News On August 13, the head of the Portland Police Bureau’s Traffic Division, Captain Todd Wyatt, was involved in what the Idaho State Police are calling a “road rage incident,” and is presently under investigation. Wyatt allegedly brandished a handgun at another vehicle carrying at least two local passengers shortly after 11 am outside of Post Falls near milepost 6, in the Idaho panhandle, says Lt. ...   More

News After requests from WW and other media for interviews about recently reported road-rage incidents involving Portland police, Chief Rosie Sizer this evening responded with a brief written statement. "Our officers are held accountable for their actions both on and off duty," says the statement, which was sent by email. "People are drawing conclusions about 1,000 officers based on recent reports ...   More

News Police Commissioner Dan Saltzman tells WW he and Chief Rosie Sizer decided today to take Sgt. Kyle Nice off the street following a recent off-duty road-rage incident in Washington County. Nice — one of the cops involved in the 2006 death of James Chasse Jr. in police custody — is currently on paid leave pending an internal Portland police investigation of the road-rage incident. ...   More

News Mad props go to Larry Bednar, the Northeast Portland statistician who came up with the killer stat in our story this week about Sgt. Scott Westerman's twin road-rage cases. Bednar spent part of his weekend calculating the odds that Westerman would randomly encounter the same vehicle at opposite ends of the metro area — once off I-205, and again two days later on the Beaverton-Hillsdale ...   More

News The victim of two road-rage encounters this year with the head of the Portland police union told a sheriff's deputy she believes the two encounters were connected, according to an internal Washington County Sheriff's Office memo. The memo obtained by WW in a public-records request says Virginia Thompson told authorities her second encounter with Sgt. Scott Westerman "stemmed from an incident ...   More

News While reporting this week's story about antiwar protester Joe Walsh's lawsuit against the city of Portland, we ran across a supremely entertaining gem related to another case against the city's cops. The exchange came while Greg Kafoury, a Portland lawyer well-known for suing the city's police, deposed Sgt. Kyle Nice (pictured above, courtesy KOIN) on April 9. Kafoury was deposing Nice that ...   More