A school shooting might have occurred at Port Townsend High School if it weren’t for the school’s police officer.
That was one of the reasons why PTHS principal Carrie Ehrhardt urged City Council to keep a School Resource Officer stationed with her students and teachers. In a letter to be considered at tonight’s meeting of Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Public Safety and Law Enforcement, Ehrhardt pushed back on suggestions to end the SRO program. Sharp questioning of the Police Chief by members of the committee at an earlier meeting, and the removal of police from other school districts as a “reform” or “reimagining” of law enforcement have prompted fears that Port Townsend may end its successful police in schools program that has been in place, except for 4 years during the last recession, since Ehrhardt arrived as a teacher in 2001.
“There is a natural link between safer schools and safer communities,” Erhardt told council. When the SRO program was discontinued from 2006 to 2010, “our community saw a significant increase in crimes being committed by teenagers.”
In 2015, the current SRO, Officer Jeremy Vergin, was able to obtain the police records of a student who had enrolled in PTHS. They showed he had such a violent history that the school put him on a home based program and did not permit him on campus. Unhappy with this arrangement, the family moved. This student committed the North Thurston High School shooting a month later. It took an extremely brave and fast thinking teacher to tackle the student as he was firing a .357 pistol.
A year later, a teacher with severe mental health issues returned to school and his former classroom filled with students. Officer Vergin was able to diffuse the situation quickly because he was on campus. “If not for Officer Vergin,” Erhardt asks, “what would have happened during the additional minutes waiting for law enforcement to arrive?”
“In closing,” wrote Ehrhardt, “my hope of the committee is that you make decisions based on the community we live in, and want we want for the citizens and youth of Port Townsend, instead of reacting to emotions based on circumstances in other cities, that do not represent PT.”
Confess that you are racists. Take out a newspaper ad to proclaim your guilt, demanded Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County of the Sheriff and Port Townsend Police Chief.
Port Townsend Free Press has obtained emails between Cameron Jones, who has identified himself as an organizer of Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County, and Jefferson County Sheriff Joe Nole and Port Townsend Acting Police Chief Troy Surber. Purporting to represent BLM Jeffco, Jones made these demands in a July 10, 2020 email. In addition to a public confession of racism, he demanded that the public statement from the Sheriff and Police Chief “acknowledges BLMJC’s intentions” and “pledged to work with the community and BLMJC on realizing the intentions stated in our letter.”
One of those “intentions” was disarming police officers and deputies.
Much of the list of “Intentions” was vaporous stuff like agreeing that “Black lives matter.” Nobody disagrees with that unassailable statement, but then you get pulled into endorsing the political agenda of Black Lives Matter, Inc. and all that entails.
Sheriff Nole responded in general terms. “I am in total agreement with the Values of BLMJC,” he wrote to Jones on July 17. He was also in agreement with most of the items on their “Current List of Intentions, i.e., Invest in Community, Economic Justice, Protection of the First Amendment Rights and Protesters, and End White Supremacy and the War on Black People.” Who is not for investing in our community and protecting First Amendment rights? Who’s not against a war on Black people–if it exists? Who’s not against White supremacy–the dumb idea that White people are superior to everyone else by virtue of nothing more than skin color?
Sheriff Nole drew the line at agreeing with the demand to disarm the police and other matters controlled by union contracts and civil service rules.
And he did not agree to publicly flagellate himself and his deputies by confessing the sin of personal and institutional racism in a newspaper ad.
The demand for public humiliation was an escalation in Jones’ demands. Writing on behalf of himself, fellow BLM Jeffco organizer Sean Vinson and the group as a whole, Jones had cancelled a conciliatory Zoom meeting between BLM Jeffco and the Sheriff, Police Chief, County Commissioners Greg Brotherton and Kate Dean, Port Townsend City Councilor Ariel Speser and others and upped his demands.
I have not found any response from PT Acting Police Chief Troy Surber to Jones’ demand in the documents made available to me by the City of Port Townsend and Jefferson County. The cancelled Zoom meeting was not rescheduled. Neither the Sheriff nor Police Chief have issued the public confession demanded by Jones.
Who is Cameron Jones? Who is Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County?
Jones fired back at Sheriff Nole in a condescending and accusatory email a week after Nole did not accede to all of Jones’ demands. He rejected every effort at conciliation unless Nole issued “a direct and PUBLIC apology.” He accused Nole’s deputies of having within them “insidious behavioral mechanisms” acquired during prior military service. (Jones says he served in the military at Guantanamo Bay.) No matter what Nole did, Jones wrote, nothing mattered until Nole published an apology for his own and his department’s racism.
“Right now, since this basic first step seems so problematic, how can you ever imagine we’d have any confidence in your ability as a leader to create a culture within law enforcement that leads to substantial and meaningful policy and doctrinal change?” were Jone’s parting words.
Nole had agreed as part of his conciliatory efforts to participate in the KPTZ radio program, “The Reckoning,” that was broadcast a few weeks later. We wrote about that travesty in “Reckoning with the Reckoning.” Nole endured Jones throwing at him wild, unsupported accusations such as Nole permitting White supremacy and vigilante groups to operate in the county, five Black men being lynched, and Nole imprisoning 30% of Jefferson County’s Black residents. Nole handled the attacks with his usual courteous aplomb. Anyone who has interacted with him knows he is a patient, kind man. He was being humiliated, but he did not respond in kind, a code of conduct his own deputies have demonstrated to the people of this county over the years.
Nole could have, but did not object to being beseiged by a man who was arrested in March for trying to break into an occupied home in Port Townsend, and has had frequent problems resulting from substance abuse that have led to police involvement. We wrote about those incidents in our August 25 report, “Black Lives Matter Leaders Generated Police Calls for Help, Investigations and Arrests.” That report was limited to incidents within the boundaries of Port Townsend. Cameron Jones is the individual in that report who was arrested for attempted burglary, who did not understand it was wrong to break into someone else’s home, who lied to and verbally assaulted police officers and who insisted he could not be questioned unless police his brought parents to the police station (Mr. Jones is more than 30 years old). Mr. Jones is the individual in that report who was stopped repeatedly, but not arrested, for a variety of traffic violations that placed his own safety at risk. He was the individual whose conduct outside the Bishop Hotel led to an employee calling police. He was the individual who crashed head first into the closed Fort Worden gate, lied about his identity and was obviously biking while intoxicated.
We have just received records from Jefferson County about contacts between leaders of BLM Jeffco and law enforcement occurring outside Port Townsend. Our request to Clallam County is still pending.
Jefferson County records reveal numerous contacts going back years. They document an automobile theft followed by a high speed chase where the fleeing felon hit a horse, threats and assault, malicious mischief, driving multiple times on a suspended license, warnings about dangerous driving, arrest on warrants, and other matters.
But not one complaint that law enforcement conduct had anything to do with race. We asked for all complaints for anything close to racist conduct going back a decade. There are none, particularly none from any of the current Black Lives Matter leadership that has had many interactions with deputies.
Why no complaints of deputies mistreating anyone because of their race? Because it appears that, while doing their job to enforce the law, deputies also genuinely cared about people struggling with considerable problems and challenges. They searched for a BLM Jeffco leader who went missing after an anger management session. They made a mental health welfare check and searched for troubled runaway teen who later became a BLM leader. They cared when they found someone who became a BLM Jeffco leader unresponsive under the guard rail of the Highway 104 overpass above Center Road.
In a story published by the Leader, the BLM Jeffco leader found under that guard rail said he would not want to encounter Deputy Sheriff Andy Pernsteiner out of fear that he would be mistreated because of his race. It was Deputy Sheriff Andy Pernsteiner who saved that BLM leader from possibly dying of exposure on a cold, wet February night.
Sheriff Nole has declined a personal and departmental public confession of racism with good reason. It would not be true.
You’re not going to die. Seriously, the chances of dying from COVID-19 are remote and not much worse than the flu.
On September 10, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its updated “Infection Fatality Ratio.” It calculates the survival rate based on all they’ve learned from the onset of the COVID crisis. The numbers likely won’t matter to those people driving around with windows up, gloves on in their own car, peering over their mask at the world. I’ve concluded that their get up is some kind of body armor for people with problems that will never respond to even the most effective COVID vaccine.
But for the rest of us, the CDC’s conclusions are terrific news.
You’re not going to die. The chance of COVID felling you falls in the category of those extreme scenarios like a brick falling on your head as you walk through a city. It may happen. It has happened. But the chances of it happening are so minimal we don’t shut our cities down the way the COVID panic and government orders have.
The CDC’s lead-up to its conclusions rolls out various scenarios, parameters and qualifications. Go ahead and take the time to read the full report for a deeper understanding. Thankfully, they reduce the verbiage to a “current best estimate.” Here’s their table. We’ll concentrate on the column entitled “Scenario 5: Current Best Estimate.”
Now we’ll do the math for you:
If you are no older than nineteen years of age and you become infected with the virus, you have a 99.97% chance of surviving.
If you are twenty to forty-nine years of age, you have a 99.98% chance of surviving a COVID infection.
If your are fifty to sixty-nine years of age, your chance of surviving is 99.95%.
And, even at 70 years and older, your chance of surviving a bout of the latest novel Chinese virus is 94.6%.
Whew. Those odds should make any sensible person feel a whole better than they do after watching the always breathless evening news.
Now, that is not to say we shouldn’t continue to be responsible and compassionate. For every 100 of the most elderly senior citizens who get the virus, about 5 of them may die. That is a serious stat.
The rest of the CDC’s table shows the need for continued precautions to protect our most vulnerable population.
The “Current Best Estimate” column is again to the far right. Forty percent of people infected may suffer no symptoms, such as coughing, shortness of breath, blue lips, confusion and fever. But the infectiousness of asymptomatic people is very high and the percentage of transmissions occurring prior to the onset of those symptoms also can’t be ignored.
Those of us who pass for “younger” in Port Townsend need to be careful. Nobody wants to get the virus, and we don’t want to pass it to our most senior citizens. Their struggle will be much more difficult than what we can expect, especially those who have serious other health conditions. It is those already sick elderly who are the most at risk.
But let’s cheer up. This is not the Black Death or the Spanish Flu of WWI. Two hundred thousand Americans’ deaths are considered COVID deaths, but we know that COVID itself accounts for only a tiny number of those fatalities (something like 6%). Those lives ended because COVID interacted with obesity, renal failure, chronic respiratory diseases, heart disease and compromised immune systems. But those lives were precious lives and we must grieve and take precautions so no one else leaves us sooner than they otherwise would, without regard to how close they may already be to death’s door.
You’re not going to die from COVID. Nobody around you will likely die, either. But someone might. It doesn’t make sense to continue to destroy healthy lives, jobs, businesses and communities to protect against such remote risks. We don’t have those imaginary bricks raining out of the sky. There is no justification for Jay Inslee’s ever-changing, micro-managing, playing-favorites, always arbitrary and irrational dictates that have been a cure worse than the disease. The vulnerable elderly should be the ones to take the most energetic precautions and the rest of us should resume normal life in every aspect, while demonstrating our care for those few at risk of a rare fatal encounter with the COVID virus.
Families’ ability to mourn and remember, to honor and celebrate lost lives is being crippled by the Governor’s arbitrary rules on funerals.
Funerals of more than 30 attendees, regardless of where they are held, inside or out, are prohibited.
You can assemble hundreds of people outdoors to rage and rant, but in the same space Inslee won’t let nearly as many people gather if their purpose is to mourn and remember.
Effective September 16, 2020, the Governor allowed funerals to resume. He now allows indoor and outdoor funeral services but attendance must not exceed 30 people or 25% of maximum building capacity, whichever is less.
Inslee had previously prohibited all funerals. Unlike buying pot–which was never restricted– he had declared that mourning death and celebrating life was a non-essential activity. You could hire gravediggers to slip the wife of fifty years marriage into the ground, but you and your family could not be there to weep. In cold, indifferent words Inslee restricted cemetery services to “delivery only.”
Even the spreading of ashes with others around was illegal for the past six months.
Inslee has graciously allowed us to begin to mourn our dead again in public. But like other exercises of what has become dictatorial power, this is another example of Inslee’s arbitrariness and irrational decrees.
Churches may hold indoor worship services of up to 50 people. But if the service is instead a funeral they must turn away everyone at the door starting with number 31.
Even if the funeral service is held outside in a huge open field with social distancing observed, Inslee’s order still limits the mourners to 30 in number.
If the church building is small and holds only eighty people, the maximum number of mourners for an outdoor service on church property would be less than the thirty that would be permitted if their building were larger. They are restricted to the lower number because Inslee’s order imposes a cap of 30 people or 25% of a building’s capacity, whichever is less.
Governor Inslee has had gatherings larger than that for his own media events.
Thousands of maskless people have gathered for protests in front of the Governor’s mansion. Throngs have spread on the lawn and steps around the State Capitol for hours and hours. That was okay.
Everyday you can find a lot more than 30 people in the aisles and lines at Costco, and that’s okay, too.
But more than 30 people gathered for an hour when their purpose is mourning, prayer and expressions of love is prohibited. The COVID virus doesn’t distinguish between people’s intentions or the content of their speech. Jay Inslee does.
It’s not a pandemic pandemic. This has not been the mother of all biological nightmares.
Right off the bat the projections of millions dead were regularly revised downward, though Joe Biden keeps saying things like 200 million Americans will be dead from COVID by the time he finishes a three minute speech.
But this isn’t about Mr. Biden or the symptoms of dementia. Anyone who can count and read the data reported by our own Washington Department of Health can see that what we’ve gone through the past nine months has been very serious, with tragedies, challenges and heroic efforts by medical professionals. But it falls short of what has traditionally been understood to be a viral pandemic.
Let’s go back to how the term was understood before the World Health Organization manipulated it as a trigger for lucrative pharmaceutical contracts during the 2009 Swine Flue outbreak. That is when the term started getting mushy because it had morphed from a strictly medical/scientific term into a bureaucratic and political lever for turning on gushers of money and turning off checks and balances on governmental power.
The term’s Greek components mean “of all people.” (pan and demos). This means that the outbreak is not isolated in one community, one nation, or one continent. It spreads everywhere. Further, “pandemic” had always carried with it a connotation of extreme, extraordinary severity in terms of infection, transmission and death.
According to a 2005 WebMD article, using the long-standing Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition, a pandemic means “occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally high proportion of the population.” It is to be distinguished from a seasonal flu epidemic which “may sicken millions, but those who die are typically a small number of the elderly, very young children, and people with weak immune systems. That’s not the case during the worst influenza pandemics.”
While it is inaccurate to say that COVID-19 is “just another flu,” what we’ve seen resembles the impact of just another but very severe flu.
Washington has a population in excess of 7.6 million. According to the latest Department of Health reports, 2,037 people who had a positive RT-PCR COVID 19 test result have died. That does not mean that it was the virus alone that killed them, or that they would not have died by other causes during this year. By now, we must certainly all be aware that almost everyone who tested positive for the virus and died also had substantial, chronic and sometimes life-threatening health conditions. The Department of Health has also recognized that it had included in its mortality numbers deaths due to homicide, suicide, or accident, and naturally occurring deaths unrelated to COVID-19.
The Department of Health counts as a COVID death anyone who passed away after testing positive and whose death certificate lists COVID “as a contributing factor.” I had unsuccessfully sought information on deaths counted as a COVID death for which COVID alone was the cause. The Department of Health and the Governor’s office did not answer my questions, even though I had been promised an answer. By their silence, I think it is fair to assume that there are no deaths in Washington for which COVID-19 was the cause of death.
In its “Death Category Report,” the Department of Health calculated that 89% of reported COVID deaths were “confirmed COVID” as a contributing factor death. That leaves 11% they can’t say with scientific certainty were caused by COVID as a contributing factor.
Suspected, but not confirmed COVID deaths accounted for about half of that 11%. These are deaths where the cause could be a natural death but the person had at one point tested positive. That brings up another bit of uncertainty. Even in the case of a “confirmed” COVID death it may be counted though the person’s positive test had occurred months before their death. There is no temporal cut-off beyond which a positive test is considered immaterial. The date of the test could be remote from the date of death, but it still goes on the books as a COVID death.
The DOH also includes in its death count those instances where the death certificate merely mentions COVID, but there is no record of a positive COIVD test result. A person could not have COVID at all, instead symptoms of another respiratory illness along with fever, and they are counted as a COVID death.
If we used the 89% DOH “confirmed” cases figure – where COIVD contributed but may not have caused death on its own – and apply that to the most recent DOH total death count, we would be on firm ground in concluding 1,813 deaths resulted from COVID as a contributing but not sole cause of death.
1,813 out of 7.6 million is .02385% of the state’s population.
Not Across All Demographics, and Not Everywhere
These deaths are not spread across all demographics. They are concentrated almost entirely among the elderly who are suffering from other maladies. But, unlike the flu, COVID has pretty much spared the young and young adults.
Those above age 60 account for 89% of all deaths. Those above age 80 account for 51%. Hospitalizations for those above age 60 account for 56% percent of all hospitalizations.
Younger people account for 44% of the hospitalizations, but they recovered with little loss of life. DOH data does not indicate length of hospital stays. Even in the case of a ninety-year old Jefferson County woman, her COVID hospitalization was a mere overnight for observation. She was released and recovered. So we don’t know from DOH stats how long the reported hospitalizations were.
Across the state, though the virus has been diagnosed in every county, is has been limited in terms of the severity of its impact and incidence of diagnosis to a handful of counties. King County alone counts for 33% of all hospitalizations and 37% of deaths. Snohomish County comes in at 11% of hospitalizations and just over 10% of deaths; Yakima at 11% of hospitalizations, 13% of deaths; Spokane at 6% of hospitalizations, 7% of deaths; and Pierce at 11% of hospitalization and 9% of deaths.
These are, excluding Yakima, the most populous counties. But they have about 60% of the state’s population versus 80% of all the COVID-categorized deaths, which is their share if one adds in all the fractions which were rounded in the preceding paragraph.
Of Washington’s 39 counties, 24 have experienced fewer than 10 deaths. Seven have yet to suffer a single death. Thirty-one counties have had fewer than 25 deaths attributed in some way to COVID over the past 9 months.
Add to this one consideration from beyond our state’s borders that shows COVID-19’s lethal impact is not “everywhere.” This image shows that COVID deaths, rather than being “everywhere,” were concentrated substantially in only two states, New York and New Jersey.
Those two states, as of August 12, 2020, had over 40% of the nation’s COVID deaths, though they rank 4th and 11th in terms of population. New Jersey had a death rate of 1,797.5 deaths per 1 million population, with New York at 1,698 deaths per 1 million of population, versus the national median for states of 308.2 deaths per million population. Washington’s death rate was 226 per 1 million of population. The staggering numbers for New Jersey and New York have several explanations, from mismanagement to gross, perhaps criminal negligence in returning elderly COVID patients to nursing homes where they spread the virus in close quarters to other highly vulnerable senior citizens. The U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division is investigating.
Worse than a Bad Flu, But Not a Pandemic, Either
Remember what was said above, a pandemic is far worse than a seasonal flu epidemic which “may sicken millions, but those who die are typically a small number of the elderly, very young children, and people with weak immune systems. That’s not the case during the worst influenza pandemics.”
COVID has not in Washington killed anyone under age 20, and only 1% of the deaths are among people under age 40. Its impact has been limited to the quite elderly and those who were already very sick with compromised immune systems. Obesity, defined as a BMI greater than 30, always a killer under its own power, has been found in 40% of all COVID related deaths.
The lethality of this novel virus is somewhat geographically limited and not spread evenly across the landscape.
This is thus not a “pandemic” in any traditional understanding of the word.
COVID 19 was never what is was cracked up to be. It never overwhelmed our hospital resources. (See our earlier report.) It fell–thank God–far, far short of the dire predictions used to justify the Governor’s lock down order. COVID is rapidly loosening its grip on Washington. The question remains when, if ever, Jay Inslee will loosen his grip on the lives of the people in this state.
A closing note that reinforces the conclusions drawn above, and also is a cause for hope and good cheer: Of the more than 10,000 hospital beds available statewide, as of September 19, only 266 were occupied by patients with “COVID-like” symptoms and statewide only 21 people were on respirators.
