With all due respect

By Tom Bixby

tom@hpr1.com

“Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney and Mandan Police Chief Jason Ziegler called pipeline protesters Liz George and Kana Newell over to their table,” wrote HPR reporter C.S. Hagen, “while they were eating at the Chinese restaurant Rice Bowl,” in Mandan.

The two women were leaving the restaurant. The sheriff and the chief didn’t have to call them over.

What followed was not a conversation. Laney lectured George and Newell, and when they didn’t agree with what he said, gave them two minutes to leave or they would be arrested.

When they objected, Ziegler stood up and “confronted George, forcing her back.”

This is the kind of bullying called mansplaining -- and physical intimidation, and abuse of authority. In the present legal environment it is probably not, by itself, enough for disciplinary action against them.

But it was disgraceful, especially on the part of Sheriff Laney, a policeman’s policeman. He’s the National Sheriff’s Association’s 2012 National Sheriff of the Year, and is currently President of the North Dakota Sheriffs and Deputies Association.

Chief Ziegler and Sheriff Laney owe the two women a public apology.

“On Friday,” writes Hagen, “Governor Jack Dalrymple granted the McKenzie County Commissioners’ request” to suspend Sheriff Gary Schwartzenberger.

The McKenzie County Commissioners had asked the governor to remove the sheriff from office, citing an alleged workplace culture of bullying and retaliation, harassment and intimidation, and a quasi-military environment, according to press reports. “Schwartzenberger will be allowed a hearing” before the governor decides whether to make the suspension permanent.

All of this came as a shock to us. Every encounter we’ve had with a Fargo police officer was positive and helpful. Every individual officer was calm, reasonable, and a good listener.

Cass County Sheriff Laney, to our surprise, spent most of his career, 17 years, in the Fargo Police Department, and we’re glad we never ran into him in a Chinese restaurant.

That school bus in Moorhead

One of our favorite writers is Mike McFeely of the Forum, and his take on the school bus incident is especially good, one of our favorite columns.

We support his call for bus monitors to take pressure off of the drivers and supervise the middle-school savages on the buses. If the Moorhead School District can’t manage to hire some, its budget priorities may be questionable.

According to the students, the driver used the F-word, the N-word, the A-word, and gave them the finger as he ordered them off the bus, on a through street with no sidewalk.

We’re sorry that the bus driver lost his job. If it’s any consolation to him, he can run for President of the United States in 2020.

McFeely is right again that the students’ behavior must have been especially bad for the driver to lose his temper, and that they are partly responsible for the incident. That makes us very curious. What exactly did they do?

The school is investigating, but they will never disclose the results. The only thing we can do is guess, and we lack examples. We ask that readers who have been kicked off school buses send us emails telling us what they did. We promise to keep their identities and contact information private and not share them.

Okay, I’ll go first. In the fifth grade, the bus driver kept a broom under the last row of seats. I was one of the bad boys in the last row. As the bus pulled away from a stop, I stuck the broom out the window and hit a friend of mine with the brush part. He staggered forward and fell down. We laughed and laughed!

For that, my parents insisted that I walk to school for the rest of the school year. The school was a little over two miles from where we lived. After that, I was never kicked off a bus again.