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Joe Szwaja on Police Accountability

It is time to reform our police accountability mechanisms to increase their transparency, independence, and effectiveness. Maintaining a professional, top-notch police force requires honoring those public servants who excel at a very difficult job, while making sure that police officers who violate professional standards receive appropriate discipline. Unfortunately, this has not occurred in Seattle. Recently, well-documented cases of police officers using excessive force and lying to their superiors have not resulted in proper discipline.

As a City Councilmember, I would provide leadership to ensure that we have the most professional police force possible. To that end, I support instituting a process of reconfirmation and performance reviews of the police chief by the Seattle City Council and the creation of an independent civilian review board. We can do this by focusing on accountability, independence, transparency and effectiveness. ( click to read more)

Accountability

Checks and balances are essential to police accountability. The incumbent has said, “We don’t need to give the police chief 10 bosses.” This is wrong-headed thinking that goes against the idea of checks and balances; no one person or branch of government should have unchecked power. The police chief should be subject to at least as much scrutiny as other department heads.

• Establish city council reconfirmation and review of the police chief. The City Council currently reconfirms and reviews the performance of every city department head except the police and fire chiefs. We need to get rid of this exemption to increase public accountability.
• Create an independent civilian review board to investigate allegations of police misconduct. This board must be properly funded and truly independent from control by the police department or mayor's office.

As we push forward the process of creating a civilian review board, we need immediate improvements to the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA), which is currently the agency inside the Seattle Police Department for investigating citizen allegations of police misconduct. The following principles, of course, also should apply to the future civilian review board:

Independence

• Protect the independence of the OPA’s Director. The OPA has a Citizen Director in order to bring fairness and impartiality to the process of reviewing citizen complaints of police misconduct. Her staff members are police officers; she reports to the Chief of Police, and her recommendations of discipline are subject to the Chief’s veto. But when the Chief also becomes actively involved in overseeing investigations, he undermines the already limited independence of the OPA Director. To preserve the integrity of citizen-input in the investigation process, we need to put a firewall between the Chief and OPA Director.

Transparency

• Freedom of Information Act. The records of the OPA are currently exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The public is barred from seeing how decisions are made, and the Chief has deleted emails related to important deliberations on disciplinary investigations. We need to overturn this exemption.

• Written explanation of Chief’s Veto. The Chief overturned nearly 30 percent of all OPA recommendations of discipline from 2002 to 2005. He did not explain these reversals. He should be required to do so in writing.

Effectiveness

• Amend the 180 day time limit for OPA investigations. Some allegations of police misconduct are sufficiently serious and nuanced that they require a lot of time to investigate. The OPA’s current, 180 day time limit on all investigations needs to be made more flexible so that we can better process complex cases.

Implementing these steps will bring out the best in our police department, remove the worst, and restore Seattleite’s confidence in the integrity and excellence of our police force. A system of true accountability and good policing are not contradictory, in fact they can work together to serve all of our people.