Deputy catches Caldwell police chief speeding, lets him off with warning. Is that normal?
Caldwell Police Chief Rex Ingram was driving to work about 9 a.m. one Monday in February when he was pulled over by an Ada County sheriff’s deputy on a motorcycle. Ingram had been traveling 38 mph in a 20-mph school zone, the deputy told him, according to the officer’s body camera footage, which was posted Nov. 25 by the Idaho Dispatch, a conservative news outlet.
Ingram told Deputy Bryan Kindelberger, when Kindelberger asked, that he was Caldwell’s police chief — and told Kindelberger, who is assigned to the county-run Eagle Police Department, to “do what you’ve gotta do.” But Kindelberger replied that he’d been planning just to issue a warning, and the interaction ended, according to the footage.
The Idaho Statesman requested the footage Monday but had not received a response to its request as of Monday evening.
Deputy Lauren Montague, a spokesperson for the Ada County Sheriff’s Office, declined to say whether it was typical for a deputy to issue only a warning in this kind of case.
Gary Raney, who served as Ada County sheriff from 2005 until 2015, told the Idaho Statesman that the decision to issue a citation or a warning was a “question of judgment.”
Traffic stop followed by donation to sheriff’s campaign
Days after the Feb. 5 incident, Ingram is recorded as having donated two items — a Starbucks “gift bundle” worth $35 and an optical sight for a firearm worth $300 — to Ada County Sheriff Matt Clifford’s campaign, to be used as raffle prizes at a campaign event, according to Clifford’s campaign-finance filings. Clifford, a Republican, was then seeking re-election to the county’s top law-enforcement job.
But the donation and the incident were unconnected, Char Jackson, a spokesperson for the Caldwell Police Department, told the Statesman.
Though Ingram could not recall the date of his in-kind donations, she said, the date of the donation could have been earlier than the Feb. 5 traffic stop. On its Facebook page, Clifford’s campaign advertised receiving raffle prizes from donors in the days leading up to the Feb. 9 campaign event — but Clifford’s campaign filings list all event prizes as being donated on the day of the event itself.
Ingram also donated to Clifford’s campaign in September and October 2023, according to his filings on the Idaho secretary of state’s campaign-finance site.
Clifford faced no opposition in the May GOP primary and won the November general election handily with only a Constitution Party opponent.
This story was originally published December 3, 2024 at 4:00 AM.
