Know the Candidates: Steve Fox Challenges Scott Wriggelsworth in Ingham County Sheriff’s Race
Over the next several weeks, ELi will bring you articles highlighting the choices for state- and county-wide election. We seek to interview each of the major candidates for these offices and share an objective look at their backgrounds and goals for office.
Today, we focus on Ingham County Sheriff. With its administrative offices in the county seat Mason, the sheriff’s office conducts road patrols of county roadways and manages the Ingham County Correctional Facility (the county jail).
Scott Wriggelsworth
Scott Wriggelsworth has been a career law enforcement officer, but first he earned a marketing degree from Michigan State University.
“Interestingly enough,” he said in a Zoom interview with ELi, “some 32 years later after graduation, I have to market the profession, the agency and myself as an elected official so I certainly think there’s some takeaways there.”
He graduated from the 51st Mid-Michigan Police Academy at Michigan State University before starting a 23 year stint at the East Lansing Police Department.
“I did everything I ever wanted to do in East Lansing,” he said, “including [being] sergeant and lieutenant of [the] detective bureau, spending two years in parking, two years in records – neither one of those were places I [wanted] to go. I was a street cop day in and day out, but it really gave me a good perspective of the big picture of how important the rest of the system is.”
In 2015, when his father decided to retire as the Ingham County Sheriff after seven terms, Wriggelsworth announced his candidacy, winning election the next year and taking office in 2017.
“I think a lot of people who worked at the sheriff’s office thought it was just going to be more of the same,” he said. “My dad was a great sheriff and an even better father, but I’m not him. Coming from a city police department…I think it gave [me] a fresh perspective on how to do things, a broad overview of how things should work, maybe things to build on and things we shouldn’t do any longer.”
Once elected, Wriggelsworth knew that his biggest challenge was the need for a new county jail facility. He worked to educate the public on the need for a new jail. The electorate approved the bond to build in August 2018.
Staffing the department remains the largest challenge for the sheriff. He told ELi that his staff is nearly equally split between street cops, detective bureaus and corrections deputies who police the jail.
“But there’s fewer and fewer people wanting to do these jobs,” he said, “not necessarily because of the job itself, but because there are so many other options for young people out there to work remotely, work from their phone, make more money; really none of that stuff can you do in our profession.”
Retention is also important because hiring and training deputies can be time consuming, Wriggelsworth said.
“I’m proud that we’ve had pretty good luck, not only with recruiting but retaining individuals because once they get here, they seem to want to stay in the sheriff’s office,“ he said.
Wriggelsworth said that his ambition for a new term is to build on the progress he’s made in the last seven and a half years.
“Clearly as the sheriff,” he said, “I play a role in how well or how unwell the sheriff’s office runs. But it’s probably more about the team that you build around you. Being willing to take not only criticism from the public, but ideas from your own staff. We’re always preaching efficiencies; how can we do things better, because, let’s face it, law enforcement is being asked to do, at a lot of metrics, more and with less.”
Steve Fox
Steve Fox was born in Denver and raised in rural Nebraska. He’s spent the last 20 years in Mason.
“I thought I wanted to be an attorney,” he told ELi in a Zoom interview. “I went to law school for about a year and a half, and they disabused me of that notion.”
Today, he is retired from administrative work after a career spent at Michigan State University and the State of Michigan, among other places. Fox has never had a career in law enforcement.
“The closest experience I have in law enforcement is as an undergrad in college,” he said. “I worked as a contract security. I was a mall cop for a little while.”
Fox has considered running for the sheriff position in the past, particularly when Gene Wriggelsworth announced his retirement in 2015. However, he said he didn’t feel he stood much of a chance when Wriggelsworth’s son, current Ingham County Sheriff Scott Wriggelsworth, announced his candidacy.
He hasn’t been impressed with the incumbent’s performance, he told ELi.
“He’s been very low profile,” Fox said. “And when he has spoken out publicly he’s not impressed me a whole lot.”
Fox spoke about the sheriff’s responsibility of managing the county jail, saying that he saw it was half of the department’s duty.
Fox said his focus will be on reducing crime rates within the county. He also said he will also order that the sheriff’s department begin enforcing federal immigration laws.
When asked to elaborate on his immigration comments, he asserted that the county does not hand over “illegal aliens that may be detained by them.”
“It’s considered a sanctuary county,” he said, “which is something I will reverse by the way when elected.”
Fox said recruiting new officers at the county level is a struggle, in part, because since the Covid-19 pandemic, people became accustomed to “free, easy money,” adding that he knows people who made more money “sitting at home during Covid than they could make working.”
“Recruiting good people is a challenge here,” he said, “and also they’ve got kind of a double whammy with law enforcement positions, because, quite frankly, this ‘defund the police’ movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, all these leftist movements against law enforcement have really put a dent in the morale. So that’s going to be my number one priority and as soon as I get a handle on that, I’ll probably do some recruiting as well.”
Asked for any parting thoughts he wanted to share with East Lansing voters, Fox said he wanted them to consider whether they were safer today than they were eight or 12 years ago.
“You don’t have to make grand, sweeping changes to make people safer,” he said. “I’m a big believer in enforcing misdemeanors and that sort of thing. I think getting down to the street level and getting the small crimes enforced will help take care of the larger crimes. It’s not a panacea, but it’s a good place to start.”