The Case of SPD Officer Cynthia
Whitlatch Shows That Police Oversight in Seattle Needs to Be Radically Improved
by Ansel Herz
The Seattle Police Department's
Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) has a real problem. Its mission is
to investigate police misconduct and recommend discipline for bad cops. But in
one of the most egregious cases of misconduct from last year—Officer Cynthia
Whitlatch's July 9, 2014, arrest of William Wingate, an elderly black man, for
no apparent reason—the OPA was missing in action.
The month after that arrest, in
August of 2014, OPA director Pierce Murphy did deal with a complaint about
racially inflammatory remarks made on Facebook by Officer Whitlatch. (She
complained of "black people's paranoia that white people are out to get
them.") Murphy's response was to recommend that a supervisor tell
Whitlatch that her comments were out of line.
The previous month's arrest—in
which Whitlatch claimed a golf putter Wingate was using as a cane had been
swung at her, even though dashcam video didn't back her up—didn't appear on
Murphy's radar until The Stranger exposed it on January 28 of this year. But by
then, multiple people within SPD knew of serious concerns about Whitlatch's
behavior, and Murphy and others in the department now admit the
dots—Whitlatch's concerning arrest of Wingate in July 2014, her alarming
Facebook remarks in August 2014—should have been connected earlier.
"It's been disappointing
to see how SPD combined with the OPA doesn't yet have the ability to connect
dots when it comes to individual officers' patterns, behavior, or performance
that indicates a problem or misconduct," Murphy says, reflecting on the
past few weeks.
Police chief Kathleen O'Toole
agrees: "I will absolutely acknowledge that there was a systemic problem
there," she said. "There's no question about it."
Before assessing what must be
done to fix the problem, it's worth examining how the "breakdown," as
O'Toole called it, occurred.
First off, nobody from SPD
referred the golf-club incident to the OPA, according to Murphy. That's a huge
fuckup. He said all SPD employees, per department policy, have an "affirmative
duty" to notify his office about any allegation of misconduct against an
officer, whether the person making the allegation wants to file a complaint
with the OPA or not.
That means the allegation that
Whitlatch's racial bias led to Wingate's arrest should have been referred to
OPA months ago by Assistant Chief Nick Metz and East Precinct captain Pierre
Davis. The two SPD veterans met with former state representative Dawn Mason,
who was upset by the incident, in early September (more than four months before
The Stranger posted video of Wingate's arrest on our blog, Slog).
Joey Gray, a local librarian,
joined Mason in that meeting, along with Seattle Central College professor Carl
Livingston. In an interview on February 9 with OPA, Gray said they were
"jumping out of our chairs in outrage" that day, as they watched the
dashcam video of Wingate's arrest with Metz and Davis. Wingate had been
racially profiled, they argued. But the two police commanders defended
Whitlatch's behavior, she said, and kept calling the golf club "a
weapon."
People even higher up the law
enforcement chain, and at the City Attorney's Office, had knowledge of the
incident and the allegations against Whitlatch. After the outcry led by Mason,
Deputy Chief Carmen Best worked with city prosecutors to dismiss the charges
that had been filed against Wingate, and to return the golf club to him. Best
also offered Wingate an apology. Deputy Mayor Hyeok Kim and Chief O'Toole knew
about the case, too. And police spokesman Sean Whitcomb was copied on e-mails
from Gray about the incident.
No one, according to Murphy,
referred the case to the OPA, which could have noticed the pattern that SPD
officials apparently weren't noticing themselves.
The OPA could also have noticed
the pattern had Murphy been aware of concerned discussions about Wingate's
arrest in the community—for example, on Mason's blog on August 20, and at a
community meeting on police reform held on September 24. But he said he wasn't
aware. "I'm not trying to shirk any responsibility," Murphy said when
I asked him about this. "At this point, I don't know how I could have
known."
So what can be done? Five
things right off the bat.
1. Make more of the OPA's data
available in real time
There is progress being made at
the OPA, and Murphy is at the center of it. He's trying. Still, it's
astonishingly slow-going work. The OPA has been around since 1999, and Murphy,
who once trained to become a Jesuit priest, has been on the job for about a
year and a half. "I get very frustrated," he told me. "I have a
clear vision of how I want it to be, and it's not there yet." One part of
that vision became reality last week, when Murphy added a real-time log of
completed OPA investigations to his office's website in an attempt to improve
transparency and allow the public to track his work more closely. The log
doesn't include employee names. But he wants to make the log sortable by date,
allegation, and OPA finding. Next month, he said, the OPA will implement a
complaint-tracking system, similar to a UPS or FedEx package tracker, that will
notify citizens and the SPD employees involved about the status of an OPA
investigation as it proceeds.
Of course, there's even more
that could be done on this score. Public defenders in New York have developed a
database on thousands of officers and their disciplinary records. We should aim
for something similar.
2. Get the SPD and other
branches of city government to communicate better with the OPA
The OPA is supposed to be
informed whenever someone files a legal claim with the city alleging police
misconduct, Murphy says. That system, which came into effect this year, has
already "failed" once, he said, "because the Wingate claim never
came to me." (Wingate's lawyers filed a discrimination claim in November
seeking $750,000 in damages.)
Chief O'Toole, for her part,
said records of OPA's decision-making and SPD's supervisory choices will be
entered into one system, called IAPro, and "all of that information will
eventually migrate into our data analytics platform." More like this,
please.
3. Give OPA more civilian staff
and make it easier for the public to interact with the OPA
The OPA finally extricated
itself from police headquarters in October and moved into the 18th floor of a
downtown building, above Top Pot Doughnuts. But Murphy would like to go further
and open up a street-level office to encourage walk-in complaints and enhance
accessibility.
Once someone comes in with a
complaint, Murphy hopes for that person to be greeted and interviewed by a
civilian, not a police officer. Murphy is working with a staff of seven police
sergeants, who rotate in and out of his office. But, he said, "I totally
get the perception of 'Why should the police be trusted to investigate
themselves?'" He believes a balance of insiders and outsiders would make
for a stronger investigative office. His dream is a hybrid system of civilian
and police investigators—something he had at the Boise, Idaho, police
department, where he's been credited with leading a successful drive for
reform.
4. Expand the OPA budget and
get serious in negotiations with the police union
Murphy is hampered in achieving
all of his goals by two things: his $2.5 million budget—less than 1 percent of
SPD's overall budget—and the city's ongoing contract negotiations with the
Seattle Police Officers' Guild, the influential police union that represents
rank-and-file officers. In a budget request last year, Murphy requested two
more police investigators, a civilian to handle intake of new complaints, and a
clerical staffer. Mayor Ed Murray's budget proposal, later approved by the city
council, filled two out of those four positions—the civilian intake person and
one additional police investigator.
"But I haven't been able
to fill the intake position," he lamented, "even though I have the
budget now, because I'm insistent that it needs to be a civilian... I can't do
that until the negotiations with SPOG are completed."
5. Keep changing the SPD's
culture
Murphy also insists he's
investigating more thoroughly than his predecessor, Kathryn Olson, who resigned
in 2012 with a dismal record of failing to hold police accountable, just as SPD
was placed under a federal consent decree to force reform. In contrast to the previous
leadership, Murphy said, "I get a lot of negative feedback from inside
SPD, that the OPA is investigating too many things."
In the end, Murphy argues—and
he's got a point—that even if Kathleen O'Toole is "the best chief and I'm
the best OPA director... two people can't make that happen." By
"that," he was referring to creating the culture of public service,
reform, and accountability that the city has wanted from the SPD for decades.
There are about 1,300 sworn
officers, and O'Toole is expected to soon finish hiring a brand-new group of
assistant chiefs to help her lead them. The Wingate case represents a serious
failure on the part of virtually everyone in charge of fixing the department.
Now we'll see whether they've learned from it.
This article has been updated
since its original publication.
