Why Doesn’t Mayor Davis Care About Missoula’s Violent Cop Problem? – by Travis Mateer

On Monday, during the public comment portion of City Council, a citizen claimed there were dozens of examples of police brutality in Missoula that he’s seen over the years in his capacity as a Missoula Public Defender and, going further, he claimed that Mayor Andrea Davis is aware of this violence and that she doesn’t seem to care.

Is he right?

Since one of Missoula’s City Council members used to be a cop, what does Bob Campbell think about his role now?

If Bob thinks local cops already have the training they need to offer “the most efficient, professional services available,” then how does he explain Lucas Bighouse, the cop involved in BOTH the tasing incident getting media attention AND the death of Ross Robertson, which Missoula is now being sued over?

A wrongful death lawsuit filed in Missoula County court claims a man due to deadly force that was used during a response at his home on May 29, 2024.

The complaint was filed by Patti Jacques, both individually and as personal representative of Ross Robertson’s estate. It names the City of Missoula and unidentified city employees as John Does.

Maybe Bob, the former cop, is too busy conspiring with Missoula’s chief city prosectutor, Keithi Worthington, to hide the results from that inconvenient investigation I think the public has a right to see, since it involves courts, cops, and thousands of public dollars.

In June of 2025, the judges met with Missoula’s chief administrative officer Dale Bickell to present concerns that Worthington’s conduct was unprofessional and not giving the independence of the court full respect, according to Tuesday’s complaint. They raised concerns that Worthington was blurring the separation of powers and had made claims about Municipal Court processes and data during City Council meetings that weren’t grounded in evidence.

According to the complaint, the judges requested that this be addressed through management action by internal executive leadership. Instead, the city chose to hire attorney Jordan Crosby to conduct an external investigation.

During the investigation, in August of 2025, city councilor Bob Campbell moved to transfer $25,000 from the court to the Missoula Police Department and moved to cut $66,000 from the court’s baseline staff pay increases, the judges’ complaint says. The complaint further alleges that Worthington supported these efforts by distributing inaccurate information about court procedures and statistics.

“It was evident that Ms. Worthington had actively supported Councilor Campbell’s efforts by contributing to narratives or information that Plaintiffs believe were inaccurate or misleading,” the complaint states. “During the pendency of the Crosby investigation, Ms. Worthington continued to work with City Councilors Nugent and Campbell to undermine the credibility of the Court by claiming the Court was not following established laws and procedures.

How did Bob get so familiar with sucking up money so good? Well, in another recent Missoulian article, Bob opined on his peer’s “dark money” influence and explained that he got familiar with dark money by hanging up his uniform (and testicles?) to briefly work for Americans For Prosperity.

A Missoula City councilor said Monday night that a fellow councilor’s dark money organization has helped trickle funding into local political campaigns, including her own race for reelection. 

Ward 5 Councilor Bob Campbell said money from A Better Big Sky, a political nonprofit led by fellow Ward 5 Councilor Stacie Anderson, indirectly paid for electioneering material like mailers for several local races in recent years. 

“It is completely legitimate, completely above the table,” Campbell said at the council meeting. “But appearance-wise it is just awful the way it looks, it kinda makes you sit back and think how this operates.”

…

At Monday’s council meeting, Campbell did say he has worked for the Montana branch of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative 501(c4) nonprofit that poured millions of dollars into the June 2026 primary election seeking to elect more hardline conservatives to the Montana Legislature.

Campbell said he has worked as a paid canvasser and volunteer for the group. He said while dark money appears to be inevitable in politics, he wanted to learn more about how the money can impact local races.

Since he’s a politician now, learning to play the politician game with public dollars, Bob SHOULD BE WORRIED about optics regarding power and how that power is being systematically abused by his former colleagues. I’ve been saying there’s a serious problem for SIX FUCKING YEARS because “the optics” of the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office euthanizing and executing two black men in a liberal college town is REAL BAD, and ramifications of those actions won’t just disappear because legacy media can’t (or won’t) keep the pressure on, the ramifications fester as new corpses, like Ross Robertson, get added to the pile.

But it’s not just the cop-made corpses Bob should be worried about.

Those targeted by law enforcement for low-level harassment–like Brandon Bryant has been targeted since his video-recorded beat-down last summer showed what happens to citizens without repercussion in this town all the time–ALSO get targeted by prosecutors, like the Missoula County Attorney’s Office in Bryant’s case when they stacked an additional charge for what he said online, essentially criminalizing speech in order to further insulate cops from the consequences of their un-checked violence.

The big question now for local power brokers and money maids is this: will the dam of narrative control hold against the deepening cracks? And, the obvious follow up question: what if it doesn’t?

If our elected leaders are as predictable as I assume they are, I anticipate they will just cast a wider net of strategic victimhood for themselves, like Kirsten Pabst started doing for her fellow prosectors after Daddy Fed came in to piss on her and Fred’s turf over a decade ago.

Will it work? If the media helps, and the public has a short attention span, most likely yes, but right now the media is NOT helping the power brokers maintain narrative control, so I’ll allow myself to be cautiously optimistic.

If you’d like to help me work on widening the cracks of their dam, my new GoFundMe page is currently accepting donations. Any little bit helps.

Thanks for reading!