Local View: Clark County law enforcement show selective restraint

As the oldest civil rights organization in Southwest Washington, the Vancouver chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has investigated countless complaints and instances of racial discrimination over the years. Among the many critical concerns, it’s clear that law enforcement in Clark County has a racial bias problem.

Black people are just 2.4 percent of the Clark County population yet comprise about one-third of the people killed by police during the last couple of years. Are African Americans committing more crimes than the average citizen in our community? Absolutely not. But they appear more likely to be profiled, stopped, frisked, cited, arrested, harassed or killed by local law enforcement.

We know this isn’t a training issue: Armed, angry, aggressive white mobs are showing up at government offices, public officials’ homes, vigils organized by people of color, and even a medical facility with near impunity. Law enforcement typically takes a hands-off approach and is quick to tell media that the mobs “broke no laws.” There are no arrests, and everyone goes home alive.

Clark County sheriff’s deputies demonstrated their selective restraint when armed white anti-vaxxers showed up en masse outside Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center on Jan. 29. Even after repeatedly attempting to forcibly enter the medical facility, the mob was neither arrested nor threatened with arrest. No service weapons were drawn, and the mob ultimately left alive.

Especially telling that night was the relatively lax treatment deputies afforded a man who not only wouldn’t leave the premises but kept trying to force open the medical facility’s doors while a deputy was struggling to secure them. He was given the choice to leave or be pepper-sprayed. He was eventually sprayed — but not arrested — only after continuing his aggression.

African Americans — who are overpoliced, overincarcerated and underserved in our county — would have been granted no such choice. Rather than being treated to restraint, they would have been:

• Subjected to aggressive crowd control.

• Summarily pepper-sprayed and tackled.

• Threatened with arrest and arrested.

• Charged, at minimum, with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

• Potentially attacked with deadly force.

We field complaints of Black residents allegedly being roughed up by police, mocked by corrections officers, violated in their homes, or harassed at their businesses. We see local law enforcement excuse the growing presence of armed white vigilantes as people merely exercising “open carry” rights. We see Black men being killed under disputed claims that they were armed and threatening.

Our community deserves a local system of law enforcement that is equitable, just and without racial bias. That, however, is not the reality in Clark County, and it must change.