I wrote about Sheriff Scott Israel today:
The sheriff is an outsized figure in the American imagination. He is Wyatt Earp, shooting it out with outlaws at the O.K. Corral. He is John Wayne, a lonely instrument of frontier justice. He is Rick Grimes, the resourceful survivor of a zombie apocalypse in “The Walking Dead.”
Now, along comes Scott Israel to remind us, despite the legend, how a sheriff can be a hack politician whose primary concern is protecting his own political reputation and little fief.
The Broward County sheriff, whose disgraceful performance in the Stoneman Douglas shooting has been a master class in evasion of responsibility, is the latest entry in why we don’t trust our public institutions.