Investigative Reporter John Taft

4-23-01

Grants Pass, Or --The following article is from a campaign talk Dave Daniel gave before the Josephine County Taxpayers Association on October 15, 1998. Notice what the sheriff promised in 1998 before he was elected sheriff. Compare this to what he is saying now, in 2001. Did Daniel lie to wrest the office of sheriff from his opponent, Dan Calvert, the incumbent sheriff?

For the next fiscal year (2001-2002) Daniel has a budget of nearly $9 million. He is now asking for an additional $850,000. Daniel appears to have misled the voters of Josephine County and has taken the office of Sheriff from a better-qualified man. District Attorney Tim Thompson said in a letter to the editor prior to the 1998 election, that Daniel wasn’t qualified to be sheriff.

Read the following statements Daniel made at the JCTA meeting and you decide if Tim Thompson was right. If Thompson was right then Daniel must be held accountable.

Note grammatical errors in word usage and mispronounced words such as gonna are not typos but as Daniel spoke the words in his campaign speech.

"The primary duty of any law enforcement agency is to protect and serve the public. The primary unit of the law enforcement agency that does that is its uniform patrol division. These are the men and women out there answering your calls for service. Investigating your burglaries, investigating your thefts. When you have a cut like the sheriff took in 1995 of that uniformed partrol division, you have to sit down and figure out how can I best continue to serve the people of the county with what we have left? Well, after the layoffs in 1995 there was only nine patrol deputies left.

And the sheriff will tell you nine patrol deputies, how are we gonna get out and continue to respond to calls for service with nine patrol deputies? Can’t do it. So he severely restricted calls for service to only life threatening emergency calls. Well, that wasn’t the full story. Let me tell you the full story, because I was there. After the layoffs there’s four patrol officers left, four patrol sergeants, I’m sorry, left. There’s certified police officers none of’em laid off. Why weren’t they told to get out and start answering calls for service? There’s six detectives left after the lay offs all certified police officers, none of them laid off. Why weren’t they told to get in uniform, get out and let’s start answering calls for service?

If it means you have to reorganize your department to do that, then you reorganize it. If it means you have to put on a uniform and start answering calls, then that’s what you do. It has to be done."

"For the last three years what we have heard from the sheriff’sdepartment is I can’t respond to your burglary because we don’t have the funds. You’ve heard that I can’t answer your telephone calls because we don’t have the personnel. We can’t come out and take your stolen car report; it’s beyond available resources.

"The second goal I expect to accomplish immediately is I’m going to eliminate the automated telephone answering system we have down here. A system like that may be great in Los Angeles, they might need it there, but you don’t need it in Josephine County.

When you call the sheriff’s department you need to talk to a real person not a machine. And it should have been done six years ago. I would like to talk about getting that wall down they now have up. How many of you walked into the sheriff’s department and been met by a big glass wall? Yeah, it’s the same with the phone system, you’re cutting yourselves off from the sheriff’s department. You’re putting up a wall, the same wall they’re putting up between the citizens and the members of the sheriff’s department and you’re doing the same thing with the phones.