Can police police themselves? The debate never ends in Seattle
The city keeps tinkering with its police accountability system, and nobody is happy. Here are two ideas: Open the files and hire the best people.
In Seattle, we are back to a old question: can the police police themselves?
That issue was never fully settled in 1999, when a blue-ribbon panel proposed significant reform of Seattle's police-accountability system.
We returned to the question this week when a report was leaked criticizing Chief Gil Kerlikowske's involvement in an internal investigation of a drug bust. In that incident, a convicted drug dealer says cops planted drugs on him and roughed him up as he sat in his wheelchair. A video of the Jan. 2 arrest undercut the credibility of the officers, who ultimately received punishment for a minor policy violation.
Mayor Greg Nickels called a press conference on Tuesday, June 19, to publicly support the chief, who blasted the report as "despicable" and politically motivated. The next day, however, the mayor released a letter calling for "an additional review" (25K PDF) of the case, including the chief's involvement.
The Seattle Times has suggested that the chief is soft on misconduct:
... [I]n a string of cases over the last several years, the chief has reversed or watered down the conclusions of internal investigators and the civilian director who oversees their work. Those decisions represent a marked shift from his first years on the job.
Kerlikowske has defended his decisions, noting he has fired several officers and been upheld in appeals.
In my view, Kerlikowske is a very good chief who busted some bad cops. In 2002, for example, he held aloft the badge of a cop accused of drug dealing and said it would be destroyed and never issued again.
But the issue goes deeper than this chief. Kerlikowske operates in a system we have given him, and we keep debating what that system should be. (Full disclosure: My dad was a Seattle cop.)
Back in 1999, the blue-ribbon panel was formed after disclosure of an alleged theft by a member of the Homicide Unit, whose members kept the matter secret for years.
The panel looked at how misconduct cases were handled in Seattle and elsewhere. It wrestled with the question of whether cops could investigate their brethren. Cops insisted they should keep that role, arguing they had the best motivation to keep a department clean and understood the circumstances of how cops work, such as interactions with dubious informants. Transferring responsibility for discipline outside the department would undercut the chief's authority to run the department, they said.
Further complicating this question was an overlay of state law and a contract with the Guild that guided the process of disciplining a police officer.
The scandal in the Homicide Unit, however, was a strong argument for having outsiders decide these cases. Cops are loyal to one another. Corruption takes root because of the code of silence. Remember Serpico? African Americans came forward to tell tales of harassment by cops and complaints that were ignored or minimized by commanders.
The panel proposed a compromise: a new Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) run by a civilian appointed by the mayor, confirmed the City Council, and who would report to the chief of police. The city adopted that idea.
They made a second recommendation: Make complaints public, which would help ensure that problems would be handled properly and that patterns of misconduct could be identified. Cops, however, complained that it was unfair to publicize unsupported allegations, sometimes made by criminals just to stop cops from doing their jobs.
The city compromised with an approach that only "sustained" complaints were released in brief summary form. An additional measure of oversight was maintained by keeping the department's internal-investigations auditor, who mainly reviewed departmental paperwork and issued reports on patterns of cases.
Debate continued. In 2002, the City Council added a third mechanism, the Office of Professional Accountability Review Board. The council appoints the board, which reviews cases handled by the OPA (with officer names and other details blacked out). The new report on Kerlikowske, written by board members Peter Holmes, a Seattle attorney, and Brad Moericke, an attorney and former police sergeant, caused council President Nick Licata to propose yet another reform: a City Charter amendment subjecting police and fire chiefs, who are appointed by the mayor, to re-confirmation votes by the council.
That idea failed to gain traction, but the underlying inadequacies of our system remain. We should go back to that suggestion from 1999 and open the files. The more sunlight the better.
But even more fundamental to police integrity are those whom we trust with a badge and a gun. The best defense against corruption is to start with the best and to train them well. Standards don't mean much unless employees want to meet them.
So if the council wants to do some good here, open those files. And work like hell to encourage good people to join the department.
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Comments:
Posted Fri, Jun 22, 11:07 a.m. inappropriate
Mr Taylor I came back: Move along folks! There is nothing to see here that hasn't been covered in the dailies. "Full disclosure:" Corr's daddy was a cop. But not so full disclosure-Corr is a former aide to Chief Kerlikowski's biggest defender Mayor Greg Nickels. You know who the mayor is right? When he was campaigning for office he strutted around Pioneer Square after Kerlikowski allowed a young man to be murdered there and talked smack about the Chief and how he would hang the murder victim's photo on the wall of his office. Nickels was elected, Kerlikowski is still the chief, and that photo was never hung on the Mayor's office wall. Sorry Mr. Taylor, wrong writer for this subject, and pretty blah reporting at that. Sort'uv a readers digest approach to what the dailies had already given us. The impact of this article on your readers can be measured by the number of comments it has received after being up for several hours. Perhaps the story about 14 year old girls kissing on a bus wasn't so bad after all. see ya in a few weeks.
Posted Fri, Jun 22, 11:59 a.m. inappropriate
Glad to have you back: riverandmoney,
What part of "open the files" do you not understand? --Casey Corr
Posted Sat, Jun 23, 10:12 a.m. inappropriate
Can police police themselves?: The short answer is No. To paraphrase an old saying, Police Chiefs and fish begin to smell after a period of time. Eventually you end up with the situation that the Port of Seattle has with its police force.
Posted Tue, Jun 26, 10:49 a.m. inappropriate
Full disclosure...: In what sense is any disclosure "full"? Casey's link to the Times article about his dad was nearly full disclosure in my book. As a former political candidate and former aide to Nickels he may have presumed that his public life was, well, public. However, as you point out, the Nickels-Kirlikowski link is important and relevant, particulalry to his subject. I bet Casey thought the ace of spades represented by his father's stand-up blood history trumped the deuce of diamonds in his disclosure statement to such a degree that it was hardly worth mentioning.
In any event, what does it take to get the file opened?
Posted Tue, Jun 26, 11:17 a.m. inappropriate
RE: Can police police themselves?: The head-rotting tendency of all large organizations over time is an eternal problem. In any weaponized organization this can be exponentially more worrisome. In the case of SPD, and police departments generally, internal oversight is HUGELY important and absolutely essential. In conjunction,external oversight, particularly of any head-rotting tendencies, is important. My hunch is that SPD has much better oversight than many police departments, but because of the nature of police work and the sorts of extreme situations the police are presented with on a day-to-day basis, the motivations and incentives to do evil in the name of justice are high. Constant discipline, training, and oversight are essential.
The Philip Zimbardo book The Luciifer Effect" about Zimbardo's own Stanford prison experiment and Abu Gharib underscores and demonstrates how perfectly good people can do evil if presented with extreme, unsupervised situations that are systemically supported. The remedy for imperfect systems that allow abuse is people with the courage to speak out and fight for change of the system. Institutionally, the Press is what can best play this role as a check on other institutions of power.
So how do we open the files, and what should we expect to find in them? Will the files really reveal truth or just bureaucracy filtered through a glass darkly?
Posted Tue, Jun 26, 11:59 a.m. inappropriate
RE: Mr Taylor I came back: "Sorry Mr. Taylor, wrong writer for this subject, and pretty blah reporting at that. Sort'uv a readers digest approach to what the dailies had already given us."
Actually, Mr. Corr because of his disclosed/undisclosed history is nearly ideal for reporting on this subject. And his ability to cut to the chase, given earlier reporting, is appreciated. If Nickels is the horrible character you describe above, then Mr. Corr's former association with the mayor does preset the possibility of bias towards the mayor. On the other hand, Mr. Corr needn't have written this article in the first place, and would seem to be highly inclined to expose any wrongdoing found.
Your characterization of the mayor hinges critically on two elements: the apparent lack of a picture hanging in his office, and the fact that Kerlikowski remains police chief. The situation presented to Kerlikowski in Pioneer Square was not a simple one. He made a decision, and Kris Kime's death ensued. Many deaths occur throughout Seattle everyday. The SPD works to prevent people from killing. We count on them to do that. We expect them to police criminal behavior and hopefully to prevent much of it. Kerlikowski's judgment was that he did not want to cause the situation to escalate. Maybe several would have died instead of one. Or maybe none if he had ordered police into the midst of th riot. No one can know for sure.
If the Mayor judges Kerlikowski to be a good man and Chief, who has learned from his mistakes, then it makes perfect sense to accept his continued leadership of SPD. And if the Mayor no longer has a photo of Kris Kime on his office wall, that in itself is not proof of a blatant hypocrisy. In this Wiki post it is stated that "the certificate of his death would hang in [Nickel's] office should he become mayor. A picture of Kime hangs there today." No durations are mentioned. And as someone who's never seen the Mayor's office, I don't know the past or current history of what has been or is currently there.
Clearly, I'm acting as a bit of an apologist for the Mayor, although I have no dog in this fight, and from a distance am disappointed in his policies and the way he runs the office. I do feel that he once had popular support but has in the last couple of years general flailed and failed.
I do agree that the number of comments a piece receives is a rough measure of impact and popularity. But then what do you make of someone like me who has now posted several times on this thread? And what do you make of the impact of say, Paris Hilton, on the world at large? And what do you make of the viral nature of popularity? Oh, and was the report accurate and honest?