Before I can jump into the real argument of this piece, let me give you some necessary background information:
During the 2018 midterms, one of the races happening here in Jackson County was for the position of County Sheriff. The incumbent Sheriff, Nathan Sickler was challenged by a retired law enforcement officer from Utah. The challenger, Mr. Bill Froehlich, had lived in the Valley for 6 years when he announced he was running. He had already been critical of the Sheriff’s Department’s organization before he announced his challenge, telling the Medford Mail Tribune “My concerns developed from living here and just being very concerned with what I was seeing” (See link 1). He promised to bring his experience with Law Enforcement in Utah to the department here. And thus began his campaign, one particular aspect of which I want to discuss in depth.
I don’t know if this is true everywhere, but here in our little Valley, especially for local elections, yard signs are a BIG DEAL. You can often predict the outcome of an election based solely on the relative numbers of yard signs you see leading up to it. While Sickler’s yard signs were a regular local-election style (relatively ugly with “Elect Sickler for Sheriff” across the middle), Froehlich’s signs caught my eye immediately. With a big sheriff badge in the center, they said “Elect Bill Froehlich – The Citizens’ Sheriff”. I must have pointed those signs out to every single person I knew over the course of election season, saying “look at those signs and tell me what’s wrong with them”.
I don’t have any issues with lawn signs in general, or even people named Bill, what bothered me about them was the slogan. “The Citizens’ Sheriff” is a distinctly exclusionary phrase, and it really made me think twice about the kind of Sheriff Mr. Froehlich would be. This is how I break it down:
By calling yourself the Citizens’ Sheriff you are saying that you will value and protect the citizens of this county. That’s cool, but it’s important to remember that not everyone in this county (or this country) is a citizen. The Fourteenth Amendment defines a citizen as “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (See link 2). We have many of these birthright and naturalized citizens, however we also have many people living here as Legal Permanent Residents, on visas, or with Temporary Protected Status. There are also many people living in and contributing to our community who don’t have documents. Pitching yourself as the Citizens’ Sheriff fails to take into account this sector of our community.
Calling yourself the Citizens’ Sheriff declares your support of one group, but what of the people in all other groups? Consider this analogy, if you say to someone “do you like dogs?” and they respond with “I like big dogs”, what do you assume are their feelings on small dogs? This sign says the same thing. Rather than just say “Elect Froehlich for County Sheriff” or “The People’s Sheriff”, whoever designed that sign went out of their way to specify Citizens as being the “type of dogs” Mr. Froehlich likes.
Calling yourself the Citizens’ Sheriff suggests to non-citizens that you are not on their side. To which some might say, “but the sheriff’s job is to take care of people who are here legally, if you’re here illegally then you’re already breaking the law.” If you believe that to be true, I cannot stop you, but you’re still forgetting my previous point. There are many non citizens living here perfectly legally, who are absolutely within their rights to expect the Sheriff to protect them, and this slogan intentionally cuts them out.
This becomes demographically critical in Jackson County. The majority of our “non-citizens”, documented and undocumented, are Latino, specifically of Mexican and Central American origin. So by saying you are the Citizens’ Sheriff, you are positioning yourself as not supportive of non citizens, in this case the only majority-brown segment of our very white population. In a valley already divided by race and language, this distinction between citizen and non citizen begins to hold a weighted racial connotation.
I’m not trying to accuse Mr. Froehlich of being intentionally racist, because I don’t know whether he meant for his slogan to be anti-brown or not. But regardless of his intention, his slogan was exclusionary. Words matter, and this divisive connotation should have been noticed before it became his entire campaign slogan. It suggests two possibilities– the first, that Froehlich intentionally pushed a racist campaign slogan, or the second, that Froehlich didn’t know enough about the local community to understand the way in which his slogan was inappropriate and exclusionary. Regardless of which is true, what those lawn signs demonstrated to me was that Mr. Froehlich was unfit for office, especially in our community, a belief that I carried with me to the polls.
For related information explore the following websites:
- https://mailtribune.com/news/crime-courts-emergencies/froehlich-to-take-on-sickler
- https://www.loc.gov/law/help/citizenship/fourteenth_amendment_citizenship.php
