Sheriff Garcia – Competition is What Makes Everyone Better

➡ Sheriff Garcia, a former senior chief in the Navy, was asked to run for sheriff by his community despite having no law enforcement background. He believes that a sheriff should primarily be a leader who can guide and inspire their team. His military experience and leadership skills, along with a command staff with over 80 years of law enforcement experience, have helped him in his role. Despite challenges from those who believe he lacks the necessary law enforcement experience, Garcia asserts that his military background makes him more qualified than some of his predecessors.
➡ A new law may disqualify me from my job because it requires five years of continuous experience and current certification. Even if the requirement was reduced to three years, I still wouldn’t qualify. I believe it should be up to the people to decide who they want in this role based on their qualifications and experiences, not the state.

We do have Sheriff Garcia with us. Sheriff, there you go. Your mic’s on. Welcome, Sheriff. Welcome, Sheriff. Hello. How are you, sir? I am living the dream. Your story is so unique. I just want to start with your story. You don’t even have a history in law enforcement, do you? I did not. I was retiring as a senior chief in the Navy when members of my community came and asked me if I would run for Sheriff because my predecessor was going unopposed. And we can’t have that, can we, sir? Yeah, no. It’s a good competition.

It’s what makes everybody better. Well, and it just goes to show that to be the sheriff doesn’t mean you have to have a ton of law enforcement experience per se. You’ve got experience with weapons, you’ve got experience with training, with leadership, with all the things that really bring to the table for what takes to be a sheriff in the first place, right? Yeah. So the way I explain it is, especially now having been here for the last three years, the sheriff should be first and foremost a leader, someone whom can set a direction, listen to the people, and guide their team and inspire them to do good things to work for the people.

And that’s a skill set by itself, and it’s separate from management, and it’s separate from the details of any job or task. So that’s a skill that I had built over 22 years and nine deployments that I presented to the people of my county and Pacific County and the state of Washington. And I explained that I had the experience to do this, and I would learn anything else that I needed to learn at the time. Additionally, I was able to select a command staff that amongst them have more than 80 years in law enforcement and specific to Pacific County.

So I’m not making decisions in a vacuum. Wonderful. It makes complete sense to me. Tell me a little bit about when they asked you to run at first were you like, are you serious? Give us kind of your thought process and then how it all evolved. Well, so we were in a community meeting and at the very end of it, there were some cops in the room and they opened the floor to just questions and answers. And it devolved into kind of a bitch session about what was going on in the county and how everybody was kind of upset that they’re not being served by their sheriff’s office.

And so naturally I asked some questions about, okay, well, what do you mean by this? And so a number of people gave their anecdotal stories of how their experience with the sheriff’s office was terrible. And they tried to speak with the sheriff and couldn’t get ahold of him. And then I had asked some of the cops in the room, well, why don’t you run for sheriff? And then they each proceeded to give their excuses of why not. And one of them had said, well, they’ve given DUIs to the wrong people in the county.

And so their name’s kind of blackballed. And then one of them turned around and asked me and said, well, you were in the military, right? I said, yes. And he said, well, what was your rank? And he kind of sat back and was astounded. I look real young. And so I pulled my ID card out, my CAC, and I showed it to him. And he looked at it and he looked back at me and said, well, why don’t you run for sheriff? And so I stepped back and I laughed. And so for all the reasons I was retiring, I have four sons and I missed a lot of their upbringing.

And I spit all those reasons out. Well, that’s why I can’t run for sheriff. I need to be at home. And I also explained things like this. They kind of consumed me. And I think men like us are very similar. And we don’t do anything half-assed and we jump both feet first and learn all we can. And that takes time and that takes effort. So anyway, everybody left the room disheartened and said, well, we’ll have to endure another four years. Well, those statements kind of ate at my conscience. And so I started to do research.

And I came to a conclusion that the core problem was that it’s not that my predecessor was a bad guy. It’s that he didn’t have the leadership ability to get everybody on the team on one mission and everybody working in the same direction. And so for three months, my wife and I told people no, as they kept asking. And then I brought it up to my wife one day and she said, I knew you were going to do this. I said, what do you mean? And then she pointed out, yeah, she pointed out a couple of things that I had said or done in that timeframe that she had noticed but kept quiet on.

And I was like, oh, and she said, I know you. I knew you were going to do this. So we prayed about it for three days straight and ultimately came to the conclusion that my very eclectic career had provided me experiences and education and leadership that has built me up to be able to take this seat and not be overwhelmed. And so we went forward and that’s what I did. I was a write-in candidate three days before the primary and sent a text message out when I went to the county building to sign my declaration and pay my fee.

That text message went out to plenty of people. They wrote me in. I got enough on the primary to then make it to the general ticket. And then I launched a campaign and then won. And ladies and gentlemen, the reason that I wanted him to cover those details is because it lays out exactly what we’re saying to do. If you have a sheriff that is constitutional, that understands his oath of office, that understands that due process for each citizen is sacred. That’s really the key. And this is a perfect case in point that, Hey, citizens said, we got to do something here.

Then they worked and found somebody and then they worked with him and encouraged him and eventually helped him with a writing campaign. And that takes it up. People on the ground, people to make that happen. And then he gets elected. That’s wonderful. Now though, we’ve got the state of Washington that literally hates the office of sheriff. They want to destroy it. They want to turn it from an elected position into an appointed position and or turn them into pencil pushers or do it like they’ve done in Connecticut and get rid of sheriffs altogether.

And the assault, you can see in the public eye and the media, you can see the assault with the lawsuits against certain sheriffs in the great state of Washington, Swank, Sanger, many others. And you can also see it in the bills they’re putting forward to try to change what’s happening. Now, because you don’t have a law enforcement experience, they’re trying to challenge your ability to be there. That’s why I started out on the credentials you had and the experience of leading people and everything else you’ve had. They want to make it sound like you don’t qualify, right? Right.

And that premise would only be true if any other experience is irrelevant. They’re trying to pretend as if my nine deployments and me being a senior enlisted and some of my deployments combat, they’re trying to pretend like that means nothing. In my assertion, that means everything and it makes me more qualified than some of those that have come before me. In law enforcement, as I’m understanding, they don’t do as good of a job as they could do in building a leader. They don’t really send people to leadership training until they’re in the seat, until they become a sergeant or until they’re in the command staff or until they become a lieutenant.

And that’s a little bit too late. In the military, we’re brought up as leaders from early on. And I’m not saying that every military member is a fantastic leader. That’s not it. But the opportunity to grow into that is provided to everybody. And when you’re early on, you’re put in charge of smaller things. And then that grows and grows and grows as you rise the ranks in the military. And so the mistakes that you make when you’re young, the impact is very minimal. Whereas in law enforcement, when you make a little mistake, but you’re in a high position, that’s impactful on a large scale, which is detrimental.

And that is that’s not good. I bring that up because that’s what they want to try to do is they want to act like you don’t have the qualifications, except for this bureaucratic board and or legislative body, none of them or very few of them have any law enforcement experience. But what they want to do is decide what the qualifiers are as if they have authority and knowledge to actually put those qualifiers in place, right? Yeah. So the so in in the state of Washington, as this bill is written at the moment, the it’s called Criminal Justice Training Commission would be the ones to vet candidates prior to and a part of that vetting is you have to currently have had at least five years of experience continuous and currently hold a certification.

So what this would do is it would effectively make me unqualified as soon as the bill goes into enactment, April 30th. And then in addition, let’s say that got changed to three years instead of five, I would still not be able to run for the next election, as I don’t have five consecutive years. So yeah, it’s bad all around. It’s for the people to decide my qualifications, I present my resume, I say, this is what I’ve done, I show you, and then the people decide whom they want as a candidate. And if the situation is dire, as it was in my county, that you would roll the dice to someone who has different experiences to be their top law enforcement officer in our county, then so be it.

That’s where the people to decide not for the state. [tr:trw].