LOCAL ELECTIONS : Shared Beliefs Amid Anger in Sheriff’s Race : Politics: Despite heated campaign rhetoric, candidates Roache and Drown really disagree on very little.

When Jack Drown tools around town and spots one of his campaign bumper stickers on another car, he speeds up and shoots the driver a glance. If he sees a familiar face, he’s disappointed. If it’s a stranger, he smiles at the probability of a new vote.

Leaving a restaurant last week, Jim Roache learned that a woman at a nearby table said she had already cast an absentee vote on his behalf. That gives him four solid votes, he figures, assuming his wife and 18-year-old daughter have not mislead him.

Less than two weeks before San Diego County voters take a crack at picking John Duffy’s replacement after 20 years on the job, there is no telling who will be the next sheriff.

Roache, 45, a sheriff’s captain, won the June primary over Drown, 44, an assistant sheriff, by a 32% to 28% vote, leaving 40% up for grabs. And there are no indications that they’ve made up their minds yet. Neither Drown nor Roache has enough money to conduct his own poll, so they’ve been sacrificing shoe leather instead, showing up at nearly 60 candidate forums this year.

Both men pledged to take the high road after the primary, but it’s been an increasingly muddy route ever since.

According to Drown, Roache is a vindictive, insolent, ill-tempered, pro-gun politician who cares more about his duties as board member of the San Diego Unified School District than dedicating his life to law enforcement issues.

“We’re talking about the chief elected law enforcement official in the second largest county in California,” says Drown, one of a trio of assistant sheriffs, the department’s third highest rank. Drown has 21 years with the department.

“The fact is that Jim Roache has very little in the way of achievements in law enforcement and virtually no support in terms of chief executives in law enforcement and no professional law enforcement affiliations,” he said.

According to Roache, Jack Drown and John Duffy share more than just initials. Drown is the sheriff’s hand-picked puppet, adept at avoiding controversies and beholden to numerous Duffy friends and associates for his support, said Roache, who has been with the department 19 years.

“Everyone in the sheriff’s department knew that Jack Drown was the heir apparent to John Duffy,” said Roache, a sheriff’s captain in charge of the Lemon Grove station. “Everyone knows that Duffy has this tremendous political machine with all his personal benefactors and supporters. And all that support is going to Jack.”

In addition, Roache said, Drown “has embarked on a mud-slinging, rumor-and-innuendo-filled, vicious character assassination.”

Whoever wins, the next sheriff will have to clean up the tarnished image of the sheriff’s office that Duffy is leaving behind.

After five terms in office--two of which were uncontested and two of which he drew 62% of the vote in primary elections--Duffy announced last December he would not run again amid questions about his performance in office and a long-earned reputation for inaccessibility and truculent relations with the county Board of Supervisors.

His department faced the pressures of jail overcrowding, spiraling crime, budget battles with the Board of Supervisors and inmate abuse, particularly in the case of the El Cajon jail, where deputies were said by the county grand jury to have cruelly harassed prisoners.

The sheriff’s 2,300-member department provides patrol services to 740,000 people--about 440,000 in the unincorporated county. The department has contracts in nine cities where about 300,000 more live.

Throughout the campaign, Duffy, an avid Drown supporter, has neither been seen nor heard. Some believe he was politely asked to stay away.

But Drown has prospered from dozens of traditional Duffy sources: deputy sheriffs, county employees, honorary deputies and their families. Those sources account for 58% of the $79,169 Drown has raised between July 1 and Sept. 30 of this year, according to a Times analysis.

During the same period, Roache raised $25,214 and said he wouldn’t accept money from any of those sources. He worries that the lack of money could cost him the election. He has relied on educators and friends of his and of his wife Jeanette, who is well-known in San Diego Republican circles.

Only Drown has been able to afford a television commercial, which touts his law enforcement endorsements from the Deputy Sheriff’s Assn. of San Diego County, the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California and the California Narcotics Assn.

The 30-second ads, which ran earlier this month on a cable channel and cost Drown $23,000, asked: “Why is it that Jim Roache has no support from the law enforcement officers he has worked with for 20 years?”

Drown’s law enforcement endorsements include the sheriffs of Imperial, San Bernardino, Riverside, Mono and Inyo counties and that of primary rival Vince Jimno, the Escondido police chief, who had strongly criticized Drown and his ties to Duffy.

The endorsements, Roache believes, may be more of a bust than a boon.

“It’s more a negative than a positive,” Roache said. “There is a sentiment in the public at large that what is needed is someone who is not part of the law enforcement establishment. I think voters are looking for someone who can say, ‘I’m a law enforcement professional who is not here to make decisions on behalf of the people who endorse me.’ ”

Drown says Roache has not produced a single idea as to how he’ll run the department. Drown recently released a 12-page compilation of policies he’ll adopt if he becomes sheriff. Among other things, Drown wants to establish a review board that will examine shootings by deputies, a community council of citizens to give the sheriff some direction, and a cultural awareness program to reduce bigotry.

Roache calls the Drown report, entitled “A new decade, a new direction” a compiled rehash of existing department policy with “few, if any” new ideas added.

When pressed for specific programs and policies that his administration would offer, Roache offers generalities instead.

Public trust in the sheriff’s department must be restored, Roache said, because for years Duffy personified the arrogance of an autonomous sheriff who was quick to dismiss criticism without investigating the charges.

Beyond that, the department needs to “restructure” priorities although Roache said he doesn’t know what the priorities will be until after he’s elected. Roache also talks about having private businesses help build jails, but offers few specifics.

“We cannot begin to attack any of these problems until we substantiate to the public that we (can) do our job in a professional, neutral, objective manner without bias or prejudice,” he said. “I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people try to justify themselves but saying, ‘Yeah, but we’re sheriff’s deputies.’ It’s that kind of mind-set, that kind of attitude.”

Roache strongly supports creating a citizens law enforcement review board, which is known as Proposition A on the Nov. 6 ballot. The board, whose members would be selected by the Board of Supervisors, would have the power to subpoena witnesses and documents in its investigations of department violations.

Drown supports the review board now, but earlier in the campaign, said he believed the grand jury could do the same job with less political influence. He has since accepted the review board and helped write a ballot rebuttal to the argument against Proposition A. Duffy wrote the argument against the board, which mirrored Drown’s original objections.

Roache and Drown disagree on very little. Besides their support for a civilian review board, they both oppose Proposition B, which would give the Board of Supervisors the right to establish a Department of Corrections to run the jails instead of sheriff’s deputies.

Both men say such a department won’t ease overcrowded jails or end various abuses of prisoners that inmates say still occur. More jail space and the money to build it is needed, which both candidates say will take the best efforts of the new sheriff and supervisors. Abuses will end once hiring practices are honed so the best deputies are hired, they say.

Those issues have been overshadowed in the Drown-Roache campaign by others that some believe seem more petty but which both candidates dwell on intently at campaign forums and in interviews.

Drown accused Roache of losing his temper in a television debate, at the end of which Roache wagged a finger in Drown’s face. Roache assured Drown he’d be fired once Sheriff Roache took office even though it is typical for a new sheriff--especially one who has campaigned as a reformer--to clean house once elected. Drown raised the question of Roache’s time spent on school board issues. Roache accused Drown of hiding campaign expenditures by not disclosing who paid for Drown refrigerator magnets.

A civil service hearing involving a captain’s sheriff disciplined by Duffy last year that had little to do with Drown or Roache drew both men into battle. The fight between Duffy, a Drown supporter, and Everett Bobbitt, a Roache backer, who was representing his wife during the hearing, forced both candidates to defend their roles in the fray.

In an interview with The Times last week, Duffy said Roache is not qualified to be sheriff. Drown, he said, can manage budgets, has run the jails, helped form policy, has the respect of most deputies, can work with the media, and has almost unanimous support among top-ranking law enforcement officials.

Roache has done none of that, Duffy said.

“I have 17 captains,” he said. “Even the very best captain would be hard-pressed to step in and assume this office on Jan. 7. And Roache is not the best. He’s not the worst either. He’s in the lower third.”

Duffy himself was a sheriff’s captain when elected 20 years ago, but maintains that he was one of only five in the position in a department less than one-third its present size. Duffy said he controlled a station that oversaw all of North County.

Drown has walked a fine line when questioned about his ties to Duffy. Although he courted--and gained--the support of traditional Duffy backers, he is irked by constant comparisons to his boss. And while hesitant to criticize Duffy, Drown has tried to distance himself from the sheriff.

“This election should not be report card on John Duffy,” Drown has echoed repeatedly. “Our management styles are different. I’m more of a diplomat than a politician.”

Drown uses the same line when talking about Roache, and has tried to draw a curious analogy between Roache and Duffy to deflect comparisons between Drown and Duffy.

Drown is reluctant to talk in depth about his differences with Duffy, other than several disagreements over the years with the sheriff about budgets and their differing attitudes about how to treat employees.

“John would see an individual deputy and say, ‘I don’t like the way that guy looks in a uniform,’ and the guy would be transferred to a place where he wouldn’t be seen publicly,” Drown said. “I don’t tend to operate that way.”

Drown promises to be less confrontational and on friendlier terms with the Board of Supervisors, which Duffy stopped dealing with two years ago.

Drown and Duffy, in fact, agree on many things about Roache, including what they perceive to be his pro-gun position after he received the endorsement by the National Rifle Assn. during the primary election.

Drown supports a 15-day waiting period to purchase a handgun; a bill that would establish a nationwide seven-day waiting time to purchase a handgun; further restrictions on modified assault weapons; additional firearm safety courses; and the distribution of gun permits based on “good moral character and a demonstrated need” without political favoritism.

Roache supports a 15-day waiting period, although he believes police can do background checks more quickly; opposes the bill to provide a seven-day waiting period; and does not believe in further state restrictions for any firearms. He said the county’s current policy for distributing gun permits is sufficient.