In 2017, Charmaine McGuffey, then the highly-decorated Major in Command of jail and court services for the Hamilton County Sheriff in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the highest-ranking woman in the office’s history, was fired by her boss, Sheriff Jim Neil, who had a history of telling her to “sit down and be quiet.”
McGuffey was a liberal agitator in a law enforcement hierarchy dominated by conservative men, including Neil, who had to apologize in 2016 to the Democratic Party in Ohio for appearing on stage at a Trump rally — Neil had won office as a Democrat.
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McGuffey had been in hot water before for speaking truth to power, when she and some friends were confronted by police while walking to their car after leaving a gay bar. She lashed out at the officers for targeting them and was charged with disorderly conduct, public intoxication, and menacing. The charges were dropped, but Neil’s predecessor disciplined McGuffey for “conduct unbecoming” and slapped her with five days unpaid leave.
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McGuffey took the reprimand in stride and as an opportunity to come out. She met her wife of 11 years not long after.
Another opportunity was almost as life-changing. After Neil fired her for speaking out about use of force in the department, McGuffey — who says being a woman and gay were contributing factors in her dismissal — decided to challenge him in a run for sheriff herself.
Democratic party leaders wouldn’t forgive Neil for his “alarming” appearance with Donald Trump, and endorsed McGuffey. She walloped the sitting sheriff 2-1 in the primary and won the general election by five points, even as Trump beat Joe Biden by eight points in Ohio the very same year.
But now, Jim Neil is back, showing his true colors and running for his old seat as a Republican. The race for Hamilton County’s top cop in 2024 is a head-to-head battle between old adversaries and red and blue ideologies.
The new sheriff says of Neil, “He made poor choices.”
Taking on McGuffey again may be one of the poorest.
Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey spoke to LGBTQ Nation from her office at the Hamilton County Justice Center in Cincinnati.
LGBTQ Nation: A sheriff is the top law enforcement officer of a county, and they’re generally elected. A police chief is the top cop in a city or other municipality, and they’re usually appointed by the mayor or a police commission. Which system do you think engenders more accountability?
Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey: Well, certainly the sheriff engenders more accountability. I’m accountable to 800,000 constituents. That’s the population of Hamilton County. That’s a lot of people, and those people frequently stop me, call me. They do expect their elected official to be not just accountable, but also present.
How do you describe your politics, and should they matter in your line of work?
Well, I think politics do matter. You know, the previous administration liked to describe himself as, I’m not a politician. Well, yes, you are. Tell the truth, right? Because whenever you’re running for office, you’re a politician. You know, whenever you’re asking people to put you in a position, and not someone else, you are politicking.
I’m a law-and-order candidate. I tell people that, and I’m a Democrat. I’ve been a Democrat my entire life. I was born a Democrat, much to my family’s dismay. But I hold to and order. The officers know it, the prisoners in this jail know it. Everybody knows it. It’s how I’ve run my career. But I also factor in the fact that I am bound to also listen to my constituents on a number of issues.
Now, what would those be? Well, they would be the issues of fair treatment, particularly when we deal with criminal justice reform and incarceration. Historically, we have had a hard incarceration model, which means people come to jail and they start losing things immediately, and I can run down the list: you can lose your job, you lose contact with your family, you lose money. And then we have these prisoners sit in jail with literally nothing to do.
I had a judge one time tell me, “Well, I want my guy that I sentenced to six months, I want him to sit in that cell and stare at those four walls.” And my answer to that is, “Oh, really, because when he gets out, he’s going to do more crime. He has nowhere else to go, because you’re pushing him now out the door and saying, ‘Now go out and do better with less.’” And where is the logic in that message?
The other thing people want in criminal justice reform is they want to know that when they get approached by a uniformed officer, whether it’s because they got pulled over or for whatever reason, that that officer is going to use good manners, right? And I get it, there are people out there that don’t use good manners when they talk to us, okay? But we are professionals. We are sworn to be above that.
And I know that sometimes we have to escalate — sometimes we have to escalate. We have to use language that is pretty harsh, and do some things that are in the “use of force” realm. But when you start that initial conversation with someone, you have to focus on using good manners, and you have to stay in that realm.
And particularly, a lot of times we’re approaching people with mental illness, and that’s something else the public wants people to understand and differentiate between: someone who is experiencing a mental health crisis and somebody who’s just being an idiot, right? Those are some of the things that the public expects from us, and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office delivers because I insist on it.
Your opponent is the former sheriff of Hamilton County and your old boss, Jim Neil. How big a threat is he to your reelection, and how would you describe the difference between your terms in office?
It’s a very stark difference. I’m a leader that keeps my hand on the wheel. I don’t run for cover whenever something pops up that might be controversial. I’m transparent, and I go to the media. What Jim Neil did is run for cover every time and anytime anything controversial came up. He pushed it off to somebody else, and what that allowed him to do is point fingers later.
You’re the leader. You decide what way people do their jobs. You decide how accountable they are. He certainly has absolutely zero respect for criminal justice reform, right? He can’t manage that and he didn’t manage it in the eight years that he was here. He fired me because I was working actively in criminal justice reform. He made poor choices.
In my last election my opponent was out of his weight class when he stepped in the ring with me, and I knew it and he didn’t. And then it got proven.
After you were sworn into office in January 2021, when you surveyed the Hamilton County Justice Center, what did you see?
Oh my gosh, the place was a shambles. I mean, the jail was crumbling, and none of the infrastructure had been repaired or paid attention to. The locks didn’t work on the cells. The deputies were walking out the door in droves because they weren’t safe. Assaults were through the roof.
And use of force — I’ll give you an example. There were 77 excessive use of force investigations when I came on that year, and now that I’m here, in 2024, so far we’ve had seven, and that’s a culture change. And that was intentional, and I changed it immediately upon taking office.
So there was a lot of dysfunction. The chain of command had collapsed. And for a paramilitary organization, if you don’t have chain of command, you are in chaos. And that’s really what we walked into, absolute chaos.
You grew up the daughter of a single mom along with two sisters, and you’ve said that you knew you wanted to be a police officer by the time you were 14. What inspired you at that age, in that household, to want to become a cop?
Well, my mom was forced to fend for us and herself. Our dad was gone, out of the picture. There wasn’t anybody else helping us. And mom, she worked very, very hard. And I watched her. I watched her make the impossible happen every day. I mean, she bought us a house, and she didn’t have this high-paying wage job. But she got us to where we needed to be.
When I watched her and how strong she was and the way she played the game, she was always fair. She always encouraged us to treat everyone with respect. And I follow in her footsteps. People will ask me sometimes — I think this is fun — they’ll say, “Man, you’re so tough. I mean, wow, you know?” And I go, “You think I’m tough, you should meet my sisters.” I mean, wow!
But anyway, that’s how I grew up, and it’s the model that I follow. I knew early on that if you’re not the leader in the group of kids you’re going to have, you can potentially have a very bad day. And I always want to have good days, so that’s where I stand.
After taking office, you launched a community affairs division to enhance community engagement, along with a call center to answer questions from the public related to the legal and court systems. In the first 18 months, staff responded to over 70,000 calls for assistance. That sounds like an overwhelming success for a service that didn’t exist before. What kind of questions are staff answering and what kind of assistance do callers get?
Well, the staff answers a whole array of questions, because the criminal justice system is incredibly complex, and there are a whole lot of people out there that don’t know how to navigate it. People want to know, what’s my court date? I lost that paperwork, right? How do I get to courtroom such and such? How do I get my nephew bonded out? I don’t even know the steps. What is his bond? Is he even in jail? We have Spanish speaking people, sometimes they come down in person. I have a Spanish speaker in that unit, and we will literally walk people to the places they need to be.
And here’s my question to the public: where did all those calls go when there wasn’t the call center? I know where they went: they went nowhere. The phones were ringing off the hook, and nobody was answering them, and nobody had to care.
So I created that, and I’ll tell you, we get lots and lots of compliments. Now, we did get a guy that called and he wanted a tree removed from his front yard, so, you know, we had to move him on to someone else (laughing). But in general, that’s a service, and that’s our brand.
How have stories of police abuse in cases like those of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and Tyree Nichols affected how you see officers’ engagement with the public, and how do you shape that relationship?
I brought on a state-of-the-art training model called ABLE, that’s Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement, which means our officers are empowered if they see someone, even of rank, who’s losing it with somebody, who’s going overboard, who has their knee on their neck and they’ve lost their temper and their perspective. That deputy is allowed to go over and pull that person off. They’re allowed to intervene and stop that interaction, and they will not be disciplined for it.
In fact, that ABLE training, which is an eight-hour training model for every deputy, has already generated many, many commendations and coins and accolades to people who have intervened. It’s working and they’re doing it and that’s why our deputies are trained, “Hey, don’t let it get out of hand, and don’t allow people that outrank you in any kind of way to do it when you know it’s wrong.”
Are cops on a power trip?
Well, you know what? I think what cops are is, they’re stressed, honestly. I think they’re incredibly stressed. I mean, we’re working long hours. My deputies here have been forced to work mandatory overtime, which means, hey, you’re getting ready to get off work and you just get told, “No, you got another eight to do.” I mean, that’s hard. And they see things that you can’t unsee, right? And there’s always the layer of you can lose your life. I mean, let’s just put that in perspective for police officers, right?
And that’s something else that I brought to this model, is we have a very robust officer wellness model, because that’s something that we’ve never paid attention to. We want to make sure that these men and women have someone to call, that they have counseling at their fingertips, right? That they are able to say, “Hey, I’m struggling and I need help.” Because you do. It’s a hard business, it’s a very harsh business.
And our officers, you know what? They take that oath and they mean it: I will put my life down because of the greater good. And I would like the public to please keep that in perspective, realize that police officers are stressed, and they become more stressed if they think you are putting them in more danger than they need to be in. There’s some bad actors, yeah, but it’s up to the leader to weed those bad actors out, hold them accountable and get rid of them.
You have a stellar resume in several aspects of law enforcement. You entered the Criminal Justice Program at the University of Cincinnati after high school and started out as a jail service deputy. You were captain of the Ohio training academy, the lead hostage negotiator for your department, captain of the honor guard, plus you’re an accomplished self-defense instructor, and more. Which one of your jobs has been the most satisfying and why?
That is a hard question. And, hey, I commend you on getting all those words right, because that’s a lot (laughing). But you know what, I will tell you, when I was a training commander, that was just so incredibly rewarding and significant because I was training up those brand new people. That’s their first look at the system, right? They’re coming in, they’re 20-something years old. Some of them out of the military, and some of them bring in great skill sets, and some, you know, are just starting out.
But I super-enjoyed that I ran with them. I ran with every Academy. I’m a physical fitness person and physical fitness instructor, etc., and I ran right alongside of them, three to five miles a day whenever we worked out. And that was 100 academies that came under my purview and I enjoyed that, because I was molding those men and women.
When you first started in the sheriff’s department, you were a jail service deputy. What’s your most vivid memory from those early days working your shift?
My vivid memory is the fact that I found out just how greatly people struggle. You know, I found out from watching these men and women come into jail in that era just how little leg up they had in life, right? I watched these women come in who we released right back out to their pimp, right to the men standing outside that are getting ready to run them right under the bus again. I watched people come in that are in just such bad health. I learned a lot about mental illness.
One of my most poignant stories is escorting the nurse around to a locked-in woman who was just pleading with the nurse, “Please make the voices stop. Please, please make these voices stop.” And you know, the thing I learned there is the nurse could not have been more kind to her, and spoke to her, and just — it still brings tears to my eyes. It impressed me. And the nurse said, “I’m going to help you with this. I need you to take this pill,” and did help restore her, and treated her with such dignity. I never forgot that. And I thought to myself, “That’s the model I’m going to use.” I was in my early 20s, and it was very significant.
Have transgender inmates been a source of tension at Hamilton County and how have you dealt with the issue?
You know, I haven’t really had any sources of true conflict regarding the transgender population that might come into this jail. I’ve created a transgender policy that I ran through HRC, and I’ve had attorneys from their organization look at it and give me the suggestions I’m going to follow. We’re very conscious in this jail that we treat people with respect.
As Sheriff and in your other roles, you’ve been on the front line of the fentanyl crisis. What have you witnessed?
Well, I’ve witnessed tragedies. I’ve witnessed women who are not able to head up their households, who are addicted to drugs. And also, of course, men, but realize that the women that come into this jail have children, right? And they are oftentimes the lone parent in those situations, and when they are getting high and they’re not able to take care of their business, that is going to affect and trickle down to what the children are doing. And we’re talking about youth violence, we’re talking about kids that don’t have any parents, that don’t have direction.
And, of course, the deaths. I mean, my God, the hundreds and hundreds of deaths. It’s just — it’s incomprehensible. You just can’t absorb the sadness of it. It’s too much.
I have deputies that are out there day-to-day administering to those people. We carry Narcan. I have Narcan in my personal car, okay? And we do revive people, because I’m telling you, someday that person you revived is gonna improve, and they’re gonna come to their senses and realize, “Hey, I have real responsibilities here for my children, and I have things that I have to do.”
Would you support a form of mandatory national service for young people in the military, or another form of public service, like the Peace Corps or Teach for America?
I absolutely would. I’d support that. I think that’s a great endeavor, honestly. You know, you learn so much when you really work with people. It’s one of the things that I was blessed with.
You run a major county government department with an energy-intensive infrastructure. What’s the single most important thing the world should do to address the climate crisis?
Oh, wow. First of all, you’re getting a little bit above my pay grade (laughing). But I am going to say we need, all of us, collectively, need to respect nature. We need to respect the fact that we right now still have some trees left, right? That we have some species of animals and fish and frogs and all the things and how that all connects to the ecosystem. Respect nature and the rest is going to come.
You’re married and you live with your wife Christine and your two dogs in Cincinnati. What can you tell us about her, how did you meet, and who proposed to whom?
Oh my gosh, that’s great. She is the most fabulous person I know, and I met her some 12 years ago. I knew, honestly, I knew the moment I met her, I wanted to marry her. We met at a party, just a random meeting at a party, and I looked across the room, and there she was, and I thought, I want to marry that woman. And I’m kind of like that. I get vibes, and I do pretty well with that. And I proposed to her in probably six months. That surprised her greatly.
We thank God every day that we found each other. She’s absolutely beautiful.
Have your dogs ever misbehaved enough to put them in doggie jail?
Oh my gosh (laughing). I have a little Min Pin, okay? And anybody that’s ever owned a miniature pincher knows that that dog runs the household. I wouldn’t put her in jail, I would take her out, sit her in my truck with the windows down, and she could sit out there for a while. She really enjoys that.
What’s the best thing about serving the constituents of Hamilton County as their sheriff?
Well, I tell you what I’m most proud of, and the best thing is, is that people talk to me. They approach me. I’m out and about a lot, you know. And people who have been formerly incarcerated, homeless people, people who have struggled in life and everything, they know me, and they feel very free to approach me and talk to me, and they have conversations with me — everyone in Hamilton County — but I’m very proud of that because I don’t know how many law enforcement leaders will get approached by people who were formerly in their custody and just have conversations with them, you know. There’s things I appreciate about you no matter who you are.
Hey, I want to thank you for allowing me to be so candid. I’m typically not always this candid, but you kind of said, “Hey, it’s sort of free-wheelin’,” and so I felt good to just be myself. So, thank you for that. I hope to meet up with you soon.
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