"Tell her Sheriff Byrd Called."

After you read the implied threat below from Sheriff Ray Byrd, imagine how this would have been different if it had just been an average citizen in Perry County. The information below is from the FOIA project (www.foiarkansas.com) conducted in 1999. The same tactics are used over and over again to keep the local residents in line. If the sheriff called and left that kind of message to the average citizen in Perry County, use your imagination what it could mean for that person or their family.

No need to imagine. It happens and continues to happen on a routine basis in Perry County.

"....A clerk and a deputy at the Perry County jail were in the process of letting surveyor Lauralee Wilcox McCool see the jail log when Sheriff Ray Byrd stopped the process.

‘’When I told Sheriff Byrd what I wanted he said the information was confidential,’’ McCool recalled. ‘’The clerk said he thought it was covered under the FOIA.

“Get the prosecutor on the phone,”’ the sheriff bellowed. The surveyor said she thought the sheriff intended to scare her away.

Attempts to reach the prosecutor and another attorney were unsuccessful. McCool was told she could file a written request and the sheriff would talk to his attorney about it. McCool went to her car to get a sheet of paper for the written request; when she returned, she asked the sheriff if he had talked to the prosecutor.

“Yeah, he said he didn’t like it any more than I did, but there was nothing we could do,” the sheriff told her.

The sheriff then handed her the copy.

Byrd said later that he knew who McCool was 15 minutes after she left because he ran her driver’s license and called the local police in Greenbrier, who told him McCool was an employee at the Log Cabin Democrat in Conway. McCool was working as an intern in the news department at the time. Byrd called the newspaper and left a message: “Tell her Sheriff Byrd called.”

Byrd said in an interview later that the sheriff’s office didn’t have time for such surveys, but added, “She got what she came after.”