What can be done to bring Police Accountability to Olympia?

author : Drew Hendricks topic : police misconduct | TASER use

by Drew Hendricks

Each year, the City of Olympia spends around ten million dollars on Police, Crime Prevention, and the City's Jail. In contrast, the budget for the City Council's Police Auditor is just $20,000 per year, and that paltry amount of money is usually not all spent by the time the budget rolls over into the next year.

No significant revisions have been made to Olympia's police accountability processes in the three and a half years since Kent DeBoer was shot by two OPD officers in his parents' home in January 2002. Kent survived his encounter, but in November of 2002 Stephen Edwards did not survive his arrest by two OPD officers. Still, no significant revisions had been made after these events, except an increase in the use of force by 35 incidents each year for two years running, due to the introduction of the TASER in the fall of 2002.

In 2004, an ad-hoc committee of the Olympia City Council studied the police accountability processes already in place, and then disbanded after three public meetings. The ad hoc committee handed off its work to the regular General Government Committee, which promptly dropped the issue from its published work plan for the second half of 2005.

Olympia Copwatch has been active in our community for years now, but until recently had not been systematic in its document requests, and had chiefly been aimed at criticizing specific cases of abuse, and advocating for changes by pressuring the City Council and awaiting their action. Since the first few months of 2003, that has changed.

Olympia Copwatch now regularly requests all reports detailing the use of force, all shift assignments worked by patrol officers, the names of each sworn officer and the dates of their hiring. We have collected lists of vehicles operated by the police department, and photographed vehicles and personnel for use in our posters. We have collected a list of all TASERs owned by the department and are working with Amnesty International Chapter #474 to collect the detailed logs of each weapon's use, for regular auditing of TASER use by officers.

This systematic approach, coupled with regular reports to this newspaper and before the City Council's Tuesday meetings, has resulted in the reduction of TASER use by two thirds for Feb-April 2005. There are indications that the command staff of the Police Department has altered the level of details recorded in the minutes of their Strategic Technology Enhanced Policing (STEP) meetings to respond to an incident when a Copwatch organizer read the minutes at a City Council meeting in June. Police Chief Gary Michel even went so far as to meet and speak with former Seattle Chief of Police Norm Stamper, who has (since his retirement) become an outspoken critic of violent police culture. Changes are in the air.

It is important that we remember all of this if the department begins to unravel in the next few weeks and months under the weight of sex scandals and accusations of reprisals and abuse. The progress we have seen could easily be lost under the seedy (and distracting) details of the sex lives of more than six department employees (and former employees and volunteers) as they file their declarations and rebuttals in the case of Mel Jetter and his former lover, Cheryl King. Jetter stands accused of driving his vehicle into Ms King sometime in the early part of 2002. The details are sketchy and contradictory, but the story of their messy breakup threatens to become the most recent public face of Olympia Police dysfunction in the pages of the only daily newspaper in Thurston County. It is likely only the visible portion of a much larger circle of furtive on-the-job couplings within a culture noted for its isolation from normal society. It is also, as I have suggested, largely beside the point -- except where it illustrates the impotence of management in the face of the Police Guild. (Mel Jetter is reportedly an officer of the Guild, and narrowly escaped firing in a 2003 letter of rebuke by his boss, Gary Michel.)

In this environment, it is time for Olympia Copwatch to step up, and adopt a strategy which gets to the root of the problem of police accountability. It is time Copwatch became the police auditor in fact, rather than by default. We can't wait for the City Council to act on our behalf any longer. We must create the office we expect to see, and fund it ourselves as we see fit. We must challenge oligarchy by adopting direct democracy.

If the community wants a real, independent police auditor, we have the technology and the laws in place already to facilitate much of what we want to see. It will take at least one full time employee for the first year, and perhaps as much as $15,000 per year to fund that employee's salary and office supplies. I am proposing that I train that employee in the document request and organizing techniques which have begun to bear fruit, and direct the organization of a true grassroots democratic model of police accountability for the future of Olympia. I am not running for, and will not accept at this time, that paid position due to the conflict of interest it would generate for me in the 2006 election cycle.