Disputes about Boise’s policing boil over into politics in McLean-Masterson mayoral race
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The former Boise police chief intent on unseating Mayor Lauren McLean is drawing from a rift between her administration and members of the city’s Police Department to make his case to voters.
In public forums, Mike Masterson has accused McLean of initially hiring the wrong chief, “demoralizing” officers and botching a racism investigation after a former captain was discovered to have espoused white supremacist views.
On Tuesday, he added a new complaint.
“It’s troubling to me that this mayor, in a recent downtown police shooting, had her office control the narrative for the police shooting,” Masterson said at a Tuesday debate hosted by KTVB. “It was not responsible. They put a lot of pressure on the officers that demoralized the department and left our community confused and with so many unanswered questions.”
The mayor’s office has countered that McLean’s communications team is often involved in any city department’s news releases, and that it was no more involved in the information the police put out in a recent high-profile shooting.
The department has had more police shootings this year than in decades, with four fatal shootings out of six total, according to previous Idaho Statesman reporting.
The tension comes against a national backdrop of progressive-minded mayors coming into conflict with their local law enforcement as activists push for police reforms and greater oversight.
Masterson names Wasson shooting
In his debate comments, Masterson was referring to the shooting of Payton Wasson, 22, on June 24, he told the Statesman.
The late-night shooting near Boise’s downtown bar scene stirred a community response, prompting a protest at City Hall. Police have released limited information about the man’s death, which the Ada County coroner said was caused by a gunshot to the head after Wasson fled the scene during a drug or gang investigation. Officer Chance Feldner fired his weapon at the scene, and a gun was recovered next to Wasson.
“They have no remorse. They have no shame. They’ll call it a tragedy while making excuses for their officers’ behavior,” Ty Werenka said at a protest with about 100 people less than a week after the shooting, according to previous Statesman reporting. Werenka separately sued the Police Department over an incident in a downtown garage where he alleges he was falsely arrested and assaulted by police.
“This incident raises disturbing questions about the specific protocols used by BPD when an officer discharges their weapon in the line of duty,” Leo Morales, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho, previously told the Idaho Statesman by email.
In an interview, Masterson told the Statesman he thinks the community needs more details about shootings.
“We needed to release enough facts that tell the community it was professional, it was law-abiding,” Masterson said of the downtown shooting. When he was chief, he said, that sometimes meant releasing “more information than the prosecutor’s office was comfortable with.”
Masterson said such release of information is important while the public waits for further investigations to conclude.
Maria Weeg, a spokesperson for McLean and who runs the city’s Office of Community Engagement, said she “did not have anything to do with those initial communications from BPD.”
Police sent out two news releases about the incident, one the day it happened and another two days later. The first provided a narrative of the incident, and the second said the suspect had died.
Police sent out a third release six days after the shooting announcing a news conference to be held by Police Chief Ron Winegar, which Weeg said she had looked over before it went out. She said she works closely with the communications workers at all departments in the city and frequently serves as a second pair of eyes on news releases or social media posts.
Weeg sent the Statesman changes she made to the release, which show minor line edits, like adding “affairs” to a sentence about “an internal affairs investigation.”
In the third release, Winegar called the shooting “a tragedy” for the family and “for those who were witnesses and for our community.” In the document showing Weeg’s alterations, that quote was unchanged.
“What I did communicate to Chief Winegar at that time was that the tone and tenor of comments we were getting (from the community) after the Payton Wasson shooting was different” from how residents had responded to some other incidents, Weeg said. She said she monitors how residents respond to what’s going on in the city.
A draft of a news release dated four days after the shooting, which Weeg also sent to the Statesman, included a quote from Winegar explaining the standard process by which such an investigation would proceed. That specific quote was not sent out, though much of its contents were included in other information that was released. Weeg told the Statesman that document was from a working draft. Edits she made included changing a sentence about the city’s police oversight office from passive to active voice.
The same document also included “talking points” for officials about the shooting, which said that initial news releases about critical incidents are “usually vague because we don’t want to report anything that hasn’t been confirmed or is not true.”
“My heart goes out to the Wasson family,” Winegar said at the news conference. “We cannot bring someone back who has been killed, but we can ensure integrity and accountability in the processes and in the investigations that ensue, and we are absolutely committed to doing that.”
Guy Bourgeau, the president of the Boise police union, which has endorsed Masterson, told the Statesman that the department’s handling of the shooting “caused a lot of internal strife.”
“It implied that we did something wrong or that the officer may have been careless,” Bourgeau said.
Bourgeau said the department’s messaging angered officers, who confronted Winegar in staff meetings about their feelings.
In response, Bourgeau said Winegar told officers that the mayor’s office had “heavily redacted” news releases and “directed the narrative on that incident.”
Winegar declined to comment on the incident.
“My job as the chief of police is to be as apolitical as possible, and I don’t think I’m going to comment on anything going on in a mayoral race,” he told the Statesman.
Weeg denied Bourgeau’s account of the mayor’s office’s involvement.
“My recollection was that I engaged in the same way that I’ve engaged in a million different interactions with departments across the city about the communications that get put out,” she said. “I think all of that is in my job description.”
At the KTVB debate, McLean responded to Masterson, saying that she refrained from speaking at the press conference about the shooting “because it was for him,” meaning Winegar, and adding that the city’s communications department works on news releases.
“Ultimately, the chief spoke to the concerns of the community, cares deeply about the department, and I support the work that he’s doing to do that,” she said.
Tensions between officers, city leadership
Rank-and-file officers in the Police Department began to publicly voice their displeasure with the mayor’s administration and her chosen police leader more than a year ago, when former Police Chief Ryan Lee resigned at McLean’s request because, she said, he had lost the trust of officers. Multiple current and former officers have sued the city, and Lee has responded to one suit with a countersuit of his own, alleging an officer falsely accused him of an injury.
The discontent at the department has boiled over into the mayor’s race, injecting a city agency into politics.
The split between officers and McLean culminated in the announcement earlier this year that a former police chief would attempt to replace her. Since then, the police union and police advocates in the Treasure Valley have queued up behind Masterson, while McLean has won the support of much of the city’s liberal base.
“I would like to see a city anywhere in the U.S. who is not having huge leadership issues around policing right now,” Holli Woodings, a former City Council president, told the Statesman in an interview about the mayor’s race.
Woodings has endorsed McLean and recently moved to Washington, D.C. She added there are “reasons to be critical” about what’s happened in Boise, but that throughout the country, “when reform-minded police chiefs come in, it’s often for a short time for various reasons.”
After Lee’s ouster, McLean appointed Winegar, a 30-year department veteran, who came out of retirement to take the top job. Masterson has said Winegar’s selection was a strong choice that should have been made sooner.
Disagreement over release of body cam footage
Police have released few details about the Wasson shooting. As is common practice in the Treasure Valley, police do not release officer body camera footage, police reports or other details beyond initial news releases until months or years later, when criminal and internal investigations have been completed.
While some other jurisdictions around the country have moved to release video footage of police shootings sooner, Ada County officials have resisted such changes, citing concerns about interference with investigations.
In 2021, McLean publicly pushed Ada County Prosecutor Jan Bennetts to release body camera footage of shootings faster after officers shot three people over a four-week period. Chief Lee told reporters around the same time that the department was “having conversations” about releasing footage more quickly.
Bennetts responded that doing so would violate due process rights of those who could be charged.
“We will not be party to impeding the pursuit of justice,” Bennetts responded in a news release.
The prosecutor, a Republican who is also the wife of Garden City Police Chief Cory Stambaugh, has donated money to Masterson’s campaign.
Reporter Alex Brizee contributed.
This story was originally published October 27, 2023 at 4:00 AM.
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