As the population of once rural Loudoun County soared in recent years to more than 400,000, an idea took hold: The county needed a police department rather than a sheriff’s office. When the county’s Board of Supervisors flipped from Republican to Democratic control in November, Chair Phyllis J. Randall (D-At Large) said she would pursue a voter referendum to create a new Loudoun County police department, and the board scheduled a vote for this week to discuss putting the issue to the voters.
Then came the pushback, not only from Sheriff Mike Chapman (R), also reelected in November, but from Loudoun residents and other supervisors who felt the county was moving too quickly. Chapman released a 99-page study detailing the pros and cons of creating a police department and reducing the sheriff’s duties to overseeing the county jail and courthouse. There were very few pros, the study concluded, and Chapman’s staff estimated that creating police jobs, building new offices for the sheriff and receiving reduced funding from Virginia would cost Loudoun $20 million.
“This is a reckless power grab,” Chapman said in a statement sent out through the county’s email alert system, “intended to inject partisan politics into public safety and forever change the direct accountability of the Sheriff’s Office to the people of Loudoun County.” The sheriff added, “This initiative seeks to take away your authority as a citizen in Loudoun County to select your top law enforcement official and places it solely in the hands of an elected Board of Supervisors, none of which currently have any local law enforcement experience.”
Randall responded that the Loudoun board would not be involved in selecting a police chief, and that there is no law enforcement experience required to be elected sheriff, only a high school diploma and a county residence. “In Loudoun, we are lucky to currently have a person in office who is qualified to be sheriff,” Randall wrote on Facebook. “However, there is no guarantee this will be true in future elections.”
But after a groundswell of public reaction, the Loudoun board decided to take a step back. At a board meeting Tuesday, the board chose to have the county staff study the various financial and logistical implications of switching from a sheriff’s office to a police department. The board voted 6 to 3 to have a study completed by April, after hearing two hours of public comment that mostly favored keeping the sheriff’s office as the sole county law enforcement agency.
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Only nine counties in Virginia have police departments, including Fairfax, Arlington and Prince William counties in Northern Virginia, but most are policed by sheriff’s offices. Loudoun is the largest county with a sheriff who performs both policing and jail operations. And there are no real complaints about how Chapman’s department has policed Loudoun since he took over in 2012. Loudoun has the lowest crime rate of any jurisdiction in Northern Virginia, according to statistics compiled annually by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. The office has 614 sworn deputies, and its rate of use of force is much lower than surrounding counties, according to sheriff’s statistics.
Instead, the issue is who oversees the policing: the sheriff or the county. As it stands now, the sheriff is a constitutional officer who stands for election every four years and exercises full control over the office with no input from other elected officials. The sheriff reappoints — or fires — every sworn deputy at the beginning of their term, and can fire anyone at that time for any reason. A police chief is hired by the county administrator or executive, never stands for public election, can only fire an employee for good cause, and can serve for many years at the county administrator’s discretion.
“Every four years, the sheriff’s deputies are always worried about whether or not they get to keep their jobs based on if they supported somebody in an election,” Randall said after her reelection last November, according to Loudoun Now. “That should not happen.”
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After the 2015 election, Chapman fired one of his top homicide detectives, Mark McCaffrey, on the eve of a complex murder trial involving a man accused of killing his wife in Ashburn and staging it to look like a suicide. McCaffrey had backed Chapman’s opponent in the 2015 race. McCaffrey sued Chapman, but both a federal district court in Alexandria and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit sided with Chapman. “The law in this circuit is clear,” U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga ruled, “that sheriffs in Virginia have the right to lawfully terminate their deputies for political affiliation reasons.”
“It impacts morale when somebody actively opposes you within the department,” Chapman said after Trenga’s ruling in 2017. His office’s report noted that “at-will employees are found at all levels of government and in most areas of the private sector … an at-will private sector employee who openly criticizes their company’s leadership on social media may be terminated for no reason other than that they clearly do not support the direction of the organization.”
Randall declined to be interviewed for this report. But Michael R. Turner (D-Ashburn), a newly elected supervisor, said the push for a police department came from a need for “transparency and accountability. No one in the county has any transparency on anything in the sheriff’s office.” He said the need for oversight into local law enforcement has become more urgent after the recent national upheaval over policing, and that Loudoun was much more culturally diverse than when the same issue was raised about a decade ago.
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“We have absolutely no recourse if something goes wrong in the sheriff’s office,” Turner said. He said the laws for a recall had made it too difficult for any sheriff to be recalled by the voters, and “no matter what the sheriff’s office does, he can do it with complete impunity in Loudoun County.”
Vice Chair Koran T. Saines (D-Sterling) said he was struck by Chapman’s opposition to a citizens’ oversight board, which have been established in many cities and recently in Fairfax County. “If we had a police department, I would be in favor of that,” Saines said. Saines added that he is not critical of how Loudoun deputies are doing their job on a daily basis but that as the county grows its elected officials should have some input in its policing.
Chapman also declined to be interviewed for this article, but his office’s report analyzing the issues of creating a police department said if a police agency is committing civil rights violations, it can be reported to the federal Justice Department. “There is no supporting evidence that creating a police department in Loudoun County will enhance the accountability of the agency,” the report concluded. “The real issue is whether it is better to have a sheriff who is accountable to the people, or a police chief who is accountable to the governing body.”
In addition to his local duties, Chapman has taken on a heightened profile nationally. He is a vice president of the Major County Sheriffs of America, where he has met with top members of the Trump administration on policing issues, and was appointed to the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, where he co-chairs a working group on homeland security. He also was a recent candidate to take over as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he served for more than two decades as an agent before retiring and running for sheriff.
Matthew F. Letourneau (R-Dulles), the longest-serving county supervisor, raised a number of questions about switching to a police department, which Chapman also raised, such as losing funding that Virginia provides to sheriffs but not to police departments, and spending more money to house the sheriff’s office if they are replaced in their current headquarters. Chapman’s report estimated that new sheriff’s offices would cost $8 million, new police positions would cost $10.2 million, and the county would lose $1.8 million in state funding.
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“I would want to bring in a third party with law enforcement expertise,” Letourneau said in a statement to his constituents, “to help determine what a split of assets and functions would look like, and what the costs of those things would be.” At Tuesday’s board meeting, Letourneau said he was genuinely undecided on whether creating a police department was smart.
Having watched the debate grow, Randall posted a note on Facebook saying she had “heard from between 250 and 300 residents about a Nov. 21st ballot referendum for a Loudoun Police Department, the opinion was about even. However, about 80 percent of you said they prefer to have more information on cost. … So yes, pausing is appropriate.”
The study ordered by the board Tuesday included reconfiguring Loudoun’s form of government, from the “traditional” form of supervisors and a county administrator to different state-defined forms with a county manager or county executive, some of which mandate a police department.
If the board wanted to create a police department, it would put a public referendum on the ballot, possibly in fall 2021.
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