If Jay Jones wins the November election through a write-in campaign, Cam Hunt wouldn’t necessarily have to accept the result without question. Alabama law provides a process for contesting elections. But a successful challenge would require more than pointing to something questionable about the campaign. That possibility raises an interesting question in Lee County, where…
Voters in Barbour County will have several decisions to make when they head to the polls on November 3. While much of the attention across Alabama has been on the governor’s race and control of Congress, some of the decisions closer to home deserve just as much attention. Barbour County includes several small towns and…
There’s something unusual about the effort to return Jay Jones to the Lee County sheriff’s office. A Republican sheriff who lost his own party’s primary is now receiving support from people who don’t necessarily agree with his politics, or even with each other. Jones lost the May Republican primary to Cam Hunt by 307 votes….
A police officer already has plenty of information they can’t release. Criminal investigations, confidential personnel records, protected personal information, and security details aren’t things officers should be discussing with just anybody. Those restrictions come with the job, and there’s a good reason for them. So when a city decides its officers need to sign an…
If an employee uses a police system for something they aren’t authorized to do, that employee owns the decision. I’m not interested in watering that down by blaming the software, the supervisor, the policy manual, or anybody else for a choice the employee made. But when it happens more than 2,700 times over about a…
Police departments have access to things political organizations don’t. We can stop people, investigate them, obtain records, use surveillance systems, gather information, write reports, make arrests, and speak with the credibility that comes from an official badge and government authority. That power exists for a public purpose. Political policing starts when somebody tries to use…
A sergeant candidate may have to meet minimum qualifications, take a written exam, sit through a structured interview, complete an assessment, compete against other candidates, and live with a scoring system somebody can point to afterward. Then the chief’s job opens, and sometimes the process gets looser. A city may review resumes, conduct a few…
If I were helping a city hire its next police chief, I wouldn’t be comfortable making a recommendation based on a résumé, a good interview, and three references the candidate picked himself. I’d want to know quite a bit more about the person who was about to take charge of the department. A police chief…
When one of my officers is under investigation, I have responsibilities to the public, the officer, and the department. Those responsibilities don’t always fit neatly together, especially when people want answers before the investigation has established what actually happened. I don’t believe transparency means telling everybody everything I know, and I don’t believe protecting an…
Barbour County history is full of stories people repeat because they’ve heard them all their lives. If you grew up here, or spent enough time around people who did, you’ve probably heard some version of them. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar: high-stakes poker games where decisions were really made, the prosecutor who…