Sheriff’s critics give Broward a fine excuse to hire a pro

Why stop with Scott Israel? Get rid of the whole damn, politically tainted, historically debauched concept of an elected sheriff in Broward County. The office has been a mess since 1915.

Sheriff Israel has been catching hell after BSO’s serial screw-ups in the Parkland tragedy, both before the shooting, when his deputies apparently pursue numerous tips that Nikolas Cruz was becoming dangerously unhinged. Or during the shooting, when his deputies reportedly remained outside the killing zone.

Since, a chorus of Republicans has been demanding the Democratic sheriff ’s ouster for “incompetence and neglect of duty.” Florida Speaker of the House Richard Corcoran fired off a letter to Rick Scott, signed by 74 state reps, urging the governor to remove Israel. (And maybe divert attention away from their party’s fawning relationship with the NRA.)

Israel hasn’t helped himself with his prickly reluctance to accept responsibility for BSO’s woeful performance in the Parkland case. But if Florida Republicans were so concerned about “incompetent and negligent” elected officials, they’d gone after a certain governor whose office failed to respond to calls from a sweltering Hollywood nursing home after Hurricane Irma. A dozen fragile seniors died from heat complications.

Obviously, Corcoran and his gang are indulging in political opportunism. But they’re also providing Broward Countians justification to discard an historically rotten institution. And a chance to turn the administration of county law enforcement over to a hired professional police chief.

Broward has elected just 16 sheriffs since 1915, an astounding percentage of whom were engulfed in scandal. They abetted organized crime. Collected bribes. Colluded with bootleggers. Protected illegal gambling joints. Oversaw corrupt deputies. They packed BSO with political cronies and their own relatives. In 1935, the department’s chief deputy — the sheriff ’s brother — led the lynch mob that hung a young black man on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale.

Nova Southeastern Law professor Robert Jarvis and retired Florida Atlantic University statistics professor William Cahill summed it up nicely in their 2010 book, “Out of the Muck: A History of the Broward Sheriff ’s Office, 1915-2000.” They wrote, “The history of the Broward Sheriff’s Office dates from 1915, when Aden W. Turner was overwhelmingly elected the county’s first sheriff. In 1922, Turner was suspended by Governor Cary A. Hardee for failing to do enough to curb crime ... By and large, Turner’s successors turned out to be even worse, with three of them — Paul C. Bryan, Walter R. Clark, and Allen B. Michell — indicted while in office and a fourth — Kenneth C. “Ken” Jenne II — sent to prison after pleading guilty to mail and tax fraud.”

Bryan was charged with protecting bootleggers, taking bribes and selling seized whiskey. Clark was Broward’s longest reigning sheriff, from 1931 to 1950, except for an interlude in 1939 when he too was removed from office for blatant corruption.

In 1950, a U.S. Senate investigation reported that Clark and his chief deputy, brother Bob, not only permitted 52 illegal mob-run casinos to operate in plain sight, they raked in a million bucks a year providing the joints with slot machines. The sheriff called his sideline the Broward Novelty Co. In 1967, yet another sheriff, Allen B. Michel, was indicted on gambling charges.

A couple decades later, Broward elected showman Nick Navarro, the lawman who pretty well invented the “Cops” reality TV genre. With TV crews in his wake, he (ignoring the First Amendment) went after rap artists for obscenity and presided over arrests generated by selling crack cocaine that had been cooked in BSO’s own laboratories. Meanwhile, a number of his homicide squads’ high-profile murder convictions fell apart on evidence of coerced confessions or witness intimidation or DNA evidence that implicated the real killers.

Rather than coke, Sheriff Ken Jenne’s department cooked the stats, wildly inflating the number “crimes solved” to make it seem as if BSO was clearing cases at twice the national average. Jenne was also cooking his own books. In 2007 he pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion and mail fraud.

Then came Sheriff Al Lamberti, whose officers were moonlighting as hired muscle for Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein.

Now we’ve got Israel, with connections to infamous political dirty trickster Roger Stone and with a penchant for putting his campaign operatives on the BSO payroll.

After 103 years of corruption, incompetence and so many nefarious associations, it’s high time Broward depoliticized county law enforcement. Replace political hackery with a system that hires a professional.

Residents of Dade County (Miami-Dade) were similarly appalled by their string of crooked sheriffs, including Tal Buchanan, whose office was a virtual criminal empire, in league with the mob. He was Dade’s last sheriff. In 1966, the county voted to stop electing sheriffs and hire a pro.

Sure, the pols hounding Sheriff Israel are disingenuous, but they’ve provided Broward the pretext we need to ditch a long tainted anachronism.

Fred Grimm