Sovereign Citizens with Badges? (with Jessica Pishko)

Thanks for having me.

So I want to talk about constitutional sheriffs, but before we get there, I want to ask you, what's a sheriff?

That's a good, it's a good question.

And I mean, I always start everything with what's a sheriff because I If you put it in context, so we have, this country has like 18,000 different policing agencies and that's a lot of police.

So

it's

understandable that as you're going about your day, you don't really know like what police agency is doing what.

As we've seen now with like federal agencies doing all kinds of stuff, like people are like, oh, there's a male police and there's a IRS has police, right? Yeah.

Everyone has police.

And it's

extraordinarily fragmented at the local level, right? Like, I mean, there's the whole constellation of federal agencies, but like, I mean, I don't like, and I live in Allegheny County, and I think there's like a dozen different agencies that are all responsible for different parts of local policing here.

That's absolutely right.

You have like not only are there like small police agencies and like university police agencies, there are like constables and various other things.

But we'll focus on sheriffs for today.

So there's a little over 3000 sheriffs.

You can like limit the universe to that.

And so basically there's one sheriff in every county.

So how many counties are in the United States? There are a few states without sheriffs, mostly because they don't have counties.

So Alaska and Hawaii just don't have counties.

You know, who knew? And Connecticut got rid of the sheriff.

for reasons we can talk about at some point.

But everywhere else, there is a sheriff in your county.

They are almost always elected.

There was a handful of exceptions.

And basically in most places, what the sheriff is responsible for, the primary reason you would know about them is that they run the county jail.