Elected through Terror

Untitled Part 16

In order to continue my Rajneesh stories I need to put into perspective what the Wasco County Sheriff's Office, and particularly my, other responsibilities were in addition to having to deal with the Rajneesh.

When I ran for Office in the Spring of 1984 the Sheriff was still a bi-partisan position. I was a life-long Republican, my opponent was a Democrat. In my first term it became a non-partisan position by State Statute; that is the way it should be.

Neither of us was opposed in the primary so we would be running against each other in the Fall.

I received a campaign check, right after the election in May, from the Republican Committee of Wasco County. I held onto it for almost a month. I didn't call my campaign committee together for that time.

I was having second thoughts. Among them was the fact I was running against a man who was already in the office and was seeking re-election. I finally came to the conclusion – after discussion with other Christian's and prayer – that we needed a change, and the system was set up to ensure the people had a say in the office.

Changes needed to be done and I felt God was allowing me to be that person to do the changing. If not I would not be elected.

The more I got into the election process the more I became aware of the problems in the Office. But even that did not prepare me for what I discovered in the first few weeks after I took Office.

Frankly, for me, the Rajneesh – at least in those first few months - were like an angry mosquito, always buzzing about, always trying to disrupt, but they couldn't do much harm or have much impact – at the time – to the operation of the office. Except for the need to drive down to serve papers, a lengthy 80 mile plus drive some over dirt roads and it taking several hours – even if only to serve one paper, we spent little time on them.

To be sure we had incidents that we had to address but for the first few months they were quiet, they were licking their wounds – we figured they were waiting to be more disruptive, but not doing anything open enough for us to address.

These were the winter months so there were not a lot of them on the ranch – we knew it would change in the late Spring and Summer.

One complaint I had heard about for several years is the Sheriff's Office was not open to the citizens, and more particularly the press. The Sheriff had redacted a lot from reports before giving the press information on what were often very minor incidents in the county.

It wasn't necessary. There was a daily log kept by the dispatchers of calls and activity each day. Deputies would respond to a call and when completed would radio information to be typed onto the log.

Most of it was mundane, those that were more serious would be assigned a case file and reports would be written; a brief description would be put on the log. The information was there for the deputies coming on duty to read and know what had occurred since the last time they worked.

We did not have beginning of shift meetings since there would only be a couple or three people coming on duty AND the shifts were not the same for the Patrol deputies and the rest of the staff.

This was an efficient way of passing along info, and they could get more details if needed.

This was the same log the media could see, there was rarely any information on it that could endanger an on-going investigation.

My first order was to make that log available to reporters. My first day in Office one of the reporters from one of the local newspapers came in and wanted to look at the log.

It was given to him; he just glanced at it, smiled and left.

It was a simple thing to do and important, it showed we had nothing to hide. I also made myself very available to the media and the citizens and answered as honestly, as possible, all questions.

I just wished all of my goals could have been completed as easily, many took several years and a great deal of stress on all of us to get the Office heading in the right direction.