It was a quiet Tuesday night on June 17, but the first half of Battle Ground police officer Jeff Cabanting-Rafael’s shift featured numerous speeders, a vehicle collision with traumatic injuries and two “bathrooms in progress.”
Yes, two incidents involving bathrooms occurred during the first half of Cabanting-Rafael’s Tuesday, June 17, shift. In the first case, a known individual to the Battle Ground Police Department (BGPD) was screaming from a construction zone portable toilet. The noise resulted in a call from a nearby resident. The individual told officers he was going to the bathroom and it was painful. In another call, two individuals jumped a construction zone fence while Cabanting-Rafael was driving by, and one of them opted to use a construction zone portable toilet after a nearby business denied them bathroom access after 11 p.m. The site of two people jumping the fence led Cabanting-Rafael to report trespassing in progress and a possible burglary, as earlier this month, at the same location, officers found burglars attempting to steal from the construction site.
A supportive community environment
Cabanting-Rafael, an officer with BGPD since 2022 after moving from Hawaii, said he finds the most enjoyment in the job through support from the community.
“I think one of the biggest things I’ve come to appreciate, something that I didn’t quite realize I needed or wanted until I got it, was how supportive the community is to law enforcement,” Cabanting-Rafael said.
He explained that with “X amount of police officers and thousands of citizens,” with his night shift having just two officers and a sergeant, that communication between officers and the community members can be tough sometimes.
“Because the 20 of us assigned to patrol, functionally, we’re not going to be able to reach out to the 20-to-25,000 people that live here in addition to the thousands of people that commute through,” he said. “But nonetheless, coming from Hawaii where the relationship between the community and law enforcement had been strained over time, coming here and seeing how the community supports us, that was super big for me. Now that I’ve experienced that and I’ve had the opportunity to meet people, whether on traffic stops, like really hard calls, you know, people pass away, car accidents, major crime types of incidents … there’s a relationship that’s been cultivated here.”
He said the relationship shows the community works in partnership with the department.
“Can we make everyone happy? The answer is no, unfortunately,” Cabanting-Rafael said. “But to see that on both ends, it’s being attempted, and that culture has been fostered here for so long, it means a lot to me because I didn’t realize that was something I wanted or needed until I have it now.”
Traumatic injury collision on state Route 503
While Cabanting-Rafael was finishing up a traffic stop on South Parkway Avenue at 10:37 p.m., a traffic collision was called in to 911 dispatchers at the intersection of state Route 503 and Northeast 299th Street, north of Battle Ground proper.
Cabanting-Rafael responded with lights and sirens to the scene to assist in traffic blocking and help where needed as dispatchers provided updates of two vehicles involved, one with no injuries and the other with an entrapment. When Cabanting-Rafael arrived on scene, firefighters with Clark-Cowlitz Fire Rescue and EMS personnel from American Medical Response were working on helping the driver of a vehicle who had their leg trapped from the collision. The collision became an expanded traffic collision on the Pulsepoint app as fire crews needed to provide a more significant emergency response than a minor collision. They ultimately needed to use the Jaws of Life hydraulic rescue tool to free the leg of the driver, who suffered a significant leg injury in the collision.
The driver of the second vehicle involved told officers they were driving well over the posted speed limit and collided with the other vehicle as they turned in front of them. Cabanting-Rafael said speed was definitely a factor in the collision.
The crash is just one of many traumatic-injury collisions that have occurred this year in the Battle Ground vicinity, an issue many members of the public are concerned about.
Officer’s thoughts on traffic safety
Cabanting-Rafael likes to start his 12-hour shifts from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. with traffic enforcement. He often looks for speeders in areas that have been known for car crashes due to speeding and lack of attentiveness. Targeting “problem areas” has been referred to as “cops on dots” by BGPD Chief Dennis Flynn.
“I wish I had a concrete answer for that,” Cabanting-Rafael said of his thoughts on the recent uptick in major collisions in and around the city. “I wish I could tell you exactly why since January we’ve had six, seven, eight, major collisions and we’ve had multiple fatal collisions since January, and honestly, I don’t know what to attribute it to.”
Cabanting-Rafael said a lot of the accidents are caused by speed, lack of attention and DUI, but he added those are things that a lot of people are already aware of.
“It’s so hard to put a black and white answer on there,” he said, adding that there’s a whole new generation of drivers coming in and a generation aging out that both have some inconsistencies in their ability to drive. “And then you have the bulk of us in our mid-20s into our mid-50s where we’ve been driving the same way this whole time and it’s that complacency because I’ve stopped people that are going a little bit too fast for certain roadways, and in reality they’re just lost in the sauce, going home from work, tired, had a long day, they work construction, they do other things, nurses, people that have other things on their mind. They phase out on the road just thinking, ‘I need to go home and do all these other things, cook dinner, do laundry,’ and it’s totally understandable.”
He added that, too often in his opinion, people are in such a rush to get somewhere and forget they have to get there safely first. The faster the driving speed, the less amount of reaction time a driver has.
“When you’re going 70 miles an hour on any road, you’re covering roughly a football field a second,” Cabanting-Rafael said. “So, in that time frame, whether you look down at your phone, whether you phase out, whether you think the light’s going to stay yellow just long enough for you to make it through, that speed and that amount of distance you’re covering without being able to react to it properly, that causes accidents.”
Cabanting-Rafael performed half a dozen traffic stops by midnight on Battle Ground roadways on Tuesday, June 17. All instances involved drivers traveling over 12 mph above the posted speed limit.
Why Cabanting-Rafael chose law enforcement
Cabanting-Rafael said his adventure into law enforcement is an intimate story.
“I’m from Hawaii,” he said. “I started my career in Hawaii,and law enforcement kind of held a certain reverence in my life, but I didn’t know if I wanted to do it or not. I was kind of apprehensive about just getting into it, particularly being in a smaller community in the state of Hawaii where you grew up knowing everyone, you know. The questions always come up of, ‘can you potentially arrest your cousin or come into contact with family in that realm?’ And I didn’t know at the time. It was around 2016 where, unfortunately, my younger brother got mixed up with the wrong people and he started stealing cars and dabbling in drugs. Unfortunately, he passed away in a stolen car. (They were) his own choices, but that was kind of the driving force that if I were to become a cop maybe I could be someone that prevented — people that took advantage of my younger brother — prevent them from even having that opportunity.”
He applied to every option in Hawaii, and his first opportunity came by way of corrections. During his start as a correctional officer, Cabanting-Rafael said that’s when he knew he wanted to jump into the enforcement role. In 2019, he made the move to enforcement in Hawaii and later came to Battle Ground to continue his career.
“Coming to Battle Ground, honestly, pure happenstance,” he said. “Didn’t know where Battle Ground was, didn’t know about the community. I knew about Vancouver, mostly because of word of mouth. A lot of cops from Hawaii transferred to Portland.”
A lot of Hawaiian police officers have moved to careers along the West Coast, with Battle Ground already having a couple of officers from Hawaii before Cabanting-Rafael applied.
“I talked to a buddy that I went to the academy with in Hawaii for enforcement, and he ended up landing in Federal Way, but he was the one that told me and said, ‘Hey dude, check out BGPD and check out this place called Battle Ground, because I heard there’s a couple of cops from Hawaii that work there,’” Cabanting-Rafael recalled. “That’s how I learned about Battle Ground.”
When he came for a visit, Cabanting-Rafael said it felt like home, like Hilo, Hawaii, but in Washington. He began working for BGPD in December 2022.
