To be a district attorney in Massachusetts, you must be a member of the bar.
To be the sheriff who runs the jail that prosecutor fills, you must be eighteen, registered to vote somewhere in Massachusetts, and able to collect a thousand signatures. You do not need a law enforcement background. You do not need corrections experience. You do not need a certification, a degree, or a day of training. By the Commonwealth’s own candidate guide, you are not even required to live in the county.
That is not an oversight anyone has quietly tolerated. It is the entire body of law on the subject.
What the statute actually says
Sheriffs are governed by G.L. c. 37. We searched the full operative text, sections 1 through 26. The word “training” appears zero times. “Experience,” zero. “Education,” zero. “Academy,” zero. “Degree,” zero. The single use of “qualification” concerns a special sheriff taking office.
Section 1 is the whole of the eligibility framework:
“A sheriff shall be elected in each county, as provided in section one hundred and fifty-nine of chapter fifty-four, for six years, beginning with the first Wednesday of January following his election, and until his successor is qualified.”
Section 2 adds the only preconditions to acting as sheriff: take an oath, and post a bond with the state treasurer conditioned on performing your duties faithfully.
The constitutional provision is no more demanding. Amendment Article XIX, ratified in 1855, made sheriffs elective and handed the rest to the Legislature: “The legislature shall prescribe, by general law, for the election of sheriffs.” The Legislature has never prescribed a qualification.
It had an obvious chance to. In 2009, when Massachusetts abolished county government and transferred the sheriffs onto the state payroll, it passed a 40,000-word statute. We searched that too. Zero hits for qualification, training, experience, education, or academy. The Commonwealth took over the sheriffs’ budgets and attached no standards to the job.
The clearest statement of the rule is in the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s own Candidate’s Guide to the 2022 State Election. Attorney General: five years in Massachusetts, and must be a member of the bar. District attorney: resident in the district, and must be a member of the bar. Sheriff: “(no requirement).”
The part that should stop you
Massachusetts does impose training requirements on the people who work inside a house of correction. Under 103 CMR 915.03, every new correction officer must receive 160 hours of training in the first year, forty of them before being independently assigned to a post, covering use of force, suicide prevention, first aid, firearms, and supervision of prisoners, plus forty hours every year after. Even a clerical employee with minimal prisoner contact gets forty hours.
The regulation also assigns responsibility for all of it. Under 103 CMR 915.01, “the Sheriff, facility administrator shall develop guidelines for training and staff development.”
So the official legally responsible for ensuring that every person in the building is trained is subject to no training requirement whatsoever.
There is a further wrinkle. Under G.L. c. 6 § 116, the Municipal Police Training Committee, which sets police training standards for the Commonwealth, includes two sheriffs appointed by the governor as voting members. Sheriffs help write standards they are personally exempt from.
Kentucky at least says the quiet part in statute. KRS § 15.380 requires deputy sheriffs to be certified, then exempts, by name, “Sheriffs.” Massachusetts reaches the same destination by never legislating at all.
How other states handle it
Many do not do it this way.
California bars you from even filing for sheriff without an advanced POST certificate or between one and four years of full-time salaried law enforcement experience, scaled to your education. Ohio requires certification or recent full-time law enforcement service, plus either two years at the rank of sergeant or above or a degree, plus a two-week academy before taking office and sixteen hours of continuing education a year. Washington requires five years of full-time law enforcement work, verified before the filing deadline. Oregon screens unqualified candidates off the ballot. Texas requires an active peace officer license at filing.
Under either the California or the Ohio statute, Steven Tompkins would not have been eligible to file for the office he has held since 2013. That is an observation about statutory text, not a verdict on the man.
A caution on scope: we reviewed roughly twenty states, not fifty. Of those, about thirteen impose a real professional requirement and about seven impose none. Anyone citing a national tally should build it from the statutes rather than repeat a number.
What Tompkins actually brought to the job
Here the record is more interesting than the caricature, and it is worth setting out honestly.
His career before corrections was in communications. Roughly a decade at AT&T Cable as a television producer, making programs and public service announcements for nonprofits and politicians. Concurrent work in FEMA’s communications cadre as a field producer and regional press liaison. Then director of marketing and public affairs at the Dimock Community Health Center.
In 2002 he joined the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department under Andrea Cabral, the same year she became sheriff. His title there is rendered four different ways in the primary record: chief of external affairs, chief of external affairs and communications, and chief of external relations. The Boston Globe described the role as “responsible for her media relations and connections with elected officials, businesses, and community and neighborhood groups.”
His own camp’s summary, in the Bay State Banner in 2012, was “more than 30 years of experience in communications, marketing, media production and public affairs.”
We found no evidence that he has ever served in a sworn, custodial, or operational corrections role, and no evidence of military service, academy training, or professional law enforcement certification. That finding rests on seven separate published biographies of him, including his own department’s, his campaign’s, the Massachusetts Sheriffs’ Association’s, and Governor Deval Patrick’s appointment release. All seven trace the identical path. None mentions sworn service, an academy, or a certification.
We also pulled the POST Commission’s full certified-officer dataset, dated August 26, 2026, all 24,017 records. Thirty-one Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department employees appear in it. The sheriff does not. Whether POST certification legally reaches an elected sheriff is genuinely unsettled, and his absence is consistent with the law as written, so this establishes that he holds no peace officer certification rather than that he broke a rule.
Proving a negative is hard, and we say so plainly. We did not obtain a personnel file or a résumé. If he served somewhere early in life and never put it in a biography, we would not have found it.
The case on the other side, which is real
An honest version of this argument has to carry the facts that cut against it, and several are substantial.
He was not a parachute from outside. He spent eleven years inside the department before running it. Patrick’s appointment release headlined precisely that: “Experienced public safety leader brings over a decade of service in the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office.” It states that he “supervised his own division and was a member of the Sheriff’s nine-member Executive Team which was responsible for day-to-day management of all Sheriff’s Department operations.”
He is credited by the governor’s office, his department, and the sheriffs’ association with creating the Common Ground Institute, a vocational training and reentry program with a job placement component, along with the Choice Program and Jail Brake. That is corrections programming, not press work.
Cabral, a career prosecutor with actual command experience, vouched for him on exactly this point: “Steve brings an extraordinary level of relevant prior experience to this position. His job required him and his staff to work with every division within the Department.”
His own correction officers’ union endorsed him, in 2016 and again in 2022, as did the captains’ local. His peers elected him president of the Massachusetts Sheriffs’ Association twice, and he was the inaugural president of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. Republican Governor Charlie Baker appointed him chairman of the Roxbury Community College board in 2019, after six years of watching him run the jail. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Boston College and a master’s from UMass Boston’s McCormack School.
And Bristol County Sheriff Paul Heroux, a former mayor, made the general point to the Globe last year: “People think to be a sheriff, you need to be law enforcement. You really don’t.”
He met every legal requirement for the office. Completely. There was none he failed, because there are none.
How he got the job
In December 2012, Patrick named Cabral his public safety secretary. On January 22, 2013, the two were sworn in minutes apart at the State House, Cabral to the cabinet and Tompkins to her old office.
The mechanism was G.L. c. 54 § 142, which lets the governor, with the council’s consent, “appoint some person” to a sheriff’s vacancy. No qualification attaches to the appointee either.
There was no public application, no announced criteria, and no disclosed vetting. The Dorchester Reporter noted that administration officials had been “tightlipped about potential successors.” Who else was considered has never been released. The only trace on the record is the Globe’s line that Patrick “had looked at candidates beyond Cabral’s inner circle, including some who had more experience in the operation of jails.”
Asked about the criticism that this was a political hire, Patrick did not deflect:
“By the way, it’s a political job, so the folks that are criticizing it as a political hire, tell them: they’re right.”
He added that Tompkins was “the right man at the right time,” and declined to discuss the other candidates or their law enforcement backgrounds.
What he had been doing in the months before
On August 6, 2012, Tompkins took a formal leave of absence from the sheriff’s department to join Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign as a senior adviser on its executive staff. Warren won that November. Two months later he was sheriff.
He was also, at that moment, the chairman of Michelle Wu’s first campaign for Boston City Council. This is not a press characterization. His name appears as “Chairman” on the Statement of Organization filed with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance in December 2012 for the Committee to Elect Michelle Wu, a form signed under the penalties of perjury.
The pattern held. He spoke for Ed Markey in 2013, endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, ran twice for chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, was a 2016 convention delegate, spoke at Warren’s presidential launch in 2019, and endorsed Wu for mayor in 2021.
There is also a closed loop worth stating carefully, because all three facts are verified and none depends on the pending criminal case. Frank Perullo, a Democratic consultant, helped run successful sheriff campaigns for both Cabral and Tompkins, and testified last week that he set up an organization and “worked pretty hard to make sure he won” the 2014 race. Perullo later co-founded a cannabis company that needed a community partnership to satisfy state licensing regulators, and partnered with the sheriff’s department. Cabral, Tompkins’s predecessor and friend since their Boston College years, became that company’s chief executive in Massachusetts.
The money came from the people he supervises
This is the part of the record that most directly answers the machine question, and it has a specific history.
In 2002, the Stern Commission examined the Suffolk sheriff’s department under Tompkins’s predecessor-but-one, Richard Rouse, found what the Globe described as “runaway political patronage,” and recommended banning campaign donations from department employees. Cabral pledged not to take them, and the records indicate she kept that pledge.
Tompkins made no such pledge.
We pulled the complete itemized record for his committee, OCPF filer 15595, all 3,929 receipts, and the per-record sums reconcile exactly to OCPF’s own computed summaries. Filtering the self-reported employer field, contributions listing the sheriff’s department as employer total $153,098.88 from 225 donors across 881 contributions, or about 21.7 percent of all individual contribution dollars over the committee’s life.
That is a floor, not a census. Another 1,564 records carry no employer at all, and the department’s name is spelled at least 21 different ways in the data, including “Suffolk Country Sheriff’s Department” 64 times.
Some years run far higher than the average: 35.6 percent in 2015, 38.2 percent in 2019, 30.4 percent in 2025. The data also shows single-day clusters consistent with in-house fundraising, including 37 separate employee contributions on August 13, 2015, and 33 on February 22, 2016.
The Globe reported in August 2025 that when family members are included, employees and their relatives accounted for one of every two donations since January 2023, roughly $54,000 of about $106,000 raised. The legal line is narrow but real: a public employee may accept donations from subordinates, but may not solicit them.
Two fairness points. Common Cause, an advocacy organization, published a 2022 report attributing $319,002 in “potentially conflicted” donations to Suffolk County. That figure is the lowest of the five Massachusetts counties it named, is attributed to the county rather than to him, covers a window beginning four years before his committee existed, and carries the authors’ own disclaimer that they “did not attempt to determine the legality of specific contributions.” And a 2016 Boston 25 investigation reported that more than a third of his re-election donations came from employees; we could not reproduce that figure from the underlying filings, which show 22.3 percent of dollars for that year. He called the pay-to-play allegation “utter nonsense” and said on camera: “You don’t have to contribute to my campaign. You don’t have to hold a sign for my campaign.”
OCPF’s file shows 32 audit issues against the committee, all marked resolved, and no enforcement action.
Twice, he used the office itself
Two State Ethics Commission matters are resolved and admitted, which distinguishes them entirely from the pending federal case.
In the first, he acknowledged that in August 2013 he went to about eight Roxbury shops displaying a challenger’s campaign signs, “orally identified himself as Sheriff and showed his official identification to the proprietors,” and asked each to take the signs down. Every one complied. The Commission’s executive director called it “an inherently coercive use of his official position to aid his candidacy.” He paid $2,500 and said at the time: “If that’s the rules, that’s the rules. I’ve learned from the experience, and I’ve moved on.”
The second, in March 2023, carried a $12,300 penalty and three separate violations. After his wife died in October 2016, his adult niece moved in to help with his two young children. A month later, on November 7, 2016, he hired her as a full-time management assistant at $45,000 and assigned her to the External Affairs Division. From the signed agreement: the division’s chief “had not requested the filling of any such position and did not interview the niece or receive or review her resume,” and “the position had not been posted.” Until she resigned in January 2018, she left work once or twice a week during business hours to drive his daughter, with his knowledge and approval.
The agreement also found that between 2014 and 2022 he repeatedly asked other department employees to care for or transport his children, and that his executive assistant ran personal errands for him until she retired in 2019.
Paragraph 4 of that agreement carries the weight: “Tompkins is the appointing authority for all non-elected SCSD employees.”
He signed it, and he disputes it: “I disagree with their interpretation. If they have a policy or law that says people in my situation shouldn’t accept help from friends or colleagues, then that’s the case.” He was, by every account, a grieving widower with two children, and that context belongs in any fair telling.
The elections almost nobody votes in
He has appeared on three ballots in fourteen years and has never faced a major party opponent in a general election.
In 2014 he beat an unenrolled candidate, 82 percent to 17. In 2016 and again in 2022, no Republican filed, and he ran unopposed, taking 98.4 and 97.6 percent. His only genuinely competitive race was the 2022 Democratic primary against a former subordinate, which he won 59 to 35.
The blank ballots tell the rest. In 2016, 81,564 Suffolk County voters cast a presidential ballot and left the sheriff’s line empty. That is 25.7 percent of everyone who voted, against a 1.24 percent blank rate at the top of the ticket, a ratio of more than twenty to one. In 2022, the 46,229 blanks equaled about thirty percent of his entire vote total.
Polling explains why. An ACLU of Massachusetts survey in April 2022 found that fewer than one in five Massachusetts voters could correctly name their sheriff, ninety percent did not know the term is six years, and forty-one percent did not know sheriffs are elected at all.
Where this actually lands
The honest conclusion is not that Steven Tompkins slipped past a screen.
It is that there is no screen. Massachusetts asks a sheriff for an oath, a bond, and a thousand signatures, then hands him roughly a thousand employees, a budget of about $129 million, and custody of several thousand human beings. It requires 160 hours of training of the officer walking the tier and nothing of the man who signs that officer’s training policy. It requires the prosecutor to be a lawyer and the jailer to be eighteen.
Into that vacuum, a governor put a communications executive who had spent the previous months running a Senate campaign and chairing a City Council campaign, without a public process, and said openly that it was a political job. The voters then ratified it twice in races where no opponent filed and a quarter of them skipped the line entirely.
The result is an office where the ordinary checks have to come from the person holding it. Twice, the State Ethics Commission found they did not.
None of that turns on the federal charges, which are unproven. Tompkins has pleaded not guilty and has been on a leave of absence since August 2025, with a special sheriff running the department. And when the Supreme Judicial Court suspended an indicted sheriff in 1994, it noted that only its own justices could do so, and suggested “the Legislature may wish to make provision for the temporary suspension of a sheriff.” Thirty-two years later, it has not.
Common questions
What qualifications are required to be a sheriff in Massachusetts?
None beyond the universal requirements to run for state office: age 18, registered to vote in Massachusetts, and 1,000 certified signatures. G.L. c. 37 contains no training, education, experience, or certification requirement, and the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s candidate guide lists “(no requirement)” in the residency column for sheriff.
Do Massachusetts sheriffs need law enforcement experience?
No. Correction officers must complete 160 hours of training in their first year under 103 CMR 915.03, and 40 hours annually thereafter. The elected sheriff who is responsible for setting training policy has no training requirement.
Did Steven Tompkins work in corrections before becoming sheriff?
He worked at the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department from 2002 to 2013 as chief of external affairs, a communications and community relations role, and sat on the department’s executive team. We found no evidence he ever served in a sworn, custodial, or operational corrections position, and no evidence of military service or law enforcement certification.
How did he become sheriff?
Governor Deval Patrick appointed him on January 22, 2013 under G.L. c. 54 § 142, after Sheriff Andrea Cabral joined the cabinet. There was no public application or announced vetting process, and the other candidates have never been disclosed. Patrick said publicly that critics calling it a political hire were “right.”
Can a Massachusetts sheriff be removed or suspended?
Only by a majority of the justices of the Supreme Judicial Court under G.L. c. 211 § 4. The governor cannot suspend a sheriff, as the SJC held in Governor v. McGonigle in 1994.
Sources: G.L. c. 37; G.L. c. 54 § 142; G.L. c. 6 § 116; G.L. c. 211 § 4; 103 CMR 915; Chapter 61 of the Acts of 2009; Secretary of the Commonwealth candidate guide and election records; Office of Campaign and Political Finance filings; State Ethics Commission disposition agreements of September 2015 and March 2023; Governor Patrick’s January 22, 2013 appointment release; Massachusetts POST Commission officer data; Boston Globe; WBUR; GBH; Bay State Banner; Dorchester Reporter; Boston 25; ACLU of Massachusetts. General information, not legal advice.