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It appears that the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office Command Staff have really outdone themselves this time.
We are of course talking about the brand spanking new Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office Policy 6.60 — “Speech & Expression” — Even the name of the policy sounds downright communist.
This policy fits hand in glove with the Sheriff’s Office policy 4.34 “Social Media.” It does an admirable job of crushing Sheriff’s Office employees freedom of speech, freedom of association and their basic will to live. (Both policies linked below)
Filled with vague language and a continuous stream of threats “up to and including termination”, these policies, when combined with a highly weaponized internal investigation process, makes a trial in a Communist Peoples’ Court seem like fun.
We find Command Staff’s unleashing of this policy on August 26, barely two months before the upcoming election extremely suspicious.
Furthermore, we have been told a large majority of Sheriff’s Office employees support Sergeant Kent Vander Kamp versus Sheriff Shane Nelson’s endorsed candidate Captain William Bailey. So this policy makes it doubly seem so.
In our opinion, this is yet another example of Sheriff Shane Nelson and Undersheriff Paul Garrison firmly putting their thumbs on the scales to ensure Nelson’s protege and preferred candidate is elected as the next Sheriff. Is Bailey in on it all? Our suspicion is yes. After all he is a senior member of the Command Staff and is intimately connected to Shane Nelson
To our legally illiterate minds there are elements of this policy that are clearly designed to infringe on employees civil rights. To the point that it appears, to us at least, that Command Staff is just begging for more lawsuits be filed against them by their own employees.
Employees seem to be concerned that putting out yard signs in support of their preferred candidate might be seen as a policy violation because they have a Sheriff’s Office patrol car in their driveway. A patrol car which they are mandated to have at their homes.
In fact, we were told that in a jail staff training occurring last evening (9/5/24), staff were told that even if their spouses put out signs in support of their preferred candidate it could be seen as a policy violation.
In an email sent out by employee association president Jeff Pope to his membership, we can clearly see the chilling effect this policy has had on employees freedom of expression.
What we found even more concerning is that Pope appears to have prostrated himself before Paul Garrison and allowed Command Staff to dictate to the association how employees may or may not publicly express themselves.
This is a terrible precedent and should be alarming to the association’s membership. Candidly, we have to ask who Pope is representing: Command Staff or his membership?
If it were us, we would have walked in to Garrison’s office with the association attorney and demanded either the policy be rescinded/rewritten or the association would file suit and go public.
Why would we be so strident? Because fundamental and inalienable rights such as the freedom expression and association must be jealously guarded and protected.
Of course there is no question that a law enforcement agency must provide some guard rails on employees speech. That is to be expected, and there are elements of both these policies which make sense. However, that does not justify how these policies are currently written and we believe they need to be dumped and written from scratch.
Hopefully the next Sheriff will make it so.
“Once the Sheriff’s Office leadership is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its employees and creates an agency where everyone lives in fear.” — Harry Truman [paraphrased]
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