The Biggest Unknown Sheriff’s Dept. in the West

Wherever I was--Russia, or maybe France--the bureaucrat was standing there demanding yet another piece of ID beyond my passport and driver’s license.

I handed over my press pass, issued by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The official sniffed and shrugged like, ‘What’s this supposed to be?’ (Had to be France; that Gallic body language . . .) So I gave him my other press pass, from the Los Angeles Police Department.

Aaaah. His eyebrows lifted in recognition. L-A-Pe-De, he said, and gave me a small nod, which meant I was now free to walk among the elect of France.

I tell this tale to illustrate a quirky truth:

Los Angeles County will vote next Tuesday for its sheriff--a job with a $234,015.96 paycheck, the living wage for running the free world’s largest sheriff’s department and its most massive network of jails.

But the sheriff isn’t even on the map in France, and barely so in America, where the LAPD’s Bernie Parks appears in People magazine and Mark Fuhrman could be a clue on “Jeopardy!”

So, who shot the sheriff? Or at least winged him?

Hollywood. And history.

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The elected office of sheriff was created here in 1850, when the word “sheriff,” then as now, embodied the West. Sheriffs were bold men of action. Sheriff Barton was killed pursuing outlaws. Sheriff Aguirre was elected after he rode his horse into flood waters to rescue a score of drowning people. “Chief” sounded so urban, so Tammany, so corrupt.

The LAPD, formed the same year, was a small force in a small town. But the town grew, and so did the force, and in time the balance shifted.

The LAPD patrolled the happening, urban places, stomping grounds for O.J. and Patty Hearst and Charles Manson. The sheriff patrolled the sere reaches of the desert, the flossy fringe of Malibu, and the small cities interlocked like jigsaw pieces on the urban plain.

With rare exception, it was the LAPD that made the network news busts. The sheriff ran the jails and guarded the courtrooms where justice was meted out on paper, not by gun battles. And the sheriff’s department had no Jack Webb, the patriarch who begot generations of LAPD-TV. So the LASD labored, and labors still, in the penumbra of the klieg lights cast by the LAPD.

Some say that shadow affected morale and recruitment, the way the Marines are more alluring than the merchant marine. There is a blue line, and a brown line, and they do not meet.

Each force acquired a reputation for different styles, different cultures: The Sheriff’s Department might call you names and beat the hell out of you; the LAPD would politely call you “sir” right up to the moment they shot you.

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Haven’t seen a TV ad blitz in the sheriff’s campaign? Don’t expect to. This is not your standard elective office; people scarcely think of a sheriff as a politician. Some Angelenos only realized it is a political office in 1993, when Block talked of running for mayor.

The job has been virtually inherited, Eugene Biscailuz to Peter Pitchess to Block, three men in 66 years. The LAPD chief is appointed, limited to two five-year terms. Block lobbied the Board of Supervisors to lift the mandatory retirement age of 70 so he could run again.

Constitutionally, only the attorney general can challenge an elected sheriff on how he does his job. Block, who gathers election-year endorsements from other politicians like a farmer harvesting a crop, has said the ballot box is his ultimate job review.

Supervisors can only set his billion-dollar budget, not tell him how to spend it. Traditionally, they deferred to the sheriff; questioning anything labeled “law enforcement” became the third rail of county politics.

Contenders for the job have come from within the LASD, men who can’t be tagged as anti-law and order. They used to campaign less on public worries about the department than on the LASD’s intramural disputes. But this year the campaign pickings are richer: dubious contracts, excessive-force lawsuits, inmates lost, let out too soon and held too late, and the high price tags for those screw-ups.

Block, in his 74th year, has weathered lymphatic cancer, prostate cancer and kidney dialysis to run for a fifth term. (His healthy coloring has the too-flawless look of a tanning salon.) His most consistent opponent said he offered Block a kind of sheriff emeritus status to step aside as an act of “compassion,” to spare an ailing man the rigors of a campaign.

Nothing else sums up this peculiar political institution of ours. Imagine Bill Clinton running against George Bush--so that Bush could enjoy his golden years.

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Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com