From: The Chronicle online.com. Julie Thompson. Jun 13, 2018.

A look back at Sheriff Jeff Dickerson’s time with the CCSO

The county sheriff is passing the torch to the next generation of crime fighters.

On Wednesday, June 6, was Sheriff Jeff Dickerson’s last official day in office. Elected in 2007, he served as sheriff for 11 years through three election cycles and now, in stepping away from the title, he said he feels the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) is primed to “move on to the next person.”

We sat down with Dickerson to take a look back at his career, his time with the CCSO, and the challenges he faced while in office.

Dickerson was born and raised in Southern California and moved to Oregon in 1972 because, Dickerson said, his father wanted to have property. He graduated from Scappoose High School as class salutatorian in 1972, and went on to the University of Oregon, where he graduated with a journalism bachelor’s degree in 1982.

Initially, Dickerson was headed towards the ministry, but decided to go a different way, although he said, he still had a strong faith. Journalism had begun to wear on him. “Part of it was I was a sports reporter and I was also an athlete, but I wasn’t as good an athlete as I was a sports reporter,” Dickerson said. “I was jealous because I wanted to be a doer and not somebody who talked about people doing.”

By 1987, Dickerson was married with two children and living in Tualatin. It was then that he met an Oregon State Trooper, his next-door neighbor in the apartment complex where he lived with his family. “He said, ‘You’d make a good state trooper. You ought to apply.’ So, I did,” Dickerson said. He was hired in 1988 and sent to the Beaverton Patrol Office, then on to Banks in Washington County, where he served for ten years.

In 1998, he said he became very interested in getting into the criminal division of the state police. When an opening came up in the Armed Criminal Taskforce with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), Dickerson went for it.

“It was the job of a lifetime within that career,” Dickerson said. “I was still a state policeman, but I was assigned as a detective to the ATF. I was going all over the state chasing after armed, career criminals - people who are going to get 15 years to life for having guns. I mean, these are bad guys, right? We’re putting people away. I was having a great time. I said I could do this for the rest of my life.”

Then, in 2000, tragedy struck the Dickerson family. His youngest son died at just two years old in a house fire, rocking Dickerson’s world. He said it caused him to deeply question his own thoughts about life and all that it encompasses.

“As I sat around and started thinking about it, one of the things I believed that God was telling me was that I had an opportunity either to further this tragedy by being depressed and discouraged and everything, or I could use it as a means to do more with my life,” he said.

Dickerson adopted a new mindset: he was going to live his life and his son’s life at the same time. He was going to try to take everything that he thought his son might have been able to do and “just go for it whole-heartedly.”

“Whatever it was, I was going to take risks,” Dickerson said. “I was going to live beyond myself. I had a nice little planned-out life up until that point – I was a detective, I was having fun – but I felt like I needed to do more with my life. That’s really a lot of the reason you see me sitting here today, because of that commitment that I made.”

For a while, Dickerson thought maybe he’d write a book about the history of the state police. Since he had been named editor, and eventually the publisher of the Oregon State Trooper magazine, a trade magazine for the state police association, he was already accustomed to gathering stories and photos on his travels between working cases. Eventually, however, he decided that there wasn’t enough interest in producing such a book.

In 2002, Oregon State Police (OSP) began going through some budget cuts and began laying off troopers. He had too much seniority to be laid off, but not so much that he could stay where he was.

“They were getting ride of a lot of their task force officers and pulling them all back to patrol. The put me in the airport for a while, this was right after 9/11, but they were transitioning me out of being a detective and back to a road trooper,” he said, adding that he was told he could go anywhere in the state he wanted to go. So, Dickerson decided to return to Columbia County where he’d grown up.

Around 2007, after 20 years with OSP, Dickerson learned that the current CCSO sheriff was not going to run for reelection, so he decided to throw his hat in the ring and see what happened. That first campaign, he said, was intense. “I ran against the undersheriff and my campaign was a reform campaign,” Dickerson said. “I believed that the sheriff’s office was in need of new insight - new direction.”

Dickerson said he was hesitant to criticize the previous sheriff too much now that he has sat in the chair. “Knowing all the pressures that are involved in this office, it’s definitely a different gig,” he said.

“It’s not that I didn’t know it because I researched it pretty well. I knew all of the things I was going to be doing and I was very excited about it, but what I didn’t understand was all the nuances and how it’s impacted politically, and just experiencing it – and the pressure that comes with that – that’s something that you don’t really see until you’re in the midst of it,” he said.

Dickerson said he learned very quickly, first hand, how all of the different aspects of what the CCSO does combines together for the purpose of the office’s mission to conserve the peace of the county. When he first took office, Dickerson said, the CCSO’s reputation was not highly regarded among the courts, the prosecutor’s office, or with other law enforcement agencies in the region.

There were limited resources that left too few people in any division to be effective, (the office patrolled only one shift from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.), there were no office-specific disciplinary standards, and internal power structures centered on the self-interests of long-term employees were creating internal strife that was destructive to the concept of the team the CCSO needed to be.

“The professionalism required to bring the organization beyond the limited scope of influence it had in the criminal justice system had eluded the sheriff’s office for many years,” Dickerson said. “This began to change immediately and has slowly progressed to the point that we have generally reversed the bad reputation of the office among our partners and stakeholders.”

Under Dickerson’s leadership, CCSO began to cross-train employees to be able to fill in where they were needed. He said they developed (and later re-developed with the help of an outside firm) an industry-standard policy manual that Dickerson said is on the cutting edge for public safety organizations in the nation.

They also established an internal disciplinary manual that has standardized their approach to internal investigations. “As a result,” Dickerson said, “not a single one of our employee disciplinary actions over the years have been reversed by any trier of fact.”

Dickerson said the CCSO has now established strong ties with county department heads that were not as well-leveraged prior to him taking office, as well as strong relationships with the District Attorney’s Office, the courts, and fellow law enforcement agencies that were previously loath to depend on CCSO deputies for cover officers or to respond to their calls. They developed a triage system to help CCSO employees better manage the large number of calls they receive each shift.

“This system has helped us increase the number and quality of the police reports they produce, enabled us to cross-train and share resources among divisions and ensures more time to respond to the pressing issues, without losing track of the non-pressing ones,” Dickerson said. “We developed a way to track the calls to which were not able to immediately respond and to follow up on those calls in a meaningful way.”

In 2013, CCSO faced what seemed to be the inevitable closure of the jail after a levy they campaigned for to support it failed in November of 2013. So, Dickerson stopped campaigning and started getting honest.

“To this day, people still probably think that we threatened closure. It wasn’t a threat. It was coming,” Dickerson said. “We were putting information out as far as how many people every day we were letting go. It was non-stop. We wanted people to understand. I adopted an attitude that, ‘I’m your elected sheriff, I’m here to serve at your pleasure, not mine. If you think we can get by without a jail, vote no on this levy and I’ll do the best I can with it.’”

In May of 2014, much to Dickerson’s surprise, the levy passed. It passed again in 2016 and will have to pass again in 2020. This, he said, is an added advantage to his chosen time to retire. It will kick the CCSO into a different election cycle. Now, the next election following 2018, will take place in 2022 instead of 2020.

“If I’d have stuck out through my term, the next election would have had the sheriff on the ballot at the same time as the levy and that would have been a mess,” Dickerson said.

There are too many accomplishments to detail, but ultimately, Dickerson has decided that three election cycles has been enough. “My wife definitely felt like three election cycles was enough,” he said with a laugh.

“We have finally gotten to the command level, the leadership and command structure that we have here, and the leadership that’s rising up through the organization with the awesome people that we’ve been hiring the last few years, I’m thinking this office is ready,” Dickerson said.

“I came in from the outside, I think it was needed back then, but I don’t think it’s needed today. We’ve got some great leaders, people that are ready and have been brought up through a sheriff’s office. That’s different than coming up through a police department. You don’t learn sheriffing that way,” he said.

The biggest challenge the next elected sheriff will face, according to Dickerson, is funding. “It’s always funding. It’s not that easy to do with the resources we have. You’ve got 680 sq. miles to cover with one to two deputies at a time,” he said.

He also hopes that whoever takes over, understands the pressures of the politics involved.

“It’s so political. People who want your job if you’re a police chief, they’re not going to cast stones, they’re just going to apply. Here, there’s only one way to this office, and because of that you get a lot of sniping – people second guessing or assigning bad motives to the things that you do,” Dickerson said.

“They’ll say you’re unfeeling, you’re uncaring, all the things that they want to say about the sheriff because they want to position themselves or someone they know and care about to get elected. So, it’s time for someone fresh to come in and take the bull by the horns,” he said.

It is for this reason, Dickerson said, he liked Lt. Brian Pixley for the next sheriff. “He’s younger, he’s energetic, he’s got passion for the job and he came here saying ‘this is what I want to do someday,’” he said. “But I don’t get to appoint him, he has to run himself. I definitely felt like the best way to go was the way other counties go, they work with their commissioners, and I think that might have even happened in this case.”

“But,” Dickerson added, “what doesn’t happen in other places that did happen here is we had someone on the inside who took my email to my staff and put it on Facebook within five minutes of it getting out there. It blindsided the commissioners, it blindsided everybody, and it’s unfortunate. But that’s politics.”