Sharp and Forté trade jabs in rare competitive race for Jackson County sheriff
When three-term Jackson County Sheriff Mike Sharp quit abruptly in 2018 under a cloud of scandal, it never occurred to him that he might try to get his old job back.
“I was done with politics,” he recalled.
But at the urging of two county legislators he won’t name and other supporters, Sharp is back in politics, as the many yard signs and billboards make clear. But are politics done with him?
His successor would like to think so and is doing his best to see that Sharp’s comeback try fizzles.
To win a fourth term, Sharp, 61, must convince voters in next month’s Democratic primary that he deserves another shot, asking them to vote out Darryl Forté, the former Kansas City police chief who is facing his first serious challenge in just over two years in office.
Forté, 58, is not making things easy for Sharp. In a campaign waged largely online in this age of shutdowns and social distancing, Forté has been on social media and video chats a lot since Sharp announced his candidacy four months ago, touting his accomplishments and accusing his predecessor of “corruption.”
Forté told his Twitter and Facebook followers last month that federal authorities are looking into “criminal activity” by the former sheriff “while in office.” Forte is alone in making that allegation. He won’t back it up with proof or say what the feds are interested in, saying he can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.
The county’s legal department refused to honor The Star’s request for documents that might provide a hint, citing both the state’s records law as well as federal rules of criminal procedure.
Sharp says the accusations are a cheap shot, and that he is unaware of any federal probe. He said this in a written statement: “It’s concerning to me that the top law enforcement official in the county would put out information alleging any type of investigation by an agency other than his own. It is pretty clearly a desperate and antagonistic move by a political incumbent who is feeling pressure from a credible challenger.”
Forté is more forthcoming in recounting his previously published accusations that two employees were on the department payroll while Sharp was sheriff, but they were never seen at the office. Sharp says they did valuable work, but did so remotely.
And Forté is quick to remind voters of the scandal that led to Sharp’s resignation: the pay raises and preferential treatment Sharp showered on an assistant who was also his girlfriend, which poisoned employee morale and saddled the county with hundreds of thousands of dollars in related settlement and legal costs.
“He left an elected office under scandalous conditions,” Forté said recently during an online candidate forum sponsored by a coalition of Kansas City neighborhood groups. “If he applied for a deputy (position) today, or another position within the department of corrections or the sheriff’s office, he wouldn’t be eligible.”
Sharp apologized for those mistakes when he announced his candidacy, in interviews and in talks with voters.
“I admitted to my faults,” he said at the forum. “I had a relationship with a woman in my office. I fired her for misconduct and she was investigated for and charged with (payroll) fraud. That’s what happened. That’s the truth.”
But he says he is still the best pick for the job. He entered the race because, as a former building contractor and longtime veteran of law enforcement, he says he is more qualified to oversee the construction of a new jail. That’s why those legislators encouraged him to run, he said.
And he thinks he can foster a strong esprit de corps in a sheriff’s office that he feels has become a glum place to work under Forté.
“The morale at the sheriff’s office is probably as low as it’s ever been,” Sharp said in a phone interview. “My people wanted to work for me. His people don’t want to work for him.”
Indeed, Forté does not have the support in this election of the Fraternal Order of Police chapter that represent the department’s 104 deputies, nor from the regional FOP organization to which that chapter is a part and rank-and-file law enforcement officers in much of west-central Missouri belong.
Sharp got both endorsements.
Forté acknowledges that he has rankled deputies and some supervisors by insisting on greater responsibility and ethical behavior to correct what he said was the toxic and undisciplined culture that Sharp fostered.
In the past two years, he has disciplined 30 deputies and suspended five supervisors without pay for infractions such as striking a handcuffed detainee, ramming a sheriff’s office car into a suspect’s vehicle and failing to recover illicit drugs in a timely fashion.
“I know (some) people don’t want me there,” said Forté, the first Black person to lead the overwhelmingly white sheriff’s department. “We have a lot of people who don’t want change...They want to go back to the old ways.”
But he thinks the culture will change for the better over time. And if reelected, he can envision himself running the sheriff’s office and jail for another eight to 12 years.
“I’m trying to change the culture, and that’s difficult,” he said. “That’s why some of the people support him.”
Reform claims
There hasn’t been a competitive race for Jackson County sheriff since Sharp ran the first time and won in 2008. He went on to win reelection in 2012 and 2016 with only token opposition.
During his nine years in office, he modernized the sheriff’s office and lowered employee turnover by convincing county legislators to raise the salaries of deputies so that fewer of them would be tempted to move onto better-paying jobs at other area police departments.
Sharp encouraged more cooperation with other local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in the area and said he improved compliance within the sex offender registration system by making it easier for ex-offenders to report where they were living.
“It was in disarray when I got there,” Sharp said. “The compliance rate was 40 percent.”
He said the rate improved to 90 percent during his tenure, although a state audit in 2018 showed it had slipped to 80 percent in the months before he left office. At the time, he blamed that on staffing shortages.
Sharp denies that he presided over a hostile work environment for women and said the county often settled lawsuits that could have been won at trial to cut down on legal fees.
While saying that he’s “tried to take the high road” during the campaign, Sharp has not been above taking digs. Among his complaints is that Forté walked away from his police department job in 2017 with what Sharp and some others considered an excessively large amount of back pay and other compensation.
Forté says he was entitled to that nearly $500,000 and has nothing to apologize for.
Sharp also says Forté spends too little time meeting with county legislators and other leaders in area law enforcement. Indeed, Forté rarely attends meetings of the county legislature, which controls his budget. Forté says he’s not big on meetings, can get more work done in the field and at his desk and was limited until recently while undergoing cancer treatments. He says he is now cancer free.
He ended his pursuit of a juris doctor degree, which would have allowed him to achieve his long-term goal of becoming a lawyer, because of the time constraints of his job. He settled for a master of law degree instead, he said. Forté was enrolled in law school before County Executive Frank White appointed him interim sheriff.
Unlike Sharp, Forté is practically a political novice. He won the 2018 general election by virtue of being the Democratic candidate in a county whose voters haven’t picked a Republican for sheriff in nearly a century. Party leaders gave him that chance by handing him the nomination after White picked him to fill in until voters chose someone to complete the final two years of Sharp’s term.
Despite his inexperience campaigning, Forté has shown some political chops in his first truly competitive race. By attacking Sharp early and often, he’s held himself out as a reformer who is hard at work cleaning up the mess he says Sharp made during his tenure by tightening discipline and professionalism within the sheriff’s office.
He said deputies now provide a better record of what they do other than driving around the county. Some didn’t have much to show for their 12-hour shifts, he said.
“Now we make them do something every two hours,” he said, by showing that they checked on a building, wrote a ticket or patrolled through a park.
He said he has increased diversity by promoting the first woman to captain and that of the last eight Black men hired as deputies, he hired seven of them.
Crime has declined in the unincorporated Blue Summit area under his watch, he said, and the county is doing a better job taking care of its vehicles.
It concerns him, he said, that only two of the 18 deputies that took it passed the recent test that would qualify them for promotion to sergeant. He plans to place greater emphasis on training.
Sharp and Forté agree on one thing. The new jail now under discussion should be regional, they say, providing space for detainees being held on state felonies and lesser municipal charges brought by city prosecutors across the county.
The nearly 40-year-old Jackson County Detention Center holds mostly inmates awaiting trial on serious felonies and has a very limited number of beds for detainees held on Kansas City code violations.
A regional approach would save taxpayers money. Kansas City has been discussing building its own jail. Like Kansas City, Independence and Lee’s Summit now spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, Sharp said, to have other counties house their prisoners.
“It makes sense to have a regional jail concept,” said Forté, who is the first sheriff to run the Jackson County Detention Center since the 1970s. County executives did so until voters approved a change that was effective in 2019.
But a cooperative agreement has yet to be worked out. Planning for the jail continues and whomever Democratic voters choose on Aug. 4 will have a big hand in carrying the project through to completion in 2024.
The winner faces no opposition in the fall.
The Star’s Steve Vockrodt contributed reporting for this article.
This story was originally published July 27, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
