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October 19, 2021 \u2014 As the difference between safety and security in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest is parsed with utmost refinement, one thing remains clear: the logging sites are dangerous. Two activists have complained of significant threats, one of them caught on video. EPIC, the Environmental Protection and Information Center, has sent a letter to Wade Crowfoot, the California Secretary of Natural Resources, asking him to restore peace.\n\nAnd, although Cal Fire\u2019s chief legal counsel Bruce Crane wrote on July 2nd that \u201cThe current JDSF closure order prohibits any private security, armed or unarmed, from entering JDSF,\u201d two unarmed private security firms have been present in two sites. One was hired by a private company, while the other was paid upwards of $110,000 by Cal Fire for just over a month\u2019s work.\n\nCal Fire, the Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, manages JDSF, where protests against logging have been vigorous. Mendocino Forest Products, the sister company to Mendocino Redwood Company, purchased the contract to log Soda Gulch. They hired Two Brothers Logging to fall trees and Lear Asset Management for safety. \n\nIn a press release, Mendocino Redwood Company described the contractors as \u201clicensed and bonded Safety Specialists\u2026(who) are simply filming and alerting trespassers to the active operations.\u201d Lear is a private security company best known for armed raids on trespass grows. John Andersen, the public policy director for MRC, confirmed that the company had hired Lear as a safety contractor, but said Trouette and his staff are not carrying weapons on JDSF. \n\nKevin Conway, the Cal Fire forest manager in JDSF, said safety managers are permitted on logging sites, but did not lay out the parameters of their duties, other than to specify that they must be unarmed. \n\nThe presence of the safety manager, or the Safety Specialist, did not rule out the possibility of a non-accidental death, according to one unidentified logger in Soda Gulch on October 5th. Michael Hunter, the Chairman of the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians, described the encounter to KZYX and shared the video of the incident.\n\nHunter said that as he stood near the loggers, \u201cI recorded everything. I said hey. Please don\u2019t kill me by accident today. And the old man says, oh, it won\u2019t be by accident. I got that on recording, too, and I said, well, don\u2019t kill by purpose either, please, \u2018cause I don\u2019t feel like dying today.\u201d\n\nLast week, Matt Simmons, a lawyer with EPIC, wrote in his letter to Secretary Crowfoot that on the same day, U\u2019i Wesley, an activist and Native Hawaiian singer and dancer, had a separate encounter. She was parked by a logging gate when two masked men pulled up in a large black truck with no license plates. \u201cThey didn\u2019t say who they were, they didn\u2019t say we\u2019re with the police, or we\u2019re with Cal Fire. They just came up to her and said, you need to leave. And when she said that she wouldn\u2019t, they responded by reaching into their pocket and throwing bullet casings at her face and saying, you know, it\u2019s dangerous in here. And I think any reasonable person would feel that that was a death threat.\u201d Reflecting on the fact that both recipients of the threats were people of color, Simmons said, \u201cThe really sad truth is that Mendocino, just like all of America, has been a place of violence against people of color for a really long time. And Jackson itself is Northern Pomo and Coast Yuki territory. And there\u2019s a reason it\u2019s not anymore, right? It\u2019s because of violent acquisition by white settlers. And in some ways, it feels like we\u2019re just sort of seeing a continuation of that.\u201d\n\nIn a video he posted on Facebook, Hunter had a long verbal encounter with a man later identified as Paul Trouette, the head of Lear Asset Management. Simmons was skeptical about what he called a loophole allowing Trouette, a professional private security provider, to operate as a safety manager or Safety Specialist, in an area where private security is not allowed.\n\n\u201cNow what it looks like is that MRC has hired Trouette and are calling him a safety manager in order to have a loophole in the rules that require them not to hire private security. I did a little bit of googling on Paul Trouette, and I don\u2019t think he\u2019s the guy you hire to be a safety manager.\u201d\n\nRecently obtained documents show that Cal Fire itself hired a private security firm called Armorous to provide unarmed guards and a patrol car around the clock at the Caspar logging site from June 8th through July 5th. Payments for two guards overnight and three during the day came out to almost $111,000. Conway said that their presence did not violate the agency\u2019s chief legal counsel\u2019s opinion that \u201cCAL FIRE cannot cede control of activities on JDSF, for law enforcement and security purposes, to any person or entity at any time as JDSF is required...to always be under the direction and control of CAL FIRE personnel.\u201d Conway pointed out that this statement was ...