Saturday will bring yet another protest against the Seattle Police Department to Capitol Hill. The promises of change at City Hall continue. CHS asked city and community leaders: what, if anything, has been accomplished in reforming policing in Seattle so far? And what still needs to happen to clean up the SPD?
Since a Department of Justice (DoJ) investigation found Seattle police to be brutal and possibly biased, city leaders have promised a new and improved department. But SPD’s martial response to #BlackLivesMatter protests over the past half-year, and recently-surfaced videos showing officers pepper spraying a local high school teacher and detaining a pedestrian (both black, both times apparently without provocation), have stoked public skepticism toward these promises.
Behind this, negotiations are underway in what has become a nearly perpetual tussle over the city’s contract with the powerful Seattle Police Officer’s Guild. The Stranger reported this week on what it could learn about the status of the talks and the likelihood that recommendations from the city’s Community Police Commission will be included in the deal.
“Reform and cultural change is not an option. It’s an absolute must,” said City Council president and former cop Tim Burgess.
Tim Burgess
Burgess acknowledged the need for significant changes at SPD, but while “we’ve got a long way to go,” he said, changes in city leaders’ attitudes toward reform have made him “hopeful” in the past year. There is now “a commonly held belief among the mayor, the city council, the city attorney, and the chief of police that” reform is necessary, he said. “The city’s political leadership is unified.”
Burgess attributes this consensus largely to the leadership of Mayor Ed Murray and Chief Kathleen O’Toole. It’s a huge step forward, he said, from where city leaders were three years ago, when the Justice Department mandate first arrived.
“In a white society, people don’t ever want to deal with history,” said Rev. Harriett Walden. Her role on Seattle’s Community Police Commission (CPC) came out of the 2010 police killing of indigenous woodcarver John T. Williams, but she’s spent decades as a community activist trying to remind a largely white, affluent city of its blemished past.
Harriett Walden
Like many, Walden was appalled by video of retired Metro bus driver William Wingate being arrested without any apparent cause by SPD officer Cynthia Whitlatch. But it could have been worse, she said. “I’m glad that he was an older man who was really cool, calm and collected,” said Walden, “because if it had not been an older man, the officer might have killed him.
“She was a white woman saying she was afraid of a black man,” she added. “That’s a part of the history of America. Many, many men have been killed because a white woman said she was afraid.”
District 3 candidate and Seattle Women’s Commissioner Morgan Beach seconded Burgess’ praise for Murray and O’Toole as would-be reformers, lauding the chief for testing the department’s backlog of rape kits and for improving its disciplinary procedures.
While she wants to see more movement on racial issues from the chief, Beach said, she is cautiously optimistic. “Having a mayor and a police chief who don’t fight you on the fact that [police reform] is an issue,” Beach said, “is already a 100% turnaround [for] some of the communities that are facing [these] issues.”
Her opponent, Rod Hearne of Equal Rights Washington, said he’d like to see a review of the SPD’s semi-independent auditor, the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA).
“On the one hand, I want our officers to have some discretion to do their job appropriately,” said Hearne. “But at the same time it seems like the [internal disciplinary] system has sort of balanced more toward protecting the job security of the officers than protecting the public.”
Kshama Sawant, District 3’s de facto incumbent, characteristically called for stronger reform than her opponents. Pointing to their violent response to the MLK Day march, Sawant said “it is not clear” whether SPD has accomplished any meaningful reform so far. She also expressed skepticism toward Murray and O’Toole’s promises of improvement. “We need the police to [address issues like wage theft], rather than being an intimidating presence at a peaceful protest,” she said.
Central District activist Bill Bradburd, who is running against incumbent Sally Clark for an at-large seat on the City Council, talked about the military mindset that he thinks is too prevalent among cops.
“I think we’ve all run into that situation, where the cop who pulled me over does not like me and he feels his job is to intimidate the shit out of me,” said Bradburd. “And I’m a white man; I can imagine how a young, black kid feels.” Bradburd mulled for a moment. “Well, I can and I can’t. I can speculate.”
“There should be undoing racism training inside the police academy,” said Dustin Washington, Director of the AFSC’s Community Justice Program.
Dustin Washington
Washington said that reform per se is insufficient: the SPD must be “transformed” from a legion of “warriors” into a corps of “guardians” who understand both the communities they serve and how racism affects those communities.
“Too often we focus on what individual officers do, but it’s a systemic problem,” Washington said. “Individual officers only conform to what the system allows them to do.”
Washington emphasized that police are not the only powerful institution with which poor and of-color communities interact. For instance, racial discrimination in Seattle’s schools creates a school-to-prison pipeline, while job discrimination against ex-cons makes it difficult for anyone who’s served time to re-integrate into the above-ground economy. “It creates a vicious cycle,” said Washington. “And then police are sent in to interact with communities that are dealing with all these systems and institutions.”
What will reform look like?
Burgess’ answer is largely technical: better training (for example, in conflict de-escalation), data-driven policing, and support for Chief O’Toole as she continues to clean house. “She is fundamentally different from any previous police chief in Seattle,” Burgess said.
“Her perspective, her worldview—she has much broader experience, internationally as well as nationally. And she has a determination to bring effective change.” He noted her appointment of Mike Wagers, a civilian she brought on as her Chief Operating Officer shortly after assuming control of the Department last year, as an example of the kind of apolitical, problem-solving approach that he applauds. In terms of independent oversight of police, Burgess said he’s satisfied with existing mechanisms of civilian supervision: the CPC, the OPA, and the federal monitor which supervises the Department’s compliance with the Justice Department reform mandate. “We have probably one of the best civilian oversight systems in the whole country,” said Burgess, “in terms of its structure. The problem is that it hasn’t been functioning long enough with a high degree of transparency and trustworthiness, so they too are building their reputation and building their trust with the public.”
Beach isn’t quite as optimistic — “Somebody needs to be held accountable for the fact that we’re not making the changes that even the federal government says we need to be making,” she said—but also thinks the SPD’s Come-to-Jesus moment will be found in the nuts and bolts of departmental policy. “Really, what feeds into this is an institutional issue, and that’s what creates this problem,” Beach said. “And where you fix it, as unglamorous as it sounds, is on the training and recruitment of people. You have to start in building a better institution.”
Beach and Bradburd both also suggested the city promote — or require — more police officers to live within the city. “When the police are not part of our community, and they come in to police us, it creates this Us and Them kind of situation,” Bradburd said. Beach thinks the city should require some minimum number of cops to live within the city (most of them don’t). The City Council “just passed a priority hire program that focuses on a quota for the number of Seattle residents who have to work on construction projects that are funded by the city,” Beach said. “We should definitely do the same thing for our police force.”
Hearne said that the public — protesters especially — are also responsible for mending relations with the police. Recalling how he’d seen demonstrators at a public hearing on police accountability “saying things that I thought were pretty unhelpful, like ‘The police are murderers’ and ‘Fuck the police,'” he suggested public forums and a “public education effort” to “[help] citizens understand what the police are doing, how they’re doing it, and how to react cooperatively when approached by the police.”
Kshama Sawant
By contrast, Sawant said Seattleites should press for “a democratically-elected oversight committee that has full-powers over the SPD, that can hold the SPD accountable.”
Washington said that while he “wouldn’t be opposed” to such a committee, any attempt to fix the police without a “lens” of “structural racism, internalized racism, and systemic poverty” is doomed to fail. “I’m asking us to question: What is the overall role of police in the community?” he said. “Of course you don’t want people being brutalized, of course you don’t want people being disrespected.
“But that’s not enough.”
Within SPD, Washington suggested anti-racism and “restorative justice” training for officers, as well as implicit bias tests for new recruits. (You can take Harvard’s implicit bias test here; this reporter received a score of “moderate automatic preference for European American compared to African American.”) More broadly, he called for dialogue and better city policies for dealing with the slew of institutional pressures (jobs, housing, schools, drugs, and so on) that intersect with community/police relations. “You cannot just address police accountability or whatever the buzz word is today,” he said, “without addressing the holistic picture.”
For her part, Walden said she’s heartened by what she sees as the police guild’s apparent willingness “to come and work at some of these issues…I hope they continue to want to really work for police accountability reform, and to get rid of the ‘Us and Them’ mentality.
“It’s not that when you put on that blue uniform, you leave your humanity outside the door,” she added — but then reconsidered her statement. “I get to thinking about the lack of humanity” in the New York police officers who choked Eric Garner to death last year, Walden said. “There’s something disconnected from the humanness of a person when you actually choke somebody to death and they say they can’t breath, and you’re doing it in the line of duty.
“It’s like, ‘Okay, are you not really a human being anymore? Or you don’t think other people are human beings?’ I don’t know how an officer can go home and be alright with themselves, even if the law says that [they’re] gonna not be charged, when [they] choked a man to death.”
