Gov. Sarah Sanders drags Arkansas State Police into her politics

One of Gov. Sarah Sanders’ first decisions after her election in 2022 was to undo part of the state government reorganization put in place by her predecessor, Asa Hutchinson. Instead of appointing both a cabinet secretary for the Department of Public Safety and a director of the Arkansas State Police, Sanders gave both jobs to the same man, Mike Hagar.

Thus, Hagar is both a political appointee serving at the pleasure of the governor and a career law enforcement officer commanding state troopers. He is, in essence, his own boss, and as DPS secretary, also oversees the Department of Emergency Management, the Arkansas Crime Lab and the Arkansas Crime Information Center.

What’s happened in the two years since shows why Sanders may have made this choice — and why it’s proven to be a bad idea, with the potential to get even worse.

Last year, Sanders inveighed Hagar’s prestige as the state’s top cop to lobby for changes in the Freedom of Information Act to smother in secrecy details about how money is spent for her security and travel. Only an eruption of public outrage on both left and right kept her from gutting the law entirely.

Col. Mike Hagar, right, Secretary of Public Safety and Director of Arkansas State Police, answers questions about Sen. Bart Hester’s Freedom of Information Act bill during a Senate committee hearing in September 2023. At left is Allison Bragg, Secretary of the Department of Inspector General. (Photo by John Sykes Jr. /Arkansas Advocate)

Even more disturbingly, she has involved him in her relentless quest to demonize undocumented immigrants for political gain, which went spectacularly sideways when dash cam video of a state trooper’s encounter with a Guatemalan driver showed the incident was not as Sanders and Hagar characterized it.

She also dragged Hagar into her ongoing dispute with the Board of Corrections over control of the state prison system and has taken to using state troopers as props at events that are overtly political.

“I’m sure none of the troopers in the Arkansas State Police want to spend one minute standing behind a governor at a press conference,” says Rogers attorney Tom Mars, who was state police director under Sanders’ father and has expressed alarm at her politicization of the agency.

Sanders’ FOIA changes concealed from the public at least $3.85 million of spending during her first year in office, along with another $1.2 million in federal COVID relief funds that legislators allowed Hagar to use for security enhancements based on a vague, two-paragraph request. Hagar has insisted that the spending is necessary because of the unique security threats Sanders faces, but he also won’t reveal any details about threat assessments used to justify spending more than $5 million.

As the most polarizing and controversial governor since Orval Fabus, Sanders no doubt has more extensive security concerns than her predecessors, and there have been two cases of people having been charged with threatening her (a Rogers man was found mentally unfit to stand trial; a Fort Smith woman got 2 1/2 months in jail.) But Arkansans — and our legislators — have good reason to be skeptical when the governor’s office and Hagar ask us to just trust them.

First, the claim that disclosing details of the governor’s travel threatened her security — which no previous governor had made — emerged only after Hagar was sued by blogger Matt Campbell for refusing to comply with FOIA requests that unearthed evidence of questionable spending, including an 11-minute flight in the state police jet between Rogers and Fayetteville. Hagar balked at fulfilling those requests long enough to give Sanders time to call a special session to try to take a chainsaw to the FOIA.

And remember also that this is the same governor’s staff who paid a $2,500 consulting fee to two of her friends to buy a $19,000 lectern, and then spent months trying to cover it up.

Sanders has also roped Hagar into helping her bang one of her favorite political drums: the widely debunked claim that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a crime wave.

After a state trooper got into an altercation in July with a Guatemalan national on I-49 near Rogers, Sanders fired off a news release accusing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of “creating the worst border crisis in history” and saying that a “criminal illegal immigrant is in custody and off the streets.”

Hagar was quoted in the release — identified in his law enforcement role (state police director) not his political role (DPS secretary): “It’s even more disturbing that this suspect is an undocumented, illegal immigrant from Guatemala. That shows another level of lawlessness that will not be tolerated.”

But dashcam video raised so many questions about the trooper’s conduct, and ASP’s explanations of it, that the Benton County prosecutor dropped all felony charges against the driver, who was tasered 13 times and shot in the head. His attorney is now gathering information for a possible civil rights lawsuit.

The video clearly shows that the driver didn’t understand English; pushed on that point, Hagar said that if he were in Germany but didn’t understand German, “if a German police officer starts giving me directions, it’s going to be obvious that I just need to comply.” Left unexplained was how someone complies with commands they don’t understand.

Think about the message this sends to Hispanic Arkansans or visitors, or people who don’t speak English. Or the message it sends to state troopers, tasked with dealing with diverse populations, about the attitudes of their superiors. Sanders is a politician who can employ xenophobia for political effect. We should demand better from law enforcement.

Mars, who considers Hagar a friend and believes he’s doing an otherwise admirable job leading the state police, had a similar experience with political interference, resigning as state police director in 2001 when he was called on the carpet for rebuffing a state legislator’s attempt to interfere in a criminal investigation.

Mars had a lucrative private law practice to fall back on; Hagar has spent his entire career in the state patrol, and “I don’t think he has a choice,” Mars said.

So where else might this lead? In Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida — which the Sanders administration frequently uses as a policy template — state police have been used to investigate thousands of voters for unsubstantiated fraud claims, question voters who signed ballot petitions supporting legal abortion and were even sent to Texas to round up migrants outside their jurisdiction.

Mars says he’s not concerned that things will go that far in Arkansas, but he adds a caveat that should give us all pause: “I don’t think Gov. Sanders has any limits as to what she would consider doing to promote her anti-woke GOP agenda if she thought she could get away with it.”

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on Facebook and X.