‘The only race in town’: Experts, leaders weigh in on contest for Sonoma County sheriff

The people of Sonoma County can bank on their next sheriff being bald. That is where the similarities among the three candidates vying to lead the Sheriff’s Office largely end.

Assistant Sheriff Eddie Engram, former Sheriff’s Captain Dave Edmonds and former San Francisco police Sgt. Carl Tennenbaum are facing off in only the second contested sheriff’s race since 1990.

Many agree it’s one of the most important races on the June 7 ballot — and among the most significant in recent Sonoma County history.

“This is really the primary race of attention — in many ways, the only race in town,” said David McCuan, a Sonoma State University professor of political science. “This is the one that epitomizes or captures so much of Sonoma County — where it’s been, where it’s headed.”

The top vote-getter must receive more than 50% of the ballots cast to avoid a runoff in November.

After years of political controversy at the Sheriff’s Office and the national Black Lives Matter movement brought unprecedented national scrutiny to law enforcement and police brutality, Sonoma County voters may favor change, political observers say.

Community relationships, transparency and oversight, diversity, and a concerted response to homelessness and opioid overdoses are expected to be among the issues driving voters to the ballot box.

But reform-minded challengers face two obstacles, experts say. One is an institution that has historically favored internal candidates, and the other is a statewide trend of midterm primaries leaning conservative.

Community relationships a top line item

The stakes in this election are higher, and different, than they have been in past sheriff races, community and law enforcement leaders say, as the discourse on policing in Sonoma County has shifted in recent years.

“Police accountability and transparency is the talk of the nation, and certainly the talk of Sonoma County,” said Izaak Schwaiger, a civil rights and police brutality attorney who has brought several successful lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Office.

Schwaiger cited Measure P, a 2020 ballot initiative that increased the oversight power of Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Outreach (or IOLERO) over the Sheriff’s Office, which passed by a large margin.

“Overwhelmingly, voters of Sonoma County want more accountability from that office,” Schwaiger said.

Measure P is in limbo after it was challenged by unions representing employees of the Sheriff’s Office, who argued it violated their rights to negotiate terms that would change their working conditions. A state labor board agreed, gutting the referendum. Sonoma County has appealed that decision.

Most important to Kirstyne Lange, a Sonoma County NAACP member and founding member of the civilian review board in IOLERO, is “expanding opportunities for deputies to engage in restorative relationship building.”

To Lange, repairing community relationships begins with addressing “the harms that (the Sheriff’s Office) has caused, particularly those who live in the Roseland community and those impacted by the death of Andy Lopez.”

Lopez, 13, was killed by Sheriff’s Deputy Erick Gelhaus in 2013 while walking down the street carrying an airsoft rifle.

Sonoma County Human Rights Commission Chair Katrina Phillips agreed that “relationships between the sheriff and the community are shattered.”

Public opinion of the Sheriff’s Office has taken a dive, according to a Press Democrat poll, dropping to 48% in 2021 from 70% in 2018.

“The trust levels are at an all time low, and that's going to take a long time to fix if you don't do it right,” Phillips said.

An insider’s game

Voters have generally chosen department veterans to head the Sheriff’s Office, leading some to view the race as an in-house selection.

“They tend to be insiders, they tend to be of the rank and file, they tend to be moving at a different speed than the rest of the community,” said McCuan, the SSU professor.

Civil rights attorney Schwaiger believes this has created a status quo across administrations, calling the contest every four years “a coronation more than an election.”

But outgoing Sheriff Mark Essick defended the process.

“Yes, I think someone needs to have experience in the agency,” Essick said. “Someone who has never worked at the Sheriff’s Office before is going to really be at a disadvantage.”

The office’s responsibilities include running the jail, court security, evictions and other civil matters, a coroner’s unit that investigates over 600 deaths a year, and patrol of 55 miles of coast line, Essick said, which altogether represents a “steep learning curve.”

Challenges to reform

While some say the changes in public sentiment toward policing might tip Sonoma County toward reform candidates, sheriff races locally and across the state tend to be resistant to progressive reform, according to campaign consultant Leo Buc.

“Timing of the election structurally has a huge determining impact on the sorts of candidates that do well,” said Buc, who helped District Attorney Jill Ravitch win the recall election against her.

Buc also worked with the late sheriff’s candidate Kevin Burke before his withdrawal from the race in March.

“The basic thing is that midterm primaries are notoriously conservative,” Buc said. “They skew much, much older than if you were to compare them to the presidential general election. And they skew significantly more Republican."

This is at least relative to the jurisdiction’s electorate, which is majority Democratic.

“In every midterm primary, the animating force in swing voting is negative partisanship against whoever won the White House” in the presidential election two years prior, Buc said.

Generic ballots, a poll used by major political research institutions to determine national party sentiment, showed a 2.6% advantage for Republicans as of Thursday, according to FiveThirtyEight.

“You take that and you apply that to Sonoma County — what you end up seeing is severely suppressed turnout among Democratic voters,” Buc said.

Buc pointed to 2014, when 41.8% of registered Democrats voted in the midterm primary following a Democrat presidential win. Significantly more of the same bloc —93.2% — cast votes in the last general election in 2020, according to county data.

Deva Proto, Sonoma County’s clerk and voter registrar, said she estimates a turnout of about 50% of all registered voters in the upcoming election.

“There’s a huge divide in voter age in midterm primaries,” Buc said. In 2014, for example, over 40.2% of voters in that midterm primary were 65 or older, and 24.6% were aged 50 to 64. In the last general election, by comparison, just 29.3% of the electorate was aged 65 and older.

These two factors — suppressed turnout among progressive voters and an older electorate — “make it difficult for change-oriented candidates to do well” in elections for sheriff, which occur across the state during midterm primaries, Buc said.

“That’s how you end up with sheriffs that don’t represent the broader values of the community — because they’re elected by a small slice of the community,” Buc said.

You can reach Staff Writer Emily Wilder at 707-521-5337 or emily.wilder@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @vv1lder.