There are only six deputies in the Josephine County, Oregon Sherriff’s Office, and resources are so sparse that a woman was raped last year after an emergency dispatcher told her four times over the phone there was no one to help her.
It was last August, and a woman was brutally raped and sodomized
by her abusive ex-boyfriend after unsuccessfully pleading with a
911 dispatcher for over 10 minutes.
“I’m not letting him in, but he’s, like, tried to break down
the door, and he’s trying to break into one of the windows,”
the woman is heard telling the operator in the calls.
“He put me in the hospital a few weeks ago, and I’ve been
trying to keep him away,” she said.
Four times during that call, the operator told the woman that
she wasn’t able to provide assistance.
“I don’t have anybody to send out there,” she kept
saying. “Once again, it’s unfortunate you guys don’t have any
law enforcement up there.”
At the county jail, staffing cuts caused by a lack of funding
has formed a revolving door system where inmates are released
sometimes right after being arrested because there’s seldom enough
money to keep facilities functioning at even the bare minimum.
There are only six deputies in the Josephine Sherriff’s Office, and
recently the department’s canine unit was cut to a single dog.
“You may want to consider relocating to an area with adequate
law enforcement services,” the department cautioned the
county’s 80,000 or so residents last year.
Although a Wild West-like scenario has spiraled out of control
in the Pacific Northwest, residents voted against a measure Tuesday
that would have funded much-needed law enforcement operations at
the cost of only a 3 percent tax levy.
The measure would have bumped the county government tax rate –
currently the lowest in the state – to $1.48 per $1,000, in turn
costing the average homeowner in Josephine around $85 a year
extra.
But even after news of last year’s rape went viral, residents
narrowly decided this week to halt any attempt to milk mere pennies
on the dollar for an added sense of security. On Tuesday evening
the decision was too close to call in Josephine, but by Wednesday
afternoon the county clerk acknowledged to RT that the public
safety levy was voted down by a margin of 51 to 49 percent, with
barely 500 ballots deciding the fate of a county where calling 911
is no longer the way to handle an emergency.
“There isn’t a day go by that we don’t have another
victim,” Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilberson told Oregon
Public Broadcasting last week. Speaking to OPB, Gilberson directly
blamed the ongoing inability to fight crime on budget
restraints.
“If you don’t pay the bill, you don’t get the service,”
he said.
Policing Josephine County wasn’t always a problem. In 2000,
Congress passed the Secure Rural Schools and Community
Self-Determination Act and as a result began sharing revenue made
off of timber grown on public land.
“Federal forests make up 60 percent of the land in many rural
Oregon counties. Because federal land isn’t subject to property
taxes, the federal government for decades shared timber sale
revenue with the counties,” the Oregonian recently noted.
Those funds were until recently divvied up among rural counties
to help line the pockets where sparsely inhabited towns were losing
out on taxes brought in by more densely populated regions. The act
has expired, however, and the result has been the rapid defunding
of public programs in some areas, including the Josephine
Sherriff’s Office. Since the expiration of the bill, the county has
lost millions of dollars in revenue that for more than a decade was
a routine handout.
In the case of last August’s rape, a 911 dispatcher stayed on
the phone with the soon-to-be victim for over 10 minutes,
instructing her to hide in her house while emergency options were
considered.
“None of the sheriff’s deputies in Josephine County were on
duty,” explained Amelia Templeton of OPB. “So dispatch
transferred the call to the Oregon State Police, but they also
didn’t have anyone available.”
“And four times in total, she says there isn’t anyone who can
help,” she said.
The expiration of the act that provided the city with timber
revenue forced the Sheriff’s Office to cut its budget in half and
most law enforcement operations have ended. Had voters agreed to a
tax hike on Tuesday, the county expected to raise $9.5 million
during the next year and slightly more annually through 2016. Those
funds, the voters were told, would be used to increase inmate
capacity at the county jail, provide the resources for the District
Attorney’s office to prosecute more criminals and, generally, bring
the force back up to snuff.
“I’m not going to vote for it,” Josephine County
convenience store owner Les Monk told Templeton. “Things are no
worse or better now than they were when they were fully
funded.”
For Monk – and presumably the 13,365 other “nay” ballots casted
on Tuesday – things are just fine in Josephine. Monk told Templeton
that he carried a knife for his own protection and suggested that
paying money for an inefficient police force wasn’t worth his tax
dollars. “People have to understand you will, and are able, to
defend your property,” he said.
According to Templeton, an attorney for the rape victim said the
woman felt hopeless, alone and very scared when she waited,
unsuccessfully, for police assistance last year. Sheriff Gilbertson
admitted that it’s a very real problem.
“It’s devastated law enforcement,” Sheriff Gilbertson
told The Oregonian. “The criminals now act with impunity and a
sense of entitlement.”
“It’s been a deteriorating situation for a long time,”
added Greg Wolf, intergovernmental affairs director for Gov. John
Kitzhaber, “and we can see that we’re going to hit a wall unless
we come up with some dramatic solutions.”
Nearby on Tuesday, voters in Curry County voters rejected a $4.5
million effort that aimed to reverse the dastardly trend there. And
in Lane County, a five-year, $80 million property tax levy was
approved amid similar circumstances – but only after eight previous
attempts stretching all the way back to 1998 were rejected by
voters.
“We’ve essentially eviscerated law enforcement staffing over
the last 45 years,” Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner
told a legislative committee earlier this year. With this week’s
vote, Lane County can start to pick up the pieces. In Josephine,
however, residents have a long ways to go.
Speaking to OPB late Tuesday, reporter April Baer said Gov.
Kitzhaber is now expected to declare a public safety emergency and
likely and impose a temporary tax to keep at least some law
enforcement operations functioning through the end of 2014.
This article originally appeared on : RT