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Shortlisted for Columbia Journalism School's J. Anthony Lukas Prize. A Publishers Lunch NonFiction Buzz Book A leading authority on sheriffs investigates the impunity with which they police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in American life, law enforcement, and, increasingly, national politics. The figure of the American sheriff has loomed large in popular imagination, though given the outsize jurisdiction sheriffs have over people's lives, the office of sheriffs remains a gravely under-examined institution. Locally elected, largely unaccountable, and difficult to remove, the country's over three thousand sheriffs, mostly white men, wield immense power - making arrests, running county jails, enforcing evictions and immigration laws - with a quarter of all U.