The Columbian57%
Local View: Public safety bottleneck isn’t fault of police 72%
By James P. McElvain87%
8/3/2026, 6:01:36 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Framing Effect, and Fundamental Attribution Error, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 26.9% saturation with 168 hits. Analysis detected 1,316 faulty-reasoning hits from 624 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 57.9% and a BS Rank of 72% (7,562 of 26,696 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 71.70% of the article peer group.
Please indulge this retired Vancouver police chief for a moment as I weigh in on the recent decision to suspend arrests and citations for low-level misdemeanor offenses and traffic violations (“Union decries Vancouver police orders not to arrest people suspected of misdemeanors,” The Columbian, July 21).
Since that article, Chief Troy Price issued a clarifying statement in a Vancouver Police Department Facebook post on July 24.
Clark County Sheriff John Horch posted a similar message in a Facebook post the same day, and The Columbian commented on the topic in the paper’s Opinion section (“Ruling has undermined public safety in Wash.,” In Our View, July 25).
Although Chief Price’s initial message reported by The Columbian could have assured the community that the police department would continue its responsibility to respond to these calls, take reports and submit cases to the prosecutor’s office, a more important issue left unaddressed is the role of city leadership in this important discussion.
While city leaders — including the city manager, mayor and council members — have supported tax increases in the form of a utility tax, a countywide 0.1 percent criminal justice sales tax and the Proposition 5 levy to increase police staffing this past year, they have offered little public explanation or visible leadership regarding this issue that directly affects community safety.
That absence is difficult to reconcile with years of requests for additional taxpayer support.
Residents who repeatedly have been asked to pay more for public safety deserve a clear explanation and a plan for addressing the problem when an abrupt change to enforcement priorities occurs.
The fact that city leaders are simultaneously discussing another 0.1 percent sales tax increase for public safety only heightens the perception that they are out of step with public expectations and concerns.
Equally troubling is the degree to which the police department has become the public face of a problem it did not create.
In the days following Chief Price’s initial announcement, much of the community’s frustration has been directed at the police chief and the department, while the policymakers and stakeholders responsible for the broader criminal justice system have remained largely absent from the discussion.
When elected and appointed leaders fail to publicly address a controversial issue, they effectively leave police officers and police executives to absorb the criticism alone.
That is neither fair nor good leadership.
The current situation was not caused by the police officers responding to calls for service or detectives investigating crimes.
It is the result of resource shortages and systemic challenges involving prosecutors, defense attorneys, courts and policymakers.
Yet the most visible component of the criminal justice system (the police department) has once again become the target of public frustration while those with greater responsibility for the conditions remain largely out of view.
Public safety is not solely a police function; it requires a fully supported criminal justice system.
While city leaders successfully advocated for more police, equal attention should have been given to ensuring that the rest of the system could support those efforts.
The current situation demonstrates what happens when a critical link in the justice system lacks the capacity to keep pace.
A well-led solution is not to stop the police from enforcing the law, but to take a more thoughtful and better-managed approach.
Investing in one part of the system while neglecting others creates predictable bottlenecks that the community should not have to endure.
That reflects a failure of planning and leadership, not law enforcement.
Public safety is too important to be reduced to a police problem when the underlying issues extend far beyond the control of policing alone.
James P.
McElvain served as Vancouver police chief from 2013 to 2022.
Speakers
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