The Seattle Police Department chose to release its comprehensive special report on police officers’ use of force on March 7, despite its having been completed since last summer. The decision was made to postpone its August release in the wake of the deadly police shooting of a Native American woodcarver on a downtown street, later that month.
Ironically, the report’s release four days after the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles accidentally underscored the scope of the problem, 20 years ago and now.
The Seattle department’s report comes after a series of events that have aroused the scrutiny of civil rights groups — and possibly the Justice Department, and the ire of citizens.
In 2010, a year peppered with altercations between minorities and the Seattle Police Department, the American Civil Liberties Union called for a Justice Department investigation of the SPD in the wake of two Oct. 18 videotapes — showing an SPD detective kicking an African-American male in a downtown convenience store, and stomping on another man outside.
The department is still mending fences in the city’s minority communities for incidents last April (in which an innocent Latino man was assaulted by police in a case of mistaken identity), last June (when a teenage African-American girl was punched by an SPD officer after jaywalking and resisting police authority) and last August (when the woodcarver was slain by an SPD officer, who later resigned).
The report just released offers a statistically supported overview of SPD “use of force incidents between 2006 and 2009, and finds the Seattle department’s use-of-force incidents on a par with or below the national average. But in some ways the report raises as many questions as it answers.
According to the report findings, force was used by Seattle police officers in less than one-quarter of 1 percent of all interactions with the public.
“In Seattle, the use of force rate has declined over the last three years going from 0.18 percent in 2006 to 0.12 percent in 2009. This is less than one-fifth of the national rate,” the report states.
Direct use of force was employed only 3 percent of the time during arrests, the report stated. “In Seattle, the rate of force use relative to arrests went from 3.3 percent in 2006 to 2.4 percent in 2009. This means that Seattle police officers accomplish arrests without any use of force over 97 percent of the time.”
The report found that in 2009, officers used their own bodies (with kicks and blows) in 78 percent of use of force incidents, and employed firearms in only six-tenths of 1 percent of those incidents.
The Seattle department’s focus on use-of-force parallels that of other American cities of comparable size: Portland, Ore. (pop. 584,000), and Denver, Colo. (pop. 600,000) , have had similar experiences with police-community relations. The Portland Police Bureau issued a similar report, on the department’s racial profiling practices, in January 2009, finding that “While [Portland’s police] workforce is more diverse than it has been in the past, more needs to be done. Recruitment and hiring policies and practices are being changed that have historically been barriers to qualified people of color.”
In March 2010, the Denver Police Department started a largely pre-emptive policy that bars officers from carrying blackjacks, and requires compliance with other regs on use of Tasers and other devices.
But one of the Seattle report’s more troubling features is a chart indicating the use-of-force relative to the number of overall arrests based on race and ethnicity. According to chart data, in 2009, whites were 45 percent of those subjected to use of force by Seattle police officers, and 51 percent of all people arrested. African Americans were 39 percent of those arrested, but 43 percent of those subjected to use of force.
That imbalance is problematic enough for African-Americans in the city — the department’s own numbers show they’re more likely to face use of force in an arrest.
But other figures are compelling: Seattle’s population is 608,660 people, according to just-released Census Bureau figures. Some 69.5 percent of Seattleites are white; 7.9 percent of Seattle residents are African-American. (Asian, Native American and Pacific Islander formed most of the rest; self-identified Hispanic residents, who can be of any race, were 6.6 percent of Seattle’s population; self-identified biracial residents were 5.1 percent.)
Overlaying the census statistics with the SPD report’s findings raises a disturbing but necessary question: Why are Seattle’s black citizens who are arrested such a high percentage of those subjected to use of force, despite being a lower percentage of everyone arrested in 2009 — and despite being such a small percentage of the city’s population?
Fewer than 8 percent of the city’s population accounted for almost 40 percent of everyone arrested, and more than 40 percent of those subject to use of force by Seattle police. It may have been this disparity that prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to call, on Nov. 18, for a Justice Department investigation into “whether there is a pattern and practice of civil rights violations by the Seattle Police Department.”
It may have been that ACLU pursuit of a Justice Department inquiry that led to the curious decision to completely omit any use-of-force data from the report for the troubling year 2010. That decision effectively made the report completed in August — with no data in it beyond the end of 2009 — outdated from the moment it was released on March 7.
James Bible, head of the Seattle area chapter of the NAACP and a frequent critic of the department, questioned the report’s source: the police officers themselves.
“When an officer has the control to write up what happened and what did not happen … and have it codified in statistics and data, then we don’t get the full perspective kin reference to what’s actually occurring,” Bible told NBC affiliate KING-TV in Seattle.
Some questioned the report’s findings even before its release. At a Feb. 3 community forum, Nicole Gaines, president of the Loren Miller Bar Association, an organization of African-American lawyers and judges, challenged the SPD low use-of-force numbers, saying that numerous unfriendly encounters between young black males and police aren’t ever reported. “Your stats don’t show that,” she said, the Seattle Times reported.
Besides smaller, less tragic encounters between blacks and Seattle police — those resulting in the minor use-of-force injuries mentioned in the report — history reveals fatal incidents.
A hotel waiter beaten to death by Seattle police officers in March 1938; a questionable fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in June 1965 by a Seattle officer who was drinking before the incident; another fatal shooting by an SPD officer in November 1966, a case in which the officer was exonerated after an inquest the ACLU called ‘’a parody of a judicial hearing.’‘
The city is trying to address what Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn called “the loss of faith between our community and our police force” at a Feb. 16 community forum.
The mayor said as much earlier, at a forum on Sept. 30: “I personally take those issues very seriously. It’s challenging because we have a process that has to be followed … I realize there may be skepticism from the past about whether those processes will provide justice or fairness in the outcome.”
“Police are different; we allow them to do things we don’t allow other people to do because of safety reasons,” he said. “I believe most people in Seattle don’t have any intention of treating people differently because of their background. But you can’t argue with the data as to what actually happens.”
The disconnect between the police department and the minority citizens of Seattle may be something as simple as where they each live — literally. At his State of the City speech on Feb. 22, McGinn noted that “just 18 percent of our police officers live in Seattle, 82 percent don’t. It’s hard to have a good local police force if the police aren’t local.”
Even Seattle’s police chief, John Diaz, lives in Issaquah, about 20 miles from the city whose police force he directs.
Unlike other metro police agencies — such as the New York City Police Department, which requires officers to live within the city limits, or in a handful of outlying counties — Washington state law bars cities from imposing such residency requirements. McGinn said the “opportunity to recruit officers from the community” could happen once about 300 officers eligible for retirement actually leave, a process that could stretch to years.
Because of that absence, the Seattle police officers can hardly be expected to have an affinity for the city and its storied history of inclusion and tolerance. To more than 80 percent of the department, relatively speaking, people on the streets of Seattle aren’t neighbors, they’re strangers.
There may be no better proof of that than the letter written last year by Steve Pomper, a SPD officer, in the Police Guild newsletter calling the department leadership “a quaint socialist cabal” and condemning the city’s anti-bias overtures.
Pomper lives in a town 15 miles north of Seattle.
There’s proof that the city of Seattle means to make good on community outreach and a more inclusive approach to department hiring. At his State of the City address, McGinn said Seattle would “expand the targeting pool for new officers, to seek those who have the life experience and maturity to meet the high standards we have for the Seattle Police Department.”
There’s also evidence the SPD itself is trying to resolve the estrangement of the long arm’s length of the law. In June 2010, capitalizing on a meeting between Angel Rosenthal (the girl in that jaywalking incident) and Ian Walsh, (the officer who punched her), Diaz expressed “the need for the renewed commitment to a conversation about race and social justice in this city.’’
And in February, Chief Diaz put more space between the police and its besieged, us-against-the-world ethos when he appeared an a tribal ceremony for the memory of John T. Williams, who died Aug. 30 after being shot four times on a downtown street by now-former police officer Ian Birk.
At the ceremony, Diaz looked almost regal wearing a red scarf around his neck, red to symbolize the blood of the victim shed on the streets of the city. The chief appeared visibly moved in news videos of the event, marking Seattle’s declaration of the first John T. Williams Day, Feb. 27 – the woodcarver’s 51st birthday.
“The reason I’m here is respect for the Williams family,” Diaz said. “This has been a tragedy for everyone and there’s much rebuilding that needs to happen. I couldn’t ask for more than for you giving me the honor of coming to this today.”
The day in Williams’ honor, the outreach of city government and police to Seattle’s minority citizens, and some of the police agency’s efforts have something in common: they’re a beginning — one the city needs regardless of statistics that undercut the emotional impact of what’s taken place recently. Civil rights groups and citizens alike will watch the Seattle Police Department to see what follows the beginning, and whether the “commitment to a conversation” actually leads to one.