Someone should ask Grady Judd, the grandstanding Polk County, Florida, sheriff who routinely goes on TV to pronounce suspects guilty before they’ve had a trial, what business a law enforcer has telling people, “Welcome to Florida, but don’t register to vote and vote the stupid way you did up North, or you’ll get what they got.” (Read story here.)
Related story: Back in 2018, Judd ate crow after blaming ICE for a cop getting injured by a suspect with a record of violence after it turned out his department never reported the individual to ICE (photo, left; read about that here).
A sheriff’s job is to arrest suspects, collect evidence, and turn cases over to a prosecutor; then a court — not the sheriff — determines guilt or innocence. If a cop, especially one who makes a media figure of himself, proclaims a defendant guilty before trial, that could prejudice the defendant’s right to a fair trial and potentially set him free.
A sheriff running for election can say, “Vote for me.” He can even say, “I’m tougher on crime than my opponent.” But law enforcement isn’t supposed to be partisan. The fact some sheriffs are elected doesn’t make it so. That’s to make them accountable to voters for the policing of their communities. Judd was elected to a non-partisan office, and doesn’t run for that office under a party label.
This, however, doesn’t stop him from playing partisan politics, even though he shouldn’t. Wikipedia says (here), “While the office of sheriff in Polk County is nonpartisan, Judd frequently endorses Republican political candidates.” Here’s the problem with that: Polk County is evenly split between Republican and Democratic voters (data here), and by favoring one party over the other, he alienates half the population and sows distrust of law enforcement in his county. If he wants to be a partisan, he should run for a partisan office.
Here in King County, Washington, which had an elected sheriff from 1996 to 2020, voters abandoned that idea after a series of not-so-great elected sheriffs. An appointed police chief or sheriff is more likely to spend his time doing police work than seeking to score points with voters. It seems Judd would rather be a political figure in the limelight than a law enforcer.