City of Salem

The City of Salem slogan, At Your Service, deserves to be changed to At Your Secret Service, given the lengths city officials have gone to preserve a veil of secrecy over Deputy Police Chief Steve Bellshaw's highly unusual $53,500 taxpayer payment as he was leaving his position under suspicious circumstances. The Salem Reporter has been doggedly trying to pry what should be public information out of the closed fist of city officials. Here's how their newest story on this subject starts out. The city of Salem was prepared in the fall to release key documents about the unusual departure of…

Justice has been served Eleaqia McCrae, who was shot in the eye and chest with rubber bullets by Salem police in May 2020 during a Black Lives Matter protest. Today the Salem Reporter published a story about the $1 million awarded McCrae by a jury after she filed a lawsuit. The city of Salem will have to pay a protester just over $1 million because police violated her constitutional rights when they shot her with rubber bullets at a local protest two years ago. A federal jury on Friday, Sept. 30, unanimously ruled in favor of Eleaqia McCrae, 22, who…

Officials at the City of Salem, including the Police Department, along with the Marion County District Attorney's Office, are getting some well-deserved bad press. After the Salem Reporter editor criticized the City of Salem and Marion County DA for a coverup following a public records request by his publication concerning a suspicious $53,500 payment to former deputy police chief Steve Bellshaw, today the Sunday Oregonian had a letter from the editor that makes similar criticisms. Here's the letter from Therese Bottomly. It makes for interesting reading, especially for those of us concerned about government transparency and public accountability. In decades…

If anyone thought that a new police chief, Trevor Womack, would usher in an era of transparency and openness for the Salem Police Department, that thought needs to be dumped in the trashcan of unmet expectations. Last month I described two examples of the department hiding facts from the public. The people trying to lift the lid on police secrecy are experienced journalists: Joe Douglass and Ardeshir Tabrizian. When Douglass hit roadblocks from the Salem Police Department with his public record request for information related to communications between police officers and the Proud Boys militia group prior to a 2021…

This shouldn't come as a surprise, given that so many police departments in the United States act as if they're beyond the law. Which of course is ironic, given that police are supposed to be enforcers of laws. But there's an unmistakable whiff of arrogance emanating from police officers these days that didn't seem to be nearly as apparent in years gone by. Partly this could be a defensive reaction to recent well-publicized failures of police officers to do their job competently. Partly this comes with carrying a gun. That makes many people look upon police as if they were…

I give Joe Douglass a lot of credit for how diligently he's sought public records related to how the Salem Police Department handled the May 1, 2021 Second Amendment gun rally in Riverfront Park where the Proud Boys provided "security." (More accurately, insecurity, since Proud Boys accosted a journalist and other people in the park, demanding that they leave the area, even though the rally had no more of a right to be there than anyone else.) Since the Proud Boys are a violent hate group that played a big role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the nation's…