Ozzie Knezovich is an Army veteran, and he has developed a habit of turning down the thank-you. He says he did that for you, so don’t thank him for it. If you want to thank a veteran, vote. And vote in the primary, because the loudest people in both parties figured out a long time ago that most of us don’t.
I first met Ozzie in 2019, when I went up to Spokane to see him and spent the first few minutes of the visit admiring the 1911 he was carrying in an upside-down cross-draw rig. In the years since I’ve brought him a lot of hard questions, and I don’t think he has ever once given me the answer that would have been the easiest one for him to give.
Knezovich spent 26 years at the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, more than sixteen of them as the elected sheriff, before retiring at the end of 2022 and moving home to Superior, Wyoming, the town where he grew up and once served as marshal. He’s Superior’s volunteer police chief now, unpaid, and one of six Republicans on Tuesday’s primary ballot for Sweetwater County sheriff. Plenty of listeners in Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls have followed his work from across the state line for years.
He told the other sheriffs their letters were empty words
Ask a man who calls himself a constitutional sheriff how many times the word “sheriff” appears in the United States Constitution and, as Ozzie put it on the show, you hear crickets. The answer is zero, and Georgetown Law has it in writing: the word never appears in the document, and sheriffs draw their authority from state constitutions and state law. Which is why the phrase actually means something fairly boring. A constitutional sheriff is one whose office happens to be named in the constitution of the state he serves, and the answer changes at the state line.
What he did with that view in 2019 is the more interesting part. Washington sheriffs were under heavy pressure that winter to announce publicly that they would not enforce Initiative 1639, the state’s new gun law, and Knezovich was one of the initiative’s most visible law enforcement critics in Washington. He believed it was unconstitutional and said so on television and in front of the legislature. He still refused to sign the letter, calling the announcements grandstanding and the letters “empty words,” and telling the sheriffs who genuinely wanted to beat the law to go hire an attorney and sue instead.
“It’s a slippery slope when we decide what laws we are or aren’t going to enforce.”
That was the easiest political win available to him, handed over by his own side, on the issue he cared most about, and he turned it down because he didn’t think the office was his to use that way.
The obligation runs in the other direction too, and he gave that just as much time. When Spokane police disbanded their property crimes unit in 2011 and told residents to expect roughly five percent of their reports to be investigated, he read the common law as leaving the county no discretion in the matter. Not that a sheriff may fill the gap when a jurisdiction inside his county won’t, but that he has to. He went to the commissioners for fifty thousand dollars in overtime, stood up a burglary task force, and watched burglaries in the unincorporated county fall 53 percent.
Nobody gets an easy answer on Flock cameras
He has a nuanced position on license plate readers, and he explains why with a case rather than relying on easy talking points: a Spokane kidnapping in which a father took a child, and cameras that let his analysts and detectives track the vehicle in close to real time and get the kid back.
Then he spent longer on the guardrails than he did on the cameras. The Fourth Amendment covers this, he said, and the policy has to be built around that from the beginning instead of bolted on after somebody abuses the system. Idaho’s own statute already requires training, secure audit logs and regular audits, and bars personal or political use outright, and Idaho Falls decided even that floor wasn’t high enough and tightened its contract last month. When I asked what should happen to an officer caught running the system on somebody he’s personally interested in, he didn’t pause before calling it a terminal offense.
A mother at the fair had already talked to everyone else running
She was holding an infant when she walked up to him, and she told him he was the last one on her list. Then she asked her question. My son will be four years old at the end of your first term, so what are you going to do to take the drugs off the street and protect him?
What has stayed with Ozzie isn’t that the question was a hard one to answer. It’s that she had to ask it at all.
“There is no way that a mother in any jurisdiction should be asking that question. She should know that her sheriff’s office is out there protecting their families and protecting their children.”
[Watch on YouTube.] And if you’ve got a friend who’s been arguing about Flock cameras on Facebook all month, send them this one.
About the Author
Gregory Graf is the creator of Political Potatoes and a lifelong conservative Republican who lives in Star, Idaho.
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Disclaimer: The following is intended to convey an opinion on newsworthy events of public concern regarding public figures and/or public officials in exercising their official duties. No implications or inferences—beyond those explicitly stated in the preceding— are intended to be conveyed or endorsed by the Author. Wherever available, hyperlinks have been provided to allow readers to directly access any underlying assertions of fact upon which this opinion is based.
