INDIANAPOLIS — Last Tuesday didn’t go the way Daviess County Sheriff Jerry Harbstreit thought it would.
He was in Indianapolis in the morning in his role as president of the Indiana Sheriffs' Association to listen to a speech by U.S. Attorney Joe Hogsett about his high-profile crackdown on public corruption.
Hogsett greeted the sheriff afterward and told him he was headed south to announce the indictment of another elected official. He didn’t look or sound happy about it, as Harbstreit recalls.
By early afternoon, Harbstreit knew why. Indicted was a colleague, Clark County Sheriff Danny Rodden, a longtime law enforcement officer and member of the sheriffs’ association board of directors.
By late afternoon, the news was everywhere. Prosecutors had implicated Rodden, 60, in a messy affair with a prostitute. They charged him with lying to the FBI about giving her money for sex and ordering her to destroy police credentials he’d allegedly given her so that she could get the cheaper government rate on hotel rooms.
Harbstreit said he felt a range of emotions, from anger to sadness, while knowing that the allegations have yet to be proven.
But he wasn’t feeling surprised.
“There’d been rumors,” he said.
Those rumors started in June, shortly after he took over as president of the Sheriff’s Association during an emergency meeting of the board. Harbstreit was picked to fill the role abruptly vacated by Ken Campbell, then the sheriff of Boone County. Turns out that Campbell was also under investigation by the FBI for his relationship with the same prostitute.
Unlike Rodden, Campbell hasn’t been charged. In a statement, he confessed to the affair but said he never gave the woman money. He’s since retired from office.
Just days after Rodden’s arrest, Harbstreit talked about the collateral damage from such accusations.
So many details have yet to be revealed – including the alleged link between the sheriffs to the same woman. But Harbstreit worries that the stories – and continued rumors – feed distrust of police.
“This shouldn’t take away from all the good work that’s done every day by people in law enforcement,” he said.
“But it will.”
Last December, when Gallup asked people to rate the honesty and ethical standards of people by profession, police were rated high or very high by 54 percent of those who responded. They trailed nurses, pharmacists, teachers, doctors and military officers.
That’s so much higher than the 20 percent who said the same of newspaper reporters.
But it also reflects a downward trend from 15 years ago, when almost seven of 10 people expressed high or very high faith in police.
That’s no good for a system that operates on public trust, Harbstreit said.
“People expect a high level of integrity from the people the elect to office,” said Harbstreit, a four-term sheriff. “And they should.
“I tell people: I wasn’t elected for my good looks. I was elected because people think I have good character,” he said.
Since Rodden’s arrest, Clark County deputies have been ordered by their acting sheriff, Chief Deputy John Kahafer, to keep quiet about Rodden matter.
“There is to be no talking about the situation that has occurred today,” says the department memo dated July 29. “This is a department integrity matter that will long outlast the situation at hand.”
Harbstreit doesn’t question the directive, but he thinks talking about human failings is good.
Up to 50 new sheriffs could be chosen across Indiana in November’s elections. In December, the Indiana Sheriffs' Association will invite them to a training session. Ethics is already on the agenda, says Harbstreit.
He already knows at least one message he wants to deliver.
“People expect us to be bone-deep honest,” he said. “Let’s not disappoint them.”
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