Klickitat sheriff’s growing volunteer posse raises questions

Elsewhere, sheriffs have occasionally used posses for explicitly political purposes. In Culpeper County, Virginia, federal prosecutors indicted a constitutional sheriff for allegedly accepting $70,000 in campaign contributions between 2019 and 2023 in exchange for making donors part of his volunteer auxiliary and providing access to firearms. In Arizona, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s so-called “Cold Case Posse” attracted attention in 2011 when its members began investigating the validity of then-President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Arpaio’s successor disbanded that posse in 2017. 

Another branch of Maricopa County’s posse — which once boasted as many as 3,000 members — took part in Arpaio’s trademark hunt for undocumented immigrants, including participating in traffic stops, worksite raids and crowd control operations. Those posse activities factored into a costly racial discrimination lawsuit in 2012 that played a key role in transforming Arizona into a battleground state.

The most obvious opportunity for the posse to act as enforcers for Songer’s political beliefs came during two Black Lives Matter protests in Klickitat County in 2020 — one in White Salmon, and another in nearby Lyle. Songer routinely refers to the Black Lives Matter movement as a source of “domestic terrorism,” and he told InvestigateWest that he deployed armed posse members to “keep an eye” on the protests and intervene in the event of rioting. 

But while some attendees reported feeling intimidated by the posse’s presence, the marches ended without incident. “They had First Amendment rights,” Songer said at the White Salmon training. 

Some skeptics — both local and national — consider worries about the posse as a militia-in-waiting to be a distraction from more immediate concerns. Jessica Pishko, an attorney and author of The Highest Law in the Land, a forthcoming book on American sheriffs, doubts that Songer’s office has the administrative wherewithal to use the posse as a militia. 

“He uses this overheated rhetoric,” she said, “But he has all of these other budget and administrative problems that he can’t seem to control, and he thinks it’s a good idea to have a 200-man posse. … It strikes me that he’s biting off more than he can chew.”

In her view, the controversies surrounding Songer have often obscured the core reason for the posse’s existence — the county’s shrinking budget and the sheriff’s growing call volumes. Klickitat County has not added any new deputy positions in the past two decades, though its population grew by roughly 15% during that period.  

She notes that the notion of using posses as a savings opportunity isn’t unique to Klickitat County, nor is it new. “Ronald Reagan was a big advocate of these all-volunteer posses,” she said, “because they work for free.”

“The austerity part gets muddied,” she added. “It gets muddied … on the left by anxieties about militias, and then it gets muddied by [the posse] when they cloak it with American Western vibes.”

In lieu of money, Pishko says, posse members receive some degree of prestige, along with a badge and a magnetic placard to place on their car. “It gives people some sort of glory and super-status,” she argued, that deepens social divides in a small rural community like Klickitat County — and, she added, shores up loyalty to Songer.

Songer pushes back on the notion that posse membership is a reward for loyalty. “I’ve told the Songer-haters many times that they’re invited to the trainings,” he told InvestigateWest. “If they can pass a background check, they can be [part of the] posse too.”

‘A do-stuff posse’

Klickitat County’s posse lacks some of the ceremonial frills of many of its Northwest counterparts. Deschutes County Sheriff’s Posse members in Oregon, for instance, primarily serve as horse-mounted ambassadors at parades and fairs. “We’re more of a do-stuff posse,” Klickitat County Undersheriff Carmen Knopes said during the training in White Salmon. 

Elings estimates that the Klickitat County posse’s services save the county a half-million dollars each year. The department’s annual budget was $5.3 million in 2024, of which $11,000 was earmarked for the posse. While the sheriff’s office provides uniforms and badges, the posse members generally use their personal vehicles and cover day-to-day costs. 

Some roles performed by the posse — more specifically, those performed by the posse’s “special deputies” — come with significant risks. “There’s always the possibility that something goes wrong in the lobby of the courthouse,” Songer warned posse members in White Salmon, pointing to the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling in 2020 barring courts from shackling defendants during trial. 

The posse’s newest role as civil process servers brings more risks. Rizzi, who previously worked as a process server, says he hopes the use of uniformed teams of posse members will dissuade those receiving civil court documents — be they divorce papers or notice of a lawsuit — from threatening volunteers. 

That’s not a hypothetical concern. In March, for instance, a Kansas City-area man killed a court employee serving him an eviction notice. 

The risk of violence involving volunteers is not limited to courthouse security guards or process servers. In the past decade alone, volunteer reserve deputies and police officers — who generally receive formal training — have drawn weapons on or killed civilians in Oklahoma, Arizona and South Carolina. 

InvestigateWest has found no evidence of violent encounters between Klickitat County posse members and other members of the public, and Klickitat County’s posse doesn’t participate in traffic stops or undercover operations. While the county pays roughly $6,000 a quarter for a boilerplate workers’ compensation insurance policy for the posse, Elings says the sheriff’s office has yet to file a claim, nor does she expect it to. “We match posse members to tasks based on their experience,” she told InvestigateWest. “Based on what they do best.”

Some local critics argue, however, that the county should not ignore the risks created by the posse. 

“I think that there’s a valid function for posse members, but it should be clearly distinct from law enforcement because of the vicarious liability,” said Boardman, the county’s former undersheriff. “There is potential for misjudgment when you don’t have people vetted and trained in the same way you would for a reserve or a full-time deputy.”

The sheriff’s office emphasizes the distinction between general posse members and special deputies, who make up only a small fraction of the posse’s members. The primary role of most posse members is to “observe, document and report,” Elings said. 

Klickitat County’s Board of Commissioners, who control the sheriff’s office budget, have yet to publicly weigh the savings associated with the posse against the liabilities created by its expanding role. Two of the three county commissioners did not respond to InvestigateWest’s inquiries about the posse. The third, Lori Zoller, deferred to the sheriff’s office for comment. 

The county’s budget woes make the posse — and the sheriff’s office — a sensitive subject. 

Klickitat County has historically relied on fees from a landfill near Roosevelt for a majority of its revenue, and the recent loss of major contracts — including with Spokane County and Mason County — leaves it struggling to fill gaps in its upcoming budget. The construction of a new county administration building in Goldendale ran several million dollars over budget; some residents now refer to it as “the Taj Mahal.” 

In the face of those constraints, the county cut the sheriff’s office budget by about $40,000 between 2023 and 2024. 

Meanwhile, the county faces a $20 million lawsuit filed by the family of a Yakama Nation man who died by suicide while experiencing opioid withdrawal in the county jail in May 2023. That lawsuit, as well as a November 2023 incident in which a female jail inmate arrived at a local hospital exhibiting alarming signs of sepsis, prompted the Board of Commissioners to transfer control of the jail from the sheriff’s office to a new county Department of Corrections. 

Lynn Mason, who helped organize a political action committee opposed to Songer during the 2022 sheriff election, says the additional liabilities created by the posse are twofold: Either a posse member injures, kills or violates the rights of a member of the public, or a member of the posse is injured or killed on duty.  

“The county could be sued by a posse member if they are injured while ‘volunteering’ and being put at undue risk by performing duties outside of their volunteer job description,” she wrote.