New sheriff in town?

There has been little public interest shown in recent discussions to make Ramsey County Sheriff an elected position, so this seems a good place to post this since there is little interest in this site also.

Joe Kimball wrote a recent Minnpost article on the matter recently. He noted the history of discussion of the issue in Hennepin and Ramsey counties both and how sheriffs are chosen around the Republic. [Almost all are elected.]

For a while I have been wondering whether the modern day metropolitan day sheriff’s office isn’t really two or more offices.

Traditionally, sheriffs were responsible for roles in courts, process, and incarceration/corrections and for law enforcement in rural, less developed areas. In modern metropolitan counties there are no more rural, less developed areas and sheriffs fill a role more comparable to a police chief, a position which is traditionally appointed.

I can see where some would want to keep the person responsible for the courts, process, and incarceration elected. It seems that it might be an important check in our checks and balance system.

But we are accustomed to not electing police chiefs and nobody ever seems to mind that.

I haven’t seen anybody suggesting this but maybe we might want to consider dividing what sheriffs’ offices [or at least the Ramsey County sheriff’s office] do, leaving the courts, process, and incarceration/corrections stuff in the hands of the sheriff and establishing another department run by an appointed professional to handle the crime prevention and enforcement functions.

[Of course, any place that is allowed to call itself a city should have its own police department or be required to be annexed by a city that has one if they cannot get one in a reasonable period of time (like sixty days), but nobody seems to want to pursue that. If that were the case there would not be much law enforcement for the sheriff’s office to do.]

There would be a lot of details to work out on this. Maybe there needs to be other or further division than the two-part division I am posing here. And finance would be an issue since it might be more expensive in the long run. And, of course, there are always the political ramifications involved in anything like this.

But maybe this could be an approach.