Will Akin is the only nonpartisan sheriff in the state of Missouri, and he spends the first few minutes of this conversation explaining why that matters for how he shows up at his neighbor's door, at a chamber of commerce event, or on a call where somebody is screaming at him about a barking dog. He is also a former Blackhawk pilot who was homeless at eight years old. The Clay County sheriff sat down with Sam Sapp to talk about approachability, community safety, officer mental health, and the long walk from a California dumpster to a Missouri courthouse.
What You'll Hear
- Why Clay County is the only Missouri county that runs a nonpartisan ticket for sheriff, and how that changes the job
- The story of a Philadelphia judge who moved to Clay County and was shocked the sheriff actually answered his email
- Why knowing your three neighbors behind you and across the street is one of the best home security tools you have
- Will's take on property crime that is self inflicted, including the time someone got into his own son's car in his driveway
- What keyless start and remote start actually do, and why the cars that get stolen are the ones left running unattended
- Why Will now orders his deputies to see a culturally competent therapist before they hit the breaking point
- The childhood memory of dumpster diving behind grocery stores that Will blocked out for forty years
- The five high school teachers who drove to Will's house and banged on the door to drag him to school
Why an approachable sheriff is a strategic choice, not a personality trait
Sam opens by telling Will what he noticed the first time he heard him speak at a CAR and eChamber of Commerce event. The sheriff was approachable. Sam admits he had never really thought about whether a county sheriff was supposed to feel approachable, and Will jumps in to explain that it is a deliberate choice with a practical reason behind it.
A sheriff is unique among elected positions. Will has laws he has to enforce, but he is also a politician who was put into office by the people he now serves. He does not get to pick which constituents he is accountable to. He tells a story about a former judge from Philadelphia who had recently moved to Clay County and reached out to say he had always wanted to meet his local sheriff. Will said come on over. The judge was surprised he even got a response.
That approachability is reinforced by something unusual about Clay County itself. In 2020 voters passed a charter for government that removed partisanship from all county offices. Out of 114 counties and 115 sheriffs in the state of Missouri, Will is the only nonpartisan sheriff. He credits that structure with giving him room to balance enforcement against community trust. He still leans in a particular direction personally, and anyone scrolling a local party's Facebook page will see photos of him, but he makes it clear he is not going to neglect the other side.
He tells Sam that over his last four years in office, there have been many times he worked more closely with the side he does not personally lean toward than with the side he does. That only happens when people already believe you are honest about where you stand and willing to hear them out. Will's shorthand for it is simple. Be friends with everyone, and if the conversation ends in a disagreement, at least you had the conversation.
Home security starts with your neighbors, not your doorbell camera
When Sam asks Will the best way for a homeowner to protect their property, Will does not lead with cameras, alarms, or locks. He tells a story from his early days in law enforcement with the Phoenix Police Department. A call came in that somebody had stolen a house. When Will got there the house was still standing, but everything inside was gone. The neighbors had seen a U-Haul in the driveway all day and assumed the family was moving out. They had never actually met the people who lived there.
The lesson Will draws is blunt. One of the strongest home security measures you have is knowing your neighbors. The three behind you, the three across the street, the ones on either side. Technology has made it easy to go from the garage straight into the house without ever crossing a property line, and most of us are glad about that until the day we need someone to notice something is wrong.
Cameras help. Will has them on his own house and still uses his lock picking skills to help neighbors who have locked themselves out. Sam laughs because it turns out he does the same thing. He realized that having a camera and a lockpick set made him the neighborhood's informal help line, and in the process he got to know people he might never have spoken to otherwise.
Will is also honest about the downside. More visibility means you find out about more crime, including crime you might have been happier not knowing about. A neighbor's stolen car does not make the news. Once you have a camera pointed at the street, you know everything. He also pushes back on the idea that crime just happens to people randomly. In Clay County, a lot of property crime is, in his words, self inflicted. Doors left unlocked, cars left running at the gas station, keys on the visor. Even his own son's car got hit in his driveway next to an unmarked patrol car. The sheriff is not immune. Nobody is.
What keyless start actually does, and why habits still matter
Sam and Will talk through why keyless start and remote start systems create opportunities a lot of drivers don't realize. Once the engine is on, most consumer cars will shift into drive and go whether the fob is in range or not. The fob's proximity cutoff is not a safety feature in that moment. The car is already running.
Will does not promise every make and model behaves the same way. There might be a high end manufacturer out there with a different rule, but as he points out, those are rarely the cars that get stolen. The cars that get stolen are the ones left running unattended with a driver who is certain it will be fine.
They land on a broader point. The old midwestern days of leaving doors unlocked and windows open are gone, and a lot of the locks we rely on now live inside our phones and fobs. Those locks are only as good as the habits around them. Will also talks about the emotional side of being the victim, even when the car is just a car. The first reaction is usually denial. You must have parked it somewhere else. Someone must have towed it. The idea that it has been driven off in minutes is the last thing your brain is willing to consider.
Officer mental health and the culture of asking for help
Sam asks how someone in law enforcement stays whole when the job is a steady stream of other people's worst days. Will does not soften it. Deputies respond to the same kind of call a hundred times in a month, but every caller is experiencing it for the first time. A stolen car to one person is a shrug. To the next person, the one barely making ends meet, it is the transportation that gets them to work. Officers have to meet each one where they are even on the days they cannot meet themselves there.
Will asks Sam to flip the coin. On the days when a deputy just left a homicide scene or pulled two kids out of a pond, the noise complaint and the barking dog call feel like children yelling on a front porch. He is honest that sometimes officers snap, and when they do, he asks citizens for the same grace he asks his own people to extend to each other.
He is candid about how far the profession has come. Twenty years ago the only reason mental health came up in law enforcement was because a command staff told someone it had to. The stigma around even considering that you might be suffering from PTSD or complex PTSD was total. He worked fifty homicides in West Phoenix in his early years and says that was simply how it was. Today is different, and in his own organization Will has ordered deputies to see a therapist before their job was at risk, not to punish them but to preserve them.
He is specific about what kind of therapist. Culturally competent. Someone who understands law enforcement, not just any clinician who will nod along. When a deputy comes back a month later and thanks him for seeing what they could not see in themselves, Will calls it saving a teammate. He would rather absorb some resentment in the short term than terminate someone in the long term because they hit a breaking point that no one can walk back. He is clear that the profession still has a tremendous amount of room to grow. He is also clear that it is in a better place than it was ten years ago, and he is trying to keep it moving.
From homeless at eight to sheriff, and the people who dragged him to school
The last stretch of the conversation is Will's story. His father left when he was three. By eight, he and his mother and brother were homeless in California. They ate egg McMuffins most mornings, he ate lunch only when a classmate shared something from their lunch box, and for forty years he had no memory of what they did for dinner. A reporter interviewed Will and his brother a few years ago, and it was his brother who said the quiet part out loud. They went dumpster diving behind grocery stores. Will says the memory crashed back down on him in the middle of the interview. As an eight year old he had been convinced they were doing something wrong and was always waiting for the cops to show up. He blocked it out to cope.
He dropped out of high school at sixteen, got his GED at eighteen, and joined the Army. He credits the Army with saving his life. It gave him structure he did not have and the confidence to do things well outside his comfort zone. He was a parachute rigger and then a Blackhawk pilot until an adult onset asthma diagnosis permanently grounded him and pushed him out of active duty after almost eight years. He had a wife and two young kids and needed a job. The Phoenix Police Department was hiring. That is how he got into law enforcement, and twenty two years later he is running a 225 person sheriff's office.
When Sam asks about giants, Will names his mother and a group he calls the five. Five high school teachers who refused to let him stay out of school. They would drive his English teacher's minivan to his house and bang on the door to drag him in. He hated them for it at the time. Years later, after a leadership course at the FBI National Academy, he wrote a paper about them and sent it to his social studies teacher, who was also the principal of his high school. His English teacher wrote back. She told him she was proud of him. Will says he has had a lot of people tell him that over the years, but from her it was overwhelming. His guiding principle is integrity. He is the same person in every room, because that is the only thing he says he really has.
About Will Akin
Will Akin is the sheriff of Clay County, Missouri, and the only nonpartisan sheriff in the state. Before taking office he spent nearly eight years as the spokesperson for the Clay County Sheriff's Office and started his law enforcement career with the Phoenix Police Department after almost eight years of active duty Army service, where he served as a parachute rigger and then a Blackhawk helicopter pilot. He is writing a realistic fiction book drawn from his childhood, his military service, and his time in law enforcement.