Loyalty to the sheriff or loyalty to the law?

I spent most of my adult life in a state where off-duty political activity by law enforcement officers was expressly protected by law. Deputies ran against sitting sheriffs in every election cycle and nothing much happened besides everyone going back to work on Wednesday, so I figured that was normal, a simple part of any citizen’s civil rights.

I’d heard of places where deputies got fired or demoted for challenging an incumbent sheriff — even places where new sheriffs swept the entire office and required deputies to reapply — so when a friend sent me a link about one such drama playing out in Alabama, I took a closer look. It’s a local story but it illustrates national variations in law, culture and the politics of elected law enforcement — variations that often determine who is even allowed to run..

Political loyalty and patronage firings

Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones joined the sheriff’s office more than 50 years ago, and he’s been the sheriff for 27 of them. He ran unopposed except for his first campaign (with the endorsement of the retiring sheriff), and one other time against a local libertarian candidate. He is well-spoken, well-educated and a former adjunct professor of criminal justice.

A deputy told him he intended to run against him in the 2026 election; Jones fired him, inspiring a flurry of coverage by local news outlets. He explained the termination by citing case law in Alabama, Florida and Georgia that grants sheriffs the right to expect political loyalty since those states (with a few exceptions garnered by collective bargaining in larger departments) regard deputies as an alter ego of the sheriff himself. In interviews, he cited “public safety” as a cause for concern if one of his deputies runs against him.

I asked Jones about that concern when we talked on the phone while he was on a break during a training session. “Public safety is one element,” he said. “I consider the agency a team. Dissension within the team will logically affect efficiency, which diminishes our capacity to effect that mission — which is public safety.” Jones’s argument hinges on the idea that political opposition within the agency necessarily translates to operational dysfunction.

Patronage dismissals are legal in Alabama, but challenger Cam Hunt is pushing back.

He believes change is needed, and that he has the leadership experience to bring it to the department. Law enforcement runs in his family. His grandmother, Peggy Hunt, was the first female certified police officer in the state, serving the city of Opelika from 1975 till she retired; he served as a Marine officer after graduating from Auburn University, after the example of other veteran relatives. When he returned to Alabama to raise a family, he followed in his grandmother’s footsteps at Opelika PD before working for the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. He said in a phone interview, “I saw things that need dire change and I didn’t want to wait 20 years to be able to make that change.”

Photos/Cam Hunt

He met with Jones to tell him he had decided to run for sheriff in the next election, and left the meeting unemployed. He says he was not asked to resign. Jones says he should have resigned before announcing his candidacy. The campaign has become tense and fraught, and in a lot of the country that’s the norm.

The state of the sheriff’s campaign

Most counties have sheriffs, and most of those sheriffs are elected, but there is no single standard regulating the office. Once a sheriff is elected they tend to stay in office, sometimes for decades. They often run unopposed, even when clear ethics and legal breaches have been proven. Challenging an incumbent sheriff means facing a historically high bar; in many places it’s impossible for an active deputy.

Besides case law like the ones cited in Lee County, obstacles include the Hatch Act, which precludes political activity by someone in a position that is even partially federally funded. One contact told me of a New York sheriff who ended a political challenge simply by transferring the deputy to a position funded by federal grants. (To be fair, the Hatch Act has also caught out some sheriffs who trod too close to funding lines during their own campaigns.)

Challenging an incumbent may be interpreted as disloyalty or insubordination, and where employment is at-will, termination doesn’t require cause anyway. There are also “resign to run” laws that can require a deputy to resign before running for political office.

Do deputies always have to quit to run for sheriff?

Short answer: No — but it depends heavily on the state.

Some states have civil service systems or government codes protecting due process and civil rights for law enforcement. Arkansas, California, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Tennessee and Wisconsin all have Law Enforcement Officer or Peace Officer Bills of Rights that spell out some degree of protection for legal, off-duty political activity, including running for election. Deputies in some states must take a leave of absence during the campaign. In others, they may continue on with their regular employment, as long as they don’t campaign on duty or in uniform.

They may be prohibited from fundraising (but committees for their election may do that on their behalf), but in many of these states, and some others with civil service systems, deputies cannot be penalized for running for sheriff.

The position of sheriff: Elected by the people, for the people, to what end?

Elections aren’t really as simple as they seem. Where primaries are closed, and only two candidates run for sheriff (or prosecutor, or judge), only a fraction of voters actually get to choose who serves all of them.

If an incumbent also has influence over who may challenge them, then the voters have still less influence. Their choices were limited before they arrived at the polls.

Are political challenges equivalent to insubordination? Jurisdictions exist where deputies challenge incumbents every election cycle yet the world just keeps turning. I don’t believe that disagreement is the same as insubordination, or that personal loyalty to a sheriff is required for professional policing.

There is at least one case where a deputy spoke out to the press in opposition to department policies, won a lawsuit upholding his right to do so on First Amendment grounds, and then continued on at that department till retirement. He disagreed, but he did his work impartially. The sheriff and the DA disagreed with him, but did their jobs impartially. No one liked it, yet nothing awful happened because of it.

A “spirit of the Old West” panache permeates the office of sheriff, to the point that one sheriff described the expectation of personal loyalty to me as “riding for the brand.” That’s how cattle barons described employment during the range wars of the 1800s: specific loyalty to the one who hired you, assuming their goals and values as if they were your own. Yet, a sheriff is chosen by the voters to keep the peace and enforce the law. In theory, that law is to be enforced objectively, without regard to person or title. If that’s the mission and everyone involved behaves professionally, then how much can personal loyalty really factor into accomplishing that goal?

Shouldn’t loyalty to the rule of law take precedence?

I set out to find answers and instead found more questions, because we don’t live in a perfect world. Human factors and tradition influence law and policy that vary in every state, sometimes even each county. Upholding tradition for tradition’s sake, though, is just another way of saying “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” I’m not sure that’s ever a good reason to keep doing anything.

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