Many of you have been wondering, and let us know you have been wondering, what happened to our summary of the 911 call log that is provided by the Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office. We have been running what we call the “911 blotter” — a compilation of calls to central dispatch that originated from the Methow Valley in the previous week — on a fairly regular basis after resurrecting the feature by popular demand.
If you are not familiar with how the call log works, you can find the raw material at www.okanogancounty.gov/299/Sheriff-Police-Log, where you can then click on the PDF link. It has always been available to the public, and has been our source for the weekly report for years. We had no more access to it than anyone else.
You’ll note that the sheriff’s log report is broken down by agency or jurisdiction. We looked for material in three places: under Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office, Twisp Police Department, and Winthrop Marshal’s Office.
The challenge has always been to comb through all of the Sheriff’s Office calls — which can number in the hundreds — to cull out the calls specifically from the Methow Valley. The Twisp and Winthrop reports were of course easier to access.
We might come across an entry that looked like this (all taken from the current week’s report):
S26-05311 07:26:23 08/27/26 Animal Stray LOST RIVER RD & CEDAROSA WAY, MAZAMA
Officer: PULLEY N Comments:
Or:
S26-05354 12:36:50 08/28/26 Juvenile Prob NEWBY CREEK RD & SKY RANCH RD, TWISP
Officer: STANFIELD J Comments:
Or:
P26-0153 20:16:46 08/25/26 Suspicious S METHOW VALLEY HWY
Officer: BUDROW PAUL Comments:
The first number is the case file number; followed by the time and date; followed by a shorthand description of the incident; followed by the approximate location; followed by the name of responding officer. The listings typically did not include exact addresses, or names of callers or people involved. But they usually included a brief narrative of the event in the “Comments” area, which gave us the information we needed to put together an entry.
Several weeks ago, we opened the 911 log’s PDF to find that while the basic information described above was still there, all the narratives had disappeared. Without the narratives, we could do no more than type up the entries you see above — stenography, basically, with little added value to the reader.
An incident entry like “suspicious” doesn’t give us much to work with as a starting point. Lots of things are suspicious to callers. The “comments” narratives at least gave us some context.
We asked Sheriff Jodie Barcus for an explanation of why the log changed. She promised to look into it, and reported back that because getting the reports ready for the log is very time-consuming, including necessary redactions, the decision was made to limit entries to the basic information.
Because the entries include the case number file, we — and pretty much anyone else — can make a public records request to see that file. In the past, when we had the narrative to work with, we would periodically request some files for more information that might lead to a news story. Now, it’s guesswork to decide what files might be work requesting.
We asked the Washington Coalition for Open Government for their take on the situation, and the response from Executive Director Colette Weeks was clarifying but discouraging.
“They [the Sheriff’s Office] don’t have to create a special document for requesters (or the press),” Weeks said in an email. “They only have to provide what you ask for. If it’s a copy of their logs and that’s how they keep their logs, that’s what you get … the public and media can’t force them to create additional reports they don’t make for themselves. … It’s unfortunate, but they don’t have to make it easy for you. Best-case scenario is a good relationship with someone who will tell you when something big is happening — or happened.”
We try to maintain those relationships, but with everything else our thinly stretched little group of reporters is doing, we don’t have a lot of time to follow on every report or rumor we hear about — unless the information is so compelling that we have a legitimate reason to check it out.
That’s probably not an entirely satisfactory explanation for some readers. But it’s in the sheriff’s purview to make tough resource allocation decisions and still meet the basic requirements of state reporting laws. Meantime, if we hear from readers that even minimal information is of some interest, we’ll revisit the log with that in mind.
