professor at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. She is the author of Women in Politics in the American City and coeditor of Good Reasons to Run.
They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States, and reported the following:
Page 99 of our book starts the section of our book entitled “Professionalism and Bias in Police Stops” and details the interaction between a mail carrier and a sheriff in Piece County, Washington.Learn more about The Power of the Badge at the University of Chicago Press website.Around 2 am on January 27, 2021, Sedrick Altheimer was delivering newspapers in Pierce County, Washington, when Ed Troyer, the county’s recently elected sheriff, began to follow him in an SUV. After a verbal confrontation where the sheriff cornered Altheimer for driving in and out of driveways, Sheriff Troyer called the police and informed dispatch that Altheimer “threatened to kill me,” prompting a massive police response, with more than 40 police and sheriff cars rushing to the scene. According to testimony from a Tacoma police officer, Troyer later told police he was not threatened by Altheimer. Sheriff Troyer insisted the incident had “nothing to do with [Altheimer] being Black,” but an independent investigation called by the county council found the sheriff exhibited “improper bias” (Brunner and Kamb 2021a; Moran and McDowell 2021) . Following the incident, the Washington State attorney general filed criminal charges against the sheriff for false reporting, and Altheimer filed a lawsuit against the county for damages due to emotional distress from “racial profiling, false arrest and unnecessary use of excessive force of this man whose only crime was ‘being a black man in a white neighborhood.’’’1 Sheriff Troyer was eventually found not guilty of filing a false report (Brunner 2022b) , even as an investigation by a former U.S. Attorney (authorized by the county) found that the sheriff violated policies on bias free policing (Brunner and Kamb 2021b) . At the same time these events were playing out, three Black deputies in the Pierce County Sheriff’s office won a settlement for over one million dollars in June 2022, accusing the office of pervasive sexism and racism in hiring, management, and promotion practices (Adams 2021), and the office faced another lawsuit from a deputy in 2022 with additional accusations of sexism (Ramirez 2022).Page 99 is an excellent representation of the content of the book: in it, we focus on how sheriffs, who are locally elected law enforcement officers, often engage in bad (and racist) behavior and are rarely held accountable for that behavior. One of the main foci of the book is on how sheriffs and their deputies have discretion in the enforcement of the law, particularly around traffic laws. Is it illegal to pull into driveways in a neighborhood where you don’t live? Probably not, but also probably! The set of laws available for enforcement are wide and deep and easily applied or not.
1While awaiting trial for the criminal charges, a judge found the sheriff violated conditions of his release as he had repeatedly contact Altheimer or asked other law enforcement to do so. The judge order Troyer to post a $100,000 bail and abide by the no-contact and anti-harassment orders (Brunner 2022a).
The chapter in which we find page 99 is core to the book: do the attitudes that sheriffs have about groups, including women, people of color, and immigrants, shape their office’s policies? In short, yes. Sheriffs that have more positive views towards women instruct their deputies to connect victims of domestic and interpersonal violence to social services and care. Sheriffs who hold more positive views towards Black people report high rates of training their staff to avoid racial biases. And sheriffs with positive attitudes towards immigrants are less likely to check the immigration status of victims of crimes and witnesses to crimes.
Our book draws attention to sheriffs as an office that has a long history, a powerful role in American politics, and yet is often ignored in discussions of politics, representation, and accountability. In The Power of the Badge, we attempt to remedy some of this oversight by highlighting what sheriffs think and do and why that matters.
--Marshal Zeringue
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