# Earnest Whitten **Chief Deputy of the Pulaski County Sheriff's Office.** The agency-head signatory on the [[Pulaski County RFP-23-003 Bid Tabulation and Evaluator Scoring|Notice of Proposals Received memorandum]] (June 29, 2023), which formalized PCSO's award selection of Flock Safety on the basis of the bid-evaluation panel's scoring. Also one of the 5 PCSO personnel on the RFP-23-003 evaluation panel. ## Role and affiliations - **Chief Deputy** of the [[Pulaski County Sheriff's Office]] - The second-ranking sworn officer at PCSO (after Sheriff Higgins) - Authorized to make the agency-head selection on procurement award recommendations from Purchasing ## Appearances in the corpus ### RFP-23-003 evaluation and selection (2023) - **[[Pulaski County RFP-23-003 Bid Tabulation and Evaluator Scoring]]** — Recipient of [[Tashika Keown]]'s June 29, 2023 Notice of Proposals Received memorandum. The memorandum is structured as a single-checkbox document: Award / Do Not Award / Rebid. Whitten signed (signature line shows signature; OCR ambiguous on exact date in the signature field but reads roughly as the same week's window). - One of the 5 PCSO evaluators on the bid-evaluation panel — alongside Major [[Tony Jordan]], Lt. [[Chris Holmes]], Captain [[Joe Garza]], and Captain [[Greg Evans]]. As the senior-rank evaluator, Whitten's evaluation rubric scores carry the same per-evaluator weighting as the others, but his subsequent agency-head sign-off role makes his evaluation the formally-decisional one. ## Notes - **Whitten's selection authority is the structural threshold between procurement-process and contract-execution.** The Purchasing Department's evaluation panel produced a recommendation; Whitten's checkbox formalized the agency's selection; Judge Hyde then executed the contract. The corpus documents this three-step procurement-authority chain cleanly for the Flock procurement. - The corpus does not document Whitten's broader Sheriff's Office role beyond the procurement selection. Whether he is the operational head of any specific PCSO division, his sworn-officer trajectory, or his policy positions on surveillance is not in the corpus. - The "Sheriff Higgins" sign-line on PCSO's email infrastructure (`[email protected]`) — referenced in [[Kristin Knox]]'s appearances and the [[Pulaski County Sheriff's Office]] page — sits above Whitten in the PCSO hierarchy. Sheriff Higgins is the elected chief LE officer; Whitten is the Chief Deputy reporting to Higgins. *Observation:* the Flock procurement selection was authorized at the Chief Deputy level rather than the Sheriff level. Whether this reflects ordinary delegation, the Sheriff's distance from procurement details, or a specific PCSO administrative practice is not in the corpus. - Whitten's first name appears in the corpus rendered both as "Earnest" (consistent across multiple places) and possibly with OCR variants. The corpus does not surface alternative spellings.