Roache Leads Drown in the Race for Sheriff : Runoff: A November election runoff is likely between the two candidates, who made Sheriff Duffy the main campaign issue.

Jim Roache, campaigning hard against the legacy of Sheriff John Duffy, and Jack Drown, running on the strength of Duffy’s endorsement and money machine, were emerging as the two top vote-getters in Tuesday’s primary election for San Diego County sheriff.

Both are vying to become the first new sheriff in two decades.

For both Roache, a sheriff’s captain who sued Duffy in order to run, and Drown, an assistant sheriff, Duffy’s leadership, or lack of it, is likely to be the focus of a runoff race in the November general election.

With about two-thirds of the votes counted, Roache and Drown were well ahead of the other three candidates, with Roache’s lead growing over Drown.

But perhaps more important for Roache was the large number of votes gathered by the other three candidates--all of whom ran against the Duffy-Drown alliance. This could be interpreted as anti-Duffy sentiment, possibly providing Roache with a margin of victory over Drown in November.

“I think it’s going to be a runoff,” Roache said Tuesday night after learning the early returns. “We’ve worked pretty hard, and there’s a desperate need for a change in this department.”

Drown also expressed confidence in a November victory. “I think that the runoff will be tough,” he said. “But it should give us a chance to really concentrate on the important issues and get away from the personalities that a lot of us having been running on.”

Asked if he thought Roache, who also serves on the San Diego school board, was doing well because of voter backlash against Duffy, Drown said:

“He’s getting votes because he had some early name recognition, from having run previously for the school board. That’s what it is, more than anything else.”

Duffy, a 20-year incumbent, had been preparing to seek an unprecedented fifth term this year. However, he grew frustrated with intense media scrutiny of his management style and private home security system and suddenly quit the race.

He announced in December that he was pulling out of the contest, and, within hours, Drown announced he was a candidate--with Duffy’s immediate blessing.

Throughout the campaign, that endorsement--or hex, as some political observers saw it--was the focal point of Drown’s candidacy.

Because Duffy in his long political tenure had amassed a bank of wealthy supporters, Drown was able to tap into those money sources for political contributions and became the leading sheriff’s candidate with the largest war chest of $87,651, or more than double that of his closest money rival, Jimno. The Duffy support also meant a host of endorsements, including the coveted help of the Deputy Sheriffs Assn.

But at the same time, growing public dissatisfaction with troubles in Duffy’s department and his abrasive leadership style was seen as carrying over to Drown, who as assistant sheriff had been nurtured under Duffy and raised up carefully through the ranks.

The opposite seemed true for Roache, a sheriff’s captain in Lemon Grove. Just to get his name on the ballot, Roache was forced to file a lawsuit to overturn Duffy’s department policy banning any staff members from running against the incumbent sheriff.

Roache beat Duffy in that court battle, and the sheriff angrily labeled him as disloyal. But Roache believed the legal fight--and the publicity it engendered--cast him from the start as the only candidate courageous enough to stand up to Duffy and beat him.

The situation was similar for Vince Jimno, with no direct ties to the Sheriff’s Department, who portrayed himself as the outsider most qualified to clean out the Duffy management team. As a North County police chief, in Escondido and earlier Carlsbad, he leaned heavily on his executive experience and revealed himself to the electorate as the candidate to break the Sheriff’s Department out of the mold of 20 years of Duffy’s leadership.

Other candidates, including ex-San Diego Police Chief Ray Hoobler and Carlsbad senior police officer James Messenger, also trained their fire on Drown, branding him a Duffy puppet.

For most of the race, the campaigning was dull and one-dimensional, with Drown under attack by the other four candidates for his Duffy connection. In fact, it wasn’t until the last few weeks that sudden, unexpected events dramatically changed the color of the contest. Both events hit Drown hard.

The first involved the May 18 fatal shooting of a young Vista construction worker. He was mistakenly taken for an auto thief, and then shot to death by a sheriff’s reserve deputy.

Drown, who as undersheriff supervises the patrol divisions, was immediately attacked by the other candidates for the way the Sheriff’s Department handled the incident, and because they said he did not display any leadership in trying to calm the public outcry about the death.

For his part, Drown protested that, if had tried to speak out about the shooting, the other candidates still would have criticized him, only this time blasting him for trying to take political advantage of someone’s death.

The second incident centered on a county grand jury’s report calling for the immediate creation of a new civilian review board to investigate complaints of deputy misconduct. Roache had earlier called for such a board, and Jimno, on the day the grand jury issued its report, reversed his position and agreed that a review board was necessary.

Drown, however, stuck to his position--the same as Duffy’s--that a review board is not needed and that, instead, the grand jury should be expanded to handle allegations of deputy misconduct.