Two Important Articles You Should Read About Sheriff Mike Lewis

The Color of Suspicion

Sgt. Mike Lewis of the Maryland State Police is a bull-necked, megaphone-voiced, highly caffeinated drug warrior who, on this shiny May morning outside of Annapolis, is conceding defeat. The drug war is over, the good guys have lost and he has been cast as a racist. ''This is the end, buddy,'' he says. ''I can read the writing on the wall.'' Lewis is driving his unmarked Crown Victoria down the fast lane of Route 50, looking for bad guys. The back of his neck is burnt by the sun, and he wears his hair flat and short under his regulation Stetson.

''They're going to let the N.A.A.C.P. tell us how to do traffic stops,'' he says. ''That's what's happening. There may be a few troopers who make stops solely based on race, but thisa they're going to let these people tell us how to run our department. I say, to hell with it all. I don't care if the drugs go through. I don't.''

He does, of course. Mike Lewis was born to seize crack. He grew up in Salisbury, on the Eastern Shore -- Jimmy Buffett country -- and he watched his friends become stoners and acid freaks. Not his scene. He buzz-cut his hair away and joined the state troopers when he was 19. He's a star, the hard-charger who made one of the nation's largest seizures of crack cocaine out on Route 13. He's a national expert on hidden compartments. He can tell if a man's lying, he says, by watching the pulsing of the carotid artery in his neck. He can smell crack cocaine inside a closed automobile. He's a human drug dog, a walking polygraph machine. ''I have the unique ability to distinguish between a law-abiding person and an up-to-no-good person,'' he says. ''Black or white.'' All these skills, though, he's ready to chuck. The lawsuits accusing the Maryland State Police of harassing black drivers, the public excoriation -- and most of all, the Governor of New Jersey saying that her state police profiled drivers based on race, and were wrong to do so -- have twisted him up inside. ''Three of my men have put in for transfers,'' he says. ''My wife wants me to get out. I'm depressed.''

More

Today the Daily Times did an article in which the local NAACP President Mary Ashanti criticized Sheriff Lewis with statements like, Ashanti said. "That kind of statement is inflammatory and reckless.” Sheriff Lewis had stated, "I'm holding Barack Hussein Obama responsible for what's going on in the country." His remarks earlier this month threaten to undermine efforts to forge greater trust between local police and the black community, said Mary Ashant.

It would appear that Sheriff Lewis is experiencing a ton of backlash lately by the Press but this isn't anything new. The beginning of this article is a story from 1999. 

Sheriff Lewis went on to say, “I don’t apologize for any of my comments at all," the sheriff said. ”While Mary Ashanti has consistently divided and attempted to divide law enforcement and the African American community, I think the African American community knows me well enough to know that I won’t let Mary Ashanti divide us further.”

You can read the full Daily Times article HERE.