In light of the heightened scrutiny from the federal investigation into the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) use of force, the department has been open with how it disciplines officers, with news surfacing with unexpected regularity.
A police officer was suspended for two days without pay for demonstrating poor judgment at best while working as a security officer in his SPD uniform during his off-duty hours at a local community center in summer 2013. During an SPD Office of Police Accountability investigation, he admitted to handcuffing a teenage girl as a joke, chewing tobacco despite the posted no-smoking signs and watching pornographic images on his personal cell phone in view of a teenage boy and a community center employee.
A white, female officer received 15 days of suspension without pay — considered a “serious penalty” — for her word choice while chasing a black suspect downtown in October 2013. Superiors going through dash-camera video — as they’re required to do under SPD’s new use-of-force policy — heard her using the racially tinged word “boy.” She was also seen taunting the suspect beforehand as she nearly hit him with her patrol car, according to KIRO-FM.
“We investigated it ourselves,” Sgt. Sean Whitcomb told the news outlet. “We drove the complaint process forward ourselves without any prodding or prompting.”
Unfortunately, more is sure to surface as SPD goes through thousands of hours of dash-cam and now body-camera footage, and we’ll hear of yet another officer who has been disciplined.
Despite individual officers’ behaviors, SPD has earnestly sought and apprehended suspects in several serious cases in recent weeks, including stabbings aboard a Metro bus and at a Georgetown gas station and drive-by shootings in Southeast Seattle.
Regardless of how the public is divided in its opinion of SPD, we must remember that the majority of police officers are diligently and ethically doing their jobs to protect us.
But city officials and SPD must remember that, until the police force can collectively portray itself as an upstanding group of civil servants, they can expect more unruly and uncivil dialogue at City Hall, as protestors demonstrated during Seattle City Council’s recent briefing with Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole.
SPD can’t afford any more hits to its reputation, especially with the departure of popular Assistant Chief Nick Metz, who is leaving to lead the police department in Aurora, Colo. He had been actively looking to lead a police force for years but was demoted in 2013 and then reinstated a few months later.
The department must try harder to recruit and keep quality, law-abiding officers who understand the roles of political correctness and common sense in policing — because no amount of accountability after-the-fact will ever trump just behavior from the start.