Month: September 2020

by William Skink

A fight occurred in Missoula on August 20th and the result is a 37 year old man is dead. For some reason the dead man has not yet been identified over ten days later, though authorities apparently know enough to say he’s from Missoula:

Missoula police are investigating the death of a 37-year-old man after a disturbance behind Stockman’s Bar on Aug. 20.

Authorities had not identified the man as of Monday, other than as a resident of Missoula. Missoula Police Sgt. Travis Welsh confirmed on Monday the investigation is ongoing, calling the matter a “death investigation,” while stopping short of calling the man’s death a homicide at this time.

“There was a disturbance involved, and we have received some conflicting information, so we are trying to sort through that,” Welsh said.

It will be interesting to see how this “death investigation” plays out, considering how eager the County Attorney’s office has been recently to label murders as self defense cases, like the alleged strangulation death of Sean Stevenson and the stabbing death of Ben Mousso.

I wonder if geography could be an incentive to take this death more seriously than, say, one that happens inside a homeless shelter. Stockman’s Bar is a popular bar for University athletes, Jon Tester’s office is across the street, and Nick Checota’s two venues–the Top Hat and the Wilma–are on either side.

For a visual, the image below is the backside of Stockman’s, and the big building crowding the right of the frame is the Wilma.

This whole area is targeted by the downtown masterplan for scaled-up development. Will violence help or hurt investor interest?

by William Skink

I’ve been curious about who is taking on leadership roles within marginalized communities in Missoula, and last week the Missoula Current helped us get to know an individual by the name of Ja’Ton Simpson.

The subtitle of the interview, by Audrey Pettit, is titled Bringing John Lewis’s “Good Trouble” to Missoula, and begins with this:

Ja’Ton Simpson, a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in Missoula, begins his interviews by posing questions.

“How much do you know about black history?” he asked.

He doesn’t do this to change the subject, but in an awareness that race is present in every interaction — no matter how formalized, no matter how apparently objective.

This sounds like a good rhetorical device to put someone on the spot and get them defensive. It also helps keep the focus squarely on the topic of race to the exclusion of other oppressive factors that overlap the racial divide, like socio-economic ones.

Much later in the article we get a better idea of where Simpson is coming from as he explains his vision for his role in this movement, a role which just so happens to include his paid work at ATG and networking:

This is where Simpson envisions his role in the Missoula movement: linking student leaders, local organizations, and the city government together to support and expand on each other’s work, eventually forging a network based on anti-racist principles. He believes his knowledge of black history combined with his work as a senior consultant at the Advanced Technology Group (ATG), where he focuses on crafting scalable solutions for diverse businesses, has prepared him to address the larger, more uncomfortable problems in Missoula.

“I know that there is work to be done and I’m not going to rely on someone else to do it. I can make good trouble, as John Lewis liked to say,” Simpson said.

It’s a good thing we aren’t focusing much energy on raising awareness about socio-economic concerns, because if we were doing that we might want to connect ATG with its new Big Tech parent, Cognizant, and then we might want to make the further connection to Cognizant’s gentrification plans and the ever-rising cost of housing.

So it’s a good thing we are focusing on race, because that other stuff might be disruptive to the future plans of our illuminated braintrust, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?