Thank you, Penguin Group Dutton, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I just finished The Highest Law In The Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, by Jessica Pishko.

This book does an excellent job covering the “constitutional sheriff” movement. It is a right-wing movement that is dedicated to white supremacy and Christian nationalism, while purporting to be upholding the Constitution.

Among the many abuses of power that are covered is the arbitrary power to decide who to arrest, profiting off the local jails, the deplorable conditions in jails, especially with COVID, protecting domestic abusers by ignoring their victims and their role in abusing immigrants.

The book documents how sheriffs have become extreme pro-gun advocates, even successfully going to Supreme Court and getting the provision of the Brady Act that had required sheriffs to enforce restrictions declared unconstitutional. But, when it comes to enforcing gun restrictions, sheriffs are very good at making sure that the laws aren’t enforced against whites.

The book also documents the sheriffs’ love of the militia movement, with quotes implying there may be some degree of control, or at least big influence, that they have over the para-military groups.

I give this book an A+ and inducted it into the Hall of Fame. Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A+ equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

As soon as I finished this, I got the audiobook so I will also be able to listen to it.

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

I finished reading this on October 13, 2024.

The Highest Law in the Land by Jessica Pishko is an in depth exploration of the problems we have with the sheriff system in the US. For the outsized role that sheriffs play in US politics, there's little discourse about them. Pishko does a fantastic job of explaining how we got here, what the problem is, and how we can right the course. The writing was engaging but easy to follow. I learned a tremendous amount in reading this one. For fans of The End of Policing, Locking Up Our Own, The Highest Law in the Land is one of the clearest and best-written non-fiction book I have read in a long time.

The sheriff is a unique institution in the U.S., granted a level of autonomy as a police officer and jailer by many state constitutions—including Louisiana's—that can defy typical principles of separation of powers. And as elected officials, they're also given more freedom to engage in politics than many other types of cops. Jessica Pishko, a journalist and lawyer, explores how many sheriffs have come to embrace right-wing ideas. They can come to see themselves as defenders against other layers of government over issues like gun control, vaccinations, and spurious claims of election fraud, even at times claiming wide power to deputize supportive civilians. And she highlights the potential for abuse of power, citing claims of brutality by deputies and sheriffs, including former Iberia Parish Sheriff Louis Ackal. Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson appears in Pishko's narrative as well, as an example of the paradoxically limited power of "reform-minded sheriffs" to achieve significant change. Pishko's prose can be dry at times, and the book would have benefitted from a bit more analysis of sheriffs in the pre-Trump era, but it's still a valuable and comprehensive examination of sheriffs today and the inherent dangers of such a powerful office.

I found Highest Law in the Land to be an interesting look at the history and current reality of county sheriffs. Most of my previous reading has focused on police departments, so having more information about a very prevalent form of policing around the country was very informative. I think the chapters on sheriffs and jailing, as well as about the enforcement of white supremacy by sheriffs were especially well done.

Highest Law in the Land is a fascinating look at the role of sheriffs in American society, politics, and upholding white supremacy. I was especially interested in the section about the constitutional sheriff movement and their ties to far right militia groups and white nationalists. I was pleasantly surprised Pishko touched on the christian identity movement (it's basically white supremacist scientology but dial up the wackiness) and its founders' roles in influencing the constitutional sheriff movement. Chapter 9 was one of the strongest chapters that goes to the, horrific, historical roots of the role of sheriff in an impressively thorough way that would make Kathleen Belew proud. I highly recommend picking up this very impressive book.

An Imagined History. Pishko starts off this text openly admitting that, as the Southport NC Police Dept cop who murdered Keith Vidal in North Carolina a decade ago this year said less than two minutes after encountering Vidal - and 14 seconds after Vidal had already been Tasered and was being held on the group by two other cops when the kill shot was fired -, she "doesn't have time" (paraphrase from her, exact words of the murderous cop) to do any real investigative journalism that might show any degree of nuance or any alternative explanations for anything she writes about in this book. She openly admits in the prologue that she is going to label anything and anyone who is not a leftist progressive as "far right" because "The intent of this book is not to desegregate all of the complexities of the far-right movements - I do not think I could if I tried - which is why I have opted for the simplest terminology. Most important to me is the acknowledgement that these sheriffs and their supporters are plainly opposed to the left and progressives." (An exact quote from page 18 or so, at least of the ARC text I read.)

Thus, Pishko proceeds to concoct her imagined history, complete with narrative-defining boogeymen, the "Constitutional Sheriff's And Peace Officer's Association" or CSPOA, as it is so frequently noted on seemingly every other page throughout the narrative. Pishko "cites" well-debunked "facts" such as Donald Trump calling the Nazis at the Charlottesville, VA "Unite The Right" rally "very fine people" (actual fact: He openly decried the violence of this group specifically, noting that *other* people *not associated with them* were the "very fine people" that happened to be at the rally as well), or the repeated-three-times-throughout-the-narrative-that-I-caught bald-faced LIE that "the leading cause of death of children is gun violence". Even when looking at the CDC data *that Pishko herself cites*, the only way to get to this is to include people that are not legally children - indeed, some of the 18 and 19yos included in these numbers are actively serving the US military in war zones! Pishko also claims that "AR-15 SBRs are the weapon of choice of mass shooters" despite the number of homicides via rifle - any form of rifle, not just so-called "assault weapons" - proving that to be untrue for many years now. She claims that she observed a man walking around at one rally with an "automatic" rifle. While this is *possible*, it is also *extremely* rare - and without inspecting the gun in question (which Pishko does not detail that she did, if she did it at all), there is no way of knowing from a distance that the rifle at hand was fully automatic.

No, as with one of her criticisms of one of her primary targets of scorn throughout this text - Pinal County AZ Sheriff Mark Lamb - the best that can be said of this text is that while it is well documented, clocking in at 33% or so documentation, it is "light on substance and heavy on [extreme leftist] vibes".

Read this book - if your politics are to the left of Bernie Sanders. You'll find a new boogeyman to scare yourself with in your fantasy world.

For anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders and living in the *real* world, don't bother with this drivel. There are *far* superior books about the problems with modern police and how we got to this point, such as Radley Balko's Rise Of The Warrior Cop.

Not recommended, unless you're an extreme leftist or extreme masochist.

This was an excellent book full of all types of information I never knew. This one is both scary and informative all at the same time.