A-Infos (en) US, Anarkismo.net: Will the Department of Justice Get Their Way in Seattle? by John Jacobsen - Seattle Solidarity Network

Seattle City attorneys officially threw down the gauntlet with the Department of Justice 
last week, filing court documents which challenged the “reliability and trustworthiness” 
of a recent DOJ report on the Seattle Police. The DOJ report, which “finds a pattern or 
practice of constitutional violations regarding the use of force… as well as serious 
concerns about biased policing,” has been offered as evidence in an ongoing court case 
brought by Martin Monetti Jr. against the City of Seattle.Monetti, a Latino man, had his 
head stomped into the pavement after being told by then-Detective Shandy Cobane that he 
would “beat the [expletive] Mexican piss out of you, homie.” ---- This is just the latest 
move by Mayor Mike McGinn and the Seattle Police Department in their escalating strategy 
of resistance to the Department of Justice, who have repeatedly called for reform of the 
city’s embattled police department.


Will the Department of Justice Get Their Way in Seattle?


Seattle City attorneys officially threw down the gauntlet with the Department of Justice 
last week, filing court documents which challenged the “reliability and trustworthiness” 
of a recent DOJ report on the Seattle Police.

The DOJ report, which “finds a pattern or practice of constitutional violations regarding 
the use of force… as well as serious concerns about biased policing,” has been offered as 
evidence in an ongoing court case brought by Martin Monetti Jr. against the City of 
Seattle.Monetti, a Latino man, had his head stomped into the pavement after being told by 
then-Detective Shandy Cobane that he would “beat the [expletive] Mexican piss out of you, 
homie.”

This is just the latest move by Mayor Mike McGinn and the Seattle Police Department in 
their escalating strategy of resistance to the Department of Justice, who have repeatedly 
called for reform of the city’s embattled police department.
A violent department and the prelude to reform:

Seattle residents – particularly those in working class and non-white communities – have 
called for reform of the police department for some time, and for good reason; there have 
been a number of high-profile police murders in Seattle – not least of which was the 
shooting of unarmed Native wood-carver John T. Williams by Ian Birk, whose death sparked 
months of protest and outright attacks on police.

There is also the issue of routine instances of physical force used by SPD officers, which 
the DOJ has found to be “unconstitutional… nearly 20% of the time.” Of use of force 
encounters, moreover, particularly those in which impact weapons are used by police, “57% 
of the time it is either unnecessary or excessive.”

This, of course, is only of incidents we can statistically gather. The DOJ report also 
finds that in nearly half of all investigations by the SPD’s Office of Professional 
Accountability, officers did not include any mention or report of their having used force 
when, in fact, they had. It was also recently revealed that a whopping 100,000 dash cam 
video’s in police cruisers have “disappeared” during a lawsuit against the department by 
KOMO News.

Moreover, many residents may simply be too intimidated to take legal action against the 
department, as officers with the Seattle Police Officers Guild may go out of their way to 
intimidate citizens who dare even file complaints against the SPD.

Harry C. Bailey, in fact, (formerly a sergeant hired by Mayor Mike McGinn to improve 
community relations for the Police Department) made headlines for overseeing the filing of 
five lawsuits against citizens in 1994, accusing them of making false complaints with the 
department’s internal-investigations section – all 5 lawsuits were later dismissed when 
the guild simply abandoned them in court, leading many to speculate “whether the lawsuits 
were brought to have a chilling effect on others.”

…

The mayor and the police recognize that there is, if only in terms of their public 
relations, a problem with police violence in Seattle. They may contest the methodology 
used by the DOJ in surveying the department’s use of force, but they are politically savvy 
enough to recognize that at the very least, they have to feign reform.

Not only is animosity towards police politically dangerous for McGinn and the SPD brass, 
but physically dangerous for officers – resistance to police have mounted in numerous 
communities around Seattle.

The ACLU and the Seattle Human Rights Commission have put pressure on the city to address 
what the ACLU called a “consistent pattern that people of color were being targeted.” 
Crowds of black clad protestors have repeatedly attacked police and police vehicles, and 
Seattle Police Department spokesman Jeff Kappel recently revealed that the Department has 
become increasingly worried about a rising number of citizens becoming openly and 
physically hostile towards police actions in their neighborhoods, in which residents have 
physically prevented the police from carrying out their work.

In response, Seattle Police introduced what they call the “20/20 plan,” a list of 20 
initiatives the department wants to implement in the next 20 months in order to create “a 
culture in our police force of respect for the community, accountability, and service to 
the public.” The ploy, of course, was to convince the public that DOJ oversight was 
unnecessary.

The city’s resistance to federally mandated reforms is unlikely to work, however, as city 
leadership has been unable to meet even the basic requirement of winning over the 
self-appointed community leadership of organizations such as the Seattle Human Rights 
Commission, the ACLU or El Centro de la Raza. These groups, and several dozen others, have 
repeatedly been denied access to negotiations surrounding reform efforts, prompting them 
to refuse further cooperation with the mayor and police’s 20/20 plan, which, they note, 
was never legally binding to begin with.

This complete break down in the city government’s ability to handle the escalating crisis 
has led many to speculate that a consent decree, in which Seattle allows a federally 
appointed monitor to help implement recommendations made by the DOJ, is on its way in.

Captain Dave Bailey, of the Cincinnati Police Department – the man tasked with overseeing 
similar reforms in his city ten years ago – said of the struggle between Seattle and the 
DOJ: “[SPD is] going to find out what we found out.” Namely, that the reforms are inevitable.
A bankrupt reform effort:

The Department of Justice, for their part, has their sights set on three aspects of 
Seattle’s police department.

The DOJ argues that Seattle’s excessive police violence is a result of failing to properly 
monitor or investigate the use of force; to implement adequate policies on the proper use 
of various force weapons; and to adequately train its officers on the use of force, 
particularly the appropriate use of various force weapons.

The findings have been similar in other cities.

New Orleans’ current agreement, in fact, should sound very familiar to Seattle residents - 
a DOJ report there found that, amongst many other problems, the city uses “too much force 
against civilians, often don’t report it and, when it is reported, too often fail to 
investigate the incidents thoroughly.”

Indeed, it seems that the pattern with federal investigators and dysfunctional police 
departments has been the same throughout the country. More than a dozen cities, including 
Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh, have been forced to sign consent decrees by the 
Department of Justice, and this has not escaped the attention of reform advocates in 
Seattle; both Sharon Pian Chan of the Seattle Times, and by Linda Byron of King 5, have 
called for the city to “submit to its discipline (from the Department of Justice),” and 
for us to emulate Cincinnati, a city under federal oversight which is “a model for how 
police and citizens… [can come] together to make the streets safer for everyone.”

There is reason to be skeptical, however, about the claim that federal or independent 
oversight has come very close to solving any city’s problems with police violence, or of 
truly bringing “police and citizens” together. Just this month in Cincinnati, an 
18-year-old college student was murdered by police for allegedly “charging towards them 
with clenched fists.”

It should be noted that while there does appear to be a statistical drop in use of force 
complaints while police departments are monitored, one problem with the consent decrees is 
that police departments tend to return to their old practices once the federal oversight 
has ceased.

In Pittsburgh, Witold ”Vic” Walczak, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney says of 
the oversight’s expiration, “I do believe that the culture of the department was changed 
[during the oversight], but that culture is now sliding back toward where it was.”

In January 2010, plainclothes Pittsburgh officers beat Jordan Miles, a black high school 
honors student walking to a relative’s home in a crime-ridden neighborhood. He said the 
police never identified themselves.
While the decree was still in effect, the number of complaints brought to the ACLU about 
police in Pittsburgh dramatically decreased, Walczak said. Now that it has expired, 
however, there has been an uptick. Indeed, similar attempts by federal authorities over 
the last several decades to reform the nation’s police departments appear not to have 
particularly long-lasting effects.

In 1981, the United States Commission on Civil Rights urged Cincinnati to curb its 
officers’ “lack of standards for using force” (a euphemism commonly used to describe the 
indiscriminate use of violence), and in 1981 and 1987, the city was pressured to sign two 
consent decrees surrounding discrimination within the department itself. And yet issues of 
brutality and racism still abound.
Motivations and certainties:

We should be clear on the fact that the worry for the SPD is not rampant police violence 
itself, but importantly, “losing the public trust.” Similar phrases are evoked in nearly 
every consent decree you can find, and it makes sense when you understand precisely what 
the authors mean.

When they concede that the community no longer trusts the police force, what they are 
really saying is “people are beginning to resist,” or “people are fighting back.” It’s 
instructive that both in Seattle and in Cincinnati, DOJ investigations were launched 
following riots and protests which targeted the police, not to mention the heated street 
fighting in Oakland.

Seattle City government, in fact, is still haunted by the specter of Occupy Wall Street, 
who on May 1st launched successful attacks against city banks and businesses in the 
downtown corridor.

In the age of economic downturn and austerity, authorities have realized just how quickly 
their cities can erupt. Of course, these ruptures require swift, violent police 
intervention. But it is recognized that this police intervention cannot operate without 
sufficient public support. As all of us (including the Mayor and Police) saw in Oakland, 
California, last year, it only took one brutal attack by police on a Marine veteran to 
turn virtually the entire city out into the streets.

The problem for city officials, then, is this: when police violence begins to exceed what 
Seattle residents deem as legitimate or normal, regular police functions become 
increasingly difficult. The Police Department becomes bogged down in extra litigation and 
investigations, and officers increasingly face a hostile public in their day-to-day 
operations, impeding their ability to function effectively.

McGinn and the Police, correctly, saw this ordeal as basically a PR battle – if they can 
simply remain legitimate in the eyes of the public, they can retain a reasonable amount of 
control during public disturbances. The Mayor and police, however, underestimated the 
depths of the wounds left after years of police violence, which lead to a fundamental 
miscalculation with the 20/20 plan. Because they are now entirely without support for it, 
they will have to rely on the DOJ to restore the city’s legitimacy, if it can.

The DOJ, then, far from being the benevolent father figure envisaged by Sharon Chan of the 
Times, simply serves as a safety mechanism for cities unable to meet the basic 
requirements of policing their citizens. They will, whether McGinn or the police like it 
or not, drag our broken department into 21st century policing, where a major part of 
avoiding unrest means sticking only to the “legitimate” uses of police violence.

Related Link:
http://thetrialbyfire.org/2012/06/20/will-the-department-of-justice-get-their-way/
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