Most sheriffs in the United States are elected to the office. The practice dates to the seventeenth century, when English colonists in Virginia instituted a tradition from back home. (Whatever Attorney General Jeff Sessions may have wished to imply, in February, when he called the office of sheriff “part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement,” he was not wrong.) Those who defend the practice say that it helps insure that sheriffs are beholden to citizens; critics say that it results in unqualified candidates who are more concerned with popularity than with doing the job well. In 2010, William P. Cahill, a former professor of education at Florida Atlantic University, and Robert M. Jarvis, a professor of law at Nova Southeastern University, published “Out of the Muck: A History of the Broward Sheriff’s Office, 1915-2000,” which provides some evidence for the opposition: the lively and sometimes unsavory chronicle of sheriffs in Broward County, Florida—which has the largest fully accredited sheriff’s office in the country, with some six thousand employees and an annual budget of more than eight hundred million dollars—features bootleggers, bribery, and Al Capone. The book’s postscript goes up through the 2008 election, when Al Lamberti, who was appointed to the position after federal corruption charges brought down his predecessor, held off a Democratic challenger named Scott Israel. View more Israel was elected four years later, and he was still in office on Valentine’s Day, when a nineteen-year-old named Nikolas Cruz took an AR-15 to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which is located in Broward County, and killed seventeen people. Israel was praised in the immediate aftermath of the shooting—“What a great job you’ve done,” President Trump told officers gathered at the sheriff’s office on February 16th—and, the following week, he won over many proponents of gun control with his performance at a CNN town hall, where he challenged the N.R.A. spokesperson Dana Loesch and called for additional measures restricting the sale of firearms. (Israel has long supported gun-control measures; in 2015, he wrote an editorial opposing open-carry legislation.) Then news broke that a sheriff’s deputy had not entered the school’s freshman building as Cruz went on his shooting spree; that a captain from the sheriff’s office reportedly ordered officers to set up a perimeter rather than go inside; and that, over the previous decade, the sheriff’s office had received at least twenty-three worrisome messages about Cruz and his family. On Monday, a Broward County Circuit judge ruled in favor of media organizations that sued the Broward Sheriff’s Office to obtain surveillance video from outside Stoneman Douglas. The twenty-seven-minute tape, which begins just after 2:22 P.M. on February 14th, was released on Thursday. Most of the footage offers an east-facing view of the building where the shooting took place. An officer can be seen in the distance, for the seven-minute duration of the attack, standing beside one of the building’s exits. Particularly for those who oppose gun control, Sheriff Israel has become a handy scapegoat—the conservative columnist Michael Graham argued that he could supplant Nancy Pelosi as the G.O.P.’s “favorite Democrat to vilify.” But, even among those who agree with Israel on guns, criticism has grown. The crime rate in Broward County dropped during Israel’s first term, and he won reëlection handily in 2016. But, during the last two weeks, in conversations with multiple former colleagues and associates of Sheriff Israel, I was told again and again that, since taking office, Israel has failed to engage sufficiently in the essential if unglamorous work of overseeing law enforcement in a large and complex U.S. county, and that he was overly focussed on the politics of prolonging his tenure. (Israel’s public-information officer, when presented with a list of claims made by people I’ve spoken to, described them as “shameful, baseless, and patently false.”) Those concerns have deepened since the Stoneman Douglas shooting. Jeff Bell, president of the Broward County Sheriff’s Deputies Association and a deputy, who has been with the B.S.O. for twenty-two years, said, “We feel like we’ve been deserted. A ship at sea, just drifting. No sense of direction whatsoever.” A former senior employee of the B.S.O., who asked not to be named, told me, of Israel, “If he survives this, morale will never be the same. And it’s already as bad as it’s ever been.”

Some of Israel’s harshest critics are among those who worked to get him elected. Before seeking the office, Israel, who’s from New York, had been chief of police for tiny North Bay Village, in Miami-Dade County. He had also been a Republican—he switched parties in order to run in Broward, which is historically Democratic. Judith Stern was Israel’s campaign manager in 2008. “We had a lot of work to do to get him appropriately ready as a candidate,” she told me. “He wasn’t a brain guy. He was a cop who was generally liked by other cops. So we made sure to surround him with real law-enforcement pros, to educate him.” But Stern ultimately came to believe that Israel was opportunistic and would say what people wanted to hear in order to get elected. Stern, like Israel, is Jewish, and she was surprised, she said, to learn that he did not regularly attend synagogue. “I’m like, ‘That jerk. I’ve been going around talking to rabbis about your Jewishness!’” (Broward has one of the largest Jewish communities in the U.S.) Stern described Israel as someone who “believes in his own ego. He told me he was like a rock star. When you’ve got Roger Stone pissing in your ear saying, I can take you places, that’s when you come out telling the press, after a mass-shooting, I’m an amazing leader.” Roger Stone, the political consultant and conspiracy theorist who has worked for Nixon, Reagan, and Trump, among others, didn’t start saying nice things about Israel until 2012, when he assisted on Israel’s second, successful run for sheriff. In 2011, he called Israel “an unqualified punk, a racist, and a thief.” (He supported Lamberti in 2008.) The next year, he helped get Israel elected. After he won, a former B.S.O. commander named Sam Frusterio, who acted as Israel’s campaign treasurer during his first bid but supported his opponent in 2012, filed an ethics-committee complaint against him for illegal acceptance of gifts. Israel and his family had taken a cruise to the Bahamas on a lavish yacht that belonged to a construction-company founder and owner of strip clubs who’d donated a reported $245,000 to Israel’s campaign. Israel told the Sun-Sentinel, “I’m a man of honor, I’m a man of courage, I’m a man of decency.” The Florida Commission on Ethics determined there was probable cause in the case, but declined to take action because Israel lacked political experience and had relied on the advice of his lawyer. Israel characterized Frusterio, at the time, as a disgruntled former employee. Frusterio, who is now seventy-two and living in Bluffton, South Carolina, told me that his concerns about Israel began during the first campaign. “As time went on, I realized this guy was power-hungry and didn’t care who he stepped on or what he did to get there,” he said. The former senior B.S.O. employee, who worked at the sheriff’s office for decades, had other complaints about Israel. “We never talked about crime,” he said. He added, “We had monthly crime meetings with the district folks, but Israel never sat in and talked to us about it—not a burglary, not a robbery—never.” Instead, he said, Israel preferred to discuss community events. “He wanted to make sure we had all the parades and block parties covered. Even during hurricane season, the guy never sat us down and said, ‘O.K., where are we with the hurricane plan?’ ” Israel, he said, “was more interested in branding, putting his picture on the side of trucks. He’d say, ‘I’m the most visible sheriff ever.’ I’d be visible, too, if I never came in the office. The guy didn’t spend twenty hours a week there.” A deputy who currently works at the B.S.O. also could not recall “ever hearing Israel talk in detail about crime.” Other people who worked in the sheriff’s office described Israel as “a hothead” and “crazy,” someone who would scream at them one minute and a few minutes later act as though nothing had happened. “We all felt like we were walking on eggshells with Israel, because you never knew what mood you were going to get,” Phyllis Massey Lind, a former B.S.O. executive assistant who worked for Israel and who still lives and works in Broward County, said. Lind told me that the two sheriffs who preceded Israel seemed much more confident in their work. “This Sheriff has refused to accept responsibility numerous times, in numerous settings,” Lamberti, who lost to Israel in a four-way race in 2012, told me. “Leadership 101 is: the boss is responsible for everything,” Lamberti added. “The very first lawsuit filed, his name is going to be at the top. When I was Sheriff, an inmate in the jail didn’t like the food and I got sued for that.” Scot Peterson, the deputy who was outside of Stoneman Douglas during the shooting, has disputed Israel’s characterization of his actions that day, though, so far, audio and video seem to back up Israel’s account. Lamberti emphasized that a sheriff is accountable for whatever his deputies do. “The deputies are your alter ego,” he told me. “They’re basically the Sheriff. So you are responsible for everything that happens in the organization, including what they do. I was sued when a speeding deputy of mine injured someone. It’s vicarious liability.” (In 2014, two deputies who served under Lamberti surrendered to federal authorities after an investigation into a massive Ponzi scheme; the Sun-Sentinel, in an editorial, called it a “stain on the administration of former Broward Sheriff Al Lamberti.”) Multiple people told me that Israel had a poor track record when it came to hiring. “He surrounded himself with unqualified people,” Judith Stern said. In 2014, the Sun-Sentinel reported that Israel had made Scott Stone, Roger Stone’s stepson, a detective, despite the younger Stone seeming to lack basic qualifications for the job. Israel later dismissed the idea that the appointment had anything to do with a political relationship. “If his name was Scott Jones, he would still be there,” Israel said. Two years later, the Sun-Sentinel published a story about the many people Israel had hired for new “community outreach” positions who had also worked on his campaign. “What have I done differently than Don Shula or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Gandhi?” Israel said at the time. “Men and women who assume leadership roles surround themselves with people who are loyal.”