Montana’s Governor, Greg Gianforte, is acknowledging there’s a drug crisis, and he’s acknowledging it has something to do with cartels on the other end of America’s southern border because that allows him to blame President Biden.
The drugs Steve and Greg are taking photo-ops about–I wonder HOW they enter Big Sky country? Could they, the drugs, come by means of motorized vehicles? Perhaps on Interstate 90, from western distribution centers, like Yakima?
Yes, drugs, like people, travel on roads, and I-90 is a serious one that goes over serious mountains. On the Idaho side, it’s Shoshone County; on the Montana side, it’s Mineral County.
What does Greg Gianforte know about securing Montana’s WESTERN border? Has he chatted with his Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, about whether or not the Mineral County Sheriff’s Office is capable of competently protecting Montanans from OUTSIDE threats?
Behind the scenes there are some big things moving, and they should be. Because here are some of the meta-questions to ponder as multiple letters circulate that will challenge your concept of law and order.
What do you do if a top-level law enforcement figure REFUSES to do his/her job? And what do you do if the state oversight agency refuses to do theirs? Same for the Feds? Do you Mandamus the sons of bitches?
I’m not going to wade into the murky legal waters that Mandamus’ing seems to be. Instead I’ll ask another question: remember those two autopsies I wrote about nearly a month ago, on August 2nd? Yep, STILL not released.
Now, to conclude this post, I’m not going to make any audacious claims, like Funke is pals with DB. But I will leave readers with a little tune. Enjoy!
When I realized yesterday’s date was the year anniversary of Johnny Lee Perry getting himself shot by the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department, I did something I hadn’t done since last August, and that was amplify my voice on the streets of Missoula.
Since it was just after 9am on a Monday, there weren’t many people on the streets to hear me testify. One person I made note of–and who definitely made note of me–was Eli Parker, one of the Westridge Creative judges. Remember this link for later in the post.
After the morning megaphone session, I visited the remote, wooded location where Johnny’s life ended last August 29th. Here’s the brief report:
Upon leaving the area I came across a nice backdrop that got me thinking about how long people can live in the woods, and if it could be possible housing for traffickers. Do I get a finders fee?
After squeezing in some quality river time with some school-bound kiddos, I returned downtown for City Council. My one and only comment of the meeting referenced the ten year plan to end homelessness, the daily failure I see on the streets, and my hope that accountability could be shared between the CITY and the COUNTY.
My hope of County/City alignment is something I borrowed from Dave Strohmaier, a once-upon-a-time City Council member currently acting as one of three County Commissioners. Here’s Dave from a recent article about our departed Mayor:
“I think about the great strides we’ve made in strengthening the relationship between city and county government and jointly coming to realize that the city of Missoula is in Missoula County for crying out loud. And so we need to be working together.,” Strohmeyer said.
“The relationship over the years — and over the decades — has not always been smooth, but John has certainly been right there with us as the Board of County Commissioners in recent years, figuring out how we can jointly work together for the good and benefit of the folks who we represent because this is our community too,” Strohmeyer continued.
First off, yes, the name of our Commissioner is misspelled. Second, what kind of strides? Are you going to have the audacity to mention homelessness, Dave? Of course you are!
A good example of that was the combined efforts launched last year to help the homeless and tackle Missoula housing issues, and efforts to keep Marshall Mountain open to the public.
Strohmaier says that even though John Engen may be gone, he believes that collaboration between the city and the county will continue. In fact, it’s on his “to do” list to see that that happens.
“Yeah, we’ve made such great strides over the past years. I think John would be extremely disappointed if we backslid into an era of controversy and needless rancor,” Strohmeyer said.
What a classy politician. Unload some bullshit about dealing with housing and homelessness, then take full opportunity of Engen’s passing to issue a not-so-veiled threat about “backsliding” and “rancor”.
Some of the work Dave Strohmaier would NOT want to overtly reference when it comes to County/City alignment are the political connections that have wormed from the City into the County, and one of those worms is Westridge Creative, the consulting firm I mentioned above, which is also connected to our outgoing Sheriff.
Since words mean a lot to our elected officials–which is weird when you consider how they abuse them AND their meanings (plural) so often–I should probably clarify that my assertion, made in public comment last evening–that the names Sean Stevenson and Johnny Lee Perry WILL be known in this community “by the time I’m done”–wasn’t intended as a threat.
I’ll leave it there, for now, but stay tuned all week, it’s going to be busy. And, as always, thanks for reading!
While Missoula’s URBAN law enforcement (commonly known as police officers) deal with the non-prosecution difficulties our County Attorney’s Office creates for them on the streets of the CITY, our RURAL law enforcement (commonly known as Sheriff Deputies) handle shit their own way. Is that what happened on Saturday when a robbery suspect was shot and killed?
One person, a suspect in a criminal investigation, is dead after an officer-involved shooting.
Lydia Arnold, Public Information Officer with the Missoula Police Department has more details.
“One suspect is deceased and there is no threat to the public after an officer-involved shooting that occurred on (Saturday) August 27,” said Arnold. “The Missoula Police Department responded to several robbery calls in the city limits. The robbery suspect was located by a Missoula County Sheriff’s Office deputy just after 11:30 a.m. on August 27 in the 5700 block of Highway 10 West.”
Arnold said multiple law enforcement agencies are involved in the incident and the ongoing investigation.
“The Missoula Police Department, Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service law enforcement, Missoula Airport police, Ravalli County Sheriff’s Office, and the Montana Highway Patrol were all involved and responded to assist due to the threat to public safety.”
Though it’s difficult to discern from this article, it sounds like city cops were on the trail of this suspect when a Sheriff Deputy found him and shot him. I’m sure we’ll get more accurate details about this case as they become available (yeah, right).
While we wait for that to never happen, I’ll share an anecdotal story that highlights the tension between urban cops and rural deputies.
The Missoula County Courthouse, and the land surrounding it, is like a jurisdictional island in the urban core of Missoula. I discovered this during my tenure working at the Poverello Center with the Homeless Outreach Program. The more closely I worked with CITY cops, the more I realized there was an almost unspoken, dare I say, enjoyment at the thought that COUNTY deputies would have to deal with the chronic homeless clients I was working with.
This was specifically articulated to me during a “HOT” call I responded to years ago. A well-known client, known on the streets as “Bozo”, was passed out near Wordens. When I told the cop my plan to relocate Bozo to the County Courthouse lawn, he said something like “great, let the Sheriff’s Department deal with him”.
Missoula, as a community, has a GREAT opportunity right now to really take a look at how the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, specifically, is dealing with people, and the financial compensation they should be receiving for their work.
In anticipation of some VERY intriguing claims that will be made this week by a certain law firm I’ve written about recently, claims that will come as part of some obscure legal move, I’d like to give a little peek into the open records request I got this weekend.
If that $4.4 million dollar General Obligation Bond passes to pay for the Sheriff Office’s wage claims, here is the kind of payday (broken down in bi-weekly payroll chunks) some deputies can expect to receive.
Here’s a screenshot of what Sean Evans, the Deputy who shot Johnny Lee Perry in the back, will get (this is NOT his whole financial enchilada):
And here’s a screenshot to show the same ballpark amounts, per payroll, that Justin White will get, the Sheriff Deputy who ran the Johnny Lee Perry operation:
While these snapshots don’t illustrate much by themselves, they DO hint at some of the rhetorical fodder I’ll be taking into the field as I converse with people about local “law” dynamics.
While my notion of different jurisdictions, and the badges that claim the lawful role to serve and protect them, evolves to thinking of them more as gangs, or tribes, I recognize the general public has different ideas. And those ideas are still informed by mediated narratives (read PR) exploited by our outgoing Sheriff.
If someone new to this blog reads JUST this post, without knowing anything else about my opinions on local issues, that person might assume I’m a knee-jerk supporter of simplistic schemes to “defund the police”.
Not so fast.
I finally watched “The Fight For The Soul Of Seattle” and fully acknowledge upstream policy decisions by elected officials are showing people on the ground what chaos looks like, and, therefore, the need for SOME kind of substantial consequences for chronic, criminal behavior.
But that’s the meta-narrative. The micro one developing this week will add another incredible layer to an already-existing pile of absurdities even I sometimes can’t believe.
I book-ended last week by attending two public meetings, Missoula’s City Council marathon meeting on Monday, then Mineral County’s Commissioner meeting on Friday. Some of the highlights? Gwen Jones defines clapping as an “outburst“, and Debra Jackson can’t approach a table to answer questions without shoes on.
In Missoula, the process to select our place-holder Mayor moved forward with 19 potential candidates filling out their applications. A little controversy emerged during the selection of the questions that will be asked of these candidates because two questions were allegedly problematic. From the link:
While council members supported the questions for their range of issues, at least two of the nine proposed questions were called out for being potentially biased or loaded.
One asked if a candidate would “replace Rogers International with another private security force” or create a “public, non-militarized” replacement.
…
Another question on the Missoula Redevelopment Agency was also set aside for needed revisions. It asks a candidate if they’d be “willing to change the governance of the MRA, specifically how they identify and distribute funds, to a model where they must seek council approval.”
Several council members suggested the question was loaded and narrowly focused and failed to reflect the majority view of the City Council. Rather, it suggested that change was necessary and imminent, when that’s not the case.
While Missoula’s elected leaders can’t agree on questions to ask our Mayoral candidates, the local government in Mineral County struggled just to hold a meeting, since part of it was scheduled to be a closed session. Some local citizens were a little miffed at how this was being handled, so they showed up to ask what the hell is going on.
Here’s how Mineral County Attorney, Debra Jackson and Deputy County Attorney, Wally Congdon, decided to conduct themselves on Friday:
After the excitement of that odd showdown ended, most of the crowd left, so I didn’t have much of an audience when I made my one and only public comment (during Missoula’s Council meeting I made 3).
Thanks to modern technology, I have an audio file of my comment, so you can listen to it below.
After the excitement of watching local governments struggle to accomplish basic things, I returned to Zoom Town where live music played all weekend long, for free, thanks to the River City Roots Fest.
This event has been happening for 16 years, just one year short of our deceased Mayor’s reign. It’s also one of Ellen Buchanan’s favorite events, so I’ll conclude today’s post with a song I recorded for Ellen, the director of Missoula’s shadow government known as the Missoula Redevelopment Agency.
The Orwell quote I saw materialize this week in the Mayor’s proclamation that August 24th will be James K. Caras day goes like this: who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.
Here’s the kind of time I was TRYING to think about yesterday, as represented in an image from the 1930s of Higgins Bridge, which you can find in a book titled Missoula County Images, Volume II.
This image shows Missoula’s iconic Wilma building on the upper left, and a side channel of the Clark Fork river on the right, which seems to flow almost right next to the Wilma. It wasn’t until 1962, exactly 60 years ago, that this side-channel was filled in, creating Caras Park.
For a present day look, here’s a quick panorama I took yesterday from Higgins bridge, itself nearing completion and set to be rededicated soon.
The narrative control I will continue to write critically about, even the seemingly well-intentioned platforming of marginalized people, is starkly embodied in County Commissioner, Dave Strohmaier, and his attempt to use the bridge for PR purposes while his political colleagues at City Council play funding games with ARPA dollars.
Here’s Dave himself, excitingly describing what the dedication of the bridge might accomplish:
Earlier this year, the Higgins Avenue Bridge was officially renamed the Beartrack Bridge, to honor the Bitterroot Salish peoples who crossed the river over a hundred years ago on their own ‘trail of tears’ to what is now the Flathead Reservation.
Missoula County Commissioner Dave Strohmaier was the first to forward the idea after the bridge remodeling project got underway.
“Maybe we need to use this rededication of the major piece of infrastructure as an opportunity to recognize and honor native heritage and history, and that dates back to 1891, when the U.S. Government conducted a forced relocation of the Bitterroot Salish people to the Jocko Reservation, or what is now called the Flathead Reservation,” said Strohmaier.
Talking about the present efforts by our elected (and non-elected) leaders to be “inclusive” with their new forms of narrative control is fun and all, but on the day meant for James K. Caras, I was upstream, on a different river, celebrating someone who has a calling similar to my own.
Yes, it’s true, I’ve joined forces with a fellow writer and overall amazing woman who has taken a stand against the predatory inclinations of our dying institutions because she recognizes what’s at stake. And August 24th was HER birthday, something a wide-spectrum of political operators can appreciate (or at least pretend to on Facebook).
What is LESS appreciated is the discomfort our mere existence can sometimes produce. It’s weird. But our parallel paths over the years, with non-profit work and criminal justice advocacy, and the subsequent alienation we’ve experienced by NOT shutting up about the things we know–her from the faith community, and me from the arts community–make our collaboration seem inevitable.
And, to those with shit to hide, pretty threatening.
Yesterday, while writing this post, what I found threatening were the real world experiences I kept having, like once again having to call 911 because a VERY unstable individual was acting out, in the middle of the day, just half a block away from where kids were outside chalking the sidewalk.
I did a quick search on this guy’s name, since I know him from working at the shelter, and what I found was like an irony-onion with too many layers to peel for outsiders to appreciate, but I’ll include a screenshot anyway:
Yes, the name, the year, the headline and, most disturbingly, those eyes, all resonate strongly for me. Maybe that’s why I appear a little escalated in this on-the-ground report:
Who controls the present? That’s an interesting question to ask as University students flood back into town, hitting the bars for that college experience.
Those in authority have a big advantage when it comes to controlling the present, especially on the narrative level. For example, what’s the biggest threat in Montana, according to Attorney General Austin Knudsen? And WHO is our AG going to rely on to deal with the threat?
Here’s some recent messaging from the AG’s office about the threat of fentanyl (emphasis mine):
“There’s no question that fentanyl is now the number one public safety threat facing Montana. Mexican drug cartels are pushing it across the border, flooding it into our state at an unprecedented rate — and killing Montanans,” Attorney General Knudsen said. “I’ve put additional resources into the fight against drugs and crime in Montana and will continue my efforts alongside other law enforcement agencies to keep our communities safe.”
Narrative control is a great way to control the present, and an Attorney General of any state carries a lot of weight when it comes to defining things in the present that are threatening, then outlining the remedy.
But as much as any person or institution may try to exert control over the present circumstances of navigating life in America at this late stage of the experiment, reality is getting incredibly uncooperative, making those in authority even MORE desperate to exert control–or, at least, the illusion of it.
After this article posts I’ll be driving to Mineral County to investigate a rumor that a certain Sheriff Deputy is trying to control his own future, and thus the future of the entire County, by getting himself appointed due to the ill health of his boss.
To back up this rumor, here’s what’s supposed to be going down in Mineral County, according to the agenda:
Though I can’t say what the future holds, I CAN read books about the past, and Margie E. Hahn has a book on the history of Mineral County, titled In Retrospect. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 8:
Dividing boundaries and placing land under different jurisdictions is no new thing. What is now Mineral County has been successively under the jurisdiction of thirteen governmental combinations since the white manifest came to the northwest.
On July 5th, 1843 the provisional government of Oregon Territory created four districts of which Clackamas was one. It extended to the continental divide so what is now Mineral County was included.
The next year the Hudson Bay Company protested the northern boundary so its as moved south to the Columbia River, placing this area in what was called the Vancouver District by the British.
In 1845 the Hudson Bay Company agreed that land north of the Columbia River should be incorporated as a county, thus setting up another form of jurisdiction. This was still Oregon Territory. That same year the county was divided and the eastern half became Clarke County.
I find this fascinating, and helpful context for what we’re dealing with here.
