Before colonizers left England for what would become the so-called United States, they knew kings appointed sheriffs to collect taxes and enforce orders. When facing Indigenous communities in the West, settlers elected their own sheriffs as militia to commit land theft and genocide. In the South, enslaved and formerly enslaved Black Americans would become sheriffs’ targets. And the cherished writer James Baldwin exposed their true function in this country.
The sheriff is “hired by the Republic to keep the Republic white,” wrote Baldwin in 1987. In 1979, he’d said, “...in spite of the American Constitution … I know that my father was not a mule and not a thing. And that my sister was not born to be the play thing of idle white sheriffs.”
Sheriffs chased plantation escapees. During Jim Crow, sheriffs arrested Black people over “Black codes.” Many were “leased” to private companies for more slavery. Others, as sheriffs looked on, were sprung from their jail cells and lynched by white mobs.
Today, sheriffs are three times deadlier than other police. A few still operate chain gangs. Some lead deputy gangs. And, unlike police chiefs, sheriffs run jails and rely on reelection.
The history of sheriffs acquiring and wielding their power is what they’re meant to achieve now. But standing on stolen land, brutalizing the descendants of stolen people, their power isn’t warranted.