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This summer Sheriff Brian Pixley was awarded over $940,000 in grant money from the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, which will pay for two additional Sheriff’s Office detectives who will focus their investigations on the illegal production of marijuana.
As your District Attorney in Columbia County, but also as a Commissioner on the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, I can tell you that Sheriff Pixley’s decision to seek this grant was a victory for our county because it will reduce all types of crime in our community.
In 2018, the Oregon Legislature created the Illegal Marijuana Market Enforcement Grant to assist local law enforcement trying to stop the lawlessness surrounding illegal marijuana. This law could care less about the legal, private use of marijuana among adults but seeks to prevent the risks that come from having organized crime and human traffickers in our community.
This is a real issue in rural Oregon. Horror stories detail the use of forced labor to operate these illegal grows, which are often overseen by foreign criminal organizations. According to the Oregon Commission on Hispanic Affairs, survivors of illegal marijuana human trafficking have been treated in a manner that is “so barbaric that it is hard to believe they are taking place in the United States.”
Elderly landowners have been conned into renting portions of their land to these groups, only to realize too late that they have a mess on their hands with neighbors engaging in criminal activity. Of course, illegal marijuana is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not uncommon for police to find methamphetamine, stolen property, and unlawful weapons within the walls of these compounds too.
This issue seriously affects Columbia County. Recently Sheriff Pixley, the Oregon State Police, and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) conducted a joint operation in north Columbia County seeking to stop a large-scale illegal marijuana enterprise.
Evidence of forced labor and organized crime, as well as 23 firearms and $353,000 dollars in cash, were found just a few short miles from Clatskanie and Rainier. At this very moment, similar investigations into similar enterprises in this county are underway. If we stop this criminal activity it will be in part due to the leadership of Sheriff Pixley.
Lastly, the grant-funded detectives who will do this important work are also free to investigate other types of cases. To do their job right, these detectives will need to act like any other narcotics detective, cultivating informants in the drug community, mapping out criminal organizations, and executing search warrants. As they do so, they will also be taking meth, heroin, fentanyl, and guns off the streets, and providing intelligence from the field to officers investigating all types of crime in our community.
As a member of the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission myself who is charged with overseeing the proper use of these funds, I can say with confidence that there is nothing preventing these detectives from doing general police work too.
Regardless of who you vote for in November, we should be applauding Sheriff Pixley for winning this grant and finding creative ways to make our county safer.
Jeff Auxier is the Columbia County District Attorney. He may be reached at 503-397-0300.
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1. Be Civil. No bullying, name calling, or insults.
2. Keep it Clean and Be Nice. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language.
3. Don't Threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated.
4. Be Truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything.
5. Be Proactive. Let us know of abusive posts. Multiple reports will take a comment offline.
6. Stay On Topic. Any comment that is not related to the original post will be deleted.
7. Abuse of these rules will result in the thread being disabled, comments denied, and/or user blocked.
8. PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.