From Sheriff Matt Clifford:
Earlier this week, we settled a lawsuit with Mr. Heikkola, stemming from an incident in January 2023. It wasn’t our best day. It is the expectation that Ada County deputies perform to the best of their abilities every day — while keeping people’s constitutional rights in the forefront of their minds, while also keeping our community safe.
For anyone to claim we are trampling on someone’s constitutional rights simply isn’t true.
The reality is, we have hundreds of contacts every day with people of all different backgrounds, religions, ethnicities and socioeconomic standings. While the vast majority of those interactions go well, occasionally we fumble and miss the mark.
Part of the settlement was to include additional constitutional policing training; fortunately, we had already implemented this training prior to the settlement. We will now also include a scenario similar to Mr. Heikkola’s in our scenario-based training. We are one of few law enforcement agencies across the country with routine built-in training time. Every patrol deputy receives 9.5 training hours per month. These blocks of training include topics such as firearms training, scenario-based training, legal updates, EVOC, de-escalation techniques, arrest and control techniques, CPR and first aid, and more.
Part of our culture at the Ada County Sheriff’s Office is to always strive to be better – and learning from this incident will help us to do just that.