In an article written today by KGW about the upcoming Jeremy Christian trial, she seems to be giving credibility to incident reports written by jail deputies at the Multnomah County Detention Center (MCDC) even though anyone that knows anything about that place can tell you that nine times out of ten those reports contain false information. Usually those reports include complete fabrications by deputies that just want to make sure the inmate is punished how they wish.
In this case Deputy Gretchen Rosa is quoted as saying that Jeremy Christian told her that he slashes throats for a living. An outrageous claim since nobody has ever accused Christian of making money by slashing throats. He just gets free room and board for it, which is hardly a living.
Deputy Ryan Cook also accused Christian of making some kind of racist comment about another deputy.
Did Christian do these things? I don't know, I was not there, but that is not the point. The point is that deputies at MCDC lie all the time. They lie so much that nobody should treat anything they say as fact. If they didn't lie all the time why don't the cameras at MCDC record? Why don't the deputies wear body cameras? The answer to both questions is that having proof of what really happens there is such a liability to the county that nothing the DA's office could gain from such tapes outweighs the risk.
They act as if having a disciplinary officer review the reports substantiates them somehow, but that is really just a rubber stamp. For example I personally got found guilty by the hearings officer of assaulting deputies based solely on their word. Subsequent criminal charges were later dismissed because they had no proof of any of the injuries they claimed to have suffered. There were of course some truths to the incident reports, but in all my time as an inmate there I never got a report that did not include some false information planted to make adjudicating me guilty easier.
What is really scary here is that the MCSO has their own little dungeon where they can lock you up and say you did anything while you were in there. Then it is just your word versus theirs usually. I was lucky in my last case because their lies were proven false by a medical expert. It could have easily swung the other way if they had done a thing or two differently, but then again if they were smart they wouldn't be jail guards.
I really wish that the mainstream press in Portland would take a serious look at the lies of their local sheriff's department, but like most people that have never done time they live in a bubble. A bubble where they spend their entire lives thinking that police are the good guys. Every once and awhile they step outside that bubble to look at reality, but not nearly enough.
It looks like today's article was based on an earlier report as seen in the video below. The video starts by showing a write up from Diana Bull. In it former Sheriff Bernie Giusto is interviewed about the reports but nobody questions their credibility.