Woman Pins on Sheriff’s Badge, Maps Out a Thorough Spring Cleaning

Klickitat County Sheriff Karen von Borstel’s laughter fills her tiny, Spartan office as she discusses her first three months as one of the nation’s 17 female sheriffs.

Still an idealist after a decade as a deputy, she ran for office last fall because she didn’t like the way her boss ran the department.

“Klickitat County is such a neat county because we don’t have a lot of the big-city problems,” said Von Borstel, 39, with an engaging grin. “I think if we work real hard, we can keep a lot of those problems out or minimize them.

“And I didn’t think we were doing that. So we’ve got little gangs starting. We’ve got just an awful drug problem. And I just thought I could make a difference if I redirected our top priorities.”

She has already kept her campaign promise to get the deputies out in the field rather than inside doing paperwork. Now she’s focusing on domestic violence.

Klickitat County plans to begin prosecuting its domestic violence cases even if the victim refuses to testify, Von Borstel said.

“It seems like the kids that are products of a home with a lot of domestic violence become our juvenile delinquents when they become teen-agers,” she said. “So I think if we could make a dent in that cycle while those kids are little, we might actually change something.”

Klickitat County, population 16,800, is bordered on the south by the Columbia River and the state of Oregon, on the north by the Simcoe Mountains. Cattle ranches and wheat farms are scattered among its rolling hills and vast stretches of undeveloped land.

When she decided to run, Von Borstel didn’t realize a victory would make her the state’s first elected woman sheriff. Washington’s only other female sheriff was appointed in Skamania County to succeed her husband after his death in 1939, according to the Washington Assn. of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.

“I didn’t ever research that because I didn’t want there to be a gender issue,” she said. “I really wanted to keep it totally on merit, so I didn’t even allow myself to think about gender or target female voters. I really believed they had to just forget I was a woman.”

She feels the issue may have made her campaign tougher.

“I think I had to work harder maybe than if I’d been a man. But how do you know that for sure?”

When she became a deputy and was assigned to patrol nearly 11 years ago, she said she learned that “you’ve got to do things twice as good to prove you’re at least as capable as a man.”

“Whether the spotlight is on you or not, I felt like it was on me. And if I failed, they would say, ‘We’ll never hire another woman.’ Whereas if a man failed, they won’t say, ‘Oh, we’ll never hire another man.’ ” Von Borstel said, stopping to laugh at the idea. “They’d just fire him and go hire another man.”

Women account for just 17 of the nation’s 3,094 county sheriffs, according to Charles Meeks, executive director of the Alexandria, Va.,-based National Sheriff’s Assn.

He attributed the lopsided statistic to the scarcity of women seeking the office.

“It has not been too long ago [that] there were not many women in law enforcement, period. And if they were, they were in juvenile probation or juvenile bureaus and they weren’t in all aspects of law enforcement. They didn’t serve in patrol units, and they didn’t serve in other areas. And you surely didn’t see any of them in sergeant’s and lieutenant’s positions,” Meeks said.

“So that’s a relatively new thing that has developed over the last 10 to 15 years.”

The nation’s first female sheriff, Minnie Mae Talbott, was elected in Lafayette County, Mo., in 1919--before women were allowed to vote in Missouri--to finish her husband’s term after he and two deputies were killed while transporting prisoners. She served until 1921.

Von Borstel, an imposing woman with curly blond hair and a ready smile, has an open, casual style. She answers her own telephone with a friendly, “Hi, this is Karen.”

Her office is utilitarian, but there’s a photograph of her red-haired, 6-year-old son, Amandus, mugging for the camera on the way to her January swearing-in. Beneath the photo is a note: “Don’t worry, Mom, it’s a piece of cake!”

Reared on a wheat farm in Sherman County, Ore., just across the river, Von Borstel was working as a brand inspector for the Washington and Oregon departments of agriculture when she applied for a job as deputy.

She reached out because she aspired to become a better candidate for a job she coveted, livestock-theft inspector.

She learned she had earned the top score on a required exam for the inspector job only after she had accepted a job in 1984 as deputy here.

“I was only 28 at the time. I thought, well, I’m going to try being a deputy for a while,” Von Borstel said.

She found the work suited her perfectly and hasn’t looked back.

“This is what I think I should be doing,” she said. “I love it. Every day, you can just have new challenges. You never run out of anything to do. There’s never a dull moment.”

She doesn’t worry about the risks of her job.

After a battle with breast cancer in 1993, Von Borstel knows how fleeting life can be.

“Who knows what you’re going to die from? I just don’t worry about it,” she said.

Having cancer also made her stop worrying about age, Von Borstel said.

“I will never bitch again on my birthday. I’m damn happy to be here.”