As the rains of malfeasance set in over the Benton County sheriff's office more than a year ago, the deluge has fallen in steady sheets.
It was bad enough that, come September, former Sheriff Kelley Cradduck will face a three-day trial on felony and misdemeanor charges of tampering with a public record.
That disgrace in itself was enough to cause widespread consternation over the young sheriff who seemed to me to hold such promise when he was elected six years ago. That was before a string of mismanagement problems broke out within his department, which ranged from disputes over deputies misusing county vehicles to threatening a reporter with arrest.
Most recently, the mayors of Rogers and Bentonville, as well as police chiefs from both cities, forwarded what they call a memorandum (bureaucratic for a laundry list of complaints) to the Benton County Quorum Court. The document detailed recent behaviors and mismanagement within the sheriff's office.
The list was sent as the county government prepared to interview interim candidates to replace Cradduck, who recently resigned, until the end of his term in December.
The mayors and chiefs pointed to three accidents in Bentonville since last fall, all involving civilians, at least one of which stemmed from dangerous and unnecessary high speed. Authors of the laundry list called the incidents "chilling" and likely to cause fatalities if reckless behavior behind the wheel of county squad cars continued.
Meanwhile, the concerned city officials also pointed to four sheriff's office "sting" operations in Rogers. Most resulted in high-speed chases, all of which understandably caused citizen concerns and "an overwhelming number of calls" to city law enforcement agencies who reportedly met with little or no response when they tried questioning the deputies involved.
One of those supposed stings included a predawn shooting last month in a Rogers Wal-Mart parking lot. Thankfully, no one was injured in that melee where the deputies involved had asked Rogers police to stay away.
Now Arkansas State Police are investigating at the request of the Benton County prosecutor.
In the news account of all this by reporter Tom Sissom, the mayors and chiefs rightly pointed to the majority of men and women employed at the Benton County sheriff's office who are professional and strive to serve with dignity and honor. Yet as we all know, it takes very few to cast a bad light on many in any organization or even an entire community.
"There are some individuals and units within that office that are demonstrating reckless behavior further complicated by a continuing lack of leadership," the city officials' memo said.
And that leads back to the surprise I and many others have felt in watching Cradduck's tenure steadily diminish and fade into self-destruction over the past year.
We can all hope new interim Sheriff Meyer Gilbert can get the problems resolved and leave the next elected sheriff on solid ground when he enters office in January.
Security a priority
Senator John Boozman fired off an email last week saying President Barack Obama's "disconnect with this real threat of ISIS is alarming."
When I hear a U.S. senator with all forms of insider information at his fingertips expressing concerns about an alarming threat, I listen. It seemed out of his nature for the ordinarily soft-spoken senator to so openly chastise the president to the point of asking people to sign a petition.
"Attacks by ISIS-affiliated terrorists, including the horrific attacks we've seen carried out recently ... are cause for grave concern by all Americans," Boozman wrote. "Arkansans have a right to ask what the federal government is doing to keep us safe. What plan does our commander-in-chief have to protect Americans at home and defeat ISIS abroad?
"I've been working to get the details of the administration's plan and what I'm hearing leads me to believe that the president is not taking the threat posed by these terrorists as serious as the rest of us. For example, in the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine, President Obama is quoted as saying 'ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States,' but 'climate change is.' ...
"In what I hope will be a wake-up call to President Obama, Hillary Clinton and liberal Democrat leaders who hold the same misguided belief about ISIS, I am gathering signatures from concerned Arkansans and others across America. Our message is clear: 'Mr. President, the number one responsibility of the federal government is to protect our nation. I demand that you make our national security a top priority again!"
Coincidentally, Boozman's appeal for signatures arrived as I was reading a blurb from The Daily Signal dated April 27 which said the number of discovered Islamic terror plots in the U.S. had risen to 84. I did something I rarely if ever do, only because I believe the senator's concerns are serious and motives genuine. I signed his petition.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 05/01/2016