A8 THE BULLETIN • WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Should Oregon make
police disciplinary
records transparent?
T
he Associated Press laid it out starkly last year: “Officer
Derek Chauvin had more than a dozen misconduct complaints
against him before he put his knee on George Floyd’s neck.
Daniel Pantaleo, the New York City officer who seized Eric Garner in a
deadly chokehold, had eight. Ryan Pownall, a Philadelphia officer facing
murder charges in the shooting of David Jones, had 15 over five years.”
Those disciplinary records
weren’t made public until after the
deaths of the victims. Complaints
against police officers are mostly
kept secret. It can be a requirement
of state law. It can be a require-
ment in union contracts.
It’s hard to imagine a time when
there has been more pressure on
the police to make disciplinary
records transparent. House Bill
3145 would essentially do that in
Oregon. It would create a public
database of information including
complaints, allegations, charges,
proceedings, determinations, dis-
ciplinary actions taken and more.
And, yes, the public safety employ-
ees would be identified by name.
Law enforcement disciplinary
records are public in about a dozen
states. There is some availability of
the records in about a dozen more.
They are confidential in the rest,
including Oregon.
Many law enforcement organi-
zations oppose the bill as written.
The Oregon Coalition of Police
and Sheriffs opposes it. The Ore-
gon Sheriff’s Association opposes
it. As does the Oregon Association
of Chiefs of Police.
Many arguments were made
against the bill in testimony on
Monday. It will make it more diffi-
cult to hire officers. It could have a
chilling effect on officers reporting
on other officers. It will increase
legal costs and staffing require-
ments to comply with the law.
It will create more allegations of
grievances and unfair labor prac-
tices by officers. And it could be
ripe for abuse with people submit-
ting complaints so they show up in
a public database.
We don’t dispute there is truth
in those arguments. The question
is: Does the importance of trans-
parency in police discipline out-
weigh those concerns? There is a
strong public interest in how law
enforcement uses the authority
granted to it by the public.
The other question is: Would
making the records transparent
improve the quality of policing?
We would argue the sunlight
would make it more likely that
problem officers are properly dis-
ciplined or terminated.
The debate over this bill is far
from over. And we have only just
summarized some of the tricky is-
sues involved. Please read the bill
and the testimony for yourself. Let
your legislator know how you feel
or write us a letter to the editor.
Bill targets concealed
carry in public spaces
S
hould people be able to walk
into schools, colleges, city hall
or other public buildings or
other public spaces carrying con-
cealed guns if they are properly li-
censed?
Senate Bill 554 would allow many
public bodies to ban them.
In the right place in the right time
and with the right training a per-
son with a concealed weapon could
maybe — maybe — stop something
terrible from happening. That said,
we would rather leave intervention
with a gun to trained professional
law enforcement than amateurs.
The bill would undoubtedly create
problems for people with concealed
carry licenses who believe they need
it. As some testimony on the bill
suggested, it could create a maze of
prohibited zones to essentially make
the license useless.
To say there are strong sentiments
about this bill would be an under-
statement. You can check out the tes-
timony yourself by searching out the
bill on the Legislature’s website.
Tell your legislator what you think
or write us a letter to the editor.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
Livestock, hay, water and climate change
T
he publication, Livestock’s Long
Shadow, shows how rapidly
growing populations and in-
comes increase demand for livestock
products. Livestock are important,
accounting for 40% of agricultural
gross domestic product and globally
employing at least a billion people;
however, livestock require a signifi-
cant number of natural resources and
they are responsible for about 14.5%
of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Consider these global livestock inter-
actions:
• The cattle sector in Brazil is burn-
ing the rain forest to clear it for graz-
ing, which is responsible for 80% of
the deforestation in the Amazon.
• Livestock production is shifting
from rural to urban and peri-urban
areas, moving closer to consumers and
trade hubs where feed is imported to
serve Concentrated Animal Feeding
Operations (CAFOs). CAFOs create
serious environmental issues. Manure
management is at the heart of CAFO
operations, including solid-liquid sep-
aration, anaerobic digestion, and fre-
quent manure removal for treatment,
energy production and by-product
recycling.
Water — The livestock sector ac-
counts for over 8% of global water use,
mostly for the irrigation of feed crops.
The major sources of livestock wa-
ter pollution are from animal wastes,
antibiotics and hormones, chemi-
cals from tanneries, sediments from
eroded pastures and fertilizers and/
or pesticides used for feed crops. Live-
stock also affect the replenishment of
fresh water by compacting soil, reduc-
ing infiltration, degrading the banks
of watercourses, lowering water tables,
increasing runoff, and reducing dry
season flows.
Biodiversity —Livestock produc-
tion occupies 30% of the world’s land
surface, once habitat for wildlife, and
livestock use 70% of the planet’s agri-
cultural land. Scientists suggest that
the sixth major mass extinction is hap-
pening now and grazing plays a part
because early and heavy grazing seri-
Climate Changed
CENTRAL OREGON
GON
CROSSROADS S
By Scott Christiansen
ously affects plant flowering and seed-
ing. About 20% of the world’s grazing
land (including 73% of rangelands in
fragile dry areas) have been degraded
by over-grazing, compaction, and ero-
sion, contributing to loss of biodiver-
sity.
Cattle in Oregon — The May 2020
livestock report for Oregon shows that
most cattle ranches are In Malheur,
Morrow, Harney, Klamath and Lake
counties. In these counties, cattle graze
on private land, federal rangelands and
timberlands, where land is arid and
unsuitable for farming.
Livestock and hay are nearly always
among the most important agricul-
tural commodities in Oregon. Water
is needed to produce both. In East-
ern Oregon, water is unsustainably
pumped for hay production, lowering
water tables and affecting the availabil-
ity of drinking water for local citizens.
Closer to home in Deschutes County
an intense debate pits agricultural wa-
ter use against aquatic life in the De-
schutes River. The root cause of the
problem is related to unsustainable
water allocations to agriculture start-
ing when Bend was settled, over 100
years ago.
Economic transitions — The pop-
ulation of Bend has grown by 31% in
the last decade, from 76,660 in 2010
to 100,421 in 2019, but this growth
is not related to agriculture. Statistics
from the 2017 Census of Agriculture,
comparing changes from 2012-2017 in
Crook, Deschutes and Jefferson coun-
ties, show the number of farms in-
creased by 13% and 16% in Crook and
Deschutes counties while falling 16%
in Jefferson County. Jefferson County
farms are getting bigger to capture ef-
ficiency gains while farms are being
subdivided in the other two counties.
The net cash income per farm (and
percent change compared to 2012)
was $7,408 (-25%) for Crook, $12,866
(-12%) for Deschutes, and $31,281
(+209%) for Jefferson counties. High
value crops in Jefferson County are
contributing to Oregon’s state reve-
nues while agriculture is shrinking in
the other two, especially in Deschutes
County where data suggest that farm-
ing is more a lifestyle choice than a
commercial activity that sustains live-
lihoods.
During the past three decades, Or-
egon made the transition from a re-
source-based economy (think timber)
to a more mixed manufacturing and
marketing economy.
Across Oregon in 2017, beef cattle
and calves brought in $977 million,
with Crook, Deschutes and Jefferson
counties contributing $49 million or
5% of the total. Now compare the val-
ues for cattle production with total
direct spending for travel in Oregon,
which was $12.8 billion in 2019. In
Central Oregon (Crook, Deschutes,
Jefferson, and south Wasco counties)
the total was $935 million or 7.3%
of the state total. This was the 10th
consecutive year of growth in travel
spending — contributing to local em-
ployment and the tax base.
The reality is that our natural re-
sources bring more visitors to De-
schutes County than agriculture. It is
therefore critical to prioritize the con-
servation of its natural resources like
water, fish and frogs to sustain other
productive sectors like tourism and
recreation.
Animal agriculture and hay pro-
duction are part of Oregon’s identity
and history, and should remain so,
but stewardship should guide deci-
sion-making. We need to keep agricul-
tural water use within natural sustain-
able recharge rates so that other sectors
are not negatively affected.
ý
Scott Christiansen is an international
agronomist with 35 years of experience. He
worked for USDA’s Agricultural Research
Service and the U.S. Agency for International
Development.
Having vaccines alone isn’t enough to defeat a worldwide pandemic
BY JOYCE CHAPLIN
Special to The Washington Post
“N
o one is safe until every-
one is,” the United Nations
has cautioned about the
COVID-19 pandemic, a warning now
amplified by coronavirus variations
able to dodge vaccines that are, in any
case, too few and too concentrated
in wealthy parts of the world. That
a global pandemic requires a global
response is a lesson firmly rooted
in medical history. It took over 200
years of international effort to eradi-
cate smallpox. The very first attempt
showed that a vaccine was necessary,
but not sufficient. Ending the global
transmission of deadly disease also re-
quires international travel that is safe
and global relations based on terms of
equality, two conditions that remain
difficult to ensure.
History’s first global health initiative
was Spain’s Royal Philanthropic Vac-
cine Expedition, which sailed around
the world from 1803 to 1813, deliver-
ing smallpox vaccinations. The venture
astonished people at the time. Such
maritime circumnavigations were as-
sociated with death, not health, and
doing anything good on a planetary
scale was unprecedented.
Indeed, the effort was mostly driven
by Spain’s imperial and economic con-
cerns, not philanthropy or humanitar-
ianism.
Beginning with the Canary Islands
in the 1490s, Spanish overseas imperial-
ism had blended military conquest, en-
slavement and commercial monopoly.
Imperialism brought Spain profits
and prestige. It became the model for
all European empires, even though the
human cost of these invasions was ap-
palling. Some American Indian popu-
lations may have diminished as much
as 90% , in part from contagions new
to them. The worst malady was small-
pox, a 3,000-year old Eurasian disease
that could kill up to 30% of the infected
and disfigure and blind survivors. Eu-
ropean invaders globalized this ancient
horror, carrying it into West Africa, the
Americas and the Pacific.
But in the early 1700s, Europeans
and American colonists learned, from
Ottoman Turks and West Africans, a
miraculous remedy: inoculation, in
which material from smallpox pustules
was inserted into the uninfected, trig-
gering a milder form of the disease —
and lifetime immunity. In the 1790s,
English physician Edward Jenner
made inoculation even safer by using
pus from sores caused by cowpox, a re-
lated though milder disease. Cowpox
vaccine (vacca is Latin for cow) would
be what the Spanish carried around the
world, scant years after Jenner had re-
ported his experiments in print.
For the first time, a circumnavi-
gation to bring health seemed credi-
ble, if barely. Indeed, the Spanish plan
was ambitious: to perform vaccina-
tions, organize local medical boards
and seed stocks of vaccine in multiple
places, thousands of miles apart. From
Spain, the team stopped in the Canar-
ies, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. Dep-
uty surgeon José Salvany then covered
territories in present-day Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chilean Pa-
tagonia, while commanding surgeon
Francisco Xavier de Balmis went to
Cuba and Mexico. Balmis next sailed
to the Philippines (aboard the Fer-
nando de Magallanes, no less), con-
tinuing to China, St. Helena and back
to Spain.
By some measures, the mission tri-
umphed. Hundreds of thousands of
people were vaccinated, nearly 200,000
in Peru alone. These people, mostly
children, were directly protected and
their immunity helped prevent epi-
demics.
Such results, however, required
some dubious practices. Preserving the
vaccine outside a warm body was still
difficult. So, the expedition took on, as
wards of the state, 22 Spanish found-
lings, abandoned boys raised in char-
itable institutions, 3 - to 9 -years old.
On departure, they were vaccinated
in sequence as symptoms prompted
transfer of the vaccine, arm-to-arm, to
keep it alive. Twenty-six new boys were
added in Mexico, and others subse-
quently, for a total of 62. The Spanish
foundlings were placed for adoption in
Mexico City and the parents of recruits
compensated. But there were casual-
ties: four boys (6% ) died at sea.
And why trust these newest Span-
ish invaders, anyway? Indians in Peru
distrusted Salvany so much they called
him the anti-Christ. “They doubt ev-
erything,” he complained, “which the
White Man proposes.”
They had good reason: vaccination
was intended to maintain Spanish rule
over them. Carlos IV’s philanthropy
was perhaps sincere, atoning for the
sins of his ancestors. But his ministers
and colonial officials backed the ex-
pedition to protect the empire’s labor
supply, particularly among Indians.
The expedition thus resembled the
forced inoculations or vaccinations of
enslaved people that were also taking
place, medical interventions, without
consent, to protect plantation econo-
mies.
Smallpox would continue to ravage
populations without access to vaccina-
tion — it killed an estimated 300 mil-
lion people in the 20th century — and
eradicating it required a more equal
global society. Only after the disman-
tling of European empires in the 20th
century could international medical
authorities inspire confidence in vacci-
nation and medical tracing. The World
Health Organization (WHO) began
its historic anti-smallpox campaign in
1967 and declared victory in 1980.
The year 2021 isn’t like 1803, and
it isn’t like 1980. Yet again, we have a
new vaccine. But if empires have faded,
imperialism’s effects haven’t, as highly
unequal access to vaccination demon-
strates. Meanwhile, Brexit and “Amer-
ica First” show the erosion of global
solidarity.
And worldwide airline travel is now
both solution and problem.
It distributes vaccines, but it’s also
spreading novel diseases in the first
place, from AIDS/HIV to COVID-19.
It’s easier than ever to travel around
the world, but also to bring death back
home. That threat won’t end with vac-
cination. Instead, identifying outbreaks
early and monitoring travelers from
affected regions is critical — until ev-
eryone cooperates in doing that, no
one is safe.
ý
Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips
professor of Early American history at Harvard
University.