The shifting focus of Gov. Jerry Brown's campaign for taxes was nowhere plainer than in a budget speech to business leaders this week, when in his opening remarks he talked not about business but about public safety, his new offensive.

Brown once thought pressure from businesses could soften Republican opposition to higher taxes. But after months spent courting chambers of commerce and promoting their endorsements, the effort fell short.

So the Democratic governor is altering course, emphasizing ties to another traditionally conservative and influential constituency: law enforcement officials, particularly Republican officials in GOP districts.

Republican lawmakers, Brown said on a Los Angeles TV show Sunday, are "very concerned for the public safety. And as the legislators, even conservative ones, listen to their own police chief, they may have second thoughts."

Brown brought to the Capitol on Wednesday a handful of law enforcement officials, including leaders of state sheriffs and police chiefs associations. They defended Brown's plan to shift certain offenders from state prisons to county jails and to extend tax increases Brown proposes in part to fund the added local burden.

Without tax extensions, said Merced County Sheriff Mark Pazin, president of the California State Sheriffs' Association, "We are facing financial amputation."

The appearance was a bid by Brown to take over a position seized by Republican lawmakers who considered prison realignment a chief weakness of Brown's budget plan. The law enforcement officials' endorsement served to blunt Republican criticism that realignment would burden counties, causing prisoners to be released early from crowded county jails.

But for Brown, who needs at least two Republican votes in each house to advance his tax plan, the effect is uncertain.

Minutes after Brown spoke, Assemblyman Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, maintained that Brown's realignment proposal would cause "mass victimization and a great injustice."

"The blood will be on the streets," he told reporters outside the room where Brown had addressed them.

One difficulty for Brown in his reliance on law enforcement is that many of the officials who endorse his tax plan are also sympathetic to Republican lawmakers' demands for pension and other government changes.

"I guess I'm just frustrated at the whole process," said one of them, San Bernardino County Sheriff Rod Hoops. "It's going to take both sides to give up something."

It was for similar reasons that some business groups qualified their endorsements of Brown's tax plan, too.

"Republicans can be pro-business," said Allan Zaremberg, president of the California Chamber of Commerce. "But you know, they also have other considerations."

Hoops was among a group of law enforcement officials who met privately with Brown in Riverside on Friday. He said Brown "wants us to, you know, try and help him get his program through."

But Hoops said he has already talked to Republican legislators and that there is "not a lot" more to tell them.

"It's not my position to call up these legislators and say, 'Hey, this is what you should do,'" he said.

Jack Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, said Brown's appeal makes some sense.

"Given the intensity of Republican opposition to tax extensions, I'm not sure it will work," Pitney said. "But it's as effective as anything he can try. ... Republicans like cops."

Brown said Wednesday that an agreement to resolve California's now $15.4 billion budget deficit is "just a matter of time."

"The only thing we can do is every day, keep pounding away," he said.

Brown is making a series of statewide budget presentations to increase pressure on Republicans. Pazin said last week that he would join Brown at some of them.

"We're just hoping that pragmatism overcomes the politics of it all," he said. "This is really an epic battle that I've never seen. This is really some tough stuff."

Brown had already secured the endorsement of the Bay Area Council when he went to San Francisco to address the group on Tuesday. For a few minutes, he talked about realignment.

"The Republicans said my realignment plan to transfer lower level offenders to local probation and jails would be some kind of a get-out-of- jail-free card, and the people better get guns and dogs," he said. "But we're not going to need that, because my plan for realignment is actually going to make California safer at a much better price."

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