Under Mayor Murray, Reviews of Officers Who Shot Suspects Are On Hold

Image via Seattle Channel

At this January press conference, interim chief Harry Bailey said an armed man was "extremely lucky" not to be "dead" after officers shot him in the buttocks as he ran away. Three months later, the SPD still has not conducted any use-of-force reviews to determine if the shooting was justified.

Since Mayor Ed Murray took office January 1, the Seattle Police Department hasn't reviewed a single officer-involved-shooting incident to determine if the use of force was justified, says SPD spokesman Andrew Garber. There have been four such shootings since November, including a particularly high-profile January case involving officers shooting a man in the buttocks, but all of the force reviews, which are mandatory when a suspect is shot, are currently shelved.

Critics say this creates several potential problems:

1) Evidence could get stale by the time a review finally comes around.

2) The clock may be running out on potential police-misconduct investigations that must be finished within 180 days of an incident.

3) Failing to investigate use-of-force undermines a federal court order to reform the SPD's patterns of of excessive force.

I pointed out this problem, briefly, in a feature story in this week's paper about the Murray administration reversing and stalling reform efforts. One example of the problem as it relates to this particular case: A few days after the January shooting, interim chief Harry Bailey cavalierly said the man was "extremely lucky" he wasn't killed, even though there had been no investigation into whether the force was justified (it may be, it may not be). Prejudging shootings before an investigation does not look like reform, critics said, so it's worth taking a even deeper dive into all of this here on Slog—particularly because many are stunned that there still has been no investigation.

"It's not acceptable that shootings in January have not yet been reviewed," says Lisa Daugaard, policy director of the Public Defender Association, by e-mail today. "This is an urgent issue and it's at the heart of what triggered federal intervention in the first place."

Mayor Ed Murray has insisted that police reform is finally happening, and that reform was "not happening" until the day he took office. Murray also responded to my story on his website today, talking about the "unprecedented commitment to reform within SPD."

So, why the wait on shooting investigations? SPD's Garber explains that the department is attempting to merge two separate review processes. There's a longstanding Firearms Review Board, and now, the SPD is attempting to create "a new officer-involved shooting review process in order to meet a request by the Department of Justice Monitoring Team."

Daugaard counters that several oversight boards will be making recommendations to improve the firearms review process, but nevertheless, she says, "that can't mean these investigations are delayed."

As for concerns about preserving evidence, Garber said he's not worried. He contends that "per department policy enacted in January 2014, officers provide audio-recorded statements following officer-involved shootings... The department has no material concerns about the preservation of the cases."

Garber did not answer questions about whether the conservative police union had protested the use-of-force reviews, nor did he provide any timeline for reviewing the backlog of cases.