Shawn Vestal

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Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Justice reform moves forward, despite resistance from some in Spokane justice system

Fri., Feb. 14, 2020

Spokane has gone to great lengths to get good information and develop good ideas about how to dispense justice more smartly. But all the good ideas and hopeful recommendations will crash without any buy-in from the key players.

News >  Spokane

Shawn Vestal: A shift in rhetoric – and a key omission – in the mayor’s talk on homelessness

Wed., Feb. 12, 2020

Mayor Nadine Woodward’s State of the City speech last week was, in many ways, awfully standard fare. Lots of sloganeering and few specifics, with a call to employ the most common tool of the bureaucratic optimist: advisory committees.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Cataldo Catholic School’s 8th graders turn impeachment into a civics lesson

Thu., Feb. 6, 2020

Back and forth it went Wednesday morning in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, held in the eighth-grade history class at Cataldo Catholic School. As in the actual Senate, 2,500 miles away and later in the day, Cataldo “senators” acquitted Trump on two articles of impeachment, with votes breaking down 12-10 along party lines.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Addressing police bias in roadside stop is a marathon, not a sprint

Wed., Feb. 5, 2020

Take a gulp of relief, white people: Though we are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group in the state to be caught with contraband when searched by the smokies, we’re searched less than most any other group.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Noisy nights at Planned Parenthood lead to year of conflict between clinic, police

Sun., Feb. 2, 2020

The evangelist came from Texas just for this: to stand in the rain on Indiana Avenue on a Wednesday, preaching a sermon about the walls of Jericho and Roe v. Wade.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Moses Lake man’s abuse of toddler shows how monstrous thrive in internet age

UPDATED: Fri., Jan. 31, 2020

It’s not the kind of language you often see in court documents – even in prosecutor’s strongest sentencing arguments for the worst convicts. However, in the case of Mikhail Yuriy Ageyev, U.S. Attorney Bill Hyslop found the perfect word to deploy when asking a judge to send him to prison for 50 years: monster.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Bill that would force UW to layoff 800 administrators is a good start to cut bloat that burdens students

UPDATED: Wed., Jan. 29, 2020

A lawmaker is taking aim at administrative bloat in Washington’s universities, with proposed legislation that would take a cleaver to nonteaching jobs in the state’s system of higher learning and save tens of millions of dollars.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: ‘What are you willing to kill for?’ asks Idaho candidate and GOP official

Sun., Jan. 26, 2020

It was September 2019, and the Redoubters – Matt Shea, Heather Scott and the rest of the gang – were talking liberty at the Freedom Fest in Sandpoint. Alex Barron, the self-styled “Bard of the Redoubt,” officer of the Kootenai County GOP and candidate for the Idaho Legislature, took the stage and issued a challenge for those in attendance.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Slumbering Jim Risch symbolizes the Senate’s sham trial

UPDATED: Thu., Jan. 23, 2020

Years from now, as the no-trial impeachment trial of President Trump is reduced to lowlights by history, one image will indelibly symbolize the travesty: Idaho’s Jim Risch asleep during the trial on the Senate floor.

News >  Spokane

Shawn Vestal: Even if it’s just another ho-hum car prowling, report it to the cops

Thu., Jan. 23, 2020

It happened Monday night for roughly the 10th time in the 20 years I’ve lived in Spokane. Someone broke into my car.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Obituaries paint portrait of community

Sun., Jan. 19, 2020

One obituary is a portrait of a life. Several taken together, though, create a portrait of a community. Recent obits in the S-R have told the stories of tavern owners and music professors, auto parts dealers and train engineers, full-time moms and construction workers.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: John O. Green is not a fool nor an Idaho legislator

Fri., Jan. 17, 2020

Idaho Rep. John O. Green’s expulsion from the Legislature is well-deserved.

News >  Spokane

Shawn Vestal: City says it’s building a long-term solution, even as it adds emergency beds for homeless

Wed., Jan. 15, 2020

With the recent arrival of actual winter, the city has injected a quick $45,000 into adding 50 emergency shelter beds for the homeless.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Ceremonial gestures aside, honesty will make or break new City Hall relationships

Sun., Jan. 12, 2020

What will make or break the relationship at City Hall – and what broke the last one – isn’t what happens when everyone’s looking. It’s what happens when no one is, and how honest you are about it.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Racists using technological megaphone to share their small yet dangerous message

Fri., Jan. 10, 2020

Decent people need to remember to speak out against racists and their dangerous messages.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Inequities in how sexual assaults handled on display in Lewiston rape case

Wed., Jan. 8, 2020

There are no crimes for which our justice system fails more consistently and completely than rape and sexual assault.

News >  Spokane

Shawn Vestal: A bigger Nurse-Family Partnership would be a Christmas miracle for Spokane

Wed., Dec. 25, 2019

If we had a wish for one big gift for Spokane this morning – something that would be a true gift to the health of the community long into the future – it would be for an expansion of the health district’s Nurse-Family Partnership.

News >  Spokane

Even from space, Anne McClain stays tethered to young people in Spokane

Sun., Dec. 22, 2019

As a preschooler, she set her mind to becoming an astronaut. Now, a big part of her mission is talking to young people about space, science and service.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Scathing House report should mark rapid end of Matt Shea’s legislative career

UPDATED: Thu., Dec. 19, 2019

There was a simple question hanging fire during the House-ordered investigation Rep. Matt Shea: Would there be a last straw? Turns out the answer is no. There’s no last straw. There’s a whole bale.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Dreaming of a white Christmas? Dream on

Wed., Dec. 18, 2019

This isn’t winter. This is the season of blah. The hours of blargh. The gray days of meh.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Stats show crime continues to fall in Spokane, whatever people ‘feel’ about it

Sun., Dec. 15, 2019

In June, as the election campaign was grinding into life, the city’s CompStat crime-reporting system showed that the number of crimes reported citywide were trending downward from the previous year. They were 13% below where they’d been at the same time last year.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Organizer of drag queen protests clings to delusions of persecution

Fri., Dec. 13, 2019

They were billed as Drag Queen Story Hours. But they’ve turned out to be more or less endless as outrage fuel for those whose devotion to a sense of themselves as mighty, persecuted Christian martyrs is bottomless.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Ryan Crocker offers withering critique of U.S. involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan

Wed., Dec. 11, 2019

Spokane native and retired diplomat Ryan Crocker’s sobering interview on our efforts at rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq is that they were poorly planned, haphazardly initiated and practically unsuccessful, and they fostered massive corruption in an impoverished country that was simply not structurally prepared to handle billions of dollars in U.S. aid.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: From the Palouse to the Puget Sound, new book delves into Washington’s lost literary history

UPDATED: Mon., Dec. 16, 2019

In his fascinating new book “Salmon Eaters to Sagebrushers: Washington’s Lost Literary Legacy,” Peter Donahue exhumes the state’s deep literary history from the late 1800s through the 1960s.

Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Mitchell and Jessen, with waterboards and PowerPoints, stand at center of new film

Fri., Dec. 6, 2019

Film about post-9/11 torture program paints Spokane psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen as the bad guys.