It’s stupid we vote for county sheriff

Early last year, the ex-wife of Jackson County Sheriff Mike Sharp told Raytown police she felt scared of him.

“After the midnight and 2am texts Saturday and Sunday morning it’s obvious that you are watching my house know my comings and goings,” Cindi Sharp wrote in an e-mail to her ex-husband on February 3, 2015, that she shared with police. “That scares me.”

The e-mail appears in a police report, which Brice Stewart, Mike Sharp’s opponent in the Democratic primary, has posted on a website. Cindi Sharp went to the police after Mike Sharp learned she had started dating Mike Covington, executive director of the Missouri Sheriffs’ Association. In text messages, Cindi Sharp told police that her ex-husband had called her “Whore.”

In an interview with The Kansas City Star, Sharp declined to comment on the police report, calling it a personal matter. The police report indicates that the Raytown detective did not believe the evidence “rose to the level of harassment of charges to be filed.”

You should read the Star story, which is filled with tawdry details from an insular world. Stewart, for example, claims that a Jackson County sheriff’s office employee who is suing the county, alleging sexual harassment, had an affair with Sheriff Sharp.

Because we pretend that it’s the 1870s and we can come to a consensus on the best person to protect our dusty streets from marauders, voters in Jackson County aware of the revelations have to make sense of them. Is Mike Sharp a creep or a competent lawman whose personal life is being scrutinized unfairly? If he is a creep, is the former chief of police in Ferrelview, Missouri (pop. 451), a suitable replacement?

Most of us have no idea who should be our county sheriff. We may have thoughts about the quality and fairness of the peace-keeping our local police departments provide. But sheriff? In Jackson County, the sheriff doesn’t even run the jail. Voting for the county’s top lawman is like voting for the adjutant general of a state National Guard. 

Democracy’s great. But sometimes it asks us to make decisions we’re not qualified to make. This is one of them.