PHILLIP GOMEZ / PVT Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo: "The homeless are usually (just) a nuisance problem." Advertisement

"In spite of what people are saying, the Sheriff's Office is running very smoothly."

That sums up embattled Sheriff Tony DeMeo's assessment of the political situation as he heads for Tuesday's primary election against a bevy of opponents attacking him right and left.

"In 2002, the year before I took office," DeMeo said, "the crime rate in Nye County had jumped 31 percent in one year. We had burglary problems that weren't being dealt with. Calls for service took over 10 minutes to respond to, emergency calls over eight minutes.

"The Sheriff's Office had two detectives assigned to the District Attorney's Office who weren't doing anything but surfing the Web -- nothing to do with law enforcement at all."

DeMeo was court bailiff at the time. Now he is the administrator and goal setter for the office that sends defendants to court. Since 1999, DeMeo has worked at the Sheriff's Office and seen its operations from the inside, he said.

"[Wade] Lieseke was running the Sheriff's Office as a police agency from the 1950s," he said. "There were no community policing projects -- we just responded to calls for service. We were not proactive with strategies to reduce crimes in the area."

By 2005, DeMeo said he brought average response times down to "a little over eight minutes, emergency calls to about four minutes." The improvements came from "sectoring" the town into units so that dispatchers could direct officers more efficiently, DeMeo said.

Responding to charges that he got rid of a crime scene investigation (CSI) unit, DeMeo said, "People in the office don't know where [Mel Jackson] is getting that. Every deputy is a crime scene investigator. Selected individuals, detectives, are sent for advanced crime scene processing, and some deputies, too. And we have more crime-scene processing equipment than ever before."

DeMeo pointed to his successes: "The crime rate in Nye County dropped last year by over 11 percent, and for the last three years it has dropped. Burglaries last year were at 100 fewer than in 2000.

"At the time I took over the Sheriff's Office there was no system in place to accurately calculate the solvability of crimes. I would say that reports were fabricated -- that would be the best word for it. The system being used then was flawed. Criminal statistics were enhanced. It was without hard evidence.

"They would just pull whatever suspect information they had without relevance to the current crime report. They would just do it to boost the numbers. In 2000, when I took over, I recognized that, so we started getting a legitimate calculation rate. The flawed system was eradicated. It was a fabricated system.

"When I took office, the crime solvability rate dropped because of that flawed system. It once came up in a conversation with the state, and one of my guys told me, 'We just made it up.'"

DeMeo said that if he had continued under the old, "flawed" system of criminal reporting, "we would have an overwhelming crime problem today. The fact is, Lieseke did not have the management skills or the knowledge to adequately address the growth and the limited resources of the Sheriff's Office. He was still operating the Sheriff's Office as if it was providing service to a 5,000-population county."

DeMeo continued, "When I took office I streamlined and re-engineered management: I eliminated the undersheriff position for greater accountability. I delegated more responsibility, spread it around so there would be more accountability," he said. Each person tasked had less of a workload so they would be more responsible for the work they had.

"Since I took over, we've had over 80 progressive accomplishments: the Taser program, doubling the size of the narcotics unit, the cops-in-schools program, and every command area has more patrol deputies. We've expanded the detective unit. We remodeled the front office for better customer service," DeMeo said.

"We have a veterans' preference policy for recruiting," DeMeo said, adding that positions are filled as soon as they are advertised. And contrary to some political advertising to the contrary, he says the office enjoys the lowest turnover rate in over 20 years.

"Misinformation," DeMeo said is responsible for statements suggesting otherwise. Turnover is less than 7 percent so far this year, he said.

Also contrary to reports, the only Sheriff's Office program that was closed down was the motorcycle patrol. On average, only 12 miles were put on the motorcycles per day, he said, and the number of traffic citations written was insignificant.

"As a former motorcycle cop in Jersey City, N.J., I know how a real traffic unit should work. What we had was a facade program. It's not the fault of the deputies who were in the program; it was just not a workable program in the Pahrump Valley."

On the general subject of traffic control, DeMeo says that 7,500 tickets were written last year by his deputies. The policy is for deputies to write tickets as they see violations. "On Highway 160 we do issue tickets and make car stops there as much as any other place," DeMeo said. The problem comes, he said, with the attention required for critical incidents and the limited resources the office has at its disposal.

"When you have an agency (the Nevada Highway Patrol) whose responsibility is these two major thoroughfares, what you do is ask for the assistance. Their new task force targets those areas," he said.

Collaborative patrols will bring greater enforcement efforts to bear on Highway 160 violators, DeMeo said.

Last year the Sheriff's Office received about 25,000 calls for service, DeMeo says. "There's very little free time to do other than county roads," he said. The highways are the NHP's charter concern, "so we should ask them to help us."

There are four resident highway patrolmen in Pahrump, but they have been without a sergeant for a while, according to the sheriff.

"Our growth per capita is far exceeding growth in Las Vegas," he said. Nye County has a ratio of 1.4 deputies per 1,000 people to be served. "We should be at 2.4," he said in regard to Pahrump's population growth.

"When we get to those numbers, we can start targeting all the issues people bring to our attention. Right now, it's where we can do the most with less. Given proper manpower, we can address all the other concerns in the valley."