In a rural stretch of Washington, a ‘constitutional sheriff’ and his growing volunteer posse provoke controversy

Klickitat County, Wash., Sheriff Bob Songer, shown here in 2023, has become one of the most prominent constitutional sheriffs in the country, and his growing volunteer posse has some people concerned about the potential for violent confrontation or liability to the county.
*Isaac Stone Simonelli / Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting*

On a Tuesday evening in early July, Klickitat County Sheriff Bob Songer sat at the head of a small conference room along with about a dozen members of his posse.

One — a young wildland firefighter — was affectionately called “the big man.” Another was a gun dealer in his early 80s. They were there to discuss their annual role in supporting wildfire evacuations in a building Songer’s department shares with a senior center in White Salmon, a town of roughly 2,500 in south-central Washington and the stronghold of the county’s Democratic Party.

“We’re in the lion’s den,” quipped Anthony Rizzi, a captain in the Klickitat County Sheriff’s Posse who was seated to the sheriff’s right.

Rizzi wore his badge and posse uniform, which bears a strong resemblance to those of sheriff’s deputies. But he is not a sworn deputy, nor has he gone through Washington’s law enforcement academy. He is a member of Songer’s growing volunteer posse — whose membership now stands at nearly 170, or almost 10 times the number of deputies on the county payroll. The average posse member is in their mid-60s, and the largest share are ranchers and farmers.

The posse is accountable to Songer alone: Washington law allows for such volunteer posses but provides almost no guidelines for them, nor does any state agency oversee the training or discipline of their members.

Sheriff’s posses are relatively common in the rural West, but Klickitat County’s is unique in the region in its scope and scale — and because of Songer himself.

Songer is a central figure in the “constitutional sheriffs” movement, founded on the theory that county sheriffs have the authority to decide which state or federal laws they can enforce. He cemented his place in that movement — drawing national attention in the process — by publicly refusing to enforce gun control laws and pandemic-era public health rules. If federal or state authorities attempted to confiscate civilian firearms on his turf, Songer has warned that he would call upon the posse to help him fight back — a hypothetical showdown he once compared to the Bundy family standoffs in Nevada and Oregon a decade ago.

“I would call upon the citizens of the county, not just the posse, and I would deputize them,” he told InvestigateWest. “We would resist if they come in and take guns away from good citizens.”

An anti-drug sign sits along Highway 197 in Klickitat County, Wash.
*Isaac Stone Simonelli / Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting*

In practice, however, the posse serves more practical roles in Klickitat County. Songer formed the organization in 2015 to expand the presence of the sheriff’s office across a sparsely populated stretch of Washington. In a county with a shrinking budget and fewer than a half-dozen deputies on duty at a time, the posse helps free its sworn counterparts to respond to emergency calls.

On any given day, a posse member may be seated at the office’s front desk, providing security at the Klickitat County Fair or guarding the portable pumps wildland firefighters use to draw water from ponds and lakes. Songer deputized the posse’s half-dozen hound handlers to take part in the county’s controversial cougar hunts and trained another group of its “special deputies” to serve as courthouse security — a role in which he grants them limited arrest authority, and in which most posse members carry personal firearms.

“We simply could not afford to do everything we need without the posse,” said Karen Elings, the office’s chief civil deputy and the posse’s primary coordinator.

But the posse has been mired in controversy since its inception. Songer’s involvement in a movement that sometimes aligns itself with far-right “sovereign citizens” groups who believe the federal government is illegitimate raises concerns for some residents and national observers that the posse could be weaponized against the sheriff’s political enemies.

Local skeptics, including a former undersheriff, also worry about the possibility of a violent encounter between a citizen and a posse volunteer and say the lack of outside oversight puts the county at risk of being sued, especially as the posse’s ranks and responsibilities grow.

“Liability is Klickitat’s middle name these days,” said Gabrielle Gilbert, a county resident and one of Songer’s most vocal critics. “It is problematic as a constituent and taxpayer that we will take on extra liability because of the enhanced roles of what was supposed to be 50 people volunteering to help the sheriff’s office.”

Songer brushes off those criticisms. He is busy promoting his posse as a model for other cash-strapped rural counties, and his role as a board member of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association — the organization at the heart of the constitutional sheriffs movement — gives him a bully pulpit.

Songer took to the stage at the organization’s national conference in Las Vegas this spring to preach the gospel of budget-friendly posses. The conference’s other featured speakers — namely retired three-star Gen. Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration who resigned after misrepresenting his conversations with a Russian diplomat — were a testament to the growing integration of the constitutional sheriffs movement into mainstream Republican politics, giving Songer’s message an additional boost.

Several counties in the Northwest have already begun adopting elements of Songer’s model, including neighboring Benton and Franklin counties. In the wake of his speech in Las Vegas, Songer says he received inquiries from sheriffs in Wyoming, Texas and as far away as Australia.

For critics, that means the risks posed by the posse — in their view, an unaccountable cohort of armed volunteers who could intentionally or unintentionally bring calamity to a rural community — may spread to other pockets of rural America.

But for supporters, the interest in Klickitat County’s model is proof of the posse’s success. “We like to describe it as a rural neighborhood watch,” Elings said. “But the posse provides so much.”

Eyes and ears

By many accounts, Rizzi, the posse captain, is indispensable to the Klickitat County Sheriff’s Office.

When the office needed help transporting an inmate from the county jail in Goldendale, the county seat, to a courthouse in Vancouver, Rizzi made the four-hour round trip.

When a man accused of molesting his daughter appeared before Klickitat County’s Superior Court, Rizzi was called in to provide additional security. “His family was in there and ready to tear him apart,” Rizzi recalled. “We were really there to keep him in one piece.”

And in the coming months, Rizzi will lead a new team responsible for serving divorce papers and other civil court documents to county residents.

Posse members from the western end of the county meet in the White Salmon conference room once a month for a debrief and training; a larger contingent meets in an unassuming sheet-metal building on the outskirts of Goldendale marked only by a homemade billboard warning drug dealers to “get the hell out of Klickitat County.”

The posse's "special deputies" sometimes provide courtroom security inside the Klickitat County Courthouse and assist in inmate transports from the adjoining county jail in Goldendale.
*Isaac Stone Simonelli / Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting*

The trainings are sparsely attended — neither the White Salmon meeting nor a meeting in Goldendale in mid-July meeting drew more than a dozen posse members.

Ranchers on the posse’s roster rarely have time to attend the monthly trainings, particularly during wildfire season. Others not in attendance included the 17 posse members who do not live in Klickitat County. Most of those nonresident volunteers live in neighboring Skamania, Benton and Yakima counties, but one posse member — a pastor who vacations in the Columbia River Gorge — lists a home address in Kentucky.

“If they’re willing to volunteer their time for our community, we’re not going to say no,” Elings said.

The trainings largely steered clear of politics, though Songer — wearing a shirt with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association logo above the right breast pocket — warned posse members to be on the lookout for “terrorist cells” that may have recently entered the country via Mexico and could use wildfires as a weapon. If a posse member spots suspicious activity, he added, they should report back to his sworn deputies.

The posse members nodded, and the conversation then turned to challenges posed by the county’s limited cell coverage.

Who’s the boss

Songer took a circuitous route to the office of sheriff. He arrived in Klickitat County in 2000 after two decades with the Clark County, Washington, Sheriff’s Office, including six-and-a-half years as undersheriff, and a four-year stint as the police chief of Elko, Nevada.

Despite his leadership experience, Songer worked as a timber and range deputy with the Klickitat County Sheriff’s Office starting in 2000, spending the subsequent 14 years patrolling 1,700 acres of brush and pine forest in search of “cattle rustlers,” as he once recalled in an interview on a conservative talk radio show.

When Songer decided to run for sheriff against then-Undersheriff Marc Boardman in 2014, he campaigned on a promise to form a posse, which he cast as a form of “community policing” — albeit one with overtones of the Wild West.

After a bitter campaign and narrow victory, he made good on that promise, but community pushback was fierce. Local opponents took to Facebook and public comment sessions to denounce what they believed was a right-wing militia in disguise.

“We heard it all,” Songer recalled during the posse meeting in White Salmon. “They said we were going to be hanging people from trees.”

“They called us brown-shirts,” Rizzi added.

Not all objections were ideological. Boardman, who left the sheriff’s office after Songer took charge, said he was concerned about the level of training that posse members received, noting that they might not be well-versed in ensuring that the civil rights of citizens were protected.

“I disagreed with creating a posse with some law enforcement authority without putting them through commensurate training,” he said. “That’s why you have reserve (deputies) — you send them through an academy, so they all understand the rules of arrest and rules of evidence, along with constitutional law. But allowing people to join this posse as a way around those checks, balances, standards of discipline and vetting was concerning.”

Reserve deputies are a more common solution to staffing shortages. King County keeps a roster of 14 volunteer reserve deputies — many of them former or retired law enforcement officers — who can stand in for full-time deputies when needed. They are trained by Washington’s Criminal Justice Training Commission, which also manages the training and certification of sworn law enforcement officers, and they can perform most of the duties of their full-time counterparts.

Though Klickitat County has four reserve deputies, Songer also opted to create a posse independent of any state or federal agency. He and his staff vet and train prospective members, running a criminal background check for each applicant. Posse members who plan to carry a personal firearm on duty must pass a range safety test administered by fellow volunteers. Civilian complaints go to Elings or Songer himself, and the discipline process is subject to Songer’s discretion. While the Criminal Justice Training Commission can intervene in some disciplinary matters involving sworn law enforcement officers, it has no say in the affairs of volunteer posses.

Indeed, Washington law provides practically no framework for volunteer sheriff’s posses. State statutes allow sheriffs to call upon civilians to help respond to riots, search for fugitives or serve civil court documents, but leave the details to the sheriffs themselves.

“It’s a blank check,” said state Rep. Roger Goodman, D-Kirkland, chair of Washington’s House Public Safety Committee.

Goodman has worked with statewide police accountability groups on a bill that would restrict the services that non-certified volunteers can provide for law enforcement agencies. He plans to introduce that bill during next year’s legislative session, though he expects it to trigger fierce pushback from some law enforcement organizations.

States like Kentucky and California already restrict posses’ power to varying degrees. In Kentucky, sheriffs can only appoint a limited number of “special deputies” with arrest power and are held liable for their misconduct. In California, sheriffs can only “command the aid” of residents of their county.

But independence is important to Songer. “None of the other elected officials in the county are my boss,” he said at a 2019 constitutional sheriffs movement conference in Arizona. “The governor of the state of Washington is not my boss, nor the attorney general, the state attorney general, (or) the feds. The only people that are my boss are the people that put me in office.”

The sheriff’s office has had no difficulties finding volunteers. The posse now includes more than a dozen former law enforcement officers and seven EMTs and other health-care workers, along with nearly three dozen ranchers and farmers.

“If you have a passion for making sure there are fewer drugs in your community, maybe your job is to do a stakeout at a park and report to a law enforcement officer if you see something suspicious,” said state Rep. Gina Mosbrucker, R-Goldendale, who serves as the posse’s de facto legislative liaison. “You can choose a specialty that you care about.”

Rizzi says he joined the posse in 2015 for much the same reason he joined the Dallesport-Murdock Community Council when he moved across the state line from Oregon.

“I’m nosy,” he said. “I want to know what’s going on and how it is going to affect me. … We’re the eyes and ears who report back.”

Austerity measure or militia

Klickitat County’s posse predates Songer’s involvement in the constitutional sheriffs movement. Indeed, the sheriff’s office bills the posse as a callback to the Klickitat County ranchers who fought gun battles with horse thieves in the Simcoe Mountains a century ago.

Songer first drew national attention for refusing to enforce Initiative 1639, a package of firearms restrictions — including raising the minimum age for possessing semiautomatic weapons and tightening background checks — passed by Washington voters in 2018. As he recounted in a 2020 radio appearance with Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, Songer was largely unaware of the movement at the time.

A sign in support of Klickitat County adopting a constitutional county resolution rests in the window of a storefront in Goldendale, Wash., in 2023. The controversial resolution was submitted for consideration by Klickitat County Sheriff Bob Songer in 2022.
*Isaac Stone Simonelli / Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting*

Songer and a dozen other Washington sheriffs argued that I-1639 was unconstitutional and, therefore, that enforcing it would violate their oath of office, regardless of the will of Washington voters. The resulting conflict with state Attorney General Bob Ferguson factored into Mack’s decision to invite Songer to that year’s CSPOA conference in Mesa, Arizona.

“That really was the fire,” Songer recalled, that ignited his commitment to the movement.

Rupa Bhattacharyya, legal director of the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and a critic of the constitutional sheriffs’ movement, said the ties between posse revival and the notion of sheriffs’ supreme constitutional authority date back decades.

“The CSPOA’s theories about sheriffs are a direct descendant of the Posse Comitatus,” she said, referring to a far-right vigilante movement with roots in the 1960s that also influenced the modern sovereign citizen and Christian identity movements. Gordon Kahl, one of the movement’s leaders, killed two U.S. marshals in 1983 and later died in a firefight with federal law enforcement after a national manhunt.

While the Posse Comitatus’ views on sheriffs’ authority resembled those of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, Mack rejects the premise that his organization inherited its principles from the violent white nationalist movement. Instead, Mack points to a 1997 U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the federal government from commandeering local law enforcement to implement federal gun control laws as the foundation of his organization’s legal arguments.

“This ruling proves that the states are sovereign, that the states must keep the federal government in check,” Mack — a plaintiff in the case — wrote in a commentary on the decision. He went on to argue that county sheriffs likewise have the responsibility to keep federal and state authorities in check.

Bhattacharyya argues that interpretation doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

“There is a system of dual sovereignty in the United States,” she said, “but one of those sovereigns is supreme under the Constitution, and that’s the federal government. State and local officials cannot be required to execute federal law, but they can’t prevent the feds from executing federal law. … It’s also not true that (sheriffs) can prevent state authorities from executing state law, because again, states are supreme over their local officials.”

Songer has previously suggested using his posse to do just that: block state and federal authorities from enforcing gun control measures.

“What is going to happen if the Washington State Patrol comes in?” he asked the audience at the 2019 CSPOA conference in Arizona. “How about if the federal government comes in? How are you going to stop them? Well, personally, I’m telling them to get their ass out of my county. And then the second thing I’m going to do — I have about 130 posse members right now. And I’ll call the high school, fill the gymnasium with about four or five hundred good citizens, (have them) raise their right hand and swear them in. … If they think the Bundy deal down in Nevada was a big thing, that would be nothing compared to what would be happening here.”

Songer doesn’t frequently allude to the Bundy family — arguably the most prominent opponents of federal authority in the Western U.S. — though he says he has attended one meeting of the People’s Rights Network founded by family scion Ammon Bundy. The People’s Rights Network was formed from a core group of supporters involved in the Bundy family’s 2014 standoff at Bunkerville, Nevada. It is a descendant of the much older sovereign citizens movement, which challenges the authority of the federal government and treats county sheriffs as the supreme law enforcement officers in their jurisdictions.

Songer has continued to make headlines for his refusal to cooperate with state and federal authorities when he considers their orders unconstitutional. In 2021, for instance, he threatened to arrest elected officials or public employees who try to enforce public health directives like social distancing or masking requirements, prompting a rare condemnation from the Klickitat County Board of Commissioners.

With Songer in the limelight, national opponents of the constitutional sheriffs’ movement raised concerns about the potential use of the posse to enforce his interpretation of the Constitution.

“We completely understand that county sheriffs’ (offices) are often understaffed, under-resourced law enforcement organizations that require assistance,” said Devin Burghart, the executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights and a frequent critic of Songer. “It’s when they start infusing those posses with the kind of ideological constructs that come out of groups like the (Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association)… then we have concerns.”

Bhattacharyya said she worries that volunteer posses could provide a workaround for sheriffs who plan to interfere in elections in states that prohibit the deployment of law enforcement officers to polling locations. Though Washington elections are conducted entirely through mail-in ballots, Bhattacharyya says ballot drop box locations pose similar risks, pointing to the presence of armed vigilantes near Arizona ballot drop boxes in 2022.

“At the most recent (CSPOA) convention in Las Vegas … we certainly heard reports of efforts to organize around the elections and what those folks saw as threats to voting,” Bhattacharyya said.

Bhattacharyya argues that “constitutional sheriffs” have a record of election interference. She points to Barry County, Michigan, Sheriff Dar Leaf, who sought warrants to seize voting machines in 2020 on suspicion that they were rigged to siphon votes from then-President Trump, as a prime example.

Songer does not seem focused on the results of the 2020 election. When asked by Mack about the possibility of voter fraud in Klickitat County during a radio appearance earlier this year, he explained that he had reviewed several ballots brought to him by the county clerk and found nothing untoward.

Songer does, however, defend the Constitutional Sheriffs and Police Officers Association. “Anybody that challenges it,” he told InvestigateWest, should “stand up and give an example where their rights have been violated.”

Klickitat County Sheriff’s Posse members Shane Cagle, left, and Brian Paul stand in front of a sign that greets people at the county line.
*Paul Kiefer / InvestigateWest*

Elsewhere, sheriffs have occasionally used posses for explicitly political purposes. In Culpeper County, Virginia, federal prosecutors indicted a constitutional sheriff for allegedly accepting $70,000 in campaign contributions between 2019 and 2023 in exchange for making donors part of his volunteer auxiliary and providing access to firearms. In Arizona, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s so-called “Cold Case Posse” attracted attention in 2011 when its members began investigating the validity of then-President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Arpaio’s successor disbanded that posse in 2017.

Another branch of Maricopa County’s posse — which once boasted as many as 3,000 members — took part in Arpaio’s trademark hunt for undocumented immigrants, including participating in traffic stops, worksite raids and crowd control operations. Those posse activities factored into a costly racial discrimination lawsuit in 2012 that played a key role in transforming Arizona into a battleground state.

The most obvious opportunity for the posse to act as enforcers for Songer’s political beliefs came during two Black Lives Matter protests in Klickitat County in 2020 — one in White Salmon, and another in nearby Lyle. Songer routinely refers to the Black Lives Matter movement as a source of “domestic terrorism,” and he told InvestigateWest that he deployed armed posse members to “keep an eye” on the protests and intervene in the event of rioting.

But while some attendees reported feeling intimidated by the posse’s presence, the marches ended without incident. “They had First Amendment rights,” Songer said at the White Salmon training.

Some skeptics — both local and national — consider worries about the posse as a militia-in-waiting to be a distraction from more immediate concerns. Jessica Pishko, an attorney and author of “The Highest Law in the Land,” a forthcoming book on American sheriffs, doubts that Songer’s office has the administrative wherewithal to use the posse as a militia.

“He uses this overheated rhetoric,” she said, “But he has all of these other budget and administrative problems that he can’t seem to control, and he thinks it’s a good idea to have a 200-man posse. … It strikes me that he’s biting off more than he can chew.”

In her view, the controversies surrounding Songer have often obscured the core reason for the posse’s existence — the county’s shrinking budget and the sheriff’s growing call volumes. Klickitat County has not added any new deputy positions in the past two decades, though its population grew by roughly 15% during that period.

She notes that the notion of using posses as a savings opportunity isn’t unique to Klickitat County, nor is it new. “Ronald Reagan was a big advocate of these all-volunteer posses,” she said, “because they work for free.”

“The austerity part gets muddied,” she added. “It gets muddied … on the left by anxieties about militias, and then it gets muddied by [the posse] when they cloak it with American Western vibes.”

In lieu of money, Pishko says, posse members receive some degree of prestige, along with a badge and a magnetic placard to place on their car. “It gives people some sort of glory and super status,” she argued, that deepens social divides in a small rural community like Klickitat County — and, she added, shores up loyalty to Songer.

Songer pushes back on the notion that posse membership is a reward for loyalty. “I’ve told the Songer-haters many times that they’re invited to the trainings,” he told InvestigateWest. “If they can pass a background check, they can be (part of the) posse too.”

‘A do-stuff posse’

Klickitat County’s posse lacks some of the ceremonial frills of many of its Northwest counterparts. Deschutes County Sheriff’s Posse members in Oregon, for instance, primarily serve as horse-mounted ambassadors at parades and fairs. “We’re more of a do-stuff posse,” Klickitat County Undersheriff Carmen Knopes said during the training in White Salmon.

Elings estimates that the Klickitat County posse’s services save the county a half-million dollars each year. The department’s annual budget was $5.3 million in 2024, of which $11,000 was earmarked for the posse. While the sheriff’s office provides uniforms and badges, the posse members generally use their personal vehicles and cover day-to-day costs.

Some roles performed by the posse — more specifically, those performed by the posse’s “special deputies” — come with significant risks. “There’s always the possibility that something goes wrong in the lobby of the courthouse,” Songer warned posse members in White Salmon, pointing to the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling in 2020 barring courts from shackling defendants during trial.

The posse’s newest role as civil process servers brings more risks. Rizzi, who previously worked as a process server, says he hopes the use of uniformed teams of posse members will dissuade those receiving civil court documents — be they divorce papers or notice of a lawsuit — from threatening volunteers.

That’s not a hypothetical concern. In March, for instance, a Kansas City-area man killed a court employee serving him an eviction notice.

The risk of violence involving volunteers is not limited to courthouse security guards or process servers. In the past decade alone, volunteer reserve deputies and police officers — who generally receive formal training — have drawn weapons on or killed civilians in Oklahoma, Arizona and South Carolina.

InvestigateWest has found no evidence of violent encounters between Klickitat County posse members and other members of the public, and Klickitat County’s posse doesn’t participate in traffic stops or undercover operations. While the county pays roughly $6,000 a quarter for a boilerplate workers compensation insurance policy for the posse, Elings says the sheriff’s office has yet to file a claim, nor does she expect it to. “We match posse members to tasks based on their experience,” she told InvestigateWest. “Based on what they do best.”

Some local critics argue, however, the county should not ignore the risks created by the posse.

“I think that there’s a valid function for posse members, but it should be clearly distinct from law enforcement because of the vicarious liability,” said Boardman, the county’s former undersheriff. “There is potential for misjudgment when you don’t have people vetted and trained in the same way you would for a reserve or a full-time deputy."

The sheriff’s office emphasizes the distinction between general posse members and special deputies, who make up only a small fraction of the posse’s members. The primary role of most posse members is to “observe, document and report,” Elings said.

Klickitat County’s Board of Commissioners, who control the sheriff’s office budget, have yet to publicly weigh the savings associated with the posse against the liabilities created by its expanding role. Two of the three county commissioners did not respond to InvestigateWest’s inquiries about the posse. The third, Lori Zoller, deferred to the sheriff’s office for comment.

The county’s budget woes make the posse — and the sheriff’s office — a sensitive subject.

Klickitat County has historically relied on fees from a landfill near Roosevelt for a majority of its revenue, and the recent loss of major contracts — including with Spokane County and Mason County — leaves it struggling to fill gaps in its upcoming budget. The construction of a new county administration building in Goldendale ran several million dollars over budget; some residents now refer to it as “the Taj Mahal.”

In the face of those constraints, the county cut the sheriff’s office budget by about $40,000 between 2023 and 2024.

Meanwhile, the county faces a $20 million lawsuit filed by the family of a Yakama Nation man who died by suicide while experiencing opioid withdrawal in the county jail in May 2023. That lawsuit, as well as a November 2023 incident in which a female jail inmate arrived at a local hospital exhibiting alarming signs of sepsis, prompted the Board of Commissioners to transfer control of the jail from the sheriff’s office to a new county Department of Corrections.

Lynn Mason, who helped organize a political action committee opposed to Songer during the 2022 sheriff election, says the additional liabilities created by the posse are twofold: Either a posse member injures, kills or violates the rights of a member of the public, or a member of the posse is injured or killed on duty.

“The county could be sued by a posse member if they are injured while ‘volunteering’ and being put at undue risk by performing duties outside of their volunteer job description,” she wrote.

Political signs in Goldendale often reflect Songer’s popularity — and the popularity of his interpretation of a sheriff’s responsibilities — in the conservative farming and ranching community along the Columbia River Gorge.
*Paul Kiefer / InvestigateWest*

Liability concerns have hampered posse programs elsewhere in the country. In 2016, Pennsylvania’s liability and workers’ compensation insurance providers for county governments declined to provide a policy for a volunteer posse, and in 2018, the sheriff of Grant County, Oregon, suspended his posse program for lack of liability coverage.

Songer contends that liability is inescapable in his line of work. “Anything you do carries a certain amount of liability,” he told InvestigateWest. “If you run your shop like that — you run scared — deputies would not even crawl in a patrol car.”

The posse after Songer

This April, Songer appeared in uniform before a small and enthusiastic crowd in a hotel conference center in Las Vegas with copies of the Klickitat County Sheriff’s Posse manual on hand to share.

Songer presented the program as a cost-saving measure and a tool for civic engagement, and avoided the volatile rhetoric surrounding the 2024 election that dominated much of the CSPOA conference.

While Songer’s remarks have resonated with like-minded sheriffs across the country, his influence appears to be more concrete in his home region. Benton and Franklin counties formed a joint posse program in 2022, drawing some inspiration — and a handful of members — from Klickitat County. Nearby Columbia County, Washington, is also forming a posse modeled after Klickitat County’s.

Meanwhile, in Klickitat County, Songer is preparing to take on a new role. After three terms as sheriff and two recent strokes, Songer says he will not run for reelection in 2026. Though no candidate has thrown their hat in the ring, Mason — one of Songer’s local critics — believes the most obvious successors are more controversy-averse.

“I certainly hope the discourse around the posse shifts once Songer is no longer in charge, there is new leadership at (the Klickitat County Sheriffs Office) and the ‘volunteer’ program is run as an actual volunteer program with a manageable number of volunteers,” she wrote in an email to InvestigateWest. “I’m not suggesting simply rebranding the program by changing the name of it but really working to gain the trust of the community again. Many in the community are fearful of the posse and for good reason.”

But in his retirement, Songer doesn’t plan to step back from the posse, though his successor will formally take charge of the organization.

“I’ll remain involved, of course,” he told InvestigateWest — and he plans to take on a larger role in the constitutional sheriffs movement.

InvestigateWest (invw.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Visit invw.org/newsletters to sign up for weekly updates.