Bisch to take another shot

By Abigail Goldman

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 | 2 a.m.

She’s handing out small lapel pins with black skulls and crossbones that bookend a brief bit of text: “Criminals beware, our next Sheriff is a Bisch.”

And so begins the campaign of Officer Laurie Bisch, the first person to publicly announce a run against Sheriff Doug Gillespie in 2010. It’s a race Bisch has been planning since she came in third during the 2006 primary, about three percentage points shy of millionaire Jerry Airola. Gillespie went on to trounce the helicopter school businessman in the general election.

The odds are against Bisch this time around, too. That’s why the 16-year Metro cop is launching her campaign eight months before the March filing date. She figures she needs the extra time to raise money, glad-hand and broadcast her platform, which is largely focused on criticizing Metro’s top brass.

“Our current management and command staff is absolutely unqualified,” Bisch says.

The sheriff “thinks he knows it all. There’s nothing any of us can tell him, because in his mind, he knows it all.”

Gillespie knows enough to be politic when asked about Bisch, refusing to speak negatively — or at all — about the candidate challenging him.

And Bisch knows that trying to take your boss’s job isn’t the best way to win office popularity contests.

“I knew when I put my hat in the ring in the last sheriff’s race that I might as well have just gone out into the back yard and painted a big orange-and-black target on my back,” she says. “But there’s a lot at stake here. It’s a risk I’m willing to take. I am not going to be intimidated by these guys, and if I feel I can legitimately do things better, I’m gonna try.”

The challenge, according to observers, is that Gillespie is too well-liked, or at least too uniformly acceptable, to inspire a grass-roots shake-up.

“People want to be safe, and status quo is safe,” said Ryan Erwin, a local political consultant. “(Bisch) would have to make a compelling case. She’d have to fire the incumbent.”

If there’s a case Bisch is trying to make, it’s that a top-down attitude change would revitalize Metro.

Yes, she has serious concerns about crime in Clark County. But the biggest plank of her platform is that Gillespie is a poor communicator, an autocratic leader whose hard-nose style has demoralized and fragmented the department. Metro officers are too frustrated or scared to take ideas up the chain, she says.

For Gillespie and his command staff of yes men, “it’s about power and control,” she alleges. “For me, it’s about public service.”

Where Gillespie has spent the past 29 years working up Metro’s chain of command, Bisch is a street cop. Where Gillespie has experience balancing Metro’s more than $600 million budget, Bisch is a small-business owner and mother who has been perfectly content working the streets, not the suit-and-tie boardrooms of Metro headquarters. While Gillespie has run for elected office once, and won once, Bisch has lost a sheriff’s race and, shortly after that, a city council race.

“I have huge hurdles to overcome,” she says. “But I can tell you that people who say, ‘Well, she’s just a cop,’ haven’t met me yet.”

If elected, Bisch would be Metro’s first female sheriff. But while that may be one of her hurdles, it isn’t the most important one, some experts say. What really matters in a sheriff’s race, at least when it comes to running against a popular incumbent, is money, says Steve Redlinger, campaign consultant for 2006 candidate Bill Conger.

Conger, a retired Metro deputy chief who got into the race when former Sheriff Bill Young suddenly backed out, was a favorite among rank-and-file officers. And while this support was certainly a good thing, the late entry meant that Conger couldn’t get any of the high-dollar donations from gaming companies, who had already backed the establishment candidate — Young — before the former sheriff turned over his endorsement, and money, to Gillespie. This was what kept Conger from winning, Redlinger says.

“Among people that fund the sheriff’s race, I don’t sense there is a lot of dissatisfaction with Doug Gillespie,” Redlinger said. “You don’t have to outspend the guy, but you have to be competitive with him, and a couple hundred thousand is not going to do it.”

In 2006 Bisch raised about $200,000 for that campaign — much less than Gillespie’s $1.5 million. Airola bankrolled himself and spent twice as much as Gillespie.

New laws now mandate that candidates must have at least five years of law enforcement experience, a rule that will weed out wild-card candidates like Airola.

Gillespie is calling his prior contributors, but not aggressively raising money. Bisch says she has raised about $60,000 since 2006 and knows she needs more. She also knows she’s not going to get it from the deep-pocketed Strip properties and players in the Clark County political machine — casino companies and moguls that have a vested interest in who’s running the police department. Bisch’s goal is to get lots of small donations from lots of average citizens.

For now, Bisch is booking speaking engagements and promoting her Web site, which was scheduled to go live Monday night with Internet forums — a popular feature on her site during the past election, when people claiming to be police officers, given the cloak of online anonymity, freely expressed dissatisfaction with the department.

Offline, on the job, Bisch says she doesn’t expect overwhelming displays of support from colleagues. But privately her co-workers are supporting her, she says.

“The sheriff thinks he’s got the machine and the money behind him, that’s he’s going to win a second term,” she says. “I don’t agree.”