Earlier this week on a local radio interview, Broome County Sheriff Fred Akshar lashed out at Endicott Mayor Linda Jackson, repeatedly accusing her of “living under a rock” regarding conflicting reports of whether or not officials were properly informed of the sheriff departments activities within the village.

Akshar’s conduct was not becoming of a high-ranking public official but unfortunately, predictable from a power-hungry-bully.

M.K. Davis reminds us, “You can tell a bully from a leader by how they treat people who disagree with them.” 

Akshar demonstrated all of the tendencies of a typical bully.  There was no need to attack the mayor that harshly and with that degree of venom.  Only a coward would accost a weaker person in that way.  He could have handled the situation professionally but instead he demonstrated to the community exactly why we shouldn’t want a man like this anywhere near the levers of power yet here we are with a sheriff that essentially won a beauty contest in becoming Broome County’s living-breathing version of GI Joe.

Akshar’s personal life illustrates the same troubling tendencies; control, bully and dominate.  First a inappropriate tryst with a subordinate at the sheriff’s department, then jeopardizing a murder case by having sex with the mother of one of the victims during the trial, and finally, converting a secretary in his then senate office from low-paid part-timer to a really well-paid girlfriend and eventually wife, all examples of manipulating power for his own pleasures and benefits.

Here’s the game plan if you haven’t already figured it out.  Akshar cultivates and burnishes his image and authority by “assisting” local police agencies with all kinds of policing initiatives, painting the picture of why it makes so much sense to unify the policing county-wide into a single agency that, of course, he will head.  With his hand-picked District Attorney in waiting, team Akshar/Battisti will control the entirety of Broome County law enforcement and adjudication.  Voters have to also shoulder the blame for electing pretty-boy Battisti in another beauty contest that wrongly elevated our local Ken-doll over experienced and proven professionalism.

Team GI Joe/Ken have a track record of ignoring the boundaries of law enforcement.  In 2014, Battisti called his buddy Akshar, then a Captain in the sheriff’s department, in order to have his estranged wife arrested in the parking lot of Dicks’ Sporting Goods in Binghamton.  Ignoring jurisdictional boundaries that made it clear that the Binghamton police should have handled this call, Akshar not only approved dispatching a deputy instead of calling Binghamton PD, he sent his younger brother, a sheriff’s deputy at the time, to Dick’s and guess what?  He arrested the ex-wife and of course, all charges were eventually dropped because the whole thing stunk to high heaven of the abuse of power.

God-forbid team GI Joe/Ken take over the entire county.  The bar for integrity cannot be set too high and these guys will lower it until even snakes can slither over it.