Sheriff's race debate - Tonight!

The forum/debate in the Republican Primary race for Sheriff of McHenry County is scheduled for tonight, Tuesday, February 25, at 7:00PM. The place? McHenry County College.

I haven't seen any announcement as to who the moderator will be. The forum is co-sponsored by the McHenry County League of Women Voters and the Northwest Herald.

The Northwest Herald, generally thought of as a pro-establishment, pro-Nygren and, now, pro-Zinke newspaper, has flooded its Letters to the Editor pages with letters from Zinke supporters. Anyone who reads them can skip the Comics page of the paper that day. Those folks are just not in touch.

I am shocked by the announced support by elected officials, including the recent Letter to the Editor by Sue Low, individually. She is the Mayor of the City of McHenry. Other support has been announced by Mike Tryon, Barb Wheeler, Tina Hill, Pam Althoff.

Zinke blew any chance to qualify as a candidate for Sheriff, when he revealed a confidential DEA investigation to Nygren political supporter and MCSD Merit Commission member Brian Goode, president of RITA Corporation. Two months later Goode contributed $5,000 to Zinke's campaign.

How thorough was MCSD Legal Affairs Officer Don Leist's "investigation"? Why, really, won't MCSD (Nygren) release the report? Or, since Zinke has been running MCSD since 2010 (as he wrote in one of his fundraising letters), . Really? During that time, morale at the McHenry County Sheriff's Department has continued to decline. Why won't Zinke release Leist's report?

The chain-of-command has been blown apart. When certain line deputies know that they can skip supervisors and go right to their buddy at or near the top of the food chain, authority of supervisors is shot to pieces. And when command personnel skip the chain-of-command and issue instructions directly to line deputies? That's even worse, because MCSD has paid out the big bucks for some of those guys to go to places like the Northwestern University School of Police Staff and Command and to FBI training academies.

Certainly, the NU School and FBI Academies must teach the importance of chain-of-command and how you destroy an organization when you allow it to fall apart.

Will questions about chain-of-command come up tonight?

Will questions about improprieties come up?

Will questions about the cost of rogue squads of deputies come up?

How much drinking and driving is there by deputies? Why are those incidents handled internally by administrative discipline, instead of by tickets? Preventing a person from calling police to report an assault is a criminal act. How could MCSD handle that "administratively"?

Will both candidates support creation of an Internal Affairs Division?