A few years back, things got bad at the Rockingham County Jail. How bad? This bad:

That bit is from a story written by Jeffrey Billman in The Assembly about the most consequential race in this year’s North Carolina primary, one that I, too was curious about. After all, I live in the Greensboro area, and over the last few weeks, I’ve been astroturfed by ads run by state senate leader Phil Berger and his supporters, who may end up spending an eye-popping $10 million to keep him in office. The gist of his ads: Bearded men in garages full of hunting gear and Sun Drop really want you to vote for Phil Berger to own the libs. The other genre of ads are about Berger’s opponent, Sheriff Sam Page of Rockingham County, who, the ads say, is catastrophically bad at his job.

The macro view is this: Page and Berger have both held their respective positions for more than 25 years. Berger, the Republican president pro tem of the state senate, hasn’t really had much of a challenger during his time in the General Assembly. But since the GOP is fracturing, he’s got a valid threat in Page, who seems to be more of a MAGA guy than Berger, who landed an endorsement from Donald Trump. Their state senate district encompasses all of Rockingham County and the rural parts of Guilford County (which is home to Greensboro). As Billman points out, Berger is more of a lock in the Guilford part of his district, which has more people. Page is extremely popular in Rockingham, where he ran ahead of every other candidate in a failed attempt to become lieutenant governor in 2024. If Rockingham really turns out for Page and Guilford remains more meh for Berger, then Page has a real shot at this thing. By the time you read this, you may know the result.

Even though this is a race with statewide implications, and even though campaigns at every level have become more nationalized, the old adage still applies to some degree: All politics are local. I also believe in another journalism maxim: Every news story is really an economics story. Emotion makes you pay attention. But money almost always drives the action.

In this case, both of those ideas are colliding. In his race for state senate, Sam Page was slammed for his record as sheriff, and his jail’s safety record was a factor that led his county’s insurance company to cancel its policy, which led to higher premiums for the county. But that discovery highlights a bigger issue: Fewer and fewer private insurance companies are willing to cover local law enforcement, and those that do are charging higher and higher rates. All of this sent me down a pretty deep rabbit hole, where I tried to answer this question: What happens when a popular sheriff loses his insurance?

In 2022, Kyle Kepley, 35, was arrested in Reidsville for failing to appear in court on traffic charges. After he was taken to the Rockingham County Detention Center, a friend told the staff there that Kepley was suicidal and had mental health issues. A lawsuit later filed by Kepley’s mother said that Kepley was also going though opiate withdrawal. Two days later after he was booked into the jail, Kepley was found dead, hanging in his cell. State law states that jail guards have to check on inmates twice an hour, and the lawsuit noted that Kepley should have been on suicide watch, which would have required four checks per hour. As it was, nobody made rounds to check on Kepley for an hour and 20 minutes.

That lawsuit, filed in April 2024, got the attention of a lot of people, including Travelers, the county’s insurance provider. A month later, it notified the county that it was abruptly cancelling Rockingham County’s policy, leaving the county scrambling to find a replacement. The reason: Travelers noted the high amount of inmate deaths—11 since 2021—a higher per capita rate than all but one other jail in North Carolina. It also heard about two cases of sexual impropriety among deputies, and said that nobody had told them about any of it, or the potential claims headed their way.

Some county leaders said they were in the dark. “I noticed there were several events [the county] didn’t know about,” County Risk Manager Chris Elliott told Page in a May 17, 2024, email obtained by The Assembly. Page has said that he properly notified the state.

The county hastily found coverage through Kinsale and Indian Harbor Insurance, which doubled their premiums to roughly $300,000. The extra cost, commissioners said, wouldn’t initially be paid by taxpayers, but rather the inmates themselves. The detention center’s canteen fund, which charges inmates for movies, video games, text messaging, and snacks, had been rapidly increasing over the past few years and would cover the funding gap.

Page has pointed out that Rockingham County is in the throes of a fentynyl crisis, and that some deaths at the jail are unavoidable. He later noted that he changed some of his policies at the detention center. The new insurance plan required a medical professional to be at the facility more often. Page said he started to notify people about incidents at the jail via email so there’d be a paper trail (previously, that had been done by phone). He also said he increased more screening for sickness and mental health issues, and the result was that only two inmates had died since 2023.

He also stated, unequivocally, that he was in charge of the jail, not the county commissioners. “I serve the citizens of Rockingham County. I’m not subordinate to the county commission board, OK?” he told The Assembly. “Their prime responsibility is just funding our operations.”

The thing is, he’s right.

Sheriffs are elected by voters from their county. So are county commissioners. Hence, while the commissioners set the sheriff’s budget, the sheriff himself (or herself) does not answer to the commissioners, but rather the voters.

That creates a very specific issue. Commissioners give money to the sheriff, but have no real say in how it’s spent. And the actions of the sheriff, who doesn’t report to the commissioners, can lead to financial consequences for the county. “Sheriffs set the policy, but the county pays the bill,” says Eddie Caldwell, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, who describes the usual relationship between a board and a sheriff as “a healthy tension.” In most counties, Caldwell told me, sheriffs and commissioners work together, and most issues are worked out privately.

That’s not what’s happened in Rockingham County. Last October, Page went before commissioners, all fellow Republicans, to get some things off his chest. From The Assembly:

The board chair is Kevin Berger, Phil Berger’s son.

The next month, in November, the man in charge of handing the county’s insurance policies spoke out during a county commission meeting in November. “As far as the insurance is concerned, when we have zero oversight of how that department is ran. We're the bearer of the burden when when things don't go right,” Chris Elliott stated during the meeting. “Right now, we sit with one of the top five highest deductibles in the history of North Carolina.”

Elliott’s position is nonpartisan, and his purpose in speaking to commissioners was to counteract what he called “lies” that he hadn’t done his job. He noted that Travelers did not cancel its other policies with the county, and that in areas like umbrella coverage, commercial lines, and employment liability, the county’s premiums had gone down. That was, obviously, not the case for Rockingham County’s law enforcement liability coverage. “Who in the United States of America as a public entity has a $200,000 deductible? We're self-insured right now,” Elliott said. “If they pull somebody over, if we have a sexual harassment claim, if they if they do a high-speed chase that we shouldn't be doing, or if we do a PIT maneuver that we shouldn't be doing, or we do something as far as embezzlement, guess who covers that? Up to $200,000. It's me and [county attorney Clyde Albright]. We are self-insured up to $200,000. I've never seen that in my career. I can't make the sheriff do anything.”

(Afterward, the chairman of the board, Phil Berger’s son Kevin, thanked Elliott for speaking.)

Hence, a sheriff’s actions can jack up the county’s rates for law enforcement liability insurance. But! It turns out that this overlooks something: There’s no state law that requires police departments of sheriff’s offices to have any insurance. At all! So if the rates get too high, why doesn’t a county just drop that policy altogether?

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of sovereign immunity, it goes sort of like this: Back in the England of yore, a king couldn’t be held accountable for breaking the law because, well, he was the law. That idea was passed down over the centuries to our colonies, and it’s stuck around ever since. UNC’s School of Government, the guiding star when it comes to interpreting state laws and rules, defines it this way: “Sovereign immunity is the state’s immunity from a lawsuit of any kind unless the state consents to be sued.”

On the local level, the immunity basically means that you can’t file a lawsuit to order the local government to pay you for something it did wrong. There are a bunch of exceptions to this rule (breach of contract is one), but it generally means that you can’t sue your local city council members for damages if, say, they decide to close the street in front of your business.

Here’s a real-world example of immunity in action: Back in 2023, a guy in Wilson had his car rear-ended by a city truck. That guy said the city employee said sorry about the accident, which was clearly the employee’s fault. The guy was on the hook for $3,500 worth of repairs, but the city sent him a letter saying it didn’t have to pay for them because of governmental immunity. A WRAL investigation found 37 cases in which the city of Wilson used immunity to protect itself from paying out claims after city employees got into accidents. Hence, while you are required to have liability insurance on your car, local government employees aren’t necessarily required to pay up if they don’t have coverage.

State law does say that if a city or county does carry liability insurance, then they waive their immunity up to the limits of the insurance. So if that’s the case, then why would any city or county pay money to give that immunity up?

There are two main reasons says Charlie Eaton, director of the County Risk Group for the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners. One is that immunity only applies to state laws, not federal ones. If someone sues someone in local government for violation of, say, their federal civil rights, the local government’s on the hook if it loses the case (The lawsuit over Kepley’s death was filed in federal court). Eaton also says that over the years, state courts have chipped away at governmental immunity. In a 2004 case for example, a judge ruled that it was illegal for Durham to arbitrarily pay out money to some people whose cars were hit by police cruisers, but to claim immunity in other cases. Hence, you don’t need insurance, but most city and county leaders don’t want to make a bet that they might lose in court. “From a risk management standpoint, [going without insurance is] not a smart or viable move,” Eaton says.

And because enforcing laws is a risky endeavor, insurance is a way to keep cities and counties from being on the hook for a settlement that might send the rest of their budget into a tailspin. But getting insurance means giving up nearly absolute protection. The lawsuit from Kyle Kepley’s mother stated that Page, other deputies and officers, and the county gave up part of their immunity by having insurance. Her lawsuit was settled in 2025 for $750,000.

Rockingham County is far from the only place that’s finding it harder to get affordable insurance to cover its law enforcement officers. Since the death of George Floyd in 2020, fewer private companies are offering law enforcement liability insurance, and those that do are charging more and demanding more. Insurers are giving law enforcement “more scrutiny than six or seven years ago,” says Eaton. County sheriffs, he says, face higher rates than local police in North Carolina, generally for two reasons. One: A police chief is appointed by local city leaders and is directly supervised by them. And two: A county sheriff runs the jail, which is a higher risk environment that sees a lot of people coming in with mental illness, drug issues, or both. “There’s a lot of pressure on detention centers, which are doing things they were not designed to do,” says Eaton.

So how much are prices going up? A 2023 report from Business Insurance stated that “insurers are generally seeking price hikes ranging from single-digit percentages to 20%,” and that the number of companies providing coverage dropped from 30 to 10. From the report:

Other insurers are capping what they’ll pay out at $5 million, much less than the $20 million caps that were common years ago. That amount may not cover what insurers call nuclear verdicts. “Traditionally, you see the nuclear verdicts in challenging states such as California or Washington,” said Thanh Hoang, Senior Vice President and Public Entity Risk Solutions Underwriter for Munich Re Specialty Insurance, in a company article. “Now, you’re starting to see these larger verdicts in other states.”

All of that means that insurance companies that are still around are making more demands on the police or deputies they cover. Some carriers say they won’t cover high-speed pursuits. Others say they’ll lower rates for police departments or sheriff’s offices that properly train officers or get certain accreditations. Sure, citizens can demand police reforms. Insurance companies have the power to actually make them happen.

Some think tanks and academics think things should go further. They’ve proposed that officers should get their own individual liability policies, in the same way that doctors have to find their own malpractice insurance. That seems to be a hard sell. A Texas lawmaker introduced a bill that would have required it in 2023, and it quickly died in committee. Police unions would probably find it to be a nonstarter. It might make first responders hesitate in life-or-death situations, based on the risk. Caldwell says that change would mean cities and counties would have to pay officers and deputies more to cover their insurance costs. It’s already hard enough to find officers and deputies. If they also had to find their own insurance “you wouldn’t have anyone doing that job,” he says.

Eaton says his organization’s liability and risk pool provides law enforcement liability coverage for 64 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, and their rates have slightly ticked up over the last few years (North Carolina’s League of Municipalities provides similar coverage to cities, towns, and villages). But private insurers, like the ones that cover Rockingham County, are making a different calculation. If they can’t find a way to make a profit, they’ll just pull out, says Eaton.

That means in Rockingham County, there could be a very local coda to a very statewide race. If Sam Page is no longer the sheriff, it’s possible that the county would pay less in insurance premiums and have less risk the next time somebody sues, according to Elliott. “In daily talks that I have with our insurance companies, they don't want to come within 10 feet of us right now until this administration is done,” he told commissioners last November. “That’s a hard burden to bear.”