Josh Harris, 47, who owns a Tacoma construction business, wants you to elect him to the Pierce County Council this November.
Harris (photo below), a Republican, is running on a pro-police platform. He claims police reformers are fixated on “racial problems that don’t exist.” He’s the guy who posted bail for three Tacoma cops accused of killing Manuel Ellis (details here), and he thinks embattled sheriff Ed Troyer did nothing wrong (more about this below). He also wants to cut spending on the homeless and eliminate affordable housing mandates. (He also shot a homeless man last week, see story here.)
But despite his law-and-order posing, Harris himself is a twice-convicted felon. In 2002, he was convicted of felony theft that involved altering customer checks; sentenced to home detention in lieu of jail time, he cut off his ankle bracelet. In 2007, he was convicted of felony insurance fraud. He calls those episodes “mistakes.” I call them disqualifying.
Troyer is accused of racially profiling a black newspaper deliveryman named Sedrick Altheimer, who is now suing Pierce County and has a protection order against Troyer (see details here). As for Harris, he claims to have accosted Altheimer about a year before Troyer did, and says he pulled a gun on him (apparently to portray Altheimer as an aggressor). What’s an ex-felon doing with a gun? (Harris claims a court restored his gun rights, but refused to provide the Seattle Times with any documentation of this.)
Under a recently passed Washington law, felons who’ve completed their sentences can vote and run for office. Harris is one of four GOP candidates vying for a council seat occupied by a term-limited Democrat representing Gig Harbor, Ruston, and parts of Tacoma.
Apparently Harris has loads of money for politics (so why did he need to steal?), and has hired the consulting firm behind ex-cop Loren Culp’s windmill-tilting campaign for governor in 2020. (Note: Culp’s police dog is a crook, too, see article here.)
This story ran in the print edition of the Seattle Times on Friday, May 27, 2022, on the frontpage. Seattle Times stories are paywalled online, but it’s reproduced on another website and you can read it here.
I’d like to point out that anyone can call themselves a “Republican” or “Democrat,” and the parties have no control over who runs for office under their party banner. However, the Pierce County GOP organization gave Harris space on their website (here). And it just seems like that a lot of GOP candidates and office holders are moral defects these days. It didn’t use to be that way; I remember when the Republicans had standards. Those were the good old days.
I suppose they’ll argue they believe in redemption. Maybe because so many of them need redeeming? As for me, I prefer candidates who behaved in the first place, and don’t have criminal records. And … do leopards really change their spots?
