Bingham Sheriff Rowland should resign immediately for violent behavior, racist remarks
Bingham County Sheriff Craig Rowland has disgraced himself totally. He should resign immediately, rather than leaving his post vacant while he faces violent felony charges.
For those who have not been following the news on the east side of the state, in November Rowland grabbed his gun when a Mormon youth group came to his neighborhood to hang turkey-shaped thank-you notes on door handles.
When they knocked on Rowland’s door, he came to the door with a gun. As East Idaho News reported, he then pulled the youth group leader, a neighbor of his whom he said he didn’t recognize, out of her car by her hair and pointed his gun at her head while the teenage girls watched.
He faces charges of aggravated assault, aggravated battery and exhibition of a gun, brought by the Idaho Attorney General’s Office. The first two charges are felonies.
Such a level of dangerous behavior should preclude someone from owning a firearm, much less leading a sheriff’s office. Rowland should resign immediately, rather than wait until his criminal charges are resolved.
Now that charges have been filed, new details have emerged from the police investigation into what he did in November. The explanation Rowland gave investigators for his bizarre, dangerous behavior managed — somehow — to make matters even worse.
“I have been doing this job for 36 years,” Rowland told investigators, according to East Idaho News. “I have had drunk Indians drive down my cul-de-sac. I’ve had drunk Indians come to my door. I live just off the reservation, we have a lot of reservation people around us that are not good people.”
Nearly one of every 10 residents in Bingham County, which includes significant portions of the Fort Hall Reservation and the city of Blackfoot, is Native American. Rowland has expressed racial animus toward a huge chunk of the population he is meant to serve. So even if he is exonerated of these charges, he is plainly unfit to serve in either elected office or law enforcement.
That’s hardly the first time Rowland has said something that undermines confidence in his ability to do his job fairly. In 2016, he claimed in an interview that “the majority of rapes — not to say that we don’t have rapes, we do — but the majority of our rapes that are called in, are actually consensual sex.”
That’s another reason Rowland should resign.
Rowland’s bizarre, dangerous behavior and racist statements have done lasting harm to the Bingham County Sheriff’s Office. The very least he owes the men and women who work for him is to separate himself from them, so they won’t be tarred by association. Every day he is nominally in charge of that police department, he does it further harm.
His deputies are entitled to a decent leader, and the citizens of Bingham County are entitled to a professional, competent, unbiased sheriff.
So for a final time, Rowland should resign — today.