Staying Positive Vetting Your Sheriff

➡ The CSPOA believes it’s a crucial time to take control of issues like border control, crime reduction, and maximizing freedom, especially in the face of potential crises like COVID. They aim to provide tools to local authorities, such as county commissioners, to protect their communities, even when they lack constitutional knowledge. They emphasize the importance of local solutions and applying the constitution to specific areas of influence. The CSPOA also encourages building positive relationships with local leaders, like sheriffs, and approaching them with support rather than criticism.
➡ The discussion revolves around the challenges of reaching out to sheriffs due to their busy schedules and gatekeepers. It emphasizes the importance of understanding this process and being patient. The conversation also highlights ongoing efforts in Florida to introduce a constitutional county ordinance to sheriffs and potentially organize a freedom event. The speaker encourages others to reach out for help and shares his contact information for this purpose.

The reason I bring it up is that it’s the perfect time for the CSPOA because I think we’re beyond partisan politics. We’re saying we’ve got to get control of the border. We’re saying we’ve got to get crime down. We’re saying we’ve got to maximize freedom so that if another COVID or something like it comes along, that our citizens and our communities are protected from anybody, including the federal government, right? That’s something that we need to understand. Oftentimes, we’ve got to protect ourselves from out-of-control governments. Anyway, I bring that up because I think it’s a unique time for the CSPOA where people are less likely to fight and more likely to look towards peaceful solutions.

And that’s really what we spend our time on, Bill. And that’s why I tie it together. Yeah, Sam, I agree with you. And I think that the more we’re able to give people tools, this is one of the things why I’ve started with basically the three pillars of the constitutional county because it gives people tools in each of these areas to do it. Because when I go talk to county commissioners, these guys are businessmen. They’re not constitutional scholars. And when I call them out and say, hey, who knows what the 11th Amendment is? Most of them, their eyes blast over and they go, well, you know, I don’t really know.

They might know what the fifth or the second is, but that may be as far as it goes for some of them. So when I come to them, I say, listen, I’m trying to give you tools. I’m trying to give you some tools so that you can protect your citizenry against it. Because when I say to the county commissioner, I go, did you like losing the revenue that took place during COVID? Now I’m talking to them in a language that they understand. They’re going, no, we had lots of businesses shut down. We had lots of problems with COVID.

And then I say, well, wouldn’t you have liked to have had a tool in place that could have stopped that, that could have protected your citizen’s right and wouldn’t have had the economy shut down in your county? Now they’re listening because they’re now wanting to see what tool are you bringing me that could do that. And we show them the constitutional county ordinance, it starts to make sense to them. So the more we’re able to reach out to folks with various tools, just like with the SOEs saying, you know, gosh, I don’t know what I can do to make sure my elections secure.

Well, remember your election security plan? You’ve got full control over what you’re doing there. Why don’t you write it in so that you’re going to have integrity? Even if there’s no state or federal legislation passed that helps in that area, you can do something at a local level for your county. So that’s why I’m really so adamant about finding local solutions, finding local tools to present to people that can show them how to apply the constitution to their specific sphere of influence. Excellent. Yep, I agree. And I think that you’ll make, I mean, you can make bigger and better changes by being positive, smiling, looking for something really good to talk about, start with instead of just showing up with a whole lot of negatives.

And there are a lot of counties in the United States probably now that could use an attaboy. And everybody who’s listening or whatever in your own county make some kind of friendship with your own sheriff’s department, because that’s what we’re talking about here. But that’s just the beginning, you know, the whole county itself, as we’ve just seen by looking at Florida, what they’re doing. And there are a few other counties in the United States that consider themselves constitutional counties, even though they don’t break it down like Collier County. But regardless, they are good places.

I know last year… And remember, back in 2014, we created the CSPOA General Resolution. It’s available on our website. You can download it, look for the CSPOA 2014 Resolution. Hopefully, Stephanie can pop it into the chat and make it even easier for folks. But the reason that I’m bringing this all up is because that’s really how this whole ball got rolling. As we put a couple of hundred sheriffs and constitutional experts and everything into a room, law enforcement… And we wrote this 2014 Resolution. It’s not as strong as some of them, but it’s a great starting point for you to one, vet your sheriff and vet your public officials.

But two, to say, will they go along with that? And oftentimes, they’ll reject it. And you can ask why, and they’ll say, well, because of this, this. Now you’ve got talking points to work with them about, educate them about, focus on with them. If they say that they will back it, you know, they can make it stronger if they want to. And we encourage this from a resolution to something else, more like what Bill’s saying. Hey, it becomes a, you know, part of the law there. You can go anywhere in between. But the point is, it’s a starting point for flexibility.

It focuses on, in my opinion, the key things you need to have to be a constitutional county. And then some counties like to go well above and beyond that, which is phenomenal. But I’m just saying, we provide this for free as just a guidance dock for anybody who needs it, Jack. And we don’t want to forget that because that’s an easy place for anybody to start. Right. And so I wanted to piggyback on something you were saying about, you know, dealing with your different leaders, your sheriff’s, your county commissioners, your SOA’s, things like that.

One of the things that we’ve been really successful with is that when we go to talk to those folks, we like to be introduced by somebody who’s a friend of that individual. So somebody who’s friendly with the sheriff, somebody who’s friendly with the SOA, somebody who’s friendly with the county commission. And when that happens, and we don’t go in adversarially, we go in as a friend looking to help and support them, we have a tremendously different response than we go in when we’re trying to say, oh, well, you know, this is what you’re doing wrong, and that’s what you’re doing wrong, and you need to fix all that.

So I can’t say enough about how you approach folks makes a huge difference in how far you’re going to get, because it’s a lot easier to work with the people that you’ve got in place if you can than it is to try and get new ones elected, because that’s a much longer process. And that’s why, Bill, in our conversations, I’ve kind of threaded it back to the how-tos. How do you approach your sheriff? How do you deal with your sheriff? How do you respond? How do you – and oftentimes, I always bring it back to – because I want people to kind of get an idea of the flavor of how we think at the CSBOA.

You ought to be working with your sheriff. Confronting your sheriff is a last resort. Being belligerent and demanding that you know and your sheriff doesn’t, that’s when you have no choice but to get a new sheriff because you’re not going to get along stuff. And I get, at some point, it needs to kind of go to that, but we need to be really careful that we’re not the ones that take it there, that we’re the ones that are polite and kind and giving everybody a second chance and a third chance and a – you know, it’s hard to learn how to do all these things.

It’s really hard when you have an issue like this. It’s really hard to know how to respond, like how hardcore do you go against your sheriff? You know, if he’s polite and kind, then he’ll meet with you. Give him credit for that, because a lot of sheriffs won’t even meet with their constituents. When they won’t meet with their constituents is when I say, okay, you don’t want to meet with Sam Bushman individually because you don’t have time, fine. What happens if there’s 60 of us that are part of Campaign for Liberty or 40 of us that are part of the John Birch Society and part of the CSPOA group, or any other group you can draw upon and bring peaceful, but yet, hey, you’re telling me you won’t sit down with 60 of your concerned constituents? We’ve got a problem, sheriff.

Now, I get you’re busy, but you’ve got to make time for us. Remember, you know, this is – we elected you, and I want to elect you again. Okay, there’s ways to put a little bit of stick and carrot out there. I’m not saying just cave every time, but I am saying we need to be very careful how we go about it, because if we make a misstep, you know, people judge within a few seconds when they meet people or see things, and if you set it off wrong from the start with your sheriff and everything, it’s hard to regain that trust, and if you don’t have his trust, you’ll never get his ear.

Anyway, I don’t mean to go on about it forever. You guys know a lot about it, too, but I want to provide guidance on that, because I believe that’s really where people need the support the most, Bill. Yeah, and, Sam, one of the things that I found in working with the sheriffs down here, every last one of them has a gatekeeper. You cannot get directly to the sheriff. You have to figure out who that gatekeeper is, and you have to adhere yourself to that gatekeeper somehow, and if you don’t know somebody who knows them that’s referring you to them, then they’re going to screen you really hard before they’re going to give you access to the sheriff, because the sheriff’s a busy man, and he doesn’t – I mean, if he took every call from everybody who was, you know, calling in because, you know, they were upset about this or that, he’d never get anything done.

So he, by rights, needs to be able to screen those calls, and so you need to learn the process by which you can gain access to these gentlemen, because they all want to do the right thing. I should say, oh, I should – most of the sheriffs that I’ve come in contact with really want to do the right thing. They got in the business because they wanted to enforce the Constitution and the laws, and there really are good people. The question is, do they have the time to be distracted from that by all kinds of peripheral things, or are they going to go directly to the heart of the matter? Because, I mean, if it’s anything like my schedule, I always have 10 pounds of stuff I’m trying to put in a 5-pound bag.

Amen to that. So you want to remember with this when it comes to the sheriff too, we think our issues, our emergencies, are vital. You’ve got to respond now, sheriff. This is vital. This is – I get that you think that, but I also get you’ve got to be realistic and say, you know, whatever his county size is, my county’s got about 800,000 people in it, so you’ve got one sheriff and 800,000 people. Okay, and I’m saying, you know, I’ve got to be patient with him because I think it might be really, really, really important, but he’s going, this is just one of my citizens, and I should get to him, but I’ve got all these other issues too.

You’ve got to give him enough respect to let him prioritize. It’s only when they refuse and refuse and delay and refuse to where you can’t seem to get it done that you’ve got to say it’s a problem. Otherwise, you’ve got to give the sheriff grace too, Bill. All right, Jack, can he wrap up? No, I think we’re getting pretty close to the end. I was going to ask, Bill, what’s next for Florida? I mean, you just went through all your yearly meetings, et cetera. You got anything else on the calendar down there that we should know about or promote? Well, what we’re doing – the next step is to off the – all the contacts we made with the sheriffs here at the Sheriff’s Association.

We’re going to be going county by county, introducing the constitutional county ordinance to each of these sheriffs, getting them on board, gaining information about which county commissioners are going to be helpful. We’re also considering whether we’re going to do another Foundation for Freedom CSPY event down here, maybe by November. We haven’t really decided yet. We’re looking to see what kind of support, what kind of groundswell from the folks that we’re dealing with down here, if they’re ready for another one. Otherwise, you’re probably going to postpone that to next year.

But we’re also looking at getting more and more involved in various sheriffs that’s either on the state level or the national level. There’s also a national sheriff’s association that we’d like to see if we can make some inroads in. So we’re looking at how we can expand what we’re doing here in Florida. We’re doing a lot of documenting of the process that we’re doing so that we can duplicate it in other states and other counties. That’s a lot of what we’re doing here and trying to grow the numbers of counties that we have involved.

Do you get anybody from other states getting in touch with you that’s interested in their sheriff’s department either from the inside or from just people? Do people notice it, you know, besides us? Absolutely. In fact, when I come on this program, last time I came on the program, I got a whole plethora of calls because I put my phone number out there and said, hey, listen, if you’re in another state or if you’re in a county in Florida that you need some help with, call me.

I’m happy to help you. I’ll give you the benefit of all the work that we’re doing down here. I can save you a lot of time. Happy to do it. So the answer to your question is absolutely. People do take advantage. Good. Excellent. Well, thanks, everybody. We appreciate the fact that you’re down there doing that and anyone listening, you know, if you’re interested in what they’re doing down there, get in touch with Bill. And Bill, you have, how would be somebody to get in touch with you? What would be the best way? Best way is by email, which is BillMitchellOrmondBeach at gmail.com.

That’s O-R-M-O-N-D-E-A-C-H. And it’s all just one word, BillMitchellOrmondBeach, which is where I live, at gmail.com. Or you can call me at 909-260-8804. And both of those are great ways. You can text or call me on that number, because if I don’t answer, just leave a voicemail or text me. Okay, sounds good. I think I put something, somebody, your email in the chat there. And you can look at it real quick, make sure I spelled it all right. But that would be great. And we appreciate, again, what you do. And thank you for being on that wall to quote, you know, Nicholson from the movie.

We need more states on the wall, for that matter. And in the meantime, I want to thank everybody for coming by and hanging out with us. And if you’re listening later, as most of you are, we appreciate your support. Remember, we can be donated to at cspoe.org slash donate. And the store is always available to take purchases at no additional cost. But you had a little bit of those purchases go to the price, I should say, goes to the cspoe.org. Sheriff Mack’s on the road, and I’m expecting him back next week.

Bill, we’ll look forward to talking to you again in the future. And once again, thank you very much. Thank you, Jack. Thank you, Sam. Appreciate you supporting us and getting the word out. It’s our pleasure. We’ll see you next time. [tr:trw].