“School resource officers” vs. “campus safety specialists”
City of Spokane Police Chief Craig Meidl recently, in a letter to the Superintendent of Spokane Public Schools (SPS) that was soon made public, accused SPS of violating state law. Chief Meidl accused the District of not reporting “assaults and threats” to the Police, reporting that he claims is required by the law as detailed in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW). The media details and the background are well covered in Luke Baumgarten’s article, Custody of the Kids. Spokane Public Schools quickly contested the allegations, but Meidl went to the media and then, abruptly, the FBI was called in to investigate. Now neither Meidl or SPS will comment until completion of the FBI investigation.
When a public figure like a police chief makes such an accusation in a letter and in the media it leaves an impression, warranted or unwarranted, on those exposed to the reporting. “Gee, there must be something bad going on in the public schools.” It is hard not to suspect a political motivation on the part of Chief Meidl—or at least some sort of payback—to explain his public action.
Spokane Public Radio, using a public records request, obtained and reviewed the thirty reports Chief Meidl reviewed before issuing the letter with his legal interpretation of state law. You can listen to or read the resulting story by Rebecca White here on SPR’s website. It’s entitled “Spokane police chief says Spokane Public Schools is not reporting violence; police reports show more complicated picture”.
For reference, keep in mind that Spokane Public Schools serves nearly 30,000 students, so this Meidl-media-event is based on 30 reports involving a tiny fraction of students. Meidl’s allegation of a violation of a legal requirement to report all of these incidents is, to be generous, subject to legal argument:
Kim Ambrose, a law professor who specializes in juvenile law at the University of Washington, says some of the police reports Meidl reviewed, such as students threatening to kill their teachers, don’t fall under mandatory reporting.
In instances where parents called the police, Ambrose says it’s difficult to make a judgment because of the vagueness of state law and the limited information captured in a police report, but the common understanding of mandatory reporting is as a tool to address adults abusing children.
It used to be that “school resource officers” in the Spokane Public Schools had the power to arrest, embroiling a student in the criminal justice system.
Spokane Public Schools is one of many districts across the country that reviewed and revised its policies in response to racial justice protests and complaints from parents of children with disabilities.
The district’s current approach bars school staff from arresting students, and focuses on restorative practice. It has garnered praise from some, and criticism from others – including Spokane Police Chief Craig Meidl. He alleges the district leadership may be telling staff to not call the police when they are legally required too.
School resource officers have been replaced with campus safety specialists, who cannot arrest students.
The policy does not tell teachers to not call law enforcement, but it does discourage staff from criminalizing students. It calls law enforcement a “last resort” for serious threats to campus safety.
An example of the difference in approach under the new guidelines is illustrative:
Erin Carden is a member of the local Every Student Counts Alliance group and the mother of an autistic student. She says the newer approach has changed the district for the better.
Carden says her son’s first of many encounters with school resource officers came in second grade. He was handcuffed after he laid down on the ground during story time and wouldn’t follow orders. In his teens, interactions with resource officers became more violent. Carden says once when she went to school to pick her son up for non-compliant behavior, she arrived to find a resource officer restraining him face down on the ground, and he was repeatedly hitting his head on the linoleum floor.
She says the experience was traumatic for them both, and she contacted school leadership and eventually worked with several groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union.
“This isn’t what our kids deserve, and for me those were two really defining moments,” she said.
She says in the last two to three years, the district changed its approach when working with her son. They’ve given him more personal space and time, stopped putting him in isolation rooms, and removed school resource officers.
“He’s a different person,” she said. “I feel like we waited almost 19 years to really get to see glimpses of this, glimpses of his potential because he was so constantly kept under this magnifying glass, or pressure to be something that he was not. If he didn’t fit into that little box that they wanted him to be, the punishment was go to jail.”
Could Chief Meidl have asked to sit down with representatives of Spokane Public Schools and discuss his concerns over the reports he had read? Of course he could have, but no one is suggesting that he did. Instead, he chose to air his allegation to the media in a manner to suggest an adversarial relationship between the police department and the public schools. And the Federal Bureau of Investigation?? One has to wonder if the FBI was called in to further dramatize the supposed gravity of the accusation and foster public distrust. Is Meidl chaffing over the loss of “school resource officers” and, thereby, the police department’s direct route to criminalizing student behavior? Meidl’s media enlistment rather than cooperative effort doesn’t pass a basic smell test.
Is U.S. Rep. McMorris Rodgers (R, CD5, eastern Washington) educationally capable of comprehending global warming (and taking it seriously) or does her use of the words “renewable energy” simply serve as smokescreen to hide full fledged climate science dismissal?
As McMorris Rodgers faces another August primary and November general election it is important to re-examine the core qualifications and understanding (or lack thereof) with which she represents us to the federal government. Today I want to re-visit a telling exchange that occurred four years ago.
Only the first hour of the debate at the Bing in Spokane on Wednesday, September 19th, 2018, was televised. That hour is available to watch here. Another half hour of audience questions followed, questions and answers KHQ did not post. Parts of that half hour I’ve transcribed from recordings made by members of the audience.
Thanks to Bob Gilles (who, sadly, has since passed away) for the following question, which he posed in a very jolly, upbeat fashion I cannot express in print.
Bob Gilles: “What is your take on evolution and science? Do you believe the earth is more like 6000 years old or four and a half billion years old?”
CMR: “I get to go first, huh? [laughter] Well. OK. Ummm. The account that I believe is the one in the Bible that God created the world in seven days. [clapping] …made by His creation… [noise] I’m not here…I can’t say how old the earth is. I believe this is an exciting time for us to be living. I’m proud of the innovation and ingenuity of the American people. I’m proud to be an American. It’s the greatest country [loud clapping]…liberty and human rights and religious tolerance and self-determination. So this is a [murmuring] …and science. And I do believe that we need to…ah…know what the science is, respect the science…I’m battling right now to make sure we use science when it comes to making decisions around the Lower Snake River dams and the Snake River system…[trails off]”
It is a free country. Everyone is entitled to their point of view. The point of view McMorris Rodgers publicly revealed in her answer (a little reluctantly) is consistent with her education. She has never been exposed to the foundations of geology and biology, except, perhaps, to discount the evidence. Her undergraduate degree was taken at the Pensacola Christian College where, among the Articles of Faith, one finds:
We believe that God created the heavens and the earth in six literal days, and that God created all life (Gen. 1). We reject the man-made theory of evolution occurring over millions of years and believe that the earth is approximately 6,000 years old.
No instructor at such an institution would dare offer an unbiased presentation of the physical evidence for a planet that is three and a half billion years old. (The evidence is not only fossils in layers of rock but also the physics of the decay of radioactive isotopes, the stuff of basic science.)
If everything one is taught begins with the unshakable belief the earth is around 6000 years old (a number calculated based on the “begats” in the Book of Genesis) one must intentionally disregard the bases of nearly all modern science, especially modern geology, continental drift, and, importantly, the geological understanding of the history of climate. (If all ice ages and past documented changes in climate all occurred over 6000 years then everything has to have happened fast. In that mindset modern day concerns over the speed at which climate is changing can be glossed over as unremarkable and natural. That is the sobering background underlying McMorris Rodgers’ analysis, “We’ve been through times when the earth warmed and then also we’ve been through times when the Earth…there’s been more ice on…in the world”.)
It is important to recognize adherence to the idea of a 6000 year old earth is not a majority view in America, probably not even among self-described Christians. Much of Christianity, including United Methodism, the tradition in which I was brought up, considers the biblical creation story to be allegorical: “We find that science’s descriptions of cosmological, geological, and biological evolution are not in conflict with theology.” It is worth noting there have been recent (and un-successful) efforts to change Methodist doctrine to an anti-science view. Christianity is not monolithic, and McMorris Rodgers’ views represent only some of those who call themselves Christian. That realization is at the core of her hesitation to directly answer the question Mr. Gilles posed.
Look at McMorris Rodgers’ answer again. She performed an almost immediate hard pivot to the only “scientific” refuge she knows, her claim of a scientific basis for preserving the Snake River dams, the same pivot she employs every time climate change comes up as a question.
We need a representative whose understanding of science is not crippled by her upbringing and education. Her mouthing of words like “renewable energy” ought not be mistaken for a clear understanding of the threat we face from global warming. Even less should her utterances be mistaken for willingness to legislatively support conversion to non-carbon sources of energy.
That homelessness is a major issue in our community is no surprise to anyone. Nadine Woodward, our mayor, was elected to “solve” homelessness—a task she now quietly admits is more daunting than she had imagined. After the debacle at the Convention Center last January made it clear that the number of those needing shelter from the cold far exceeded available shelter beds people and groups from across the political spectrum began talking with more urgency and sense of purpose. Part of that conversation took place on an email listserv organized and managed by Dan Simonson, a retired CRNA. I have watched with great interest as people with varying perspectives weighed in and actually seemed to listen to each others’ point of view. Julie Garcia of Julie’s Helping Hands (JHH), an organization with a lot of experience and perspective on this issue in Spokane, has been a major contributor.
Mayor Woodward recently articulated a proposal (The Mayor’s Homelessness Plan) involving one large building on an as yet undisclosed site. It is a good faith effort, but putting everything in one large building (as you will read below) is a concept many providers who have been involved with this issue for years caution against. Julie’s Helping Hands produced a highly detailed proposal that does not involve a single larger building. JHH’s proposal was in response to a Request for Proposal (RFP) put out by the city to which JHH’s was the only response. As I have watched the listserv I have come to highly respect Julie Garcia’s experience and perspective on the issue of homelessness, and also her ability to articulate her understanding.
There are indications that there is enough money available through the American Rescue Plan to fund both the Mayor’s Homelessness Plan and JHH’s proposal.
Tonight, Monday, April 11 at 6PM the Mayor’s Homelessness Plan is up for consideration at the City of Spokane’s City Council meeting. Please read Dan Simonson’s plea below for you to read up on the two plans and attend the City Council Meeting either in person or virtually. Meanwhile,
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Today [Monday, April 11] at 6 pm may be our last best chance to make sure that our city has adequate emergency shelter in place for next winter – and allow us to once again hold up our heads as a city that will never turn our fellow citizens out into the frozen streets to fend for themselves.
Monday at 6 pm the Spokane City Council meets. The Mayor’s Homelessness Plan is on the agenda. We need to be in attendance to show solidarity – given that next winter is now only 7 months away, WE MUST ATTEND AND MAKE OUR VOICES HEARD. Please forward this to as many friends and supporters you can.I am hoping we can all attend and support the Jewels Helping Hands (JHH) response to the City’s RFP that is currently being considered by the Mayor and the City Council. You can review both the RFP and the JHH response HERE.The City Council makes the final decision on the submitted proposals (subject to possible veto by the Mayor). While I applaud the Mayor’s new path and the positive energy she and the City are putting into finding a solution, I cannot accept the portion of her plan calling for attempting to house 400 – 500 people in a big building. With even my limited knowledge as a newcomer to this issue, I just don’t see how that will work. It is just warehousing, and not a credible attempt to induct these folks back into a true community, which I think we all realize is the only long-term answer to the problem. Just as quickly as people fall off the table, we need to pull them back into our community. After we provide emergency shelter for all of our citizens who need it, we then have to move on to achieve Functional Zero – the sweet spot where the growing number of people falling into homelessness is balanced by a similar number, aided by their city, climb back out. But before we get there, we need adequate emergency low-barrier shelter. Here’s our chance! Here is a link to the meeting web page – https://my.spokanecity.org/citycouncil/meetings/2022/04/11/legislative-meeting/
You can either attend in person or by Webex. I am doing my best to find out the correct Webex URL, and will post it as soon as I am sure it is correct.In addition, those wishing to give testimony virtually can sign up between 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. at
Instructions for participation are provided on the form when you sign up.More to come, let’s do our best to prepare. This is one of the most consequential decisions our city will make to assure we do not repeat last winter. We must attend this meeting and support a solution. No more studies, consultants, and platitudes. No matter which proposal you support, we must demand action now so we are not kicking homeless people out into the streets in freezing weather next year. We cannot let that happen again.
Mission: my city will have adequate emergency shelter space available for Winter, 2022.
What follows is from JHH posted on the listserv. It is worth your time to read as plea for working together:
Posted by Julie Garcia yesterday [April 8] at 6:39 pm:
I would like to share my vision. I would like to stop all the politics and focus on “solving” for lack of a better word, homelessness.
JHH believes that two RFP’s should get funded. Because both are needed. This is a huge investment in our community. It is a chance and opportunity that can not and should not be missed.
As a low barrier service provider who is “boots on the ground” just as all the providers in these RFP’s, we are asking for unification of providers. JHH’s RFP includes Truth, City Gate, Family Promise, Consistent Care, Compassion Addiction Treatment, Revive and overseen by someone with a lifetime of service to the low income, marginalized and homeless populations, Ben Stuckart.
The Guardians also are proposing to run a low barrier shelter. The numbers in our population continue to grow and increase year after year. The optic and division in our community towards homelessness continues to divide our city. This is a perfect storm to highlight the need. What happened at the Convention Center can not be unseen. 400ish people were kept alive and that is a win. If we expect the community to become stakeholders and help our neighbors experiencing homelessness, we as providers need to do the same. Help each other.
One organization can not and does not have all the answers but together we can build a system that actually benefits all members of our community. Businesses and housed population have valid concerns, people experiencing homelessness have valid concerns and service providers and non profits have have valid concerns. All these concerns can be considered and addressed simply by creating enough space, transparency and accountability. Not just on the part of people experiencing homelessness but those that serve them as well.
If we support each other, we can all be successful in supporting the most vulnerable in our community. And perhaps decrease the rising numbers of people experiencing homelessness. The only way to truly solve homelessness is houses. But until those things come available providing safe, humane and dignified “waiting” spaces is needed.
We have to first admit that the numbers are wrong and significantly underestimated. We need to also accept that “tough love” is not working. It’s time we use data and evidence based practices to meaningfully and intentionally address the issues. I personally will be a city council on Monday to speak on the investment in my community. We need to stop being reactive and become pro active.
It costs less money and trauma that way. Wouldn’t it be amazing to enter a winter with adequate space and options instead of what we have and currently do. Wouldn’t it be amazing to not address the space instead focus on how to get these folks supported, helped and out of homelessness.
I would encourage all to attend the city council meeting and support both RFP’s and the investment in our community. We are only as strong as our weakest member. Right now people experiencing homelessness are asking for help. Lets do our part to help them be successful.
Yours for the Shalom of the community, Julie Garcia Executive Director Jewels Helping Hands 509-263-5502
Chris Cargill is casting doubt on EVs from a position of ignorance and ideology
The Washington Policy Center in eastern Washington now seems to have an open propaganda platform in the Spokesman Review. About every two weeks Chris Cargill of WPC gets a Guest Opinion slot in which to propound Republican talking points. He was recently elected in November 2021 to the City of Liberty Lake City Council. Mr. Cargill is also the Eastern Washington director of the Washington Policy Center and seems to be WPC’s primary representation in eastern Washington. Mr. Cargill credentials are ideally suited to a career in politics and communicating a political agenda. He holds a B.A. in broadcast communication studies and political science from Gonzaga University. His experience is in broadcast journalism and marketing campaigns.
Working for WPC, it is not surprising that Mr. Cargill should find himself called upon to cast doubt on anything that might reduce oil company profits, so, on April 1 he weighed in electric vehicles with a Guest Opinion entitled “Political push for electric vehicles might not make sense, or cents”. Notice, first off, that he frames conversion to EVs as “political”. He carefully avoids any mention of climate change, the primary reason for EV advocacy. Instead, he dives into his version of economics, whining in his first paragraph:
Maybe you’re one of the millions of Americans fed up with high gas prices. You might be thinking about buying an electric vehicle but are concerned about the price. Would an EV pay for itself and save you money?
Mr. Cargill then offers a hodgepodge of claims, brands, and occasional cherry-picked numbers in a rambling effort to cast doubt. His source, his proof? “The state has a spreadsheet” that “proves” the costs “might not make sense.” [The italics are mine.] He pretends to have dived into the weeds for his proof (without offering a link so one could see the methodology), and the best he can come up with is a “proof” of a “might”. He must be trying really hard…
Let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope math as a rough fact check. Gasoline right now is hovering around four dollars a gallon. For argument let’s assume (generously) that most police vehicles (the EVs Mr. Cargill seems most anxious to criticize) get around 25 miles to the gallon. To go 100,000 miles, that’s 4,000 gallons or $16,000 at $4/gal. Unlike Mr. Cargill, I’ve actually driven a dual motor Model 3 Tesla for the last three years. Plugged in at home in Spokane a kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity costs just about 8 cents. The stats on my onboard computer tell me that I have averaged 4 miles per kWh since I’ve owned the car. To go 100,000 miles, that’s 25,000 kWh or $2,000 at 8 cents/kWh. Two thousand dollars per 100,000 with a powerful EV vs. $16,000 per 100,000 miles for a gas vehicle, a saving of $14,000 per 100,000 miles. Hmmm.
Mr. Cargill’s “proof” that EVs “might” not make sense has to contend with maintenance as well. The only fluids one has to watch and maintain on an electric car are for the windshield washer and the hydraulic brake system. No messy engine oil changes and disposal, no oil filter, no air cleaner, no radiator fluid, and none the leaks of those fluids to which fossil fuel vehicles are prone. Furthermore, the brakes on an EV get far less wear than on an fossil fuel vehicle on account of regenerative braking—a technology that partly reclaims the energy from deceleration and puts it back in the battery rather than wasting that energy heating up and wearing down brake pads and rotors.
Of course, Mr. Cargill cannot leave out McMorris Rodger’s, WPC’s, and national Republican major, must-be-repeated talking points that come out whenever climate change is mentioned:
The additional [unproven] cost [of EVs], …is so large that it would be far more environmentally friendly to purchase gas-powered vehicles and invest the thousands of dollars saved in projects that reduce CO2 emissions or other environmental priorities.
Just what “projects to reduce CO2 emissions” does he endorse? You guessed it. The next two paragraphs go right to keeping the Snake River Dams and promoting nuclear power.
Mr. Cargill’s Guest Opinion reeks of fossil fuel industry efforts to slow walk dealing with climate change. He may truly believe that burning fossil fuels does not cause climate change, or that climate change is myth, but he certainly believes that spending even an extra penny to avoid the worst results of climate change cannot be justified. He will use every bit of rhetoric in the Republican-fossil-fuel-industry playbook to slow down conversion away from fossil fuels. After all, there are still profits to be made, and some of those profits eventually pay part of Mr. Cargill’s salary at WPC. Why does this man even have a platform for his hand-waving? Perhaps the answer is in the words at the end of Mr. Cargill’s article:
Members of the Cowles family, owners of The Spokesman-Review, have previously hosted fundraisers for the Washington Policy Center and sit on the organization’s board.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. I acknowledge there is likely some resistance to change in the law enforcement community. Hardly anyone welcomes change with open arms, no matter the importance to the planet. Change is even less welcome when the argument for change comes from someone else, especially from a government containing a majority of Democrats. Mr. Cargill is following a long Republican tradition undermining climate urgency and fostering doubts of its importance.
Eleven days after Ethan Murray’s life was extinguished by five shots from Deputy Joseph Wallace’s service pistol on May 4, 2019, I wrote a post entitled “A Humane World” in which I lamented the social circumstances, the fear, and the training (or lack thereof) that led to a Sheriff’s Deputy gunning down an unarmed, mentally ill young man.
After reading Ms. Epperly’s article, mulling over the knife (dropped by another Deputy by accident? by intent?), the delayed writing of the incident report (a full month later), Spokane Prosecutor Larry Haskel’s office’s finding the “use of force” justified, and the subsequent promotion of Deputy Wallace to detective it is hard not to see a closing of ranks and wonder about a coverup. As to how it all looks, I’m inclined to agree with this statement from the article:
“A million-dollar settlement speaks louder than any denial of wrongdoing,” wrote Braden Pence, an attorney for Murray’s mother, in an email Tuesday.
To date the only good thing that may have come in part from this miscarriage is that Sheriff’s Deputies (as of this year, two and half years after Ethan was killed) now wear body cameras. Had a body camera recorded this tragic encounter, certainly there would be much less to dispute.
I expect that in the coming weeks I will be able to write something more coherent.
It is no secret that neither City of Spokane Police Chief Meidl nor Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich likes it when legislators at various levels pass laws that members of law enforcement think of as critical of their performance and restrictive of how they do their jobs. No one likes to feel criticized or restrained. It should also be clear, at least from Ozzie’s recent videos (a topic for another day), that law enforcement takes a partisan view of the restrictions, i.e. they consider that Republicans approve of their current work while Democrats are critical and restrictive. Having law enforcement weigh in on politics is not new: the Spokane Police union (self-designated a “Guild”, presumably to pretend it is not a union) routinely endorses candidates for state and local office. Meidl’s post is nominally non-partisan. Ozzie’s post is partisan. He is an active, outspoken Republican.
Most of us probably would prefer that law enforcement did not engage in partisan politics—especially in the context of current political divisions. So what do we make of recent very public spat between the Chief Meidl and the Spokane Public Schools, a spat made public by Chief Meidl rather than working out differences between the parties? It is hard not to smell a partisan political rat in Meidl’s use of the media. Without presenting hard data—or even specific instances, Meidl publicly plants the idea that crime is rampant in the Spokane Public Schools and the school administration is hiding it. This is right out of the Republican playbook of “Permanent Offense”—always keep your opponent on their back foot trying to explain away vacuous accusations, leaving the sensational accusation to stick in the public mind…
Luke Baumgartner and Valerie Osier of RANGE Media expressed my unease with Chief Meidl’s grandstanding in an article entitled “Custody of the Kids”, copied below. I’ve been reading RANGE for a month or two. This article convinced me to become a paid subscriber. We need more of this sort of in depth analysis of local issues. I urge you to support what RANGE is doing by clicking on the title and signing up.
Spokane Public Schools and Spokane Police are fighting about when to put kids in jail. It’s a conflict years in the making. Plus, more PFAS contamination news.
Mar 25, 2022
Adam Driver as Craig Meidl: “You never tell me when the kids are committing crimes!”
It’s time for Additional Context: a weekly look at news that was underreported, misunderstood, or could benefit from a little additional background.
Luke | You know a divorce has gotten messy when it ends up in the press.
Especially when one side says, “let’s meet and talk about this” and the other side runs to a reporter. As with all breakups, there’s a bit of a backstory.
None of the reporting from that time includes quotes from the Spokane Police and the only mention of community comment was in favor of the change. Other than a change.org petition opposing the decommissioning of CROs that barely got 800 signatures (there are approximately 30,000 students within the SPS system), the changes didn’t seem to cause much stir, and the relationship between SPS and SPD seemed pretty normal.
That is: until a couple weeks ago.
On Friday, March 11, in a move that seemed to catch a lot of people off-guard, Police Chief Craig Meidl wrote a letter to Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Adam Swinyard accusing the district of ignoring “a pattern of assaults and threats to students and staff” that the District is legally bound to report under Washington State law.
By Monday, the district had sent a response to Meidl saying, actually, they believed they were following that law to the letter.
In an apparent show of solidarity, the district letter was signed by School Board President Mike Wiser, Vice President Nikki Lockwood, and Superintendent Swinyard, along with Paul Gannon and Jeremy Shay, presidents of the Spokane Principals Association and the Spokane Education Association, respectively. They requested a meeting with Meidl, Mayor Woodward, City Council President Beggs, and City Civil Rights Officer (and former school board president) Jerrall Haynes.
It’s unclear when or if that meeting is going to happen, but that same day, Meidl granted an interview to KREM’s Laura Pepetti in which he made grave but vague allegations that educators and administrators were suppressing “the full gamut [of crimes]. It’s assaults. It’s threats. It’s assaults of every magnitude. It’s threats against other students. It’s threats against staff members. So, uh, it’s the full gamut.”
By Tuesday, the local FBI office was looking into the matter, expanding the “full gamut” of crimes to include “assaults, sexual assaults, threats of violence, and drug use.” It’s important to note the reason we know the FBI is involved was a different city official [Michael Cathcart, no surprise here] leaking an email on Facebook, further prosecuting the case through the media – social media this time.
It is hard to overstate how irregular it is for law enforcement to go straight to the media with complaints about another institution like this. And in using scary language without offering real details, Meidl is working from a playbook that both SPD and Sheriff Knezovich have used a lot over the years. Remember the fearmongering about antifa?
It’s absolutely possible that the school district is failing to report serious, specific crimes, but we haven’t seen any evidence of that yet. If Meidl has information to that effect, he has a duty to the people of Spokane and the kids in its schools, to be as specific, precise, and public as possible. But because this is the court of public opinion – the court Meidl chose – he is able to get away with innuendo.
And the press, to this point, has let his narrative drive coverage. With the exception of Rebecca White of Spokane Public Radio – who publicly said she filed a records request and whose coverage we will talk about momentarily – and a tweet from KXLY News Director Melissa Luck, we haven’t seen public questions asking Meidl for specific details of the allegations.
We have seen calls for the school district to respond. Of course we should want to hear more from the school district here, and not just through letters. But we also need to acknowledge that when the police come straight to the media, they know exactly what they’re doing. Fear and uncertainty feed into their power as an institution, and they approach reporters or let letters get leaked to establish a narrative. It’s our job as journalists to clarify it, not follow it.
Do schools have a legal obligation to report crimes? Certain ones, absolutely. Smoking weed under the bleachers? Probably not. The law Meidl cites, RCW 26.44.030, also known as “Duty to Report,” is pretty specific in its language about when teachers and school officials (and also any for-profit or non-profit with “official supervisory capacity” over kids, such as daycares, for that matter), have an obligation to report crime:
When any practitioner … has reasonable cause to believe that a child has suffered abuse or neglect, he or she shall report such incident, or cause a report to be made, to the proper law enforcement agency.
The law elaborates that yes, this includes suspicions of abuse by teachers and other school officials.
So let’s take a closer look at Meidl’s words. When he says, “It’s threats against other students. It’s threats against staff members,” [emphasis added] he is clearly saying kids are threatening each other and they are threatening staff. Presumably he also means kids are assaulting each other. Getting in fights and whatnot.
He does not insinuate teachers are beating up kids, or staff is letting signs of abuse at home go unreported.
While the law draws a broad definition of who is capable of abusing or neglecting a kid, it does not specifically call out other children. Spokane district policy, however, does. The policy reads, in part: “Children (including other students), family members, and any other adult can engage in child abuse, neglect, or exploitation.”
And fair enough. As a kid who got bullied pretty badly at points in my life, it sure felt like abuse.
But while it’s possible, under the district’s own interpretation of the law, for one student to abuse or neglect another, there’s nothing in state law or district policy that suggests a kid threatening a teacher or staff would trigger Duty to Report, despite Meidl’s claims. The law doesn’t mention anything about drug use.
In its response, the District goes on the offensive, saying it has information Meidl has had these unspecified reports since the beginning of the school year and he has never brought them up, even when meeting with district leaders recently.
Surely, if the behaviors were serious enough to trigger Duty to Report and staff failed to do so, it would be equally negligent of Chief Meidl to wait to let the district know its staff was asleep on the job.
Beyond their respective interpretations of the law, it’s clear the Chief and the District are at odds over a matter of legal — and really, societal — philosophy: When and for what acts should kids become justice involved?
Perhaps more bluntly: What good is criminal punishment for kids?
In de-commissioning its CROs and adopting policies to limit contact with police, SPS has made its position clear since mid-2020. The Chief still hasn’t clearly stated his. And in not actually providing the reports he claims to have read, we don’t know the severity of any of these crimes, (or indeed whether evidence would support charging), so we can’t even hazard a guess.
As the story stands, there are more questions like this than concrete answers. Another question: if Meidl had sat on these reports for this long, what made him write the letter on March 11?
He hasn’t said, but just two days prior — in what we are sure is pure coincidence! — SPS approved a new safety policy that urges staff to take every reasonable step to de-escalate without calling the cops, “using law enforcement only as the absolute last resort and only for incidents for which law enforcement is necessary to address a serious threat to school safety.”
That language seemed to be on Meidl’s mind in that interview with Spokane Public Radio, saying, “we need also for the school district to acknowledge that law enforcement does have a role to play. If it’s the last resort, that’s ok, but let’s make sure we’re following the law.”
The irony of that statement is that law enforcement had a primary role in starting the district’s transition away from arresting kids in the first place, during an incident happened at Ferris High School in early 2019, and involved the most public example of reportable child abuse on Spokane Public Schools property in recent memory.
The abuser? A former Spokane Sheriff Deputy: Resource Officer Shawn Audie, who is shown in this video pressing his elbow into a Black teen boy’s neck and restraining him in a way that the child’s parents contended caused trauma. Off-camera, witnesses described Audie also putting his knee to the child’s neck. Later, the Inlander uncovered that Audie had left the Sheriff’s department to avoid termination after multiple accusations of excessive force, including striking an elderly man in the head with a baton and later killing another man with a vascular neck restraint — law enforcement jargon for a choke hold.
Thankfully, the child survived his encounter with Audie. Audie resigned when his past came out and the district eventually settled with the boy’s family for $275,000.
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Spokane GOP (aka the Spokane County Republican Party) is the official Republican body in our area, the Republican body that deals with precincts and precinct captains, the body that sends representatives to the the Washington State Republican Party. The organization has a problem when the chairman of the Spokane GOP, Brian Steele, feels the need to say, “There are a lot of good, honest, caring folks who are Republicans. They get painted with this brush that’s not accurate.”
There are “good, honest, caring folks” who are Republicans, and most of them must avoid reading the news, cruising social media, and listening to recent speakers at Lincoln Day dinners, in other words, wearing blinders preventing them from seeing what their Party has become, and the views it harbors.
Daniel Walters writes for The Inlander, the local free newspaper that not enough Republicans read. In an article dated March 11 that is pasted below, Walters hones in on the vile tripe pumped out (7000 posts) on Gab using the official imprimatur “SpokaneGOP” by an unidentified, but officially approved, prolific writer and reminds the reader of multiple other examples of toxicity of a good portion of the local Republican Party.
Mr. Steele, the current Spokane GOP chairman says he’s steering the local party to its “historic roots”. Given what the local party has accepted into its big tent, wittingly or unwittingly, Mr. Steele had better have a firm grip on that steering wheel—and those “good, honest, caring” Republicans to whom Steele refers need to wake up, understand, and curse the ditch into which the alt-right has steered their party.
Spokane County Republican Party Chair Brian Steele says the party has been trying to do a better job of policing its social media presence.
In previous years, the Spokane County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner fundraisers have often featured pundits like Charlie Kirk and Tomi Lahren — known more for being reflexive own-the-libs types instead of being intellectual luminaries of the conservative movement.
But this time, they went a different direction: They invited Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Trump-supporting niece. The connection to MLK fit with the local party’s recent “clarification campaign,” featuring billboards noting the party’s history of supporting civil rights. Abraham Lincoln, after all, was a Republican. So was the first Black congressman. Republicans had fought for women’s suffrage.
You can, of course, point to plenty of historical reasons why Republicans stopped being seen as the party of civil rights, ranging from Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to Trump’s “textbook definition of a racist comment” strategy. But just the choice to emphasize this part of the GOP’s legacy was notable.
“As chair, that’s where I’m steering the party is our historical roots,” Spokane GOP Chair Brian Steele told the Inlander in an interview late Tuesday evening. “We’re just trying to get the truth out about who we are. There are a lot of good, honest, caring folks who are Republicans. They get painted with this brush that’s not accurate.”
But that rebranding effort hasn’t just been complicated by outside critics — it’s been hampered by one of the party’s prolific but little-monitored social media accounts that had been pumping out a slew of incendiary posts, without the knowledge of some party leaders.
In April last year, the Spokane County Republican Party’s Facebook page announced the party was expanding its social media presence:
“Here is the new link to our Gab page!” announced the party’s Facebook page, linking to a Gab account titled simply “SpokaneGOP.” Gab is a social media app intended to ape Facebook and Twitter but with fewer content restrictions.
In less than a year, the account racked up 2,100 followers, a little less than half what the Spokane County Republican Party’s Facebook page has. SpokaneGOP posted to Gab over 7,000 times in less than a year — an average of 22 posts a day, every single day. The individual behind SpokaneGOP wrote that he spent four to seven hours a day posting on the account.
It took the Inlander hours to scroll to the end, but it didn’t take long to find hundreds of posts about wild conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine disinformation, and even attacks on local Republicans. After the Inlander repeatedly reached out to party leadership with questions about the account over the past month, the party deactivated the entire thing and banned the person running it from accessing party channels.
Some of the Gab account’s comments, Steele wrote in a text message Tuesday night, “were not approved and were in direct opposition to the values and principles of the SpokaneGOP.”
Steele declines to say who ran the “SpokaneGOP” Gab, but says he’s willing to shoulder the blame for not doing a better job policing it.
“I’m not in the practice of throwing people under the bus,” Steele says. “As chair, it’s my responsibility.”
Facebook screenshot
The Spokane County Republican Party Facebook page announces their Gab page.
DELUGES OF DELUSIONS The social media company Gab itself is controversial: Founded as a less restrictive alternative to Twitter, it’s quickly established itself as a hive of alt-right scum and villainy, all the way to the top. Andrew Torba, Gab’s founder, declared to an ecstatic crowd at the alt-right “America First Political Action Conference” it sponsored last month that “tolerance is not a Christian virtue” and that Christians were being “demographically replaced.”
On Gab last week, SpokaneGOP applauded Torba’s speech.
“When someone not only gets it, but makes it happen,” SpokaneGOP wrote last week, linking to the speech. “Sit down your butts and watch Andrew’s presentation.”
And when Torba referred to Washington, D.C., as an “isolated globohomo shithole city surrounded by degenerate freaks and literal demons,” Spokane GOP reposted it.
While the account wasn’t nearly as infused with racism and White nationalism as the account of Lesley Haskell, wife of the Spokane County prosecutor, that sort of rhetoric wasn’t entirely absent either.
“I fully believe that European Americans need to start having children again,” declared SpokaneGOP in the comments about a post about abortion. “The minorities seem to be having plenty.”
The SpokaneGOP also shared a post calling Afghan refugees “barbarous” rapists and a post claiming that FEMA camps were going to be used as death camps for “Whites, Christians and Trump Supporters” and “vax-resisters who double as White supremacist Trump supporters.” “An informed perspective,” SpokaneGOP wrote. “Take what you want from it, but consider carefully what you keep and what you don’t.”
SpokaneGOP fired off countless conspiracy theory posts, declaring 5G cellphones were dangerous, that Bill Gates is involved with a plot to spray “chemtrails” on the public from airplanes, that former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered as part of some elaborate scheme, and illegal immigration is a George Soros plot. The account even dips, briefly, into 9/11 conspiracy talk, sharing a post claiming that “Donald Trump was One of the First to Say Bombs Must Have Been Used on 9/11“
Naturally, so are stolen election conspiracy theories, not just about the presidential election (“Dominion erasing election records all over country one machine after another“) but about Loren Culp’s loss to Jay Inslee and the failed California recall against Gavin Newsom.
The account portrayed news of Costco putting limits on toilet paper purchases last year as “pure, unadulterated BS, contrived by the communists to frighten and control us.” SpokaneGOP declared a Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendant who committed suicide and an anti-vaccine mandate protester who supposedly self-immolated each to be a “martyr.”
“Today’s Satan shots will destroy many of those who remain with any cognitive ability whatsoever,” SpokaneGOP wrote in October. “Fight it till we die. NEVER GIVE IN!”
And he did it all touting the Spokane County Republican Party’s name and endorsement.
“I belong to local GOP committees and am sanctioned for this Gab,” he repeatedly told other Gab users.
Facebook screenshot
The organizers of this campaign were later charged with defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors.
ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA
Steele, the chair of the party, stresses he had no idea all this stuff was being posted. “Honestly, I didn’t even know we had that account,” he says. Several other party members the Inlander contacted also said they were unaware of the comments.
The Inlander had attempted to reach Steele on multiple occasions over the last few weeks, including by asking party volunteer Maggie DiMauro — one of the organizers of the Lincoln Day event — to pass along an interview request.
He’d been driving home, Steele says, when DiMauro started sending him screenshots of posts from the account.
“Maggie read a few of them to me,” Steele says. He doesn’t cite specific posts or topics that concerned him, but stressed some of the posts were unacceptable.
In a statement to the Inlander, he writes that “we sincerely regret any offense that may have resulted from these inappropriate posts,” and he encouraged the public to visit the GOP’s website to read up on their values.
“Social media is a nightmare anyway. You’ve got to have a presence, right?” Steele says. “A weakness for me is I don’t pay any attention to it at all.”
Steele does, however, acknowledge that the Spokane County Republican Party has argued that extreme social media posts are relevant, including calling on Spokane Public Schools board member Jenny Slagle to resign for one of her controversial Facebook comments about the Constitution.
He says the party’s communications committee decided the party should launch a Gab account last year. He also says the account itself hadn’t been set up through the proper channels — the party’s technology chair didn’t even have the password to it.
The person behind “SpokaneGOP” had been ousted from the party’s communications committee a long time ago, Steele claims.
“We had some trouble with him; he was removed,” he says.
Steele says the party had rules in place intended to prevent the kinds of posts that SpokaneGOP wrote from being published, including requiring multiple layers of approval for the party’s social media posts, but the policies weren’t followed. One reason, he says, is some of the Inlander’s previous questions about the party’s social media accounts. Working on a potential story back in 2020 the Inlander asked Steele about a string of dubious Facebook posts promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, including a post directing their audience to the legal fund for Sidney Powell, a Trump-aligned attorney now being sued by the Texas State Bar.
We also asked about a 2018 post that had promoted a private “We Build the Wall” fundraising effort as trustworthy.
“This is a legitimate campaign,” the Spokane County GOP’s Facebook page declared. When it turned out that the people behind the “We Build the Wall” campaign were indicted for fraud, the Spokane County Republicans deleted the line about the campaign being legitimate, but kept the rest of the post up.
Steele says the party has tried to be much more diligent about what goes out under their name.
“If we’re going to try at least to have dialogue with people,” he says, it’s crucial “that the only thing that goes out is the stuff that reflects our true values.”
Gab screenshot
The SpokaneGop Gab calls for someone to challenge Cathy McMorris Rodgers in a primary — and misspells her name.
THE SPOKANE GOP VS. SPOKANEGOP
Like the Spokane County Democrats, the Spokane County Republican Party has been wrestling with a fundamental dilemma during the last decade: Who do they allow in their big tent, and who do they kick out?
In attendance at the 2018 Lincoln Day Dinner, was White supremacist James Allsup, who’d been dating a district leader of the Spokane County Republican Party. But after then-Spokane County Republican Party Chair Cecily Wright hosted an event defending Allsup later that year, local Republicans like Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich held a press conference slamming both Allsup and Wright. Wright resigned shortly after.
“Do we have bad players sometimes? Yeah, but everybody does,” Steele says. But the media coverage focusing on these figures has rankled him. The result, he says, is that some people who could be great assets to the party shy away.
“They’re afraid that some of the bad actors get so much of the public image that they would be tainted,” Steele says.
But at the same time, fringe figures within their party have tried to come after their comparatively moderate members. SpokaneGOP used the party’s own Gab account to do it, writing that Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers “definitely needs to be primaried” and that Spokane County Commissioner Mary Kuney calls herself “a moderate Republican, but she is really a Liberal.”
“Fake Republicans must be rooted out and dumped. Every year there are more of them put in place by the One Party communists to totally dismantle the Republican party,” SpokaneGOP wrote. “The GOP has more fake Republicans now than ever before, influenced by blackmail, extortion and bribes.“
It’s tricky to stand up against the fringe when many of the same kinds of wild claims that were made in SpokaneGOP’s posts are espoused by former President Trump or Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson. In a lot of places, the dividing line between mainstream Republicans and the fringe has disappeared.
“The fringe has, in some ways, become the rug,” Andy Card, President George W. Bush former chief of staff, told CBS reporter John Dickerson recently.
Yet in Spokane, Allsup’s attempt to infiltrate the Republican mainstream ultimately failed. Being associated with him remains so toxic that, when the Inlander reported he’d changed his middle name and got a job at an insurance company, that insurance company quickly fired him.
By contrast, what happens when the GOP doesn’t stand up against the fringe? Allsup’s former podcast co-host, Nick Fuentes, has turned into the most prominent White nationalist in the country. That alt-right conference that Gab sponsored? It was Fuentes’ conference — drawing in GOP figures from Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to Idaho Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin — and earning the GOP a stream of negative headlines.
Contrast that with the Sunday brunch that Steele says the party held with Alveda King and members of the community, including several local minority leaders. The goal, he says, was to bridge the divide with people who might not normally be talking to Republicans. He says the conversation was encouraging.
“We’ve opened up some dialogue to take it further,” Steele says. “There’s clearly common ground here that we could work on.”
But the branding challenge the party faces is underscored by the fact that Steele declines to say which local minority community leaders attended. Some of them, he says, were concerned with showing up to a GOP-sponsored event.
