Hey, it's Aaron. This week on the pod, Luke and other Aaron talked to Sophia Mattis Algi, who does excellent work for Range and the Newport Minor, a weekly paper in Ponderer County as part of a partnership with Washington State University. What's it like to be a reporter in such a rural place? Sophia fills us in. Then Aaron talks about the recent arrest of an unhoused man at City Council and what that says about behavioral health response in Spokane. This is Free Range, a co production of KYRS and Range Media. I'm Luke Baumgarten. Remember me? It's okay if you don't, it's been a while. I barely remember you. Tell me about it. I've been a little bit out of the news trenches dealing with some business stuff the last couple weeks, so it has not been a particularly fun absence for me. You're Kendall Roy era. We promised we weren't going to talk about that publicly. I don't know which, I don't know if I want people in Spokane speculating on which Succession character I am. But It's not been a particularly fun absence, but I'm excited to get caught back up on all things Spokane and a little teaser here Pend Oreille County today Joining me as you already heard is Aaron Sellers And we're also joined by Sophia Mattis Aldis of the Newport minor and range welcome to both of you Thank you. Hi. I feel like between the three of us, we've really got a Roy siblings dynamic and I'm gonna let everybody else guess who's who. Sophia, I thought we'd start with you because Sellers and I have no problem talking forever about Spokane stuff, but Ponderay County, you are part of the state legislator created this Murrow Fellowship, and we applied for it, and your colleague, or our, I guess, co colleagues at the Newport Minor applied for it, and we ended up getting an arranged marriage of sharing you as a, of a North County and, or pond Split custody. Split custody. We're your, we're your weekend parents. We really are the weekend parents, actually, don't you think? But you live up in Newport, and you, I would say you do most of your reporting for the Newport Minor, that's a weekly publication up there. A hundred year old publication, or? Right. Very old. Yes. It wasn't always called the minor, but it has been around in some form or another since the late 1800s. It was probably called like the jack and ape or something in the 1800s. Something like that. Yeah. When did it become the minor? Sorry, I'm, I'm, this is a, I'm already throwing you a curveball. Quite all right. I can't remember the exact year, but I think it became the miner in the early to mid 1900s. Okay, so when, while there was still mining happening. Yes, lots of mining happening. Glad it wasn't just a nostalgia rebrand. So you live up there and, and you grew up in like Caldwell and Kettle Falls area too. So you spent most of your life in the, in the tri county Northeastern area. Is that fair to say? Yes. So that gig, when did you start? When did you actually come on? It would have been October of last year. Alright, so we're, we're pushing, we're coming up on six months. Wow. Yeah. And how did you get in, I guess you grew up there, but how did you, cause you, the minor wasn't your first stop at small town northeastern Washington newspapers. How did you, how did you get your start in journalism and what, what led you to stick around those small town papers in the north? Oh, good question. I don't know how. Disgustingly idealistic we want to get here so disgusting so disgusting. Okay, roll around in the mud All right in that case when I was a little girl one of my big idols was Nellie Bly and so I was hoping for Ida Tarbell. That would have been an excellent one as well, yes. And I always thought I wanted to be three things. I either wanted to be a marine biologist, a ballerina, or a journalist. And so, when I got to be about, 19 years old. I had flunked out of college. I know I'm painting a sterling picture of my resume. I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I was forced to move back home, and I was working at a stove factory, and then a former employee at the statesman examiner in Colville was quitting, and he knew that I had written for my school paper, so he just gave me the heads up. This job is available if you want it. I absolutely did want it. And so, I had to get my driver's license and then I just pretty much hounded the publisher and the editor until they hired me. I got my driver's license and they came in and I was like, I'm ready to work now. They were just going to hire me. I feel like that's the best proof of your capability as a job, as a journalist. Because half of our job is just bothering people until they say yes. Until they talk to us, yeah. That's fair. That's a good point. Exactly. So, off to a pretty good start there. And then I was, I was basically there for all of my twenties and a little bit in my early thirties, too, until I got the job at the minor and short story long, here we are and it's been it's been a ride, it's been right. So without putting you too much on the spot here, I think. We, I grew up in North Spokane County and so I've very, and I've lived in Spokane proper for the last 20 years. So a lot of what I'm been, was reflecting on when I was thinking about chatting with you is 20 year old knowledge. I come from a place that's a little closer to Spokane than you, and I still feel like the place I grew up spends a lot of time thinking about Spokane and its relation to Spokane, and I don't really feel like Spokane thinks much about Chattaroi, Washington. You feel the same way like folks up in Ponderay County, how important is Spokane in the cultural life of Ponderay County? Is it just, the closest Walmart and Costco or is there, is there more to it? I know you come into Spokane pretty frequently. And then the other side of that, like, how do you, what do you think, the average Spokanites stereotypical view of, of Newport is and how, how accurate is that? Very good questions. Well, I would say, just in my opinion, that I think Ponderay County of course definitely thinks about Spokane because I don't have any hard and fast numbers, but I do know that quite a few people from Ponderay County commute to Spokane for their job. Oh, wow, yeah. And there are some people who, live in Spokane and they actually commute to Newport, or they live at the halfway point and they commute to Newport. Yeah. I know growing up, and To completely reveal the hayseed that I still am at heart. A trip to Spokane was a big deal. It was like, wow, we're going to Spokane, we're going to the city, yeah! And I think that it's, it's been interesting to see how Spokane has changed over the years and to, I think that relationship between Spokane and smaller communities, I don't know, I can't say what Spokanites think about us, but I do think that there is very much a symbiotic relationship in terms of labor, recreation, when, as the weather gets warm here, we're going to see a ton of people coming from Spokane up to Spirit Lake. Right. And outdoor recreation in the Ponderay County, North Idaho area. What was, well, I'm just curious what your view on that is now that you are a Spokaneite and you did start out in the country. Oh, I mean, I think it is true. Like I spent a lot of my, I started my career as a journalist in, in Sandpoint and even before all of the growth that's happened, like in the Rathbun Prairie and stuff, I would choose to drive through Newport up highway two, just cause it was a lot prettier than driving through, north Idaho. I assume more people in Spokane, especially if you live on the north end of Spokane, are taking that route as opposed to going out I 90. So, I mean, my thoughts are like, I mean, I played against the Newport Grizzlies in sports because we were in the same league and stuff, but It's probably like the Safeway is like your last really good grocery store before you get to Priest Lake, or like you were saying Spirit Lake. I, I honestly don't know if people think about it much more than that. Now that I'm back, I will say that I bought some weed in Newport and smuggled it into Idaho for a recent little trip that I took and come get me, suckers. And I was really shocked at both, or not shocked, but I was like, it was a really The experience, the dispensary was really cool, the people there were really nice and they were all I was also like really impressed with the, just the community feel that was going on there, like everybody seemed to know each other, and the bud tender had, knew everybody's by, order by name and stuff, and so, it still felt like it had that small town feel where you know all your neighbors and stuff, but that's, I don't know that I have a much, deeper opinion than that. I have a question, and it wasn't on Luke's list, and I'm sorry, but I'm going to go off script anyways. I was up in concrete Washington a couple months ago, which, it's on the west side, but it's, I think, comparably small, maybe smaller. And I was flipping through the community newspaper there that was for sale. And I was talking to the person I was with about oh, the types of stories they were covering and how they were covering them. And we got the feel that In a small town paper that relies on ad business to survive, that changes how you can cover things, especially when a community is so small. It's if you write a piece of investigative journalism about something messy going on, that might include half of your readers because your town's so small. And I guess I'm curious writing for a paper like the Minor, which I think probably is bigger than the Concrete Area, but What kind of considerations do you have that might be different than writing for like the spokesman or for a regional paper that kind of get narrowed because your audience is so small? Or do you think about that at all? Yeah. That is a very good point. I, I do think we think about it, and we've had a lot of discussions even some arguments about how to go about stories, but the great thing, as you both know, when you have an editorial staff that gets on well and you both ultimately have the same end goals, then you can have those discussions, sometimes hard discussions, and if you're gonna talk about that kind of thing, that's the best place to talk about it. For the most part, I would say no, it That advertising does not affect our coverage and in a lot of ways it shouldn't. Do we have to have conversations sometime about what is the point of this piece? And do we think it's going to? Do we think it's going to help people, or do we think it's going to hurt people? Obviously, you don't want to write anything that purposely goes out to hurt anybody. But is it truthful, and is it something that the public has the right to know? And Hats off to my publisher, Michelle Nedved, and my editor, Don Groening, because they are, they are at the front. If someone has a complaint or is very, very angry, they're the ones who have to meet that and talk about it. And the vast majority of the time, it, it's a, what I would call a, It's a fruitful conversation. It's a successful conversation. I can't think of the last time where someone just slammed the door on us and that was all she wrote. But it is something you have to talk about because yeah, you're gonna, the likelihood that you'll be walking down the street for your morning coffee and you're gonna see that person walking their dog or coming into the same coffee shop is super high, so. You don't, of course, have to agree about what the point of the story is but I do think you, I do think you need to be able to explain your editorial process to the public, whether they agree with that or not, that's, that's up for debate, but. Yeah, it just triggered something for me. I, I, I've been thinking about this a lot with the work we do and, obviously Sellers writes a lot of pretty spicy stuff about. In a similar way I feel like the people who come to Spokane City Council are not unlike, the denizens of a, of a of a a small town. at a bus stop the other day. Did you really? Yeah, and I actually got yelled at at a different bus stop by a person who was, I thought was the same person who had been yelling at sellers, but it just turned out they were doppelgangers. Yelling might be a solution. talking very aggressively in a relatively high volume, but I don't know that I would put it quite yelling might be a stretch, I don't know. They had strong opinions, though, about what you wrote. Mm hmm. They did. And I told them I was not on the clock, and that they could talk to me about it later. And then they told me not to get triggered, and I said, I'm sorry, I'm not on the clock right now. I'm, I'm not discussing whether or not I'm triggered with you right now, because I'm not on the clock. Good for you. And I don't know if the, my 20 year old self would be proud of what I'm about to say, because I think I was a little more hard charging back then. But I, I, we have thought a lot of, with the homeless coverage that we do, and, and just Some of those include businesses, some of those businesses that have made real mistakes and then if you write a story that might actually take somebody down or, be the end of their business, I think a, a, a really important question to ask is, is the harm being done and then the harm, and then, worth putting in the newspaper and then and then does reporting on it. Cause more harm or does it cause healing to happen right and it is something we think about and I and I actually think that working for a small town paper is like a master class in that sort of relational thinking that So the trip I was taking that I stopped off at the dispensary for was up to the Sandpoint Reader, which is on the other end of Botner County from where you cover, and it's a, they just turned 20. So something about the Spokane region makes solvent alt weeklies possible with, in a way that isn't really possible anywhere else in America, it seems but, I mean, every time I go up to Sandpoint and talk to those guys who are now really, dear friends of mine, it's just That is a navigation they have to do every week among this increasingly, hyper conservative, the whole county is pretty conservative at this point. But then a lot of the stuff that's happening in civic and municipal spaces is, these. now probably the middle aged children of former draft dodging hippies in relatively constant conflict with people who may have moved up in the 70s, may have moved up two years ago, who live on compounds, and are, probably have hundreds of pounds of preserved meats and canned food. There's, it's just It's just the best estate sales are up there. Incredible estates, yeah. True, very true. I can't actually vouch for that. So it's this, and that's I guess the other piece. of this that I wanted to bring in. You're on, you're literally Newport sits on the Idaho border and it doesn't have the sort of benefit of the sort of big blue dot urban urban Sea of Spokane, and people are always I feel like, especially my Spokane friends, pivoting to the last 20 years of my life, are like, wow, when they talk about what's happening politically around here, nobody everybody acknowledges the Aryan Nation, everybody acknowledges the history of white supremacy, everybody acknowledges the neo Nazis. But just the way it gets framed in the in the cultural imaginary, almost, is Oh, Idaho's got such wild stuff happening, it's weird to live near Idaho because Idaho's just getting nutty and nuttier and nuttier every, every day. Growing up in Chattarooga, I, that was not my experience at all, we were talking about this a little bit on the walk over, what's it like on a border, like both living on and reporting across that border, do you get a sense that the, the residents of Priest River are miles apart from the folks that, your neighbors in, in Newport? True. We do joke about that a lot. I joke about that a lot. So, Idahoans, please forgive me. But the truth is that I, I think the, the political vein, so to speak, is very similar. It's just because there are certain things happening right now in North Idaho that Get more news coverage and rightfully so because of our political climate and what's happening there, but I view it as. If you go to a family dinner, the Idaho conservatives, the far right Idaho conservatives are like the loud cousin who comes rolling in and, let's have those conversations. Whether you want to have those conversations or not over dinner, we're going to have them and I'm going to tell you exactly what I think and da da da da da, whereas a lot of, I feel like, not all of them, of course, I don't mean to generalize, but, washington conservatives on the other side, they may hold very many of the same beliefs, they probably do, but they're more like, they're more like, I guess, Maggie Smith from Downton Abbey, they'll be very proper, and there's protocol, and there's the way we do things, and then, if you go outside of that, then they'll have something to say about that. So I would say it's, it's two different sides of the same coin, and I, I don't know how many people in Idaho listen to this, so I'm gently digging my grave here with a spade, but I do think that that ideology, at least it feels that way, has become emboldened over the last decade and has become much louder. In terms of where that's going, well, that, that remains to be seen. Okay, speaking of, you're in a border community in another way. You are right up against the Canadian border, right? Or pretty close. The county is anyways, yeah. Yeah. How have How have our relations with our friends up north been in the last two weeks? Have you noticed any shifts? Are there less Canadians coming down since all of the tariff fighting? Has there been any change in, or your neighbors, have they changed how they're talking about Canada? I think, I think you hit on something there, Aaron, I think that's a story that we need to do. That's an upcoming story that's coming down the pipe. I haven't heard any new developments. I know that I had that story a while back about how the border hours were changed during COVID and that certainly affected us on this side in terms of tourism. I know that there are Canadians who do own property up in North County. Hmm. Yeah. So they do come down for the summer and other events. I'm not sure how things are going right now. That's an excellent question. We should check in with our neighbors to the north. I heard anecdotally border crossings from the US up into Canada. We're getting a lot more aggressive, like just. I just had a warning. Harder to get through or something? Harder to get through, like if you're driving up just be prepared for like more questions and more aggressive questioning. That was just like anecdotally from a couple people. Interesting. But I was curious if you'd heard anything about that. Just in the last two weeks as geopolitical tensions have climbed. From the Canadian side. Did you hear they're getting more like we're getting more harder questions. Yeah harder to get into Canada interesting interesting It used to seem like it was the, it's been a while since I've been to Canada, but last time you go there, it seems like on the American side, they're very stringent, like we have questions, stay in the car, da, da, da, da. That's always been my experience too, yeah. Yeah, when they're like going through your stuff in the backseat. And the Canadians are like, hey, you're, oh, you're here for the weekend? Cool, have a good weekend. Yeah, go to this store, eat this pie, you'll have a great time. Yeah. Even back when the, the Drinking age was, in BC, was 18. I made that traditional trip up. Anybody, I feel like, who goes to college in Spokane. It's a rite of passage, for sure. Once you turn 19, because it changed to 19 by the time. Yeah, it was, it was 18, so I did it as a high school kid. When I turned 18. Yeah, I was a college sophomore. And even, even back then, it was like the Mount, was it the Mounties, I guess? I don't, I don't even know if Canada has its own border service, or if it's just like a dude on a moose. But it, it was always very chill, even to the point of oh, a bunch of kids. The Medellin Falls border crossing, you headin to Nelson? You're gonna, make sure you drink Molson when you're up there. And that was, like, the totality of it. And then, we got Red the Riot Act coming back through. But yeah, I am curious. I mean, Just the number of people you'll bump into around the holidays in Spokane who said they've come people I've met come, who've come down from Calgary to shop in, in Spokane. Really? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. A surprising number. And I, so I would assume that it's, especially since, the Medellin Falls border crossing runs right, is right in the, the heart of Pendraya County. I would assume it's a, it's a pretty, maybe a not, it's a, it's a non zero part of your, economy when people are driving through on their way somewhere else or, or just vacationing in, in Bonduray County, like you were saying, going to property they might own. Yeah, it's a really, something we should definitely follow up on. We are going to be running up against our 20 25 minute break soon, but I want to know, what's your favorite story you've written since you started your Murrow Fellowship? Ooh. Good one. I, let's see. Probably the story I wrote about after the executive orders came out from the Trump administration and that was the 28th and things were so up in the air and people were so confused. Our local homeless youth non profit they're, they were locked out of their pay account. This is the federal funding, please. The federal funding, excuse me. Yes. They were locked out of their account, the way they pay their bills, their utilities, everything. That eventually was restored, but for the first 24 hours there, they were just in absolute stalemate. They couldn't do anything. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. And. Homelessness is, obviously, I think you guys, there's more obvious examples of it in a bigger city, a bigger municipality, but because we don't see it as well in rural areas, there's a tendency to think that it's not really a problem. So, that, that was, I felt, an important story. To write for someone to write and I'm I'm glad the way it came together And I was very thankful to the staff at yes youth emergency services that were so open and so Frank about what they were dealing with and at the end of the day what their mission was and how dedicated they were to it So it was a shame It was such a serious issue because there were so many good headline puns we could have used And it did not feel appropriate to use any of them. What were some of them? Just one or two. Yes told no by the Trump administration. Oh, because the organization is called Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah. Just, it's, yeah. No jokes. No jokes about very serious issues. Yeah. alright, so this part of the episode, we're going to Aaron's gonna catch me up on just a smattering of things we can think of off the top of our head that that I haven't been around for the last couple weeks, or I've been tangential to, so. I've been doing a lot of reporting and not a lot of writing, which is not ideal, but it's great for having podcast content. And it does happen sometimes, so, yeah, we're, uh, it's one of the nice things about being a digital paper Sophia you guys have a weekly deadline and advertisers to, toodle around. Yeah. Your toodling is like most people's breakneck speed, though, Sellers, so I'm not super worried about you. So, let's start with, there was, in January, a man was arrested outside of city council. This is a story we're actively working on. And we're trying to figure out, again, back from, from that harm reduction lens, it's is this a story we actually want to tell? Is this a story just about one person who had an episode and, and the way he was treated? Or does this tell us something more systemic? Or is, does it shine a light on something? And so it's something we're actively trying to figure out, which is one of the reasons we're not going to even mention the person's name when we chat about it today. But you did get some data that's, it's is this preliminary data or is this final data? This is final data. So just a little backstory and I want to apologize because when this happened I made some jokes on Twitter. I didn't think it was going to turn into a serious thing. I like live tweet, right? So yeah, I'm just typing away whenever something happens in council and it was the last meeting in January. I saw a man in the front row was like talking pretty loudly during the land acknowledgement that they do at the top of the meeting. So the meeting just kicks off, somebody's again, somewhere between talking loudly and yelling. And I look over as I'm like, writing on my computer, and I notice that he's taken layers off. Like he's, he's taken off his, his sweater, and at some point his pants get unbuttoned and unzipped, and There was a security guard over there talking to him, telling him that he had to be quiet or go hang out in the Chase Gallery, which is an area right outside of Council Chambers, where if you want to move around, or if you're a reporter who needs to take a phone call, or if you just want to be noisy, you Overflow for Council Chambers. Yeah, and they like have You know, you can still see what's going on through the glass, and they've got speakers so you can hear where they're at in the meeting and what's going on, but you don't have to be so quiet. So the security guard was trying to get him to go to that, and I couldn't tell if he was trying to show the security guard that he didn't have any weapons it almost looked like he was trying to, be like, oh, I don't have anything on me, yeah. Somebody else thought that it was just really warm in there, and he was getting rid of his layers, and was trying to re talk. But his pants were unbuttoned and unzipped. He was sitting right next to one of the council member's legislative aides, who was a young woman, and right in front of another council member's or no, same council member's wife. So, people were a little uncomfortable, but a council staffer Managed to talk to him, de escalate the situation, get him to go hang out in the gallery, and just wait for his turn to talk. And I thought that that was all it was going to be. And the meeting ended with this man getting not just arrested, but six cops put him into one of those little burritos and carried him out of the building. And he is still in jail a month and a week or so later. Almost six weeks later, right? Almost six weeks later. And on the body cam footage, the security guard asked for him to be trespassed for life. And so I am working on a story of just like How did we get here? Because almost every city council meeting I go to, there are people breaking the rules. Sometimes, it is the same person, every meeting, yelling out of turn, or, saying things loudly under his breath, or harassing people in the gallery. And he's even been on record in a local court case as having threatened a staff member at city council. And this guy gets to come every week with no issues. They let him break the rules pretty constantly. He just gets a warning to stop for the day and he still gets to come to council. And another man who is unhoused shows up within the first ten minutes of the meeting started. He's booted to the chase gallery and in another half hour he is being dragged out of the building by six police officers. One. And that, I think, the way you framed it around what, what, what, how the the Overton window of civil discourse shifts based on people's perceptions of Who you are. and whether you're just angry, or maybe you're mentally unwell, or you might be on drugs, or something like that. And, and that's, that's something I definitely want us to think about and talk about. The other thing that I think is fascinating to me, and this is, let me call back to former Sheriff Ozzy Konezovich, who's no fan of range given that he used to kick us out of Take us out of press conferences and stuff but even he would say things frequently the Spokane County Jail is the second largest mental health facility in Washington State in terms of the number of people who get, warehoused there during, either drug related or, or other, bouts of mental illness obviously in a negative way, and, and once again, I find, it's just, And again, if you're indigent, you're just gonna stay, if you can't make bail, regardless of, what you've been charged with, you're more likely to stay in the jail. So now, This person who's, and, and, the sheriff was pretty transparent about how hard it is, and we've written about this in the past, how hard it is to get people on their meds when they're in jail. It's obviously a stressful situation for anybody, so it can exacerbate existing mental illness or episodes. And and now here we are with this, this dude who, may or may not have been In, in your characterization, not, not disrupting things much more than other folks in, who are, frequent flyers at the city council, and now he's been in jail for six weeks, right? So. Yeah. Probably disconnected from meds and, and other things that, who knows what happens next. Yeah. And I do think that, I have to imagine, for the council members, there's a difference between a known quantity and an unknown quantity. For the person I'm thinking of, that breaks the rules almost every night. This, they've seen him for years, they know what level he's gonna go to, what to expect. And with this guy, they didn't. But, I mean It is one of those things where the people that council maybe arguably needs to hear from the most are the people who are experiencing mental health crises, are the people who are experiencing being unhoused, the people at the center of these issues that they're voting about every night. And the council council staff met this gentleman. at the Spokane Homeless Connect event. It was the very first time the city council had had a table at this event. And basically, it's like a large room. There's a bunch of tables of resources. And if you are unhoused or low income, you can show up and you can get connected to a lot of things at once. So there are people there that will help you replace your ID. People there who will help you figure out do I qualify for food stamps? How do I get signed up for this? Or If there's a barrier, housing vouchers, if they're around get you signed up for a library card so that you can use the internet and maybe apply for jobs or read books, basically just figuring out, trying to get everybody in the room to address any possible gaps and making it just like an open welcoming space for people in crisis or on the streets to just come in, get everything done at once and not have to try to track down a bunch of things. Council had a table there and I've been told by a council staffer on the record that they met this man who ended up getting arrested and he told them like oh I have some things I want to share about my experience and you know he was pretty amped up they said his general demeanor like both times they encountered him was you know a little frenetic a little keyed up and it got worse when he saw cops. He seemed to have an aversion to people in uniform that kind of got him a little riled, but she helped him get connected to services. She said he told her he went to the library booth to get a library card so that he could come in and use the library computers so that he could sign up for a time to speak at council because you have to sign up to get on the list to testify and they'll help you do that at the meeting. But if you want to guarantee that you've spot, you can, you can do it. ahead of time, and he had gone through like all of these hoops to get signed up so that he could speak. And, one of the things you just kept hearing, I listened to the whole body cam footage of the arrest, and he repeats it multiple times No, I'm not going with you, I'm signed up, I have to speak I'm signed up. He really wanted to stick around and share, and I still don't know what it is that he wanted to share, what it was that he wanted to say. Yeah. But he was like invited by council staff to come down there and talk and share his experience and it wasn't for a couple of reasons like it His own behavior and also that the setup is, maybe unfriendly in some ways or not set up for people in distress. Even though that, that's the group of people that counsel should be hearing from as they make these policy decisions that are going to impact this guy. Well, and even it's just another reminder to the like, regardless of what sort of good intentions leadership can have in situations like this, you have to sort of like, make sure that is like trickles down to various levels of bureaucracy, whether that's aides, which who seemed like they did try to get this guy hooked up and able to talk. But then all the way down to, in this case, cops and stuff as well and security or the secure contracted security guards who work there. And I think all of the council members probably have different opinions about how this should have gone down if it happened correctly, if it didn't happen correctly. And some of the staff members have thoughts, too, about well, how do we help in the future? Maybe, he seemed to think he needed to be in the chambers in order to speak when it was his turn, and that was maybe not an environment. Like, all of the people around, all of the security guards, the formalness, where you have to be like, quiet. And if it would have been communicated that he could hang out in the gallery, and then just come in when it's his turn, like maybe things, there's all of these little things where, you know, maybe if it would have gone differently, he wouldn't be sitting in jail right now, and I don't want to say that, because again he was, his pants were halfway off, and he was yelling over the land acknowledgement, but It had been deescalated. It had been deescalated and then the cops got called. Like he was just chilling in the gallery eating snacks, and then the cops show up. So, there's definitely some I've been working on reporting this. I've watched a lot of body cam footage, listened to the 911 calls, and had my own experience of being there that night. And I'm starting to just now talk to staff and council members. But, sorry, there was a lot of backstory to talk about some stats that got presented on Monday at their, I think it was the Public Health and Safety Committee, which they do every once a month. And the Chief of Police and the Fire Chief both come down and they present some key statistics from their departments. Some of these they choose, some council has requested to please share information about this. And I noticed that for 2025 calls to the behavioral health unit, which is the sort of small unit in the police force that is like a co response unit where they pair a police officer with a. Somebody from Frontier Behavioral Health, and they go out on calls for mental health crisis and calls for overdoses. The, the, the sort of situation that would have been perfect for this City Council situation. Yes. Except they, they don't go out after 6, right, currently? Yeah, so you're scooping me here, but the person on the 911 call who called the cops specifically requested the Behavioral Health Unit. They specifically said I think this man, is in crisis. It might be related to drugs. It might not be. But I think the most appropriate response here would be the behavioral health or the behavioral, yeah, behavioral health unit. And the dispatcher did not say that that would not be available, but apparently they are now not working after 6 p. m. So. Which is another interesting part that is maybe a systems failure because somebody I talked to was talking about sundowning and how the most common times for people to be in mental health crises are when it starts to get dark, so usually after 6 p. m. Mental health crisis 9 1 1 calls are up 76% in 2025. In the first three months alone, we have had 1,101 mental health crisis calls to the Spokane Police dispatch. And drug calls are only up 7%. And so I wanted to share this set of statistics. It doesn't, it doesn't tell the whole story, right? And these are just raw numbers. But I do think there's this perception that everything wrong in our community is about drugs. It's fentanyl, it's ruining our city. Well, and looking at these stats, it's actually, that looks like it's a 7 percent increase over a five year average, so starting back in 2020. But it actually, it's, calls are way, way down from the same time. The same three month period from 2024. So there's 730 drug calls in 2024. There've only, there've been less than 500 so far. So I find that really, really interesting as well. Yeah. And I don't know, I think I don't know how much of a salient point I have to make about these stats, but it is something that I've been thinking about as. A lot of times I hear at council like we just need to arrest more people, we need to stop the criminality, we need to stop letting people break laws. And what we're seeing in the calls is that the, the real heart of the issue is a mental health crisis. Not, not drug use. Not drug use, which, drug use may be involved in the mental health crisis. Sure. Again, these are just raw numbers. I don't know. But it looks like it's It's based on how they come in to the center. Into the center. So you might think it's a drug thing and it's actually a mental health thing or vice versa. And it's drugs or vice versa, yeah. But, it seems like for a large portion of these calls, the most appropriate response is not jail. Well, that's the thing about the Behavioral Health Unit is like they've got a trained mental health person with them, so that's And the goal is to keep people out of jail and out of the hospital unless those are absolutely the most appropriate place for the person. So de escalation, well, it's, Spokane Police Department's default tactic is supposed to be de escalation, but this is like a unit that's like specially trained in additional sort of de escalation around mental health stuff and then yeah, to your point, they're, The first call is ideally not to the county jail, it's, it's some other diversionary program or something like that. Right, I went on a ride along with them and the The police half of the duo handled a lot of the interactions. I went when it was Richie Plunkett, who's pretty well known in Spokane. He's, has some mental health training himself. Everybody on the streets knew him, trusted him, would come up to him and talk to him. And then the Frontier Behavioral Health person partnered with Richie. would then go through this log of resources okay, I've got this person in crisis, can I, how many beds are available at the sobering center? How many beds are available at this shelter that might be a good fit for them? Do I know what shelter would be a good fit? Running through those resources in a way that isn't just oh, you're breaking the law, we're going to jail, or, oh, you overdosed, we're going to the hospital. It was a lot more holistic. And but we only have I want to say there's six or seven officers that are part of the behavioral health unit. And it's a pretty small thing comparatively to the rest of the force. And so that option might not always be available. They might be out on one call when another one comes in. They might not work past six. We're balancing a lot of officers schedules. So it's just complicated. Sophia, how have you? Like mental health crises and things like that. How does that get responded to in Ponderay County or the other places you've reported? And have you noticed a shift in the last I mean, since the pandemic or, or whatever, I think there was definitely a shift during the pandemic. I imagine a lot of municipalities and counties saw that, but we did get an increase in calls for behavioral health services. Unfortunately. Our Pondera County Counseling Services isn't a place you can go to just if you're looking for a counselor or a therapist. And like a lot of behavioral health, they, Turnover is, is hard for them. They've got, and I don't mean to disparage them because they've got great staff there who work very hard and they know the community very well. These are high stress jobs that don't always pay a lot of money. Oh yes, especially not in smaller counties. Right. So the the incentive to, if you get an opportunity to go to a bigger county where you can make more money, the incentive is high and I don't blame anybody for taking that opportunity. I know that Lately, I can't really say how things are shifting. That would be another good follow up story for us to do in terms of how that's looking from a rural area. But I do think that the demand for services is high. It has been for a while. Our sheriff department works very hard. Hand in hand with behavioral health, I feel like they're trying, but it's a huge swatch of county. It's very long, and there's only, only so, so many. deputies in a day, so to speak. So it's it's hard to cover. It's hard to get those services especially to north county. Once upon a time many many years ago There was a bus that ran actually all the way from the north county to spokane. I'm not sure when that went away Was that like sponsored by the kalispell tribe? Or something like that. It might have been. I think it might have been. It might have been. Or they even had a little bus service for their clinic. I wonder if that, if it was the same thing, because I used to also drive by my high school. Oh, did they? Yeah. Oh. Like on the, it would just come down highway two on the way to Spokane, yeah. I know we still have a bus that runs from Newport to Spokane, but I think the one for the North County went away a long time ago, which is very unfortunate because anyone up there who does need. Behavioral health is going to have to, we've talked about this before, they have an hour commute one way to Newport, basically from from the north end of the county. Yeah, whether they want to go to Newport or whether they want to go over the hill to Colville. It's either way. It's about an hour. So I think I think we're facing a lot of the same things that Spokane is, of course, but It's just definitely more, you see it more here and I'm not telling you guys anything you don't know. It's a lot to deal with, whereas I think in rural areas, again, it's easier to act like it's not there because you just can't see it as much because Everybody is so spread out. Yeah, and I grew up in a rural area and homelessness just looked less, it looked different. Not just like invisible, but it looked like, camping on public lands repeatedly. Or, yeah, like a camper that you're constantly having to move around because you don't, have the money for a hookup at XYZ spot. Right. Yeah, so it just seemed very different than than what it's like to be homeless in a city. Yeah, exactly Speaking of being homeless in a city. Yeah, if you heard all of that and thought oh, no, they're not arresting people We haven't made homelessness a crime. We're just treating it like a mental illness I have and the voters the voters voted to make it a crime. So yeah promises kept we are Arresting slash giving citations to way more people in 2025 than unhoused people specifically. And I mean, I'm looking at these charts that the police presented. So when we're, when we're calculating how. Homelessness is criminalized. We're looking at three different statistics for arrests based on three different types of law. So, pedestrian interference. Yes, and that means basically Are you on the sidewalk and in the way of a pedestrian? That could be a crime. But not waiting for the new iPhone in front of the Apple Store. It would be something else, probably. Yeah this is usually a crime that is I want to say 99 percent of the time enforced against somebody that is unhoused. I'm just pulling that number out of my head, but like even the cops and the council call these sort of like crimes associated with homelessness. There's a specific phrase they use. It's sort of like if you're unhoused, it's really hard to just not commit these crimes. And these, it's, we should say that this is not. us deciding these were the things we're going to talk about. This is how they look at statistics around homelessness and interactions with cops, right? Yeah. And so we've got, yeah, pedestrian interference, unlawful camping And then the one that's gotten a lot of press is sit and lie, which kind of tells you where you can sit and lie, at what hours, where you can't, when that becomes a crime. But apparently that used to be like the favored choice. tool of past administrations, and it's gone a little bit out of fashion. Under Mayor Brown pedestrian interference citations are way, way, way up. And As opposed to sit and lie. And sit and lie was so, I think the word Chief Hall used was negligible, that he didn't even include a slide of About sit and lie. About sit and lie. Because They'd only enforced it, I think, once in the entire month of February, as opposed to 74 enforcements of pedestrian interference in February. And is, is the green line, is that this year? Green line is 2025, the dark blue is 2024, and the light blue is 2023. So you're seeing two different, we're talking about two different mayoral administrations here. 2023, we were under conservative Mayor Nadine Woodward. 2024, it switches to Brown, Mayor Lisa Brown, who is ostensibly a Democrat. You might think, a lot of the campaign messaging was, Brown is soft on crime. Brown won't arrest homeless people. Brown wants to put safe parking lots for people to sleep in, in the backyard of your business. These are all like, I'm pulling these off of billboards that we're all over. Well, there was a press, there was a press conference in it. Not in my lot, Lisa. Yeah, exactly. But it looks like so, from Woodward's last year in office in January, 18 people were arrested for pedestrian interference or cited or cited last year. During Brown's first year, it was 27, and then just last, a couple months ago, it was 117. So a 4x plus, more than, more than 4x jump from Woodward, or from Brown's first year to her second, and an even bigger jump from, from Woodward's final year. I'll also say that SitLie was create, I think it was, in 2015 or 2016 under the Condon administration, but it was, it was a progressive council that passed it. Ben Stuckert former council president of that first that first, majority progressive council Was one of the proponents of that and pushed it through and the at the time a lot of I would say relatively Progressive like retail shop owners downtown were also even in favor of it because they said things like well We need something to do like we need some sort of mechanism of control for when people get out of hand or if they can't be roused at all and So it's fascinating that It's not even really being used in pedestrian interference, which has probably always been on the books as a law. For, yeah. Has now become the sort of enforcement mechanism of choice. So maybe, maybe sit lie is just a little, maybe even irrelevant now. Yeah, I think for one, it's the, the burden of proof seems to be easier. And sit and lie came with conditions oh, you can only enforce it in this area under these hours. It was like downtown. Downtown. Where with pedestrian interference, I want to say that's. I mean, I know it's at all times, and I want to say it's citywide. But also, the big thing that happened here is the Grants Pass Supreme Court case. So, Cities were maybe not enforcing these laws that are intrinsically tied to homelessness. That's the phrase that I've heard counsel. Intrinsically tied to homelessness. Because it could be considered cruel and unusual punishment to arrest somebody for, sitting in their unlawful camping if there's not shelter beds available. The Supreme Court found that, oh, that's not the case, so now you don't have to check for shelter beds, and you can just, arrest people for being homeless, basically, or for sleeping in public, or, being on the sidewalk. Anyways, the reason we brought this up, and I'm trying to wrap this up quickly because we we're close to the end here. We're, we're yappers. There is going to be a slate of new policies coming up for a vote in a couple of weeks. There was these big community round tables where they were trying to gather people with lived experience, service providers and folks from the business community to sit together and talk about. Homelessness in the city and what we need to do about it. And some recommendations emerged from these roundtables that now council has drafted ordinances based on the findings from these roundtables and they're going to vote on these ordinances. I don't know that they're all going to pass. Some of them are pretty controversial. They all tend to lean relatively conservative with the exception of one progressive ordinance called ban the address. That is a bipartisan collaboration, I think between Lily Navarrete, Paul Dillon and Michael Cathcart, which would make it illegal for employers to discriminate against people applying without a permanent address. Yeah. A lot of times people are looking for jobs, they have to put down an address, so put down the address of a shelter or maybe a library like the one we're sitting in or, or some other and might get rejected because of that. Right. So that's something that I'm keeping an eye on in the next couple of weeks. I'm going to continue reporting some of this homelessness stuff we talked about. And one thing we didn't even touch is evictions are also calls for eviction are up 50 percent so it's really a holistic crisis we're talking about here. Right. And, on that note, Well, so what are you working on, Sophia? Thanks for joining us for this first time. You have 30 seconds to tell us what you're working on. What can our readers expect from you in the next couple weeks? Yeah, maybe just one thing. What's the next thing you're working on for Andrew? Okay, coming up, we have a story about rural reproductive healthcare and how Idaho's very strict abortion laws have affected women's access to OBGYN and comprehensive care during their pregnancies, so please stay tuned for that. Awesome. All right. Free Range is a weekly news and public affairs program presented by Range Media and produced by Range Media and KYRS Community Radio. Sophia, Aaron, have a great week, everyone. Thank you guys for joining us and see you next week.