Sitting down in front of a basketball hoop inside Live! Casino & Hotel just outside Baltimore, Shaquille O’Neal, the NBA Hall-of-Famer and four-time champion, elaborated on his plans to run for sheriff in Henry County, GA, in 2020, reports the Washington Post .
Shaquille O’Neal to Run for Sheriff in GA
Shaquille O’Neal, the NBA Hall-of-Famer and four-time champion, plans to run for sheriff in Henry County, GA, in 2020.
August 8, 2017
O’Neal previously floated the idea to run for the position in a television interview back in May. Henry County has a population of about 215,000 and O’Neal said he recently bought a home there after signing a multiyear contract extension with TNT in 2015. O’Neal is a studio analyst for TNT and NBA TV, both of which are based in Atlanta.
O’Neal said he had always wanted to run for sheriff in Florida, where he has a home (in Orlando), but because of the new deal, “I don’t think I could be sheriff in Florida and work in Atlanta. So I bought a house in Atlanta, and I’m going to be in Atlanta full time, so it’s like, let me try here first, and maybe when it’s all said and done, I could go back and be the sheriff in Florida.”
For O’Neal, the decision to run for sheriff came down to what he sees as a divide between communities and the police. “The gap between law enforcement and communities is too spread out. When I was coming up, police were real respected. I don’t know how it’s gotten so far apart, but I know in the community that I live in, I know that I could change some of that,” said O’Neal, who was at the casino for a charity free throw shooting competition against owner David Cordish. “I’d just have to do it piece by piece and piece by piece, the way I do business, and the way I won championships, I’m very confident that I can run a successful operation.”