Seattle Police Monitor finds SPD's response to reform is to regress back to the Stone Age

Just in case anyone thought that the agreement between Seattle and the Justice Department to improve accountability in the Seattle Police Department is “on track,” the draft Seattle Police Monitor’s second semiannual report last week was the not unexpected rude awakening. The report does see “improvements”—but only in the establishment of police monitoring entities and equipment in the past six months, and the “diminishing” of bad blood and the creation of greater “openness” between the monitoring staff and top SPD management. 

However, the only real improvement that makes is to make it more clear what hasn’t improved, mainly what the monitor is supposed to be monitoring.  “Significant disappointment and frustration” seems to be the order of the day. The “Seattle Police Department has not made nearly as much progress during this period as the Monitoring Team knows to have been possible.” Information provided by the SPD has been “incorrect or incomplete” and its IT “has proven itself unable to tackle management projects of import or complexity.” “Error ridden and inadequate” data is apparently the reason why the SPD has been unable to adequately “track, analyze and use data.” One rather strongly suspects there is a deliberate method to this madness; the less information the monitor is provided, and the more ill-informed the public is, the less accountable the police are for actions not known. 

Incidents involving SPD officers discharging their firearms into citizens also continue to be inadequately examined: “The SPD’s Firearms Review Board continues to conduct reviews that fall well short of full, fair and impartial analyses of SPD shootings.” The monitors accused the SPD of “patent attempts to narrowly restrict the scope” of firearms enquiries, to “improperly coach officer testimony” and “definitively stack the odds” against a neutral process that might discover a shooting that was “inconsistent” with stated policy. The FRB was also accused of being “visibly agitated” by questions by monitors that FRB should have been expected to ask itself. In blatant defiance of the spirit of “accountability,” the FRB barred the Office of Professional Accountability to monitor its proceedings. In fact, out of 357 use-of-force incidents this year through October, only 12 were referred to the OPA. 

Up and down the ranks there continues to be resistance to reform, with the general response likened to “saber-rattling.” Other issues include “technical issues” with on-board cameras that have been allowed to fester, and even when working the failure of some officers to activate their on-board cameras, particularly during confrontations with suspects. The SPD refuses to bring in technically more able “outside experts” to develop a data input system that is meant to be used by the monitors, obviously so that they can control what the data input is. The report also noted that SPD’s current data input and output system is practically Stone Age compared to that of other jurisdictions around the country, where pertinent computer data can be obtained in “seconds” rather than weeks. 

Since racial profiling and race-based policing was one of the major issues regarding the SPD, the report found that the SPD’s data indicates a deliberate effort to obfuscate racial classification. Incomprehensibly, the SPD was found to frequently “confuse” white and Asian suspects; no doubt Latinos are often listed as being “white.” According to the report, this and many other data problems shows that the Monitoring Team can have “little confidence in the reliability” of the information inputted in SPD data banks. Furthermore, the FRB seems to limit the scope of its investigations to whether an officer fired his or her weapon “in or out” of policy, and not if the actions of an officer or officers leading up to the discharge of a weapon or weapons needlessly aggravated a situation that did not require such a response.

These and many more issues are detailed in the report. It is clear that the SPD continues to be intransigent and obstinate in its refusal to accept reform or accountability. This is only part of an ongoing “us” versus “them” culture that only further underlines the inability of the SPD to “police” themselves.