GRAND RAPEDS, Mich. (AP) — Against the backdrop of the hum of the convention center, Dar Lev settles into a club chair to explain the sacred mission to America’s police chiefs, his bright blue eyes and warm smile bubbling the vehemence of the issue.
“The sheriff is supposed to protect the public from evil,” said the chief law enforcement official of Barry County, Michigan, during a break at the 2023 National Police Association convention in June. “When your government is evil or out of line, that’s the sheriff’s purpose, and protecting them from that.”
Leaf is on the advisory board of the Association of Mayors and Constitutional Peace Officers, founded in 2011 by former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack. The group, known as the CSPOA, teaches that elected mayors must “protect their citizens from the overreach of an out-of-control federal government” by refusing to enforce any law they deem unconstitutional or “unfair.”
“The safest way to actually do this is to make local law enforcement aware that they have no obligation to enforce such laws,” Mack said in an interview. “They are not laws at all anyway. If they are unjust laws, they are laws of tyranny.”
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This project was produced by Howard Center for Investigative JournalismIn cooperation with Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. The Howard Center, housed at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is an initiative of the Scripps Howard Fund in honor of the late CEO and news industry pioneer Roy W. Howard. AZCIR is a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom focused on data-driven investigative journalism. For more see https://azcir.org/cspoa/. Contact us on howardcenter@asu.edu.
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The group of mayors has criticized gun control laws, COVID-19 mask mandates and public health restrictions, as well as alleged election fraud. The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism has also found that he has also quietly spread his ideology across the country, seeking to become more mainstream in part by securing state approval for taxpayer-funded law enforcement training.
Over the past five years, the group has hosted trainings, rallies, speeches, and meetings in at least 30 states for law enforcement officers, political figures, private organizations, and members of the public, according to a seven-month Howard Center investigation, conducted in collaboration with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.
The group has organized formal trainings on its “constitutional” curriculum for law enforcement officers in at least 13 of those states. In six states, the training is approved for continuing education credits for officers. The group also has supporters who sit on three government boards responsible for law enforcement training standards.
Legal experts warn that such training — especially when approved for state credit — could undermine the democratic processes enshrined in the US Constitution and is part of what Mary McCord, former federal attorney general and executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Defense and Protection in Georgetown, is part of. . The university, which it calls the “broader insurgent ideology” that has dominated the nation since the 2020 presidential election.
“They have no power, not under their state constitutions or bylaws, to decide what is constitutional and what is unconstitutional. That’s what courts have, not sheriffs,” McCord said.
McCord added, “Another kind of evil lurks there, because the CSPOA is now an essential part of a broader movement in the United States to believe that it is okay to use political violence if we disagree with some kind of government policy.”
At least one state, Texas, has revoked credit for Dean’s training after determining course content—which it said included a reference to “This is war”—was more political than educational. But other states, like Tennessee, have approved the training, in part because it was hosted by a local law enforcement agency.
In contrast to continuing law enforcement education, such as firearms training, Deans’ curriculum is largely an argument about the purported constitutional foundations of the police’s absolute power to interpret and overrule certain laws. “It is the county sheriff who can say to the feds, ‘Beyond this boundary you shall not pass,'” says one of the pamphlets advertising the group’s seminars. “
Since 2018, the Howard Center-AZCIR investigation found, at least 69 mayors across the country have been identified as members of the group or have publicly supported it, though at least one later disavowed the organization. A 2021 survey by academic researchers working with the nonprofit Marshall Project found that more than 200 of the estimated 500 sheriffs who took part agreed with the group’s ideology.
In addition, the reporters found that at least a dozen U.S. counties affected by the group of mayors have considered “constitutional boycott” decisions over the past two years. The decisions range from a simple reaffirmation of support for the constitutional rights of county residents to empowering local government, including sheriffs, to refuse to enforce state and federal laws that they interpret as unconstitutional. Officials in two Nevada counties — Lander and Elko — have become official constitutional counties of the CSPOA, a move that includes a $2,500 lifetime fee paid directly to the group of sheriffs.
Nationally, there are about 3,000 mayors, whose salaries are funded by taxpayers. They serve as the chief law enforcement officers of their respective districts and are the only elected peace officers in the country. They appoint deputy sheriffs and jailers and serve the courts within their jurisdiction. Mayors have a lot of influence over what happens in their county, especially in rural areas.
Many sheriffs are joining the group from a “misguided but well-meaning perspective,” said Amy Cooter, director of research at the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism. But, she added, it also allows for some mayors “the potential to engage in extremism by not enforcing legal, legal and Sharia orders.”
Some states have opposed the group’s training efforts, and not all sheriffs support the group’s ideology. Many at the National Conference of Sheriffs distanced themselves from Constitution Sheriffs or claimed they didn’t know what they were about.
“When I took the oath 17 years ago as mayor, I took an oath to uphold the Constitution, not to transgress it,” said Troy Wellman, Sheriff of Moody County, South Dakota, and Vice President of the National Sheriff’s Association.
There was general opposition in some provinces, led by “constitutional sheriffs”. In Klickitat County, Washington, residents alleged that Sheriff Bob Songer, a board member of the Sheriffs Group, engaged in fear-mongering and intimidation. It was the target of a formal complaint in 2022 that the state’s Law Enforcement Standards Agency ultimately rejected it for lack of jurisdiction.
The group’s public image, led by white men, prominently features the American flag and the experiences of black civil rights icons who rejected unjust laws. But the details of its operations are closely guarded, and its finances are protected from public scrutiny. It was briefly registered as a nonprofit organization in the state of Arizona, but internal records indicate that it is now a private company.
The group does not publish a list of due-paying members, nor does it publish information about where and how trainings are conducted. However, the group’s leaders’ sympathy for white nationalist far-right causes is well documented.
Mack was an early board member of the Oath Keepers, the group implicated in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Although he has said he broke away from the group several years ago when it became a militia, Mack still speaks at Oath Keeper rallies.
Leaf was investigated, but not charged, in connection with the Michigan Attorney General’s investigation into alleged illegal seizure and violation of vote-counting machines in 2020. He also appeared at a rally with election deniers with two men who were later charged with conspiracy to kidnap. Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Another Sheriffs’ group board member and former Maryland Attorney General candidate, Michael Pirotka, was once affiliated with the League of the South, which supports a “free and independent Southern Republic.” In a 2019 training course, he said: “There is a Creator God. Our rights come from Him. The purpose of civil government is to secure and defend God-given rights.”
John Lewis, a research fellow in George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, called the group of deans “malignant” and said they had become “the norm bearers of engaging in more violent forms of extremism.”
“Just because he’s not overt in their subversion of the democratic system, just because he’s quieter about how it’s done and what it advocates for, doesn’t make the ideas any less dangerous,” Lewis said.
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Brendon Dear of the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, Jamie Cloutier, Heaven Lamartz, and Annabella Medina of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism contributed to this story.
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This project was produced by Howard Center for Investigative JournalismIn cooperation with Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. The Howard Center, housed at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is an initiative of the Scripps Howard Fund in honor of the late CEO and news industry pioneer Roy W. Howard. AZCIR is a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom focused on data-driven investigative journalism. For more see https://azcir.org/cspoa/. Contact us on howardcenter@asu.edu.
This article originally appeared on apnews.com
