Moyle, Skaug shamelessly turn Boise’s tragedy into fuel for politics | Opinion
Last week, Ross Wardlaw, 41, was charged with murdering Jordan Harbst, 25, on the Boise River Greenbelt.
It is a terrible tragedy. And a disturbing series of facts about the case suggest that there are real problems Idaho needs to solve, especially when it comes to repeated violent offenders with serious psychiatric problems.
But two Idaho politicians pounced on the incident immediately, ready to instead lay murder at the feet of their political rivals.
“It is sad and infuriating to see a possibly preventable crime occur because Boise won’t enforce the law,” claimed House Speaker Mike Moyle, R-Star.
“If the city of Boise had followed the law, that young man would likely be alive,” claimed House Judiciary Committee Chair Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa.
Moyle and Skaug didn’t just want to threaten Boise, they wanted the spotlight trained on them while they did it. That’s why they didn’t just call the attorney general to talk about a new state law requiring cities to enforce camping bans, they sent out a press release bragging to everyone in shouting distance that they had done so.
The question Skaug and Moyle decided to fixate on was: Why are there still sometimes homeless people on the Greenbelt?
That is a stupid question.
Go to any major city in America; go to a park; you will find homeless people. If a person exists, and that person doesn’t have a private place to sleep, that person will sleep in public.
A much better question is: Why was a man with a long history of serious violent crimes — stretching back more than 20 years and with the most recent charges only a year ago, according to Boise State Public Radio — who had previously been found unfit to stand trial and been involuntarily committed, why was that man unhoused and unsupervised?
But at a time when Boise needs problem solvers, what we have instead is a pair of prima donnas trying to edge into the spotlight.
The camping ban Moyle and Skaug claim Boise doesn’t enforce achieves precisely nothing in terms of violent crime prevention. Roust someone from a park bench or clear a homeless camp, and those people will with absolute certainty sleep somewhere else. If any of them are unstable or violent, you have moved — not solved — the problem.
As the Idaho Statesman’s Carolyn Komatsoulis reported, there were about 800 homeless people in Boise at one time as of last count. The Ada County jail has a total of just over 1,100 beds. Unless Skaug and Moyle would like to double our jail capacity or release everyone currently inside, it’s not remotely possible to get all the homeless people off the street.
You can’t solve this problem by raising sentences. Prosecutors claim Wardlaw killed Harbst because of “generalized paranoia that people on scooters were after him,” as Alex Brizee reported. Motives like those, built on paranoid delusion rather than rational calculation, are not susceptible to deterrence.
You can’t solve this problem by talking Attorney General Raúl Labrador into suing the city, which at best would mean nothing but fewer resources for actual public safety measures.
Perhaps a way to actually keep people with known psychiatric problems and dangerous behavioral patterns from hurting people is through some combination of supervised treatment and separation from the general public.
But there are only 155 psychiatric beds at State Hospital South in Blackfoot — where Wardlaw was committed for time after he was found unfit for trial over hitting one person and threatening to stab someone else last year (he was later acquitted by a jury), according to Boise State Public Radio — along with another 55 at State Hospital North in Orofino. That is, Idaho has over 2 million people and about 200 beds suitable for people who might be involuntarily committed.
And the Legislature has dragged its feet on longstanding calls to build a facility to house the dangerously mentally ill, despite Department of Health and Welfare officials stating in 2023 that there were only nine beds statewide for such patients. Moyle pushed tax cuts instead.
The Legislature holds the purse strings to build more beds and to hire more staff to treat people with behavioral health problems. It has significant control over Idaho’s rules for involuntary commitment. It has the ability to study this terrible killing and take evidence-based steps to reduce the likelihood that it will happen again.
But why do any of that when you can make a little political hay by publicly knocking heads with the liberal mayor of the state’s biggest city?
This is about an innocent man whose life was taken, allegedly due to delusional beliefs held by a man with a long history of violence and serious psychiatric problems. It sure would be nice if Moyle and Skaug could get over themselves for a moment.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.