Keith Swank

Oh, no, totally.

Keith Swank down in Tacoma, I believe he decided to keep the... contract with flock because they use it.

I mean, this is how they find stolen cars.

This is how they locally, the local sheriff is using it for exactly what we want them to use it for.

It's not supposed to be a legislative body, but in our case, low turnout, the people that came in, came in with a plan.

Plan number one was to get Keith Swank out of office.

And the first charter amendment proposed was an amendment to change the office of sheriff from an elected office to an appointed office by the county executive.

There's only four counties in the state of Washington that even have a county executive.

And their sales pitch early on for the amendment to appoint a sheriff was that it would allow them to go on a national search to have qualifications that ensured they got a great sheriff.

Well, that's not really their motivation, but that was the sales pitch.

And interestingly enough, four months of public commentary and most of the public commentary in favor of the amendment was from people that hated Keith Swank.

Sure.

I want to talk about this political power grab that's happening in broad daylight.

Sheriff Keith Swank joins me now, the elected sheriff chosen by the voters of Pierce County, Washington.

Sheriff Swank, welcome back.

Thank you.

And so they'd be recalling me without having to do the recall process, right? Remove me from office without having to do the necessary steps for that.

So yeah, I filed an initiative.

Before we go to the initiative, is that constitutional for a county to say, we're going to propose a change to the county charter, but in the meantime, we want to take what the voters did in electing Keith Swank as sheriff, and we want to undo it and get rid of him before we've even asked about the other matter.

Does that sound constitutional to you?

but it wasn't about, it was about Barnes.

So Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank claims he was at a police graduation and somebody told him that Interim Chief Sales wanted to speak with him somewhere private-

Mm-hmm

... like away from other ears.