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COLUMNIST
Shawn Vestal shawnv@spokesman.com (509) 459-5431Shawn Vestal joined The Spokesman-Review in 1999. He currently is a columnist for the City Desk.
Most Recent Stories
July 12, 2020, 4 a.m.
When it came to coronavirus precautions in Spokane County, we lost our minds on Memorial Day weekend.
July 10, 2020, 4 a.m.
It’s a strange time to be thinking of normal times and “normal” problems on college campuses.
July 8, 2020, 4 a.m.
My fellow white people: We have a terrible hearing problem.
July 1, 2020, 4:30 a.m.
The unanimous Spokane City Council rejection of the contract proposed with the Police Guild was a victory for police accountability and for democracy itself.
June 24, 2020, 5 a.m.
The armed yahoo brigades that have shown up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the Inland Northwest have so far been little but absurd sideshows.
June 21, 2020, 5 a.m.
The courts look at whether an officer acted reasonably when using force against people on the streets. Spokane Police Chief Craig Meidl, and at least one other higher-up in the department, employed a different, correct standard when they fired an officer who kicked a handcuffed Black man in the groin.
June 19, 2020, 5 a.m.
Section 129 of the Spokane City Charter is where the sunshine of optimism shines most brightly with regard to police oversight.
June 17, 2020, 5 a.m.
Spokane’s police officers are four years overdue for a raise.
June 16, 2020, 5 a.m.
Midway into a new ombudsman's report on the now-infamous profanity-laced rant of a still happily employed Spokane police officer, a word appears that is crucial in considering where we’ve been, where we are, and where we going with police and accountability.Culture.
June 7, 2020, 4 a.m.
The virus threatening the health of the population is also threatening the health care system. In Spokane – where a large part of our population relies on government health insurance and a large part of our workforce is employed in health care – that means a lot of added pressure on hospitals that have already been losing money.
June 5, 2020, 4 a.m.
Most of us understand that the coronavirus presents a health crisis, an economic crisis and a social crisis. But for those at the bottom of the economic scale, it could also turn into a legal crisis.
June 2, 2020, 5 a.m.
Us is all of us, like it or not. At this moment of extraordinary national tension, so full of the potential for violence, so fractured at the core, so full of venom and incitement radiating from the White House, and so vilely attended by bigoted online calls to shoot protesters or run them over, us versus them is a disastrous formulation.
June 1, 2020, 5 a.m.
The line that is cracking the foundation of the country ran through a parking lot in downtown Spokane on Sunday.
May 31, 2020, 5 a.m.
Mail voting improves voter turnout. It does it among both parties, too.
May 29, 2020, 5 a.m.
A repeat drunken driver who works at Spokane’s coronavirus hot spot just put six city cops – and who knows how many others – at risk of contracting COVID-19. From the jail to his job at a Hillyard pasta factory to a crowded sedan full of fellow partiers, he has done his best to be our gold-medal super spreader, while giving the city an example in what not to do
May 24, 2020, 4 a.m.
For years, when an infectious disease reared up in Spokane, there was a simple but important reaction: Call Dorothy MacEachern.
May 22, 2020, 4 a.m.
Everywhere you look right now, with the announcement that Spokane County can move cautiously down the road toward reopening the economy, you see people racing across the coronavirus finish line, arms raised, cheering. Which risks putting us back at the coronavirus starting line.
May 20, 2020, 5 a.m.
With video conferencing, courts are trying to fit an in-person process into a no-contact world and trying to balance justice with safety in unprecedented ways.
May 17, 2020, 4 a.m.
A Spokane woman and her daughter walked to New York City on the promise of a $10,000 payment in 1896, while an infectious tragedy played out back at home.
May 17, 2020, 1 a.m.
It came as Father said it would come, a shroud over the sun, a night in the day, a black pall upon the earthly coffin of the wicked. At the campground, the Forest Service man came and asked for $16.
May 12, 2020, 5 a.m.
Lots of people have been demanding that Spokane County be allowed to move most quickly down the path toward reopening the economy than the rest of the state. But there’s really only one voice who can truly ensure that the move toward reopening is based on good, sober science and a concrete plan to build a testing regimen into the process.
May 9, 2020, midnight
For about 90 minutes almost every day, Mandi Ibarra-Rivera is a meal wrangler. Working from home, Ibarra-Rivera, a Spokane writer, contacts restaurants and coordinates orders from hungry families to help produce the home food deliveries that have been the core of Spokane Food Fighters – an emergency response system for the hungry that sprang to life on March 22, as the state shut down to thwart the coronavirus.
May 6, 2020, 4 a.m.
Dr. Bob Lutz is getting ready to try and put the coronavirus in a box. That, he says, is ultimately how we will reopen public life safely – by having a strategy to quickly identify, trace and quarantine new cases of the coronavirus.
May 4, 2020, 5:23 p.m.
Good for you, the thousands of residents who are responsible, thoughtful, informed, impatient, hurting, unselfish, decent people who did not participate in an ill-fated and selfish protest last week in Spokane.
May 3, 2020, 4 a.m.
Has the Idaho Freedom Foundation – the faux charity that strives to be the king-maker and king-slayer of Gem State politics – caught a serious illness? Or just a seasonal bug? Either way, the sicker the IFF is, the healthier Idaho politics will be.