Four years ago, George Floyd’s murder and the resulting months of demonstrations brought unprecedented scrutiny to the deeply problematic practices of American policing. Yet one key figure — the county sheriff — barely got any attention, while the focus was on large urban police departments. Since then, sheriffs have since become significant figures on the populist right, epitomized in the mythical notion of the "constitutional sheriff," which sails right past the fact that the word “sheriff” appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution.
In an effort to restore a certain balance, two quite different books on the historic and present-tense role of sheriffs have been published in the same month. The first, "The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States," by Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman (author interview here), is a rigorously synthetic work of political science that contains some telling specific details, but whose core strength lies in tying them together.
