A bad penny

Over the past few weeks, I've been reading news stories about police in Clark County, Washington (a Portland suburb) using deadly force in questionable circumstances. One Saturday night last month, the Vancouver police shot and killed a 45-year-old man at a trailer park. 

[S]omebody called 911 to report a man inside their home on Northeast 59th Street was armed with knives and had possibly started a fire.

The caller and several others, including two children, were locked in a bedroom and eventually escaped through a window. 

The killing was denounced by the League of United Latin American Citizens of Southwest Washington.

“We hope that in the future the Vancouver Police Department and policing in general find ways to use less lethal force so that the individual in question can have a fair trial to determine guilt,” the statement reads. “Instead, we have a judge, jury and executioner in the position of policing.”

As I was brooding about that story, an even wilder one went down up that way this past weekend. A guy allegedly robbed a convenience store and ran off through a residential neighborhood, somehow winding up at the door of an off-duty city police officer. The off-duty cop or his wife called 911, and when the county sheriff's deputies arrived, one of them mistook the off-duty officer for the perpetrator, and shot the cop dead. The robbery suspect, who had allegedly stabbed the victim, is a 20-year-old dude with an apparent history of mental problems.

It sure is getting to be the Wild West up there, I thought. And then I read a little further. Guess who the deputy was who killed the off-duty cop. It was Jonathan Feller, one of the three deputies who 15 months ago killed Kevin Peterson, a young black guy who was running away from them after a screwed-up drug sting.

I've written about the latter case a fair amount; most, if not all, of it is here. Peterson had a gun and was allegedly selling Xanax pills, but security video at the bank parking lot where the homicide went down shows that the first shots hit him in the back as he was running away from the deputies. Feller wasn't disciplined. Neither were the other two deputies who took Peterson's life.

One of those other two, Jeremy Brown, was himself shot and killed last summer as he engaged in a botched spy operation on some drug suspects. Now Feller has killed an innocent man, a fellow officer no less.

On days when the decay of Portland gets to me, I think about moving to Clark County. It would be the same nice part of the country, I think, just cleaner and safer, with a way better tax system for someone like me. But on days like today, I remember what Admiral Randy Leonard once said: "If you move to the 'Couve, you have to live there."

Comments

  1. Better as the Vantucky / 'Couve tax system is (luxury goods, new cars, but not food (I don't buy new cars or luxury goods anyway?), & nice as the Clark Co. PUD .08¢/Kwh 1/3 cheaper power is, & cheap water bill in unincorporated Clark w/septic sewer if you're lucky (of dubious quality for drinking water sometimes), I half wonder if it's about to have all of Portland's problems by the time I'd get it together to move there & the bridge will fall into the river / somehow get more congested & dysfunctional or the fat toll will hit? My luck...probably?

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  2. Unless you can afford to live near one of the nice homes or condos by the river, you really can’t escape the “ambiance” of the ‘Couve. I speak from experience as I did my time there in the early 20’s, as I moved there for a job to save on taxes. The people are not that bad, and most of them just seem to want to live their lives without any interference and on their own terms. But it is what it is......and glamorous it is not.

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    1. ^Ehh as a friend said of the 'Couve 'Everyone has either been to jail or a cop, or probably both!' of the culture & the 'authoritarian & dickish' culture (w/all that military contractor $$$ in WA) sans any urban planning (at all, not apologist for graft being what it is here) & living around a bunch of other guys living there because of 'what it isn't' (tax dodgers) has little-no appeal thx.

      Like, a neighbor will have some POS domestic car on a jack-stand missing a wheel left crooked/lopsided in the public right of way (not that I'm a NIMBY or would call them in w/o offering to help em out first/solution oriented), but yet they'd rat you out w/OR plates to code enforcement/similar instead of just casually talking to you first or talking to the other neighbors to see who's car it is & maybe just someone's significant other/boyfriend or girlfriend that visits 2-3 nights/week?

      It's lonely? But it is ¢h33p/affordable & total sypathy to ya if you're dodging the defacto extortionist fees/ defacto ~flat 9% taxes on wages & Portland dysfunction...
      ...but as said it's spreading all around, really, what can ya do?
      & houses there are only ~$25-50K cheaper there anymore & often shoddier, neighbors don't talk to each other & you're constrained by the traffic/decaying draw-bridge bridge if you gotta drive into OR or rose-quarter & delta park bottle necks & you get slapped w/ the 9% income tax if you got OR-based income anyway & now maybe soon-enough $4-6 gas anyway is probable/likely?

      Not that many trailer parks up there, for whatever reason...

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