Walking with Jose Quiroz along Columbia Pike, the stomping ground of his youth, feels a bit like how I’d imagine it is to stroll through the Bronx with Derek Jeter.
“Hi, I’m Jose,” he says to a group of teens listening to music at a bus stop. “I’m the sheriff of Arlington County. I grew up right around here.”
Once the connection registers, their eyes light up and confused faces turn to smiles. “Si, Abingdon! Si, Kenmore!!” he says, ticking off the schools he attended with a warm smile.
A few blocks over, at the corner of the Pike and George Mason Drive, Quiroz chats up the customers of a snow cone stand in fluent Spanish. A man chopping coconuts behind the counter stops and comes around to take a selfie with the guy with stars on his collar.
Though he’s sometimes mistaken for one, Quiroz isn’t a police officer. Police patrol the community and respond to 911 calls, while the sheriff’s department runs the county jail and provides security at the courthouse. “We’re dealing with folks that are incarcerated,” he explains. “Yes, we’re law enforcement certified. Yes, I carry a weapon and have arrest powers, but that’s not my primary function.”
Quiroz, 45, is the 19th sheriff in Arlington’s history and the first Latino to hold that post. Of the 123 elected sheriffs in the Commonwealth of Virginia, he is the only one of Hispanic descent. But his greatest point of pride is that he gets to work and live—now with his wife, two kids and two dogs—in the same place he grew up.
His parents emigrated from Honduras, settling in the Wildwood Park Apartments on Columbia Pike. “There was a Betty Brite Cleaners over there and a Roy Rogers,” he says, looking down the road. “Do you remember Roy Rogers? And, of course, Goodwill. They’ve been here forever.”
As our conversation turns to school (he attended Abingdon, Kenmore, Swanson and Bishop O’Connell), he pulls out a few photos. “This is my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Fishbein. I just saw him at an event and he recognized me. Dave McBride was my English teacher at Swanson. Now he’s a principal!”
Quiroz was 13 when his father died—a loss that hit hard and forced him to grow up fast. Following his high school graduation, he spent four years in the Marine Corps.
He joined the Arlington County Sheriff’s Office on Sept. 10, 2001, one day before the world changed forever.
After working nights in the Corrections Division, he was promoted to sergeant in 2015, lieutenant in 2019 and captain in 2022. As sheriff, he now oversees some 370 inmates—people convicted of crimes ranging from petty theft to rape and murder—plus 193 deputy sheriffs and 48 staffers who are civilians.
“I don’t think anyone takes pride in being a burden to society and their own family.”
“We are a community in the detention facility,” he says. “If you look up ‘community’ in the dictionary, it says it’s a place where people live, where people work. Well, people live in the jail and people work in the jail. And so what I model to my staff is that we are in a community setting, just with people who are incarcerated. In any community, you have to engage. You have to know who’s in there, talk to them, get to know them.
“The whole lock ’em up, throw away the key thing is so dated,” he says.
Every person, he believes, has something to contribute. “Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t think anyone takes pride in being a burden to society and their own family. When you’re incarcerated, you’re not paying a mortgage, you’re not paying rent, you’re not bringing home the bacon. You’re not being productive.”
He aims to change that.
“In the Marine Corps, I found structure. And structure is what I’m trying to provide in the jail,” he elaborates. “We’re giving folks an opportunity to get back on track. We talk about domestic violence. We talk about what it is to be a man, to be a father.”
On the women’s side, the sheriff’s department has teamed up with a nonprofit called Birth in Color to provide doula services. But it’s more than that; the program also teaches female inmates to get certified as doulas, “so they have a skill for when they get out.”
Yes, he’s heard the sarcastic comments about the pickleball court he had installed at the detention facility late last year. It isn’t about being woke or turning the jail into a country club, he says. It’s a reward strategy.
“We call it positive jail adjustment, when there are no fights and no disrespect to staff,” he explains. “The court is open so long as its users are on good behavior. I went in to watch the first tournament, and the inmates were like, ‘Sheriff, please don’t take away the pickleball.’ I said, ‘Guys, you all dictate what gets taken away in here. Not me. I don’t live here. You live here.’ We’re holding them accountable. It’s on them.
“We can have the pickleball or we can take it away,” he continues. “But if you never give anybody a chance or hope, then what are we doing? If you just say, ‘You know what, guys? You are just the worst,’ and then they get released into Columbia Pike, into Little Falls Road, into wherever, what has that accomplished?
“I prefer a neighbor who has had a chance,” he says.
“The whole lock ’em up, throw away the key thing is so dated. I prefer a neighbor who has had a chance.”
Mental and physical health also factor into his goal of maintaining a facility that is safe, stable and respectful, that will—hopefully—prevent recidivism. A biometrics program measures inmates’ heart rate, pulse, movement and other fitness indicators with a device similar to a Fitbit.
“That information goes into the tablet, and it’s either green, yellow or red,” the sheriff says. A healthy prison population is a stable population.
Out on the street, Quiroz continues to chat with folks lined up next to Blanca’s Snow Cones, the local food truck Blanca Diaz has operated for 22 years. Originally from Mexico, Diaz gets a little emotional as she describes what it’s like seeing a sheriff who looks and speaks like her.
“Yeah, there’s inspiration and hope,” she says. “It’s a hope for us. It means a lot because it gives a lot of opportunity to Latino people. It’s like our community is growing up. Now we have a Latino sheriff. We feel protected. We feel like…”
She pauses for a second.
“We feel like someone’s looking out for us.”
Matt Mendelsohn is a writer and photographer living in Arlington.