For the past few weeks, Kerry Healey has pounded the Bay State with the message that Deval Patrick is dangerously weak on crime. She has used his past work and advocacy on behalf of the accused, the convicted, and the incarcerated to accuse Patrick of coddling criminals rather than protecting victims.

If only there were some respected law-and-order Democrats around who could stand up for him, reassure the public, criticize the Romney-Healey administration’s public-safety failures, expose the folly of Healey’s smears, and praise Patrick for his work and ideas on all sides of the law-enforcement mosaic.

In fact, Massachusetts is chock full of such officials, current and former. So why have we heard so little from Democratic district attorneys, sheriffs, and others during this contretemps?

The answer has a number of components, including Patrick’s puzzling failure to court their active support, and the deafening silence of Attorney General Tom Reilly, sore loser of the Democratic primary.

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But part of the answer also lies in the nature of law-enforcement culture, where knee-jerk defensiveness with regard to anything remotely pro-defendant often trumps everything else — including politics.

Two long weeks after Healey launched her “Deval defends cop-killers” ad, Patrick could wangle only a few of these law-and-order Democrats for a series of October 18 speaking events intended to turn the crime issue against Healey: unopposed DA candidates Gerry Leone of Middlesex County and Joe Early of Worcester County, and Sheriffs Guy Glodis, Bob Garvey, and Michael Ashe.

Martha Coakley, Middlesex DA and shoo-in to replace Reilly as AG, finally stepped up to the plate this week and filmed a television ad for Patrick that defends his record. But even she seems more ambivalent than pols usually are in the last weeks of a heated campaign.

“You could say in a general way that Republicans have been more sympathetic to our issues, law-enforcement issues, over the last 20 years,” Coakley tells the Phoenix.

Deval Patrick’s former — perfectly reasonable — qualms about whether justice was done to Benjamin LaGuer sounds to law-enforcement officials like an attack on retiring long-time Worcester County DA John Conte, and by extension all state prosecutors. “I have real concerns about his advocacy for Benjamin LaGuer,” says David Capeless, DA of Berkshire County. “I would want a governor who thinks first about victims, or at least thinks equally about them.”

It’s understandable that Capeless and other DAs affiliated with the Democratic Party don’t want to publicly praise Patrick for ever suggesting that Conte had committed an injustice. But most partisan politicians, such as state representatives or mayors, would swallow that one disagreement and consider the bigger picture of getting their party’s candidate elected governor.

For good or ill, that isn’t the instinct of most DAs and sheriffs, says Coakley. “They’re probably the least political of anyone in the state,” she says. “For most of them, this is their first elected job.”

Lack of partisanship may help explain why so many have been unable to graduate to elected offices beyond those in criminal justice — and why they have been so unsuccessful at lobbying Beacon Hill for the resources they need.

Stepping up to the plate
Only four of the nine Democratic county sheriffs in the state have endorsed Patrick, according to the campaign. The party’s current DAs almost all skipped recent Patrick events intended to publicize his support among law-enforcement officials. Even in local media across the state, supportive quotes by Democratic law-enforcement officials have been hard to find, despite the local popularity — and absence of electoral opposition — of officeholders such as DAs William Bennett, Jonathan Blodgett, and William Keating, or Sheriffs Guy Glodis, Michael Ashe, and James DiPaola.

It’s been former Democratic prosecutors now out of office, such as Scott Harshbarger and Don Stern, who have taken swings publicly for Patrick. So too have the nonpartisan presidents of the Boston and Massachusetts Bar Associations, who wrote an op-ed in the Herald, and the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, which slammed Healey and endorsed Patrick. Even Republican Ralph Martin, former Suffolk DA, penned an op-ed in the Globe praising those who advocate for the potentially wrongfully convicted.

Current officeholders, on the other hand, have seldom criticized the administration. More often, they have been seen praising Healey for her lobbying on behalf of prosecution-friendly bills on sex offenders, drunk drivers, and gang members.

“Healey has been very supportive of the DAs,” says Capeless.

But these Democratic officials have plenty with which to bash the Romney-Healey administration. The DAs could use this opportunity to talk about the very real deficiencies they see in the state’s justice system — particularly the lack of funding that has left their own offices with fewer prosecutors, and the police with fewer officers.

“It goes beyond our [DA] budgets. It goes to every part of the criminal-justice system,” says Capeless. He points to the lack of resources in the courts and probation offices — where, he says, probation officers have occasionally had to forego drug testing their charges because they couldn’t afford to order more urine-collection cups.