Excerpt from "VALLEY PEOPLE"

Deputy Squires

by Bruce Anderson

On my way out the door, I'd like to say a few words in defense of deputy Squires, not that he requires it from me, necessarily, but because I'm probably the only person around who will bother to speak up for him when he's secretly slandered as he was recently to me by a crumb bum KZYX type. "Squires won't do anything because the victim is a Mexican." Bullshit. How many Mexican victims go to a local lib for help with anything? But local Mexicans will go to Deputy Squires' house in the middle of the night for help because they know they can trust him to do the right thing. How many communities are there anywhere in America whose residents call the cop at his house on his personal phone and have that cop roll on whatever the problem is? Which is quite a testament to the guy, I'd say, and I'd say it even if I didn't know about the numbers of kids of all races the Deputy has privately helped out over his many years here — helped out with everything from shelter in his own house to cash to job placement.

We're almost uniquely fortunate to have enjoyed a community cop for three decades who has functioned as a kind of unpaid, one-man social services agency, and don't even try to tell me that Anderson Valley hasn't been more than well served by Deputy Squires who, on many, many occasions has gone way, way out of his way to help somebody out who would have otherwise been unnecessarily packed off to jail, or would have killed him or herself, or harmed a loved one, or gotten into his or her car blind drunk and out onto 128, or would have had no place for a local kid to stay, or would not have had a big forceful guy to give her single mom young son a stern talking to so the kid wouldn't slide into dope and the company of dopes, or refuse to do an eviction for an infirm old man. And on and on. Add up all the many hundreds of times deputy Squires, without anybody but the involved parties knowing about it, without this gruff but modest man ever once blowing his own horn about the many hundreds of times he's had to roll out of bed on a night he's been off duty or even on vacation to take care of a matter needing immediate attention whether or not that matter was law enforcement related, we all owe this guy a debt as big as he is, and he's a big guy in every sense of big. It's long past time this severely fragmented community threw a Deputy Squires Day of Appreciation, because this one guy has done ten times as much for us as he's been paid to do.

We all owe him whether or not we know it.