Tag Archives: Police

News

Video Confirms that Officer Was Going 74 MPH, Did Not Have Siren Running When He Struck Pedestrian

by Erica C. Barnett

(This article was originally published on PubliCola and has been reprinted under an agreement.)

Content warning: This post contains descriptions of a violent, fatal traffic collision and images of a vehicle involved in that collision.

Video from the body-worn camera of Seattle Police Department (SPD) officer Kevin Dave shows Dave accelerating to 74 miles an hour and failing to turn on his siren as he approached the intersection where he struck and killed pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula earlier this year. The King County Prosecutor’s Office, which is still deciding whether to charge Dave with a crime, provided the video and other documents in response to PubliCola’s records request.

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Arts & Culture

Police: Not Just Above the Law, but Hiding Behind It

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable’ | By Joanna Schwartz | Publisher, 2023 | Nonfiction, politics | Available at The Seattle Public Library

by Dave Gamrath

(This article was originally published on Real Change and has been reprinted under an agreement.)

Anger around the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer seemed to finally generate demands for changes in American policing, but over the past three years, not much really changed. Stories of police abuse keep coming. Why is this?

In Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz explains the multitude of barriers that have prevented necessary police reform from happening.

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Features

Derailing the Defund: How SPD Manipulated the Media Narrative Around the 2020 Protests

by Glen Stellmacher

(This article was originally published on Real Change and has been reprinted under an agreement.)

While thousands of Seattleites took to the streets to protest George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police, calling for the Seattle Police Department (SPD) to be defunded by 50%, exclusive SPD documents obtained via public records requests reveal internal deliberations and backroom dealings designed to craft a counternarrative to those demands.

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Voices

OPINION | The Answer Is Never More Police in Schools

by Cinthia Illan Vazquez

The unfortunate tragedy that resulted in the death of a student at Ingraham High School has once again sparked conversations around whether we need more police in schools in order to keep our students safe.  

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News

Summary of Inquest Hearings into the SPD Shooting of Charleena Lyles

by Vee Hua 華婷婷

Last Updated on July 7, 2022, 11:48 am.

Content Warning: This article contains discussions of police killings, violence, mental health crises, and suicide.

Inquest hearings continue through July 6 around the death of 30-year-old Charleena Lyles, a pregnant mother of three who was shot seven times by Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers following a disturbance call to her home in 2017. Thus far, the hearings have provided insights into the timeline of the day’s events, actions of officers, firefighters, and paramedics at the scene, attempts to revive Lyles, and traumatic impacts on Lyles’ children.

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Voices

OPINION: Mayor Bruce Harrell Starts His Own Legacy of Stop-and-Frisk Policing in Seattle

by Johnny Mao

For many in today’s Little Saigon and Chinatown-International District (CID) — if you are hanging out in front of a building, sitting on benches, or at a bus stop — the police can stop and search you with a “stop and frisk.” 

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Voices

OPINION: Police-Led Mental Health Welfare Checks — Getting to the Root of the Issue

by Ayomi Rajapakse

There is an increasingly popular argument suggesting that investment in Mental Health First Responders over new police hires may help reduce fatal interactions between police officers and individuals experiencing a mental health crisis, but these proposed reforms often miss the bigger picture.

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News

OIG Partial Certification Memos Raise More Concerns Over OPA Investigations

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by Carolyn Bick

In April of this year, the Emerald published a story about the Office of Police Accountability’s recent decision not to sustain the most serious allegations against the Seattle Police Department officer who, in August of last year, drove onto a crowded sidewalk.

In its April story, the Emerald noted a curious addition to the Case Closed Summary (CCS) of the incident, which it had not seen in previous summaries. In this particular CCS, the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) stated that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) had declined to certify the OPA’s investigation as objective or thorough. This meant that the OIG — which is part of Seattle’s police accountability structure, conducting Seattle Police Department (SPD) and OPA audits, overseeing the OPA, and working alongside SPD and others to create and update SPD’s policies and practices — had only partially certified the investigation. In its brief paragraph about this in the CCS, the OPA did not go into detail. It merely stated that the OIG’s points of objection were “didactic and immaterial” and declined to address them further.

The Emerald recently obtained the OIG’s certification memo for that case, as well as for eight other OPA investigations for incidents that occurred between April 2020 and May 2021, via a public disclosure request. The Emerald also obtained the OIG’s memo for OPA case 2020OPA-0583, which concerned the overall decision by SPD officers to confront protesters in front of the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) headquarters in SoDo on Sept. 7, 2020. The Emerald published a story regarding that memo, which deemed the OPA’s investigative shortfalls so severe that they “cannot be remedied” with a new investigation.

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News

OIG Memo Reveals Serious ‘Deficiencies’ in OPA Protest Investigation That ‘Cannot Be Remedied’

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by Carolyn Bick

Author’s Note: For the purposes of clarity, the Emerald will use “(sic)” in parentheses in quoted sections of the OIG memo discussed in this article to indicate that it has been reprinted here exactly as it appears in the source material (the OIG memo). Where readers see “[sic]” styled as shown here, with square brackets, this text was used by the OIG in their memo to indicate that the text quoted in their memo appears exactly as it appears in the source material (the OPA Report of Investigation/ROI).   

On the evening of Monday, Sept. 7, 2020, hundreds of protesters marched to the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild headquarters in SoDo. The march fell just after the 100th day of protests against police brutality held in the city since late May 2020, following the murder of George Floyd.

Once the protesters arrived at the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG) headquarters, it didn’t take long for police on bicycles to confront the crowd. It’s unclear exactly what prompted the police to come outside, but the situation soon erupted, with officers deploying blast balls and pepper spray and arresting several protesters. Videos about the event online, including those in this Twitter thread from Seattle Times reporter Heidi Groover and this Twitter thread by Stranger Associate Editor Rich Smith, show what appears to be a peaceful scene, before Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers on bicycles come around the corner to confront protesters. Based on these videos, it does not appear that any of the protesters instigated the confrontation, though a heavily edited official SPOG video, complete with background music, claims otherwise and says that police sprang into action after allegedly seeing a protestor carrying Molotov cocktails.

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News

‘You Don’t Make a Lot of Friends’: The Uphill Battle for Oversight in King County

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by Carolyn Bick

This is the third in a series of articles examining the pushback and internal pressure former Office of Law Enforcement (OLEO) director Deborah Jacobs appears to have faced during her tenure at OLEO. This pushback appears to have mainly stemmed from within the King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO), the very law enforcement entity OLEO is tasked with overseeing, as well as the King County Police Officer’s Guild (KCPOG), some of whose members belong to the KCSO. Multiple sources have alleged that certain members of the KCSO and the KCPOG mounted an internal campaign against Jacobs and said that the main goal of the campaign was Jacobs’ ouster. The King County Council decided not to renew Jacobs’ contract, after an independent investigation found that Jacobs had violated King County discrimination codes. Jacobs has since filed a tort claim against King County. You can read part one of this series here and part two of this series here.

Author’s Note: Several sources requested anonymity over concerns of retaliation or professional repercussions. These sources are noted as such throughout the piece. Their real names have not been used.

“Designed to Frustrate the Work of OLEO” 

When Deborah Jacobs was hired as the King County Office of Law Enforcement Oversight’s director in mid-June of 2016, “she took her job seriously,” one of the Emerald’s anonymous sources, Dan, said. But the critical eye the office cast over law enforcement at the King County Sheriff’s Office meant that Jacobs made few friends, he said.

“[OLEO] actually started going through the cases, the investigations, and then asking — as is their right — for follow-ups,” Dan said. “Like, ‘You did not do a good job on this interview. Why did you not ask these questions?’ And if there is nothing cops hate more, it’s being told they don’t know how to do their jobs.”

Dan said that this “also started to sort of change the temperature when it comes to her. Because it was happening a lot. There were a number of people [at the KCSO] that OLEO had deemed were not thorough and complete” in their investigations or processes.

“Then, you start getting into the pride issue, and ‘Who are you to know what police work is?’ And all that BS,” Dan continued. He told the Emerald that he believes that there was a way for Jacobs to have approached this work in a way that would not have “gotten a knee-jerk reaction … but it just didn’t happen. 

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