Wednesday’s Fraternal Order of Police candidate forum at the La Plata County Fairgrounds Extension Office elicited passionate and increasingly pointed exchanges from the two men running for La Plata County sheriff.
Republican incumbent Sheriff Duke Schirard touted his five terms in office and accomplishments such as a new jail, a drug task force and alternatives to juvenile incarceration, while dismissing his Democratic challenger, Deputy Sean Smith, as an unqualified upstart.
“Deputy Smith has plenty of ambition but not much experience. In my opinion, he isn’t paying his dues,” Schirard said.
Smith, meanwhile, repeatedly framed the contest as one between old and new, saying whereas Schirard was backward-looking and complacent, he had a vision for the future – including hybrid vehicles, deputies fitted with body cameras and more concerted engagement with community organizations.
“Most of his accomplishments end in about 2002,” Smith said, saying he’d heard many people criticize Schirard’s administration as out of touch. “This is not an election about what someone has done, as my opponent has tried to frame it, but about what you and I can do going forward,” he said.
While the two candidates’ overarching narratives of the race repeatedly clashed, their exchanges on issues were often sharp, prompting both candidates to craft their responses with a new degree of political delicacy.
In an answer to a question about what the candidates thought of mandatory arrests in instances of domestic violence, Smith alluded to recent comments made by Schirard on his Facebook page and in a letter to The Durango Herald, in which Schirard wrote, “when I was a child (1940s and 1950s), domestic violence was not as prevalent. More couples were married with family values, and there was a lot of social ostracism should that sort of activity occur.”
Smith said Schirard had already said “what it used to be like” before Colorado enacted laws requiring mandatory arrest.
“That’s why the law was changed,” he said.
He said mandatory arrest was vital to breaking the cycle of violence, and when law enforcement is called to the scene, it’s “very rare” that officers have insufficient evidence for probable cause to make an arrest.
Schirard countered with a ringing endorsement for mandatory-arrest laws. He said early in his own career with law enforcement, he would encounter “an abused woman bleeding from the mouth and face, with a black eye complaining about who did this to her,” but unless an officer actually witnessed her being battered, no arrest could be made without the victim going to the District Attorney’s Office and signing an affidavit.
“That was horrendous. That was awful,” he said.
He said this persisted into the 1990s, until mandatory-arrest laws allowed law enforcement to press charges against domestic abusers on behalf of the state – as opposed to victims, who frequently face pressure to recant. The change, he said, came about only thanks to activist groups, “and they were 100 percent correct.”
“The La Plata County Sheriff’s Office has enforced that 100 percent since the day it was enacted and continuing today. My stance on zero tolerance is 100 percent,” he said.
Asked what he had learned from Dylan Redwine, Schirard said he couldn’t answer candidly. “There are all sorts of things that I can tell you about this case and lessons to be learned, but I am not going to jeopardize this case. It’s largely in the hands of the DA about whether or not he wants to go to trial,” he said.
Smith said, “This young man’s death is a tragedy, and has no place in a political platform.” He said, “the only thing I would have done differently, perhaps,” is embrace tools developed to help law enforcement to track missing and exploited children.
“Not taking advantage of tools like that is not good for our office. But I can’t tell you if it would have made a difference in this case; no one can,” he said.
In a to-and-fro about gun-control laws, Smith revisited remarks he made at Monday’s forum about a lawsuit filed by Schirard and other sheriffs challenging the laws’ constitutionality. Though a judge denied the sheriffs’ lawsuit, ruling they had standing to sue as private citizens – but not through their offices – Schirard has promised to not enforce the laws.
After reiterating his commitment to the Second Amendment, Smith lambasted Schirard, saying sheriffs have a constitutional obligation to enforce all laws, not just the ones they like. “We don’t get to choose when and where to enforce the laws,” he said.
Schirard said, in fact, he agrees with many gun-control laws, for instance, those regulating bazookas. But, he said, there are already “30,000 federal, state and local laws in the U.S.” At a time when money is tight, Schirard said he refuses to “utilize precious resources that you people gave me to try and enforce unenforceable laws.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
