Orange County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Earl Campbell said he is running for the Town of Wallkill Ward 3 councilman seat to bring the community together and move it forward.
“I like the direction Wallkill is going in now, and I want to be a part of it,” Lt. Campbell told The Epoch Times. “I love being active in our community. I love representing people.”
Having risen above a challenging childhood and difficult early adult years, he climbed through the ranks at the county sheriff’s office to a lieutenant—a real-life success story that he often tells to inspire young people in the community to do better.
“You can get to where you need to go if you just be persistent and do your best with it,” he said.
Lt. Campbell said he would also bring to the councilman seat an ability to communicate and build consensus.
“One thing I learned about being a correctional officer is communication,” he said. “Treating people with respect will go a long way. That’s maybe why I excelled because I was able to not only look at them as inmates but also as regular people.”
As a child, he lived with his aunt for several years in the University Heights neighborhood in the Bronx, where gangs and violence were not uncommon.
His father was largely absent in his life, and his mother was going through a rough patch at the time.
“My uncle instilled a lot of great things in me, such as going to church on Sundays,” Lt. Campbell said. “That helped me a lot. I didn’t fall into gangs. I didn’t fall into drug dealings.”
Moving to Middletown
After graduating from high school, he picked up retail jobs at Best Buy and H&M stores in New York City.“I was going through a difficult period in my life, both financially and not having family around me,” he said. “My grandmother, my aunts, and my mother all moved up to Middletown.”
In 2006, he decided to follow in his relatives’ footsteps.
“It was a big change in atmosphere for me, and I just adapted to it,” Lt. Campbell said of Middletown. “Just a breath of fresh air, all the green grass, not like concrete, subways, and the homelessness in the city.”
Two years later, his girlfriend was pregnant with their first child, and he felt the urge to look for career opportunities outside retail and set his eyes on the county sheriff’s office.
Rising Through the Ranks
Because of his Bronx upbringing and early family situation, Lt. Campbell said he was able to put himself in the shoes of inmates who had similar experiences and talk them into compliance.That ability served him particularly well in dealing with gang-related conflicts in jail.
“I just have them think [about] the consequences of their reactions; what you are doing now is not working and just going to bring more chaos,” he said. “But if you change your mindset a little bit and understand where the other person is coming from, or just leave it and not react to it, it can help you a lot.
“Every action doesn’t need a reaction,” he added.
His trick to treating all inmates the same way is not to look at their criminal history except when he has to for work reasons.
Lt. Campbell said that the ability to talk inmates into obedience is increasingly important against the backdrop of changing state laws, such as a law passed in 2021 that put more restrictions on the length and conditions of solitary confinement at correctional facilities.
“Sometimes the only way to get the job done is to talk,” he said, adding that although the law makes it more challenging to deal with certain inmates, it has also made officers communicate better.
“We have a saying, ‘be fair, firm, and consistent,’” he said. “If you are fair, you are firm on your decision, and you are consistent, not jumping from here to there, you are going to excel.”
Councilman Campaign
As a member of the county sheriff’s office, Lt. Campbell said he tried to help people in the local community learn about the services and resources the agency provides, such as the Safe Child ID program.His community outreach work centers on building a better relationship between youth and law enforcement through neighborhood events.
“Running for town board is a bigger step to help my community and residents in Ward 3,” he said. “It is new, and it is different than things I’ve done before, but I’ll figure it out.”
On the campaign trail, Lt. Campbell has learned about residents’ concerns, such as high rental and housing prices, traffic congestion, and speeding.
“Ward 3 is the big economic hub of the Town of Wallkill,” he said. “We need to bring in more businesses with high-paying jobs so people get to work and live here.”
The ward encompasses the busy retail complex along Route 211.
Lt. Campbell currently oversees the jail shift between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m.—the busiest shift of all—and, if elected, plans to use vacation days and occasionally swap shifts to attend weekly town work sessions and monthly town board meetings in the evenings.
A Republican, Lt. Campbell faces Democratic candidate Steven Vinella in the race for the open seat.
The seat’s Democratic incumbent, Neil Meyer, is running for town supervisor in the fall.
