Election Interview: Rob Nou Runs for County Sheriff

Sheriff Bill Cumming has served for 24 years as San Juan County Sheriff. Orcas Issues presents profiles of the two candidates hoping to succeed Cumming: Brent Johnson and Rob Nou. The following two articles are courtesy of in-person interviews with the two candidates.

The County Sheriff supervises eight officers on San Juan Island, five on Orcas and three on Lopez Island, as well as two detectives and Undersheriff Jeff Zerby. The Sheriff Department budget is $2.3 million dollars, and is paid from  San Juan County’s General Fund.

Rob Nou  runs for Sheriff

Rob Nou has served as a deputy on Lopez Island with the San Juan County’s Sheriff’s Department for the last two years, coming to the county from Burns, Ore., where he served for  four years as Police Chief. Before that, Nou served for 22 years with the Yamhill County (Ore.) Sheriff’s Office.

Nou says that he feels the biggest internal issue confronting the next Sheriff is that the Sheriff Department “doesn’t feel like a single entity. Communication between the islands isn’t what it should be, and the cohesiveness of the staff between islands could be better, both from the standpoint of communication and culture.”

His plan to improve that cohesiveness are to have the deputies work on all the main county islands, during the off-season, so they can get to know their colleagues  and the other islands’ “geography, culture and personality… to build competency across the agency that serves the whole county.”

“The Sheriff’s Department is cut into three pieces, each with a moat around it,” Nou says.

Nou says the point is driven home to him, sometimes embarrassingly, when he travels to Friday Harbor for court appearances and is asked on the street about San Juan Island.  “I’m wearing the uniform, the badge, and yet I have to say, ‘I don’t work on this island.’ That shouldn’t happen.”

As deputies work everywhere in the county and are assigned shifts on different islands, the agency will better serve the entire county, Nou maintains.

Training

Inter-island cohesiveness will also be improved by scheduling training sessions together, Nou says. While the County meets the requirement for 24 hours training per officer per year, Nou says the agency training has been “haphazard,” with officers attending training sessions just because they’re free or the planned training fits within the time deadline. “That leaves the deputies scrambling to get their required training, and can be costly when travel time, lodging, meals, and class time” are figured in, Nou says.

He would plan to use “in-house” trainers to address a number of topics – from the Prosecuting Attorney’s office, for example. He suggests that multi-day training be offered with sessions including a specific training class offered on matters such as domestic violence, or Driving-Under-the Influence (DUI) citations, serving warrants;  legal updates; and topical information such as CPR, blood-borne pathogens or hazardous materials.

With that training offered to half the force at a time, Nou says that the other half will carry out daily operations. Additional benefits are the entire staff will benefit from the cohesiveness and the Sheriff, “the boss” will get face time for a “meeting of the minds with the folks working with him.”

These “Unique” Islands

Nou also describes the county’s lifestyle as “unique.” Each island has its distinct personality and style, Nou says, with the geographic nature of the islands the county’s most prominent element, with travel to and between the islands by boat and small planes.

“Everyone here has chosen to pay the ferry toll to be here, everybody wants to be here, and in that regard we don’t have the transient element that exists on the mainland,” Nou says.

“The difference between big city policing and small town policing is how the police interact with the community, including the intensity and call load. In a small town there is much more ownership back and forth – the kinship of the community and their ownership of the police.  It’s fun to watch that dynamic over the years, on whatever island, affect the sensitivities and sensibilities of police enforcement.”

But the limited numbers of police creates a threat to the personnel, Nou says,  much more on Lopez and Orcas Islands due to the numbers assigned.”

For this reason, Nou has significant officer safety concerns, increased by the unavailability of timely back-up. He cites a case on Lopez Island where two deputies were involved in a domestic violence call where “one or both parties were under the influence and shots were fired.”

On the mainland, even in a small rural community, backup could be called from other public security agencies. But with no state patrol or municipal police departments on the islands, the situation evolved into an armed barricade before two officers from Orcas could make their way over to Lopez, obtain ground support, and help the Lopez deputies.

“In law enforcement, when things start unraveling, bad things happen very quickly,” says Nou, “and frankly, it’s terrifying.

“Fortunately those incidents are few and far between, but precisely because those incidents are dealt with infrequently, the skills to deal with them get blunted.”

Budget

Given his concerns about back-up for deputies’ security, Nou is adamantly opposed to the County Council “taking a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to the budget and cutting every department by 5 or 10%.”

Nou says, “Every department and service needs to be looked at: is it a service we are obliged by law to provide? Or an essential, vital service? Or one the county provides because no one else does or it’s a quality-of-life program that is not mandated.”

“The Council, at the policy-making level, needs to prioritize where our resources go without sacrificing public safety or mandated services. In a real crunch time, where do you want to spend the money?”

Drug- and alcohol- related crime

“The common denominator in most island crime is alcohol and drugs,” Nou says. “People under the influence exercise bad judgment, they take risks, and they think poorly, whether they are the victim or the aggressor.”

This goes from traffic safety to property crimes such as  robberies and burglaries to interpersonal relationships such as child neglect and abuse, domestic violence and date rape or stranger-on-stranger assaults.

As an officer in the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program in the 1980s, Nou appreciates that the program improved trust and interaction between students and uniformed cops, but he says that the program didn’t seem as effective in reducing the rates of drug and alcohol use.

The educational and mentorship role of law enforcement is one that Nou values in teaching kids to think in terms of choices and consequences.

He takes a four-step comprehensive approach to combating drug- and alcohol-related crime:

• Education
• Prevention
• Suppression
• Enforcement

Identification of possible drug activity in a neighborhood, indicated by frequent brief visits to a residence, leads to increased police surveillance and intelligence-gathering that may disrupt the illegal drug activity (“It makes the neighbors happy if they move,” Nou says) or may result in arrests.

Nou says that although methamphetamine use is present “in all the islands,” he says it varies by the island and the associated problems evidenced on the mainland – child neglect, property theft and the theft of metals – are not experienced in the county “to any degree as compared to the mainland.”

“Which is not cause to sit back and deny the problem exists. Meth is a horrific drug with devastating effects to the entire community. It destroys families and lives.”

Immigration

Nou describes the islands’ immigration issue as “not a matter of policy, but of law.

“It is not a state and local duty or responsibility: immigration and border protection issues are federal, for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security to deal with.”

If someone is taken into custody because of a criminal offense, and are jailed, the process is to contact federal immigration authorities. They decide whether to place a detainer on the person, so that once the local issue is resolved, they will take custody, or not.”

The seriousness of the crime, the person’s history and budget constraints all play a part in the decision process, says Nou.

As Sheriff, Nou’s management style will be to trust the staff, “delegating some responses and establishing and honoring the chain of command.

“It is important to push every appropriate decision to the lowest level of autonomy and responsibility. To try to micro-manage what deputies do in the field is nuts. With guidance of policy and training, let the guys that are directly involved make most of the decisions,” he says.

“Beyond that, it’s important to develop a ‘deep bench’ so that each level is learning the next job up, building a foundation into the future.”