Police reform

Not a positive moment for the reputation of the Salem Police Department, to put it mildly. Last week a jury awarded $3,150,000 to Christopher Garza after a Salem police officer, David S. Baker, treated him badly in 2021. Christopher Garza (Oregonian photo) An Oregonian story by Maxine Bernstein tells the tale in "Jury awards $3 million to Salem man falsely arrested by an officer who used excessive force." (The Salem Reporter reprinted this story.) Excerpts: A jury Thursday awarded more than $3 million in damages to a Salem man wrongly accused by a police officer of stealing a car and…

Keep this excellent investigative journalism in mind next time City officials want you to lavish more money on the Salem Police Department, which will occur in the November election via a proposed payroll tax.  The Salem Reporter has a great update on the thoroughly sleazy behavior by the department following the death of a cyclist on March 28 at the hands of a federal DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) employee who drove through a stop sign and killed Marganne Allen, who was riding her bicycle on High Street. After the Salem Reporter obtained cell phone call records, email logs and police…

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…

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about how angry I was that Salem police killed a mentally ill homeless man after he failed to comply with a traffic stop when he failed to come to a complete stop upon exiting a parking lot. A moving violation shouldn't be a death sentence. But as I said in "Killing of mentally ill man shows Salem police are incompetent," the officers involved in killing Richard Meyers did a lot wrong in the early morning of February 7. In this post I want to use excerpts from a February 17 press…

Angry. Pissed-off. Furious. That's how I feel after reading stories about how a grand jury found Salem Police were justified in shooting and killing Richard Meyers, a mentally ill homeless man whose "crime" was failing to pull out of a parking lot without stopping. In Salem, as elsewhere in the country, that will be a death sentence if you have the bad luck of encountering incompetent police officers who are clueless or uncaring about deescalating a situation, choosing instead to shoot first and think afterward. Maybe you think "incompetent" is too strong a word. Actually, it isn't. If a grandmother…

The more I learn about last Monday's killing of a man by three Salem police officers who fired their weapons after the man drove into Northgate Park following an attempted traffic stop, the angrier I get. I'm angry that a homeless man with mental health problems is dead. I'm angry that the Salem Police Department won't say why the officers shot Richard Meyers or if he was armed. I'm angry that the Oregon State Police, which is investigating the killing, are using the grand jury system as an excuse to not provide any information about how and why Meyers died.…

Early Monday morning, officers with the Salem Police Department shot and killed a man who drove into Northgate Park after police attempted a traffic stop.  I'm bothered that the Salem Police Department isn't saying what led to the shooting, or if the man was armed. An OPB story describes what happened. It's unclear what caused the death of the man's dog. Salem police officers fatally shot a man Monday during what officers called a “confrontation.” The shooting happened at Northgate Park, and began as a traffic stop. A dog that was with the man was injured in the shooting, and…

Recently a highly controversial slide was found at the end of a PowerPoint presentation used to train police officers in crowd control methods. A January 14 Willamette Week story, "Portland Police Included 'Prayer of the Alt Knight' Meme in Protest Training Presentation," contains an image of the slide, along with what it said, since the image is kind of hard to read. “And the Lord said...Woe be unto you, dirty hippy;For thou stinketh of patchouli and BO;For thou talk of Marx, yet know him not;For thous hast bills, yet have not paid;For thou hast dreadlocks and white skin.And so I…