by Jack Russillo

With less than a week to go before the deadline for which it was asked to provide feedback to the Seattle Police Department (SPD), the Seattle Community Police Commission (CPC) hosted a virtual town hall event on January 26 to address some of the policy changes that SPD has been considering. 

The CPC is a commission created by the City of Seattle to amplify its community voices during police accountability processes. The SPD is currently proposing more than 100 pages of policy changes — concerning issues like officers’ use of force and how they can police protests. SPD originally set a deadline for comment at January 8, but the CPC pushed SPD to extend that deadline until January 31 — in order to give the CPC more time to host the online forum and engage the community and encourage people to submit recommendations about the policy changes. Members of the community have until January 31 to submit their feedback directly online.

In an online summary of the proposed changes SPD describes changes to its use of force core principles, which only state that officers “will” engage in an action, instead of “should” or “shall” (e.g. “officers will use de-escalation tactics”). In its analysis of the changes, the CPC said that “although SPD committed to re-envisioning public safety together with community, leaving this section effectively unchanged signals that it does not intend to meaningfully alter the way and frequency it uses force on community members.”