by Mark Worth
The Free Press
While most people around Seattle's Public Safety Building have been talking recently about Police Chief Patrick Fitzsimons' plan to resign next February, another issue that strikes at the heart of how the Seattle Police Department is run continues generate controversy.
A week before Fitzsimons' announcement, the police department rejected most of the major recommendations made by an independent auditor studying how SPD should improve the way it investigates officers accused of wrongdoing.
SPD lawyer Leo Poort told the city's Public Safety Committee July 8 that the department opposes six key recommendations made in June by Terrence Carroll, a former King County Superior Court judge who has been examining SPD's internal investigations section (IIS) for more than a year. Poort offered only half-hearted support for one of Carroll's significant proposals to improve how SPD decides whether an officer is guilty of abusing citizens or breaking department rules.
The city hired Carroll as an independent "police auditor" last year after several government and private organizations found that the way SPD investigates and disciplines its officers is too secretive, too inbred and too exclusionary. The result, the organizations said, is that many citizens have little or no confidence that a complaint filed against an officer will be investigated fairly and that the officer will be disciplined if appropriate. (See "When Cops Investigate Themselves" Free Press, June 1993.)
Released in June, Carroll's second semiannual report spells out a handful of improvements - some major, some minor - that he believes SPD should institute to improve both the department's self-inspection system and public trust.
Poort, however, told Councilwoman Margaret Pageler and the rest of the Public Safety Committee that many of Carroll's ideas aren't what the department has in mind. The major proposals Poort rejected call for the police department to:
- Increase the rate of citizen complaints that are "sustained" - that is, when the evidence indicates an officer committed an alleged misdeed. In 1992, 5.4 percent of 921 complaints were sustained, making SPD one of the few big-city departments in the U.S. with a rate below 10 percent.
- Stop allowing the chain-of-command - the brass who supervise accused officers - to review completed internal investigations after they leave IIS and before they reach the chief's desk for a final decision. Carroll has indicated that the current system may allow favoritism and other personal factors to creep their way into disciplinary decisions.
- Stop allowing an officer's superiors, instead of IIS, to investigate allegations of "minor" misconduct, a system Carroll says "is asking for trouble." Though rejecting the proposal, even Poort acknowledged that the current setup has "been a concern."
- Allow Carroll to make recommendations to the chief as to an officer's guilt and level of discipline.
- Release to the public investigations that conclude an officer misbehaved and was disciplined. Poort argued strongly against this idea, saying that "public confidence is built on hard work for the citizens, not by embarrassing officers by putting their names in the paper." (This proposal would have to be approved by Seattle Police Officers Guild, which historically has been against the idea.)
- Allow IIS to not only investigate citizen complaints, but also to make recommendations to the chief as to the officer's guilt or innocence, and to recommend discipline.
Poort agreed with several minor proposals, such as assigning experienced sergeants to IIS (officers rotate in and out of the unit), completing investigations of unnecessary force complaints within 60 days and using a computer database to more effectively identify officers with recurring problems.
Poort appeared before the Public Safety Committee and submitted a written response. He did not respond to a request for an interview after the meeting.
Despite Poort's opposition to Carroll's proposals, the final decision isn't up to SPD - it's up to the City Council. And the council and its staff have their own ideas about how the department should investigate its officers, said Susan Crane, a Public Safety Committee staffer. Crane said she's waiting for Mayor Norm Rice to respond to Poort's response, and that she's hoping to have a plan to implement some of Carroll's proposals by Aug. 12. Crane would not say which of Carroll's ideas might be in the plan.
Watching all of this unfold is Carroll, whose second report repeated many of the recommendations he pitched in his initial study completed six months earlier. As SPD's recent opposition to many of his ideas would indicate, most of them have sat idle. But, he says, that situation might change.
"I think you're going to see this time around a much stronger effort to put in place some of the recommendations. There are people in the city [government] who support the things I have been talking about," Carroll said, including Mayor Rice and Councilwoman Pageler.
Carroll chalked up SPD's resistance to change, in part, to a sort of institutional inertia. "It is part of the scenery that change can be difficult, especially when those changes involve a department looking at itself."
Beyond improvements in SPD's self-inspection system, Carroll said top department brass may need to undergo some changes.
"It is my strong belief that improving the management of the police department is the most critical aspect of improving the relationship between the police and the community," the former judge said. "Anyone who believes that punishment and lawsuits will improve the disciplinary system is sadly mistaken. It has to be put primarily in the lap of those who supervise the officers.
"I think there will always be a place for punishment. That clearly has a role," he said. "But the minor things that can lead to more serious problems later on need to be looked at by the supervisors - an officer's behavior, the words he or she uses, the lack of respect for citizens. There are some signals that need to looked at."
Though not within his role of police auditor, Carroll was critical, in general, of police departments' "military approach" to law enforcement. "It only goes so far," he said. "It promotes distance between the constabulary and the citizen.
"But police work is extremely difficult in an urban area. And the huge majority of police officers in Seattle are good officers a great majority of the time. We're not talking about a Los Angeles. We're not talking about an out-of-control department," he said. "We're talking about minimizing incidents of improper police conduct. The department is open to listening and there are people there who think these changes will be helpful."
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Contents on this page were published in the July/August, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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