Complaints against sheriff are rejected

Accusations that Bonner County Sheriff Phil Jarvis and his top two administrators made vindictive criminal complaints against a search and rescue agency are “totally without merit,” Bonner County Prosecutor Phil Robinson said in a memo issued Monday.

A week ago, Mike Nielsen, president of Priest Lake Search and Rescue Inc., presented a complaint to the Bonner County commissioners in which the search and rescue group’s board of directors demanded the FBI investigate Jarvis, Undersheriff Elaine Savage and Capt. Jim Drake for criminal misuse of their powers under “color of law.”

Color of law complaints involve law enforcement agencies that misuse police powers to harass or intimidate, Bob Davis, FBI supervisor in Coeur d’Alene, said last week. On Monday, Davis said his office has forwarded information to the U.S. attorney general’s office in Boise and is awaiting a written decision about whether the feds will investigate the complaints from Priest Lake Search and Rescue.

The search and rescue group, Nielsen said last week, believes it became the target of harassment from the top levels of the sheriff’s office in a dispute after refusing to back Savage, a Republican, in her campaign for sheriff against Democrat Tony Lamanna and independent James “Bean” Johnston.

Nielsen, in the information presented to the county, pointed out two fairly minor incidents involving Priest Lake Search and Rescue that the sheriff’s office forwarded to Idaho State Police detectives for criminal investigation. Nielsen said the allegations were false and accused the sheriff’s officials of knowing they were false.

Bringing the countercharges – after the ISP investigation was complete – was an attempt to call attention to an apparent abuse of police powers, Nielsen said. The County Commissioners and others in Bonner County called it an attempt to enflame voters just a week before a hotly contested three-way race to replace Jarvis as sheriff.

Nielsen, in turn, called Robinson’s release of his findings on the eve of the election “obviously political.”

Robinson, in Monday’s memo, said he found the allegations forwarded from the sheriff’s office to ISP were appropriate charges, which the search and rescue group disputes.

One allegation concerned monies paid by the Idaho Department of Lands to reimburse Priest Lake Search and Rescue personnel who helped out during the Hunt Creek fire in the summer of 2003. The sheriff’s office said some of the money belonged to it.

Nielsen, in his documents last week and again by telephone Monday, said Priest Lake Search and Rescue did forward $338 of the reimbursement funds to the sheriff’s office and he has the check stubs to prove it, Nielsen said.

The second allegation was that Nielsen had improperly signed the titles of two boats that were donated to the search and rescue group and then had ownership transferred to the county.

Many of the parties, including Savage, called the boat title charge especially trivial.

Savage said the sheriff’s office was following proper procedure by forwarding allegations to an outside agency for review.

Nielsen was steamed, he said, that he and his group were being accused of theft and fraud by the sheriff’s office when the matters could be worked out by discussion, and when sheriff’s officials knew the allegations were groundless.

Even Robinson last week said the matters seemed more appropriate for an auditor than the FBI.

With Robinson concluding in his memo that he won’t ask for an FBI investigation or a special prosecutor, the search and rescue group doesn’t hold out much hope the commissioners will ask for an investigation.

It is unlikely Priest Lake Search and Rescue Inc. will itself ask the feds to investigate, Nielsen said. “They have al Qaeda, they have real issues,” Nielsen said.

“We get harassed, but nobody got hurt.”