Support for Columbia County Sheriff's Office

Letter to the Editor -

I am writing in support of our Columbia County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff Joe Helm has created a strong team of Deputies that choose to serve and protect our county. THANK YOU ALL!

It’s always easy to boo and hiss from the cheap seats. It’s always easy to hide behind a keyboard and post inflammatory statements or outright lies to social media. It’s easy to cherry pick incidents and use those random incidents to display law enforcement in a bad light. I rarely see those same people sharing all the positive deeds performed every day by our local Sheriff and Deputies. These are folks that are plugged into this community in many ways both professionally and personally. They are members of our community just like everyone else and it matters to them that we all have a safe community to live in. However, they also have a job to do, a job that is complicated on any given day and even more so by recent changes in laws in Washington State. It’s unfortunate that there are people that cannot police themselves and therefore need to have police do it for them.

What’s fortunate is to have a Sheriff that cares about the county he serves, is focused on positive community-based policing and is striving to build a team of Deputies that are willing every day to do a job that not everyone or anyone could do.

So, THANK YOU Sheriff Helm, we appreciate your leadership skills and appreciate the work and protection your Deputies provide for Columbia County.

Vicki Zoller

Dayton, Wash.