Former Deputy Chief of the Hall County Sheriff’s Office Jeff Strickland came under fire by his opponents and audience members for previous decisions as the agency’s second-in-command at a more than two-hour debate sponsored by a student organization at Gainesville State College on Monday. Particularly, the colonel came under scrutiny for the agency’s handling of a 2010 incident in which handcuffed inmates, who were believed to have started a jail riot, were hit and kicked by a jailer and the jail’s highest-ranking officer. Gerald Couch, a veteran of both the Hall County Sheriff’s Office and the Gainesville Police Department, first raised the issue, noting the light the news media shed on events that otherwise would have remained in the dark.