The Columbia County Sheriff’s Office is reviewing the handling of a Jan. 15 incident in which a phone recording shows a deputy refers to an assault victim as “a speed bump” and the Clatskanie Fire Department as “dodos.”
Beyond the unidentified deputy’s “sarcastic, unfeeling comment,” the incident also is being reviewed for its broader implications for the handling of public safety in Clatskanie, said Columbia County Sheriff Jeffrey M. Dickerson.
“We will be having a meeting with all parties in the next week or so to determine where the glitches are,” Dickerson wrote in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive, “because we are determined to work this out for the good of all concerned.”
A source who wishes to not be identified contacted The Oregonian/OregonLive about the incident. With its police department mired in controversy, Clatskanie began contracting its police services with Columbia County last year.
In the first of two 911 phone calls to the deputy’s home at about 2:15 a.m. Jan. 15, a dispatcher told the deputy a man and his stepson had a dispute and that “the man was intoxicated and had brought a golf club to the dispute,” the sheriff wrote in his email, adding that the dispatcher told the deputy the man and his stepson had a fight.
In the 911 tape, the location in Clatskanie of the altercation isn’t clear. However, the dispatcher told the deputy the man was “laying in the middle of the street, drunk, in the freezing temperatures.”
That’s when the deputy referred to the man as “a speed bump.”
That was “a sarcastic, unfeeling comment that we have addressed internally with the deputy in question,” Dickerson wrote.
However, at the time the deputy made the remark, he’d determined from the information supplied that “this was not a law enforcement emergency, but a medical services emergency,” the sheriff says in the email. “The deputy asked to have the Clatskanie Fire Department (which was on duty inside the city where this occurred), respond to address the medical emergency, versus waiting for our on-call deputy to get dressed and make the roughly 40-minute trip running code to Clatskanie–when the issue was the life safety of the man ‘laying in the middle of the street.'”
In a follow-up phone call from the dispatcher to the deputy, however, the dispatcher says “that the fire department was requesting a law enforcement response,” the sheriff wrote. “The deputy correctly made it clear that he needed a reason to justify a law enforcement emergency response.”
The deputy, during the second conversation with the dispatcher and in reaction to the fire department’s request for an officer, refers to the fire department as “dodos.”
Dickerson, in the email, wrote the sheriff’s office has “addressed this matter as far as the professional conduct during the call.”
Dickerson added that the deputy correctly assessed that the victim – who was not identified as an assault victim until the second call – would be best served immediately by the Clatskanie Fire Department. Waiting for the arrival of the officer would have required a 40-minute wait before medical care was provided, the sheriff wrote.
Dickerson, in the email, noted that when no deputy is on duty in the county – as was the case at 2:15 a.m. Jan. 15 – a single deputy is on call to handle emergency calls for the entire county.
“We have tremendous trust in our deputies to triage these calls, as dispatchers often call them at night, waking them up to ask if they will be taking the call or not,” Dickerson wrote. “We cannot afford to have these deputies take every call for service when they are off-duty.”
–Allan Brettman
abrettman@oregonian.com
503-294-5900
@allanbrettman
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