At the May 2015 meeting of the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners, they once again put the issue of their own illegal harassment of unlicensed practitioners on the agenda (they called it “Exempt Practitioner Workgroup”), and once again they did nothing.

Warren Foote, the board’s attorney, said that they were not done “investigating the legislative history of the exemption.” But that’s just lawyer-speak for “We’re in the wrong, the case against us is open-and-shut, but I’m still combing through the dusty stacks of precedent, hoping against hope to find a loophole.”

In the meantime, what about the board’s false prosecutions? They’ve put them on hold, right? “Above all, do no harm.” Well, the OBPE is a different kind of organization. The investigations are continuing, as if nothing had happened.

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The Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners has come under a lot of criticism recently, but how can we tell if it’s justified? Well, this is the Age of Science, so let’s do some research!

May 25, 2015: This is a work in progress. I’m putting the framework here and providing access to the raw data. As I work my way through the data, I will post conclusions. I will also add links and references over time.

June 2, 2015: I’ve uploaded a spreadsheet with most of the data entry complete, but not the analysis. See the update at the end of this article.

Purpose of the Experiment

To see where the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners (OBPE) lies on the spectrum between scrupulous, even-handed fairness and the reckless, biased, abuse of power.

Background About the Fairness Problem

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
— Lord Acton

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So there I was, attending the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners Meeting on March 20. It was sparsely attended, as usual, with just myself, Christian Wolff (a licensed Psychologist Associate who attends all the board meetings), someone associated with the Oregon Psychological Association, and another guy.

A Mysterious Stranger

After the meeting, Christian and I went out to the lobby and were talking, and the other guy also went to the lobby, so Christian did the polite thing and went over and introduced himself. Then he came back and told me what he learned:

(The laughter is mostly mine.) In short, the other guy was a security guard: a Mr. Colton of Advanced Security, Inc. in Salem. (Nice guy, by the way.) Now, normally I’d have assumed that the only reason for a security guard to attend something as sedate as a Psychology Board meeting would be to catch up on sleep, but he showed too much interest in us for that. In short, he was there for us!

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