Where I stand
Spend on People, Not Surveillance and Spectacle
The Sheriff’s office is the county’s second-largest department, more than $110 million a year. Where has the money and attention gone?
It went to a Flock license-plate surveillance network that scanned your comings and goings and shared the data with well over a hundred agencies across multiple states, until the County Board, backed by the ACLU of Wisconsin, defunded it over Fourth Amendment concerns. It went to crowd-control munitions that were finally taken off the shelf and used on nonviolent people on April 18th. Meanwhile, the deputies who actually keep this county safe have spent years short-staffed, working mandatory overtime that their own union calls unsustainable, on schedules a county study said were hurting recruitment over fifteen years ago.
And budget season, every year, becomes a public battle of press releases between the Sheriff and the County Board instead of an honest conversation about what the department needs. When the Board froze funded-but-vacant positions to help close a county deficit, the response was a media campaign, not a data-driven case. Whether the department had absorbed its share of cuts is genuinely disputed between the Sheriff and the Board, and that is exactly the problem: it should not be possible to dispute. The numbers should be on the table.
In my view, this is a department run for image, with priorities that serve the man at the top more than the people doing the work or the public paying for it. You can look at the same record and draw your own conclusion. Either way, the record is what it is.
As Sheriff, I will:
- Put staffing, retention, and training first in every budget I propose. People before gadgets.
- Not rebuild mass surveillance programs the public and its elected board rejected.
- Replace budget brinkmanship with open books: a transparent, data-driven needs assessment the Board can verify, every year.
- Account publicly for what major operations cost, including the April 18th response.
A safer county is built on trusted, well-supported deputies, not on cameras, gas, and press conferences.