Editorial: Public Safety and Our Right to Know

— by Lin McNulty —

Orcas Fire and Rescue Chief Kevin O’Brien is ever-faithful about releasing a Chief’s Report each month to keep the public up-do-date on what activities the Fire Department has been involved in, to include the number of calls to which they have responded.

This is a valuable resource not only for transparency and accountability, but for public safety. Remember, for instance, our rash of suspicious fires last summer? It was mostly the Fire Department who publicly provided us with valuable information.

Another area of public safety concern, however, is what is happening–or not–in the law enforcement area. Did we truly have an at-large sex offender wandering our island a few months ago? An anonymous, knowledgeable source reveals to me that we did, and that he has been arrested and is no longer on the island. Good news that he’s gone; bad news that we weren’t alerted to this potentially hazardous situation.

We rarely receive any information or reports from the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office (SJCSO), other than an every-so-often press release from Sheriff Nou. This lack of public notification may well hinder ongoing investigations for which our citizenry may have valuable information to contribute—if only we knew what was going on. This information can help the public protect themselves by providing information. It’s a two-way beneficial street.

San Juan County Sheriff’s Office installed new software which prints out an activity report, but it is not available to the press. The reason for this secrecy? The software program is not able to redact information that is not public (names of juveniles, for instance.). Orcas Issues has been following up on this with the Undersheriff for months with no solution in sight. That information used to be readily and publicly available (before technology butted in). Remember when you could read the Sheriff’s Log weekly?

Anacortes Police Department provides a weekly report (log) of calls, as do most police agencies, to their local press. While it seems Anacortes PD uses the same software package as SJCSO, a captain in the Anacortes department has been assigned the task of compiling and releasing a press packet every week.

For reasons of both public safety and good community relations, I would suggest that someone at the Sheriff’s Office be assigned a similar task and submit a weekly report (redacted, is fine) to the press so that the public is removed from this veil of uninformed darkness.

They have stepped up their game for public safety funding. Now it is time for them to step up their game for public safety and transparency.