Farris and Holman note that incumbency effects are large in other political offices, but “only 26% of state legislative candidates report a prior political position” and “less than 5% of candidates for mayor and city council in California report positions as a legislative or local staff” (p. 58-59). All of this creates opportunities for sheriffs to handpick successors from within and to punish potential challengers, which Farris and Holman demonstrate in a number of ways.

This limited electoral accountability also has implications for policy. Farris and Holman provide some evidence that sheriffs’ attitudes on race, gender, and immigration can have consequences for policies such as trained domestic violence personnel, prohibitions on using race or ethnicity in traffic stops, and department policies on checking immigration status. In a chilling chapter five, the book explores the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a right-wing extremist group that claims that sheriffs have the highest level of authority in the United States. CSPOA has strong connections to anti-government, white supremacist militia movements. Farris and Holman find that sheriffs with more extreme views also showed less willingness to enforce national gun laws and COVID-19 mask mandates, while demonstrating more support for the January 6 insurrectionists. Farris and Holman conclude with a chapter outlining possible reforms, but they are not particularly optimistic.

Despite the generally uncompetitive nature of sheriffs’ elections and the highly unrepresentative nature of the office, sheriffs regularly tout the accountability of elections as a defense of their broad powers. As one sheriff noted in the survey, “The office of the Sheriff is the only law enforcement official who answers directly to the voters of their county” (p. 53). The National Sheriffs Association claims that: “The sheriff provides a check and balance as an elected county official directly responsible to the citizens that protects from undue influence by members of the county board or by other county officials” (p 53).

Sheriffs’ championing themselves as an important political check on power fits neatly with the standard tropes about the American system of checks and balances. But the evidence provided by Farris and Holman suggests something altogether different: sheriffs’ offices, like other opaque corners of the American political landscape, operate as mini-fiefdoms, where largely unchecked power is concentrated in the hands of a few powerful individuals. In this case, those power wielders are almost entirely white and male, and more likely to occupy an extreme right political position than the median voter in their own county. While such biases permeate numerous political institutions in the U.S., it is hard to think of any that are this unrepresentative, let alone ones in which the political actors are armed and have the legitimate authority to use lethal force. Nothing says “democracy” like uncompetitive elections that produce extreme partisan results for a political institution that has the power to arrest, jail, and harm people.

I wasn’t quite sure how to evaluate the second of the book’s claims, that sheriffs have been central to the reproduction and maintenance of the racial, gender, and class status quo. There is certainly plenty of historical evidence of sheriffs enforcing racial hierarchy, dismissing women’s claims of harm, and disrupting labor disputes, and Farris and Holman provide additional illustrations of contemporary race and gender bias. But this broad claim could apply to any number of political institutions in American politics, even outside law enforcement. Moreover, Farris and Holman’s own data suggest substantial variation in sheriffs’ willingness to use their offices in this way in the contemporary context. The fifth chapter on right-wing extremism and CSOPA, for example, is indeed disturbing, but it is unclear what percentage of sheriffs believe in, let alone abide by CSOPA’s positions. It certainly doesn’t appear to be anything close to a majority. In contrast, the anecdotes in the book illustrate a high level of run-of-the-mill corruption that gets much less attention but might have more impact on ordinary Americans’ lives. Having said that, the outcome of the 2024 election might embolden the more radical of the right-wing sheriffs and, as this book shows, it is unclear what mechanisms exist to hold them to account.