The conventional wisdom is that striding into the sheriff’s office with a reform agenda is a great political move—as long as you do it fast and then get out before the next ugly scandal comes to light and reveals just how deep the problems there are.
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Over the last few months Dart has convinced quite a few of us that he might actually believe in that reform stuff, establishing himself as a law enforcement populist with his own talent for generating publicity. “We have to get the word out about the good stuff we do,” he said. “People tell me this job is an albatross, but that’s only true if you’re trying to move up the pecking order and get a new position. There’s a lot of untapped potential here.”
Here’s an account from one of the earlier court filings by the inmates’ attorney, Michael Kanovitz of Loevy & Loevy:
Later, the approximately 30 women were led to a hallway lined with chairs, where they were ordered to sit and wait. Periodically, a woman emerged from a room off the hallway to call numbers assigned to the detainees. When their numbers were called, the detainees were made to enter the room.
Attorneys for the sheriff’s office argued that the searches were necessary to maintain security, since even inmates facing misdemeanor charges have smuggled in weapons and contraband. But district judge Matthew F. Kennelly wrote that jail officials failed to show that everyone had to be searched this way: “Strip searches were conducted without regard to the seriousness of the charges against an individual detainee and without individualized reasonable suspicion that a strip search was necessary.”
