PORT ANGELES — It had always been Brian King’s dream to become a sheriff’s deputy, not a sheriff. But having won election as Clallam County Sheriff by an overwhelming margin in November 2022, the former leader of the Olympic Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Team said he is glad he took the leap.
“I can say that I am really enjoying it,” King told members of the Port Angeles Business Association at their Tuesday meeting at Jazzy Joshua’s restaurant. “I think we are doing a lot of good things at the Sheriff’s Office.”
His top priorities, he said, have been stabilizing and retaining the office’s staff of deputies and the nurses who work in the county jail.
Encouraging young people to serve in their community is critical to making that happen, said the Forks native, who is in his 30th year in law enforcement, the last 26 years with the Sheriff’s Office.
It is a message King intends to deliver when he speaks at Forks High School’s graduation on June 14.
“I see a difference in the deputies that we hire when they grew up here,” King said. “They have connections here, they have family here, and they just work a little bit harder because they have a passion for it and they want to give back.”
To help recruit nurses, the Sheriff’s Office partnered with Peninsula College to add the county jail as a clinical site, where students gain experience shadowing one of the psychiatric professionals.
“Hopefully they’ll find a passion and a purpose for that kind of work,” he said.
The Sheriff’s Office staff currently includes 40 fully commissioned officers, including King, and 32 corrections deputies.
The national average rate of full-time law enforcement officers is 2.4 per 1,000 residents, King said. Washington state has among the lowest average, with 1.4 officers per 1,000 residents. Clallam County has 0.82 officers per 1,000 residents.
Clallam County has to compete for law enforcement personnel with other jurisdictions that pay more. It also competes with health organizations like Olympic Medical Center and the Jamestown Clinic for nurses.
The Sheriff’s Office is currently in negotiations with its bargaining units.
“Our ability to stay competitive right now is in the basement,” he said.
Jurisdictions do collaborate when it comes to responding to incidents and sharing resources, he said. For example, the Sheriff’s Office doesn’t have a canine unit, for example, but it does have a digital forensics unit.
The Port Angeles Police Department has the former but not the latter.
“Everybody has certain programs that we all need, but we don’t have to expend on them because we work together,” he said.
The use of body cameras beginning in 2023 to record interactions with people and on service calls has been a “game changer,” he said.
It has reduced the number of frivolous complaints the Sheriff’s Office is required to investigate, captured important evidence and changed some of the behaviors they encounter, King said.
“You can see a person whose attitude is up here, the minute you say you’re being audio and video recorded, it goes down,” he said.
King said that, on any night, about 80 percent of the jail population has either a substance abuse problem, a mental health disorder or a combination of both — all conditions that contribute to criminal behavior.
The Sheriff Office’s HOPE program, operated in partnership with Olympic Peninsula Community Clinic, as well as the therapeutic drug and mental health courts, have been successful in reducing law enforcement encounters, getting people into treatment and lowering the number of overdoses in the county, King said.
“There’s a course of action that’s going to be best for you,” he said of the HOPE program. “Once you’re released, we’re going to help you get to treatment and make sure you case manage that.”
Since 2022, more than 300 people have entered the HOPE program and about 167 have enrolled in in-patient treatment, he said.
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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached by email at paula.hunt@peninsuladailynews.com.
