By now you’ve probably seen the video of attorney general and Illinois Nazi chapter head Jeff Sessions speaking to the National Sheriffs’ Association. Here is the money quote from that speech:

“The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office.”

You might be somewhat almost kinda willing to consider this a slip of the tongue on Sessions’s part, or attribute his phrasing to long-standing legal vernacular (Sessions ad-libbed the inclusion of “Anglo-American” into his script). But, of course, a man can only slip up so often before you realize that he’s not all that into hiding his racism. After all, it’s not like Sessions will get FIRED over this. Donald Trump won’t fire you over any sort of moral principle; he’ll only fire you if he deems you troublesome to his own needs and desires. Sessions will probably be fired one day, but it’ll be because he didn’t shitcan Rod Rosenstein, or because he failed to draw little hearts around Trump’s name before handing him a briefing. It won’t be because he’s a monster.

More to the point, by praising sheriffs so lustily, Sessions is tacitly endorsing the sheriffing work of modern-day Bull Connors like David Clarke and Joe Arpaio (more on them in a moment). And he is almost certainly receiving quiet plaudits from the yahoo Trump voters who currently hold this poor nation hostage. If you rewind his speech a little bit, you can hear him feeding into the mythology of the Great American Sheriff:

“The independently elected sheriff has been the people’s protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elective process.”

Now, that is what a lot of Americans like to think sheriffs do. It plays to their fondest Wyatt Earp wet dreams. Sheriffs are stoic, good men. Men of principle. Men who will do what is RIGHT. The sheriff archetype is all over popular culture, from Rio Bravo to The Waking Dead, and almost always features some folksy, small-town lawman forced to take matters into his own hands in order to protect the citizenry from all the bad men. He’s like Superman crossed with a fucking troop. Sheriffs have dined out on this archetype for years and years.

And yet, that doesn’t square with actual history. On the contrary, the history of American sheriffs is replete with horrifying violence, racism, and abuses of power. In fact, I’d wager the majority of Americans can’t even tell you what a sheriff actually is, or what he does. I know I couldn't until roughly two days ago. They’ll just tell you he’s the Big Police Man. That is wrong.

The office of sheriff is more than a thousand years old. It was a job created back in feudal times, when the king needed a “reeve” to go around and collect taxes from the peasantry. If you’ve ever met a collection agent, you know what sunny, wonderful people they are. The English brought the vocation with them to America, and thanks to the near-infinite diversity of local laws and jurisdictional tangles across this fine nation, a sheriff can now find himself as a de facto all-purpose lawman, wielding any number of powers over his little fief, some of those powers absolute. He can enforce court orders, conduct autopsies (!), manage jails, provide security details, contract out police services to neighboring areas, and even dispatch ambulances. Certain states, like Georgia, still allow sheriffs to literally round up a posse to execute warrants. Many cities, like Dallas and Los Angeles, have both a police department AND a sheriff’s department (it will not shock you to learn that the L.A. Sheriff’s Department has a history of violence and corruption that rivals their LAPD counterparts). If you find this redundant and needless, well then you best not yap to a sheriff about it.