Oregon government workers face violent threats in the field, survey finds

Key people managing Oregon’s natural resources have dealt with death threats, attack dogs and gunfire, according to a recent survey of field staff from nine state agencies.

Last year, two Department of State Lands workers tasked with protecting wetlands fled a terrifying site visit on the Oregon Coast. Agency Director Vicki Walker said the employees were initially having a courteous conversation with a Lincoln County property owner, until they informed him he was violating a state environmental law.

“The gentleman just completely changed his attitude and threatened to murder them both if they didn’t get off his property,” Walker said. “In a situation like that, you don’t wait around to have a conversation, you remove yourself.”

This incident sparked a first-of-its-kind investigation into the safety of Oregon’s natural resource workers. Many of these workers roam remote areas collecting scientific data, inspecting for permits, upholding environmental laws, or enforcing hunting and fishing regulations.

This year, Walker partnered with other state agencies, such as the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Department of Environmental Quality, to survey the experiences of rank-and-file field staff. Grim themes emerged from the comments, from verbal abuse to outright assaults.

“It shines a light on how the public interacts with its government and feels about its government,” Walker said.

Of more than 600 state agency employees who took the survey, a third said they’d recently had a public interaction that made them concerned for their safety.

“I was attacked by [an] owner’s pet resulting in two months of treatments,” one respondent said.

Other state employees described threats with loaded guns and large knives.

As one Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife worker who enforces hunting regulations wrote: “Occasionally shots are fired near employees.” Another said: “I’ve had landowners threaten to shoot me by patting their side-arm clearly in a holster.”

Numerous women reported regularly experiencing sexual harassment.

“The [property] owner told me he wanted to see me undress,” one wrote.

Another said: “I am often meeting with middle-aged men (usually more than one), some of whom carry firearms, in the middle of nowhere at some quarry, and don’t want to be told by a woman what to do or that what they’re doing is wrong.”

Some staff were scared by conflicts with people living unsheltered in natural areas, and connected threatening behavior to drug addiction and mental health crises. Others said their state uniforms and marked vehicles made them targets for road rage.

Many of these people work in remote areas with poor or no cell service. They said in the survey that they want more suitable technology, such as satellite phones, GPS monitoring and body cameras. Others want pepper spray.

Besides getting in the way of officials’ doing their jobs, these hostile interactions cause burn-out and take a toll on their mental health, a summary report on the survey found.

Since the two Department of State Lands employees received that death threat on the coast, their boss has directed staff not to go in the field alone, and Walker said that the agency offered more training on how to verbally de-escalate conflicts.

But she and other executive leaders want a more uniform, statewide response. They’re calling for structured safety training across agencies, improving collaborations with law enforcement, and creating a database to capture incidents in real time.

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek “believes that the results of the survey are deeply concerning and must be addressed with haste,” according to an email from Kotek spokesperson Anca Matica.

The governor’s office is working with the natural resources agencies on policy changes to ensure staff safety, Matica said.

“We anticipate significant progress to be made in the coming months,” she added.