"There are roughly three thousand sheriffs in America, in forty-seven states. Arpaio and Peyman are among the dozens aligned with the 'constitutional sheriffs' movement.'"

"Another is David A. Clarke, Jr., the cowboy-hatted Wisconsin firebrand who considered joining the Department of Homeland Security.... There are even more followers of constitutional policing across America among law enforcement’s rank and file. One group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or C.S.P.O.A., claims about five thousand members.  C.S.P.O.A. members believe that the sheriff has the final say on a law’s constitutionality in his county. Every law-enforcement officer has some leeway in choosing which laws to enforce, which is why it’s rare to get a ticket for jaywalking, for example. But, under this philosophy, the supremacy clause of the Constitution, which dictates that federal law takes precedence over state law, is irrelevant. So is the Supreme Court. 'They get up every morning and put their clothes on the same way you and I do,' Finch told me. 'Why do those nine people get to decide what the rest of the country’s going to be like?' To the most dogmatic, there’s only one way to interpret the country’s founding documents: pro-gun, anti-immigrant, anti-regulation, anti-Washington.... When [Richard] Mack launched the C.S.P.O.A., around 2010, he described it as 'the army to set our nation free.'... Mack personally disavows discrimination and infuses his lectures with the language of the civil-rights era. He likes to say, 'We should have never heard of Rosa Parks,' explaining that a constitutional sheriff wouldn’t have arrested her...."

From "The Renegade Sheriffs/A law-enforcement movement that claims to answer only to the Constitution" by Ashley Powers in The New Yorker.

It was the mention of the Sheriff of Malibu (in "The Big Lebowski") in the previous post that reminded me I wanted to blog that article. Remember that scene?



"We got a nice quiet beach community here... Stay out of Malibu, deadbeat! Keep your ugly fucking goldbricking ass out of my beach community!" Malibu is a city, not a county, so that guy is not a sheriff, but — as the screenplay says — the chief of police.