Seems that some of the folks who work for the sheriff’s department down here in Sussex can’t get it through their thick heads that they are not law enforcement officers.
I’ve received numerous reports of an incident that occurred last Friday near Lincoln. A sheriff’s deputy, in uniform and driving a sheriff’s vehicle, decided that he was going to make a traffic stop of someone who apparently was speeding. Sheriff’s vehicles down here have no lights or sirens, and no markings.
So this deputy gives chase to this car and pulls the driver over. Not sure how he accomplished this (since he was in uniform, he may have flashed a badge or something else). He told the driver, who works in corrections, that he was pulling him over for speeding, but since he noticed the badge on the driver’s uniform (which was hanging in the back window), he decided to let him off with a warning “as a professional courtesy.” The deputy told the driver he was going 75 in a 55 MPH zone. Don’t know how he figured that out since sheriff’s cars are not equipped with radar.
This is wrong on so many levels. First, neither the sheriff nor his deputies have police powers. They aren’t cops. And according to testimony the sheriff gave before the Sussex County Council a number of months ago, he decided he was going to let the constable certification of his deputies lapse. There is only one county in the state that has a police department and that’s NCCo. And the NCCo Police are separate from the sheriff’s department. Second, what would have happened if the driver had been someone who got mouthy with the deputy? What, G-D forbid, if the deputy had shot the driver if he had gotten up in the deputy’s face?
Sheriff Christopher and his sycophants in the Sussex GOP (St. Bodie Girl, Ayotte, Knotts, Curly, and the other munchkins) have been hellbent on creating some sort of police department resident in the sheriff’s office since last year’s election. They cite the Delaware Constitution as their source for justifying this. Boys, you’re wrong! Dead wrong!
But this incident cannot go left unpunished. I’m calling on the Attorney General’s office to investigate this matter and prosecute the deputy and anyone else in the sheriff’s department that has given these deputies the go ahead to impersonate police officers. It’s time for these shenanigans to end.