SEATTLE — Seattle is paying $100,000 to a University of Washington geography student who suffered broken bones in his face when he was arrested in 2012.

David Pontecorvo said he was pulled off his front porch by officers and beaten with fists, batons and a flashlight because he was videotaping as they arrested one of his friends during a party, The Seattle Times reported. He underwent surgery in June to repair his damaged sinuses, his lawyer said.

The police responded to a noise complaint at Pontecorvo’s West Seattle home early on Sept. 22, 2012, and the partyers turned down the music. But as officers were leaving, someone turned it back up. The police returned and arrested one of the people in the house.

Pontecorvo, then 19, and another friend began recording the arrest on their cellphones. Pontecorvo was inside the house filming the action on his front porch when an officer, identified as Christine Nichols, told him he was going to be arrested for “obstructing.”

The shaky video shows Nichols pushing him toward the stairs. The pair move off-camera, and another officer is heard yelling, “I’m coming, Christine!”

Pontecorvo is then heard yelling that he’s not resisting and asking why the officers are using force: “I’m not doing anything wrong! I’m not resisting! Why are you doing this?”

According to the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, Pontecorvo said that at the bottom of the stairs he was grabbed by Officer Michael Renner, who took him to the ground. Renner, Nichols, Sgt. Joseph Maccarrone, Alvaro Ferreira and others beat him, the lawsuit alleged.

Court records show Renner and Maccarrone were defendants in a 2008 lawsuit filed by Eric Garcia-Arcos, who claimed he was beaten, shocked with a Taser and illegally arrested after a noise complaint in 2006. Garcia-Arcos suffered fractures to two vertebrae and two ribs, according to court documents. The city paid $85,000 to settle that lawsuit.

Pierce Murphy, the civilian director of the police department’s Office of Professional Accountability, said the office never received a complaint about the Pontecorvo incident. None of the officers was disciplined.

As the Seattle Police Department’s attorneys would have her known, Sgt. Ella Elias is a conniving malcontent hoping to be made a millionaire with taxpayer money.

Certainly, the department’s attorneys say, the veteran squad leader wasn’t bullied for outing cronyism on the part of an assistant police chief. Sgt. Elias’ key supporters – her former supervisors, since sidelined by Chief Kathleen O’Toole as well – just have it all wrong, too.

That’s the story SPD is selling.

King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North bought none of it.

“Quite frankly, I’m surprised she’s still working for the Seattle Police Department given the incredibly hostile environment she was subjected to,” North said from the bench Friday as he shot down SPD’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Elias.

North cleared the way for Elias to take her claims to King County jury as two of her former commanders – Capt. David Proudfoot and Lt. Steve Strand – are poised to sue as well. They claim they were attacked for trying to protect Elias, and the department.

Proudfoot and Strand claim O’Toole ruined their careers after they argued against a punitive transfer forced on Elias. Elias says she was retaliated against after complaining about preferential treatment given to friends of then-Assistant Chief Nick Metz, the former head of SPD’s patrol operations.

Judge: City is making excuses for punishing whistleblower

Elias, Proudfoot and Strand were rising stars in the department’s South Precinct, which encompasses much of South Seattle, including the Rainier Valley, Beacon Hill and the stadium district. The area is one of the most diverse in the nation, and rampant crime has afflicted several neighborhoods within the precinct boundaries.

After an exemplary career as the only female patrol sergeant in the precinct, Elias claims she was targeted after raising concerns that Metz had handpicked four friends for a lucrative, prized overtime duty. Elias sued the department in November 2014, claiming she was harassed and retaliated against.

Writing the court, Jessie Harris, a private attorney representing SPD in the matter, described it as “ironic” that Elias claims she was discriminated against after being cited following an internal investigation.

“Her lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt by Elias to circumvent accountability for her own conduct and failure to satisfy reasonable performance expectations SPD holds for supervisors,” Harris said in court papers.

SPD had hoped North would kill Elias’ lawsuit by finding her lawsuit meritless. Such an outcome would undercut any legal action from Strand and Proudfoot, who’ve both given the city notice that they are preparing to sue.

Instead, North, with strength unusual in a preliminary court hearing, described Elias as a whistleblower who was retaliated against by SPD. The department’s explanation as to why Elias was punished, the judge said, was a pretext for the retaliation.

“I think it’s obvious that it’s a pretext,” North said from the bench Friday. “I don’t think there’s really any question that that’s what’s going on here.”

The claims put forward by Strand and Proudfoot shift the allegations against Metz to O’Toole and Deputy Chief Carmen Best, the department’s second-in-command. Metz left Seattle for Aurora, Colorado, where he is chief of police. Strand and Proudfoot – both of whom led South Precinct in recent years – claim O’Toole and Best went after them for standing up for Elias.

Spokespersons for the Seattle Police Department and Seattle City Attorney’s Office, which represents the city’s departments in legal actions, declined to discuss allegations made by Strand and Proudfoot.

‘The gravy train of overtime’

Elias, now 49, had been under relentless pressure since early 2012, when she complained of what she saw as unfair, preferential treatment of several officers close to Metz, according to statements made to the court. Elias faced embarrassment when she was sent home during an investigation later found to be groundless.

Having joined the SPD 23 years ago after an 11-year career in the Army, Elias is one of few women serving in the department’s patrol division. Women account for about 14 percent of the 1,189 line officers and detectives employed by the department as whole. In 2013, only 17 of the department’s 144 sergeants are women.

Elias, long the only woman patrol sergeant at South Precinct, had an exemplary record. Then, four years ago, she complained about favoritism in overtime assignments.

Beginning in late 2011, Seattle police launched an program aimed at stemming violence in the city’s nightclubs. In South Precinct, the emphasis meant four officers were paid overtime on Friday and Saturday nights to patrol clubs.

Writing the court, Elias’ attorney Julie Kays said Metz handpicked the officers “for the gravy train of overtime.” Kays described the officers as close friends of Metz who regularly drop the assistant chief’s name around the precinct office.

Elias learned the overtime opportunity had not been opened to other officers as required by city policy and the officers’ union contract. Elias reported her concerns to Strand and Proudfoot, and ultimately won out – the nightclub patrol was opened to all the precinct’s officers.

Writing the court, Kays said the officers who’d been enjoying the work then turned on Elias. They refused to recognize her authority, walked out of meetings she was leading and put a threatening poster near her locker, according to the lawsuit.

The insubordination was supported by some of Elias’ superiors, one of whom filed a complaint against Elias on the officers’ behalf. Elias was sent home from work and placed on leave in an instance Kays described as an “extraordinary break in protocol” that chipped away at the sergeant’s reputation.

Kays said Elias alone was disrespected by the officers after she raised concerns about the overtime scheme. She was the only woman in the chain of command at the time, and was left to fend for herself.

Sergeant: ‘We needed to change’

Like Proudfoot, Elias describes herself as a strong supporter of reforms pushed on SPD in recent years by the Justice Department.

A Justice Department civil rights investigation found Seattle police frequently used excessive force. Though investigators stopped short of accusing the department of racist policing, the Justice Department won an agreement from SPD to implement reforms meant to combat police brutality. A federal monitor is currently overseeing the effort.

Questioned by Harris during a deposition, Elias said she was accused of berating one of Metz’ friends after she overheard him disparaging the new use-of-force rules.

The officer, Elias said, was talking about keeping “the old school way of doing things” alive in South Seattle by refusing to run body cameras or follow the new rules. Elias rebuked him.

“I said you can either progress with us as an organization or you can stay behind, but the officers are going to follow the policy and I’m going to be sure they follow the policy,” Elias told the SPD attorney.

“He felt that I was talking down to him because I corrected him there,” she continued. “I’m telling you right now I’ll do it every time. I was happy Department of Justice came in. We needed to change.”

In a statement to the court, Elias denied discriminating against African-American officers or members of any other minority group serving the department.

“As a gay person and a woman, I know what it is like to be treated unfairly, to be treated differently just because of who I am,” she said. “I would never do that to anyone because I know what it feels like.”

‘You’re setting me up to fail’

Elias had been temporarily transferred to a desk job in S2013 after the anti-discrimination complaint was filed against her. The allegations were found to be meritless, and Elias was returned to South Precinct after six months away.

Not long after she returned to South Precinct, Elias was subjected to another anti-discrimination investigation prompted by one of the four officers close to Metz. That time she was accused of telling her supervisor, Strand, she didn’t want minority officers on her squad.

At the time, Strand was considering placing a minority officer with attendance problems on her squad. Strand hoped Elias would either make the officer improve or build a case for her removal.

Questioned by investigators, Elias said she’d just been through a discrimination-related internal investigation when she made that comment because she was afraid of being subjected to another retaliatory investigation.

“I said, ‘I think it would look worse if I start documenting things and the folks who filed a complaint against me before are gonna see that I’m documenting things against another minority,’” Elias told an SPD investigator, recalling the conversation with Strand. “I said, ‘You’re setting me up to fail. Plain and simple.’”

Interviewed by Elias’ attorney, Strand said Elias later came to him with names of several minority officers she wanted on her squad. There was no evidence Elias tried to keep anyone from working with her.

Strand found nothing offensive about Elias’ comments. She was expressing concerns about taking on a known problem employee, he said, nothing more.

Strand said Metz spoke with him about Elias at least five times while the investigation was ongoing. Strand cautioned the assistant chief not push Elias out.

“It would divide the South Precinct, she would likely be exonerated, and it looked like harassment,” Strand said in court papers. “More importantly it was retaliation against Elias because she had already filed her notice of intent to file suit against the city.”

The investigator, a longtime internal investigations sergeant, recommended Elias receive additional training on the department’s anti-discrimination policies. After SPD became aware Elias was considering a lawsuit, though, an assistant city attorney told the investigator to make the discipline recommendation more robust.

3 careers shaken

Elias was transferred out of South Precinct at Chief O’Toole’s direction. Doing so, O’Toole asserted Elias had “created tensions in the South Precinct.”

“I believe the South Precinct would be better served by having a new sergeant,” O’Toole said in a reprimand issued Jan. 20.

Neither O’Toole nor the investigator noted that Elias previously raised concerns about favoritism that had benefited her accusers. Best, in a sworn statement, said that “neither retaliation nor discrimination played any role in the actions undertaken against Sgt. Elias.”

Elias’ forced transfer drew objections from the Seattle Police Officers Guild, Strand and Proudfoot.

The captain wrote a lengthy email to Best, O’Toole and Metz warning that the transfer was retaliatory. The transfer went forward anyway. Elias was humiliated.

Proudfoot, a 26-year SPD veteran formerly assigned to the department’s Office of Professional Accountability, claims O’Toole admonished him for sending the email.

“Chief O’Toole told me she ‘didn’t want to have to move another commander out of the South Precinct,” Proudfoot said in court papers.

According to Proudfoot’s account, the chief made good on her threat in March. Proudfoot was involuntarily transferred eight months after he began what he believed would be a years-long assignment.

While leading South Precinct, Proudfoot implemented a program that saw officers visit each classroom at the 14 elementary schools in the precinct. Officers also supported Rainier Beach High School’s homecoming football game and dance, the often troubled school’s first in 25 years. Perhaps most importantly, the precinct saw violent crime rates fall during Proudfoot’s tenure.

“The only reason why Proudfoot was removed from his position at South Precinct was to retaliate against him and send him and other staff … the message that this is what happens when you speak out against an unlawful practice,” Kays said in Proudfoot’s tort claim, a warning potential litigants are required to file before suing a public entity like the city of Seattle.

Captain: Chief O’Toole wanted us gone

In a statement to the court, Proudfoot said he had been under consideration for a promotion to assistant chief. His support for Elias cost him that opportunity, he said, as well as his command.

“It is clear to me that O’Toole wanted those who spoke out against the Elias involuntary transfer gone from South Precinct,” the captain said.

Stand contends his support of Elias cost him his leadership role at South Precinct as well as a chance to head the department’s harbor patrol. He was demoted and transferred to West Seattle in January by Best in a move he contends cost him $50,000 in annual pay.

Writing the court, Elias recounted a more personal snub she claims the chief delivered.

At her new commander’s urging, Elias was honored with the “chief’s award” for her actions during a recent hostage situation. Usually, there’s pomp and ceremony as the chief bestows the award. O’Toole didn’t show up for Elias, who was quietly given her award by her lieutenant.

Elias’ lawsuit is ongoing. Strand and Proudfoot will be able to sue in late December, should they choose to do so.

Published at seattlepi.com

Jayne Fuentes is one of three plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing Benton County of having “modern-day debtors’ prisons.”

After years of drug addiction, Jayne Fuentes feels she’s close to getting her life back on track, as long as she doesn’t get arrested again — but not for using drugs. She fears it will be because she still owes court fines and fees, including hundreds of dollars for her public defender.

Fuentes hopes to change that. She’s one of three plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed this week by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, charging that Benton County, Wash., where she lives, “operates a modern-day debtors’ prison.”

Fuentes first told her story to NPR in 2014, in our investigation called Guilty and Charged. That series showed how in all 50 states, defendants are now handed a bill for more and more of the costs of their own trials, sentences and supervision when they leave jail. That can be a hardship for many indigent defendants. And, around the country, when they fall behind on payment, they may end up serving jail time.

That was particularly so in Benton County, where last year, an NPR analysis of jail records found that about 1 out of every 4 people in jail for a misdemeanor offense was there because he failed to pay court fines and fees.

The ACLU lawsuit says people in Benton County who are homeless, unemployed or just out of prison get sent to jail when they can’t pay their court fines, which can add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Fuentes says she owes “tens of thousands of dollars” to the county Superior Court, where she faced felony drug charges, and almost $2,000 to the District Court, which handles misdemeanors.

Since leaving prison in 2011, she’s repaired relationships with her family. She has stayed sober, left a treatment house earlier this year and moved into an apartment with a roommate. She also bought an old, used car and, in July, finally found work, a part-time job making sandwiches at a fast-food restaurant. But she lives from one paycheck to the next, and there have been months — especially before she got her job — when she missed or was late on the $65 monthly payment she has to make to the courts.

When that happens, she says she gets a letter stating that the court can issue a warrant for her arrest. She worries about going back to jail.

“I would lose my job, my house, my car, my life and my freedom, for not being able to pay a fine,” Fuentes says.

She says she’s willing to pay what she owes the court, but shouldn’t be penalized for months when she has no income. Her debt grew when she was in prison. Every year, including when she was behind bars, there was a 12 percent annual interest rate added by the state to her debt to Superior Court.

Among her debts, she says, are several hundred dollars to pay for her public defender. The NPR survey found that’s common. In 2014, 43 states allowed indigent defendants to be charged a small fee or even hundreds of dollars for a public defendant.

Benton County, NPR found, collects just a fraction of the fines and fees it’s owed, but it still collected $13 million in 2012. Across the country, municipalities have come under scrutiny for the way they raise revenues through court fines. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report critical of Ferguson, Mo., for arresting people and charging them court fines and fees and then jailing them if they did not pay. There are 90 municipalities in St. Louis County, and some of them were collecting 20 to 60 percent of their municipal budgets in court fines. Since then, state lawmakers have put stricter limits on how much counties can raise, capping the amount at 10 percent as of 2017.

Officials in Benton County did not respond to a request for comment. But in the past, judges have said they give defendants multiple chances to reset the amount they owe, before ordering them to jail.

Vanessa Torres Hernandez, an attorney with the ACLU of Washington, says resetting fines is not enough because a person’s ability to pay can change quickly, if he loses a job or there’s a family emergency.

“There is a growing local and national recognition that debtors-prison systems are unproductive,” says Hernandez, and “as a society we all benefit when we give people who have made mistakes and gone through the criminal justice system real opportunities to pay their debts to society and rebuild their lives.”

By Joseph Shapiro for NPR.org

Relatives of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, the unarmed Mexican immigrant farmworker who was shot and killed by police in Washington state, filed Thursday a federal lawsuit alleging that his killing was unjustified.

“Antonio Zambrano was unjustifiably and wrongly shot and killed by the three Defendant City of Pasco police officers, denying him his civil rights as protected by federal law,” family attorney George Trejo wrote in the complaint.

The family is seeking more than US$25 million in damages.

The death of Zambrano-Montes, which was caught on video, set off a storm of controversy in the United States where a number of high-profile police-involved killings have drawn attention to the treatment of people of color by police.

Video footage shows Zambrano-Montes fleeing from police. He then appears to stop, face the officers and half raise his arms before being shot.

The shooting reflected a pattern of unconstitutional practices, excessive force and poor training of the city’s officers, the complaint stated.

Police said they shot Zambrano after he pelted them with rocks. One of the officers said he felt compelled to shoot because he feared police or members of the public would be injured.

Officers further alleged that Zambrano goaded them into shooting him, saying, “No, kill me, bitch, kill me, kill me.”

Trejo rejected those accusations, saying in July that the videos captured audio as well and that Zambrano cannot be heard saying those words.

Police admitted that Zambrano-Montes was unarmed when he was fired upon by police 17 times. An autopsy later revealed that he was hit by as many as seven bullets, including two in the back, contradicting earlier police claims that he was not shot in the back.

The city of Pasco, its police department and police chief and the three officers are defendants in the lawsuit.

City Manager Dave Zabell said in a statement that Pasco did not comment on pending litigation.

In an email to Reuters, Franklin County Prosecuting Attorney Shawn Sant said the office was still reviewing, seven months on from the time of the incident, whether criminal charges are warranted against the officers.

Sant has been accused by Latino advocacy groups of having a close relationship with police he has been asked to step aside but refused.

A federal civil rights trial alleging police in the Seattle suburb of Tukwila used excessive force in the 2011 arrest of an intoxicated 60-year-old man, who was handcuffed and then pepper-sprayed at a bus stop, ended suddenly this week when the city agreed to pay the victim $300,000, reports the Seattle Times.

David Earl Lott sued the Tukwila Police Department alleging two officers, Zachary Anderson and Jacob Berry, shoved him against the bus stop and took him to the ground, where he was arrested and handcuffed.

He was slammed on the trunk of a patrol car after he was handcuffed, according to dash-camera video of the incident, which also shows Anderson directing a blast of pepper spray into the handcuffed man’s face.

He was driven to the police station before the irritant was washed from his face, according to the lawsuit. Lott alleged the Tukwila department has displayed a “pattern and practice” of the unconstitutional use of pepper spray, and he sought an injunction stopping its officers from using it without justification.

Lott, in a lawsuit filed last year, alleged the Tukwila department has displayed a “pattern and practice” of the unconstitutional use of the powerful irritant, and he sought an injunction stopping its officers from using it without justification.

Joseph Shaeffer, one of Lott’s lawyers, said the settlement offer came Wednesday after two days of testimony in a bench trial before U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, after the judge questioned Tukwila Deputy Chief Bruce Linton about “what he thought that injunctive relief might look like.”

Shaeffer said Tukwila defines the use of pepper spray as a “type 1 or level 1” use of force, among the least amount of force that can be applied to gain compliance of an arrestee or suspect.

However, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has found in a series of cases that the use of pepper spray constitutes an intermediate level of force, and that its use is an “unreasonable application of force against individuals suspected of only minor criminal activities, offer only passive resistance and pose little or no threat of harm to others.”

“Under that policy, the city trains and has trained its officers to use pepper spray in situations that call for very low levels of force,” according to Lott’s lawsuit, which alleges “That policy is facially unconstitutional, and causes Tukwila officers to systematically use excessive force when pepper spraying people.”

Telephone messages left for Police Chief Mike Villa and Deputy Chief Linton were not returned Thursday. Richard Jolley, one of the lawyers representing the city of Tukwila, said the notice of settlement has not been filed with the court and that he could not comment.

The two officers had responded to a call of an intoxicated man yelling at the bus stop about 9 p.m. on Aug. 11, 2011, near 3400 South 144th Street. According to the officers’ trial brief, Officer Anderson arrived to find Lott “yelling wildly” at people across a busy street.

Anderson, in his report and in sworn depositions, said he approached Lott “cautiously” and, when he asked for identification, said Lott became abusive and confrontational and said the officer was harassing him.

Anderson said he told Lott to sit on the bench, but that Lott refused and moved away from him as if he was going to fight. According to the court documents, Anderson became concerned the intoxicated Lott might fall into traffic so he “pushed [Lott] toward the bus shelter” for Lott’s own safety, and decided to arrest him.

At that point, Berry arrived. The initial confrontation between Lott and Anderson is recorded on his patrol car’s dash camera. The video was shown during the trial.

Coughenour, in an order last November sending the case to trial, said Lott’s version of events was that Anderson “intentionally and roughly threw Mr. Lott against the brick and concrete structure, provoked not by genuine fears of safety but by ire at plaintiff’s lack of cooperation and obscene language,” the judge wrote.

Added Coughenour: “The court will note that the video footage frankly favors [Lott’s] version of events.”

Once Berry was on the scene, the video shows the two officers taking Lott roughly to the sidewalk, handcuffing him and escorting him to the patrol car. The video does not contain sound; however, the officers say Lott was swearing at them.

Lott is escorted to the patrol car, where he is slammed onto the trunk by the officers, who testified that he was resisting and swearing at them. At that point, both officers pull out their pepper-spray canisters, and, about four minutes into the video, Berry can be seen putting his can inches from Lott’s face and spraying him before forcing him into the back seat.

The officer said he delivered a three-second burst of the spray to force Lott’s compliance after he refused to comply with a five-second countdown to get into the car.

The officers drove Lott to the police station, where paramedics washed the irritant from his face and took him to a hospital, where it took three stitches to close a head wound suffered during the incident, according to court papers.

For most of their lives, Eric Rachner and Phil Mocek had no strong feelings about police. Mocek, who grew up in Kansas, said he regarded police officers as honorable civil servants, like firefighters. Both chose careers as programmers: Rachner, 39, is an independent cyber-security expert, while Mocek, 40, works on administrative software used by dentists.

Eric Rachner and Phil Mocek. Among their findings: Of the 11 most-investigated SPD employees between 2010 and 2013, all continue to remain on the force

But through their shrewd use of Washington’s Public Records Act, the two Seattle residents are now the closest thing the city has to a civilian police-oversight board. In the last year and a half, they have acquired hundreds of reports, videos, and 911 calls related to the Seattle Police Department’s internal investigations of officer misconduct between 2010 and 2013. And though they have only combed through a small portion of the data, they say they have found several instances of officers appearing to lie, use racist language, and use excessive force—with no consequences. In fact, they believe that the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) has systematically “run interference” for cops. In the aforementioned cases of alleged officer misconduct, all of the involved officers were exonerated and still remain on the force.

“We’re trying to do OPA’s job for them because OPA was so explicitly not interested in doing their own job,” said Rachner.

Among some of Rachner and Mocek’s findings: a total of 1,028 SPD employees (including civilian employees) were investigated between 2010 and 2013. (The current number of total SPD staff is 1,820.) Of the 11 most-investigated employees—one was investigated 18 times during the three-year period—every single one of them is still on the force, according to SPD.

In 569 allegations of excessive or inappropriate use of force (arising from 363 incidents), only seven were sustained—meaning 99 percent of cases were dismissed. Exoneration rates were only slightly smaller when looking at all the cases between 2010 and 2013—of the total 2,232 allegations, 284 were sustained.

“This is exactly why we have the robust Public Records Act that we have,” said Jared Friend, director of technology and liberty for the ACLU of Washington. “People are obviously dissatisfied with how OPA is handling its investigations, and our Public Records Act has enabled folks like Phil and Eric to engage in oversight. Through the work they’re doing, we can see some of the deficiencies and lapses in the process.”

SPD spokesman Sean Whitcomb agreed that what Rachner and Mocek are doing “is great,” and that “the more information that’s publicly available, the better.” But he added that OPA has its own independent oversight, in the form of an OPA auditor and review board. “SPD has been a leader in government transparency, with SPD staff receiving two Washington Coalition for Open Government awards since 2012,” he wrote in an e-mail.

In response to a 2010 incident (of which The Stranger obtained dash-cam video) in which two officers derided poor black people and joked about beating them up, Whitcomb said the incident was investigated and that several police reforms have been instituted since then. Both of the involved officers remain on the force.

How did two nerds come to hold SPD accountable? It started in 2008, when Seattle police arrested Rachner during a game of “urban golf.” The cops charged him with obstruction, but Rachner fought the charges and won. Then he sued the police for withholding video of his arrest, which they had denied possessing. The video turned up, and in the end, Rachner won more than $60,000 in settlements.

Then, in February 2011, Rachner met Mocek at an SPD town hall meeting. Mocek had had his own run-in with police. In 2009, security agents at Sea-Tac Airport threw him in a jail cell for lacking identification and causing a disturbance. Mocek challenged the misdemeanor charges against him and, like Rachner, won. Their run-ins and legal battles with security agencies galvanized them, they said, to hold police accountable for mistakes and abuses.

And Rachner saw an opportunity to do just that when, in August of 2011, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that police records of internal investigations into officer misconduct were subject to the state’s Public Records Act, one of the strongest transparency laws in the country. Prior to the ruling, Rachner believes, the OPA, which investigates police misconduct, would systematically “sweep all these records into the investigative file, and then after the officer was exonerated, none of those records were accessible.” They were never destined to see the light of day.

Kathryn Olson, the OPA director from 2007 until 2012, was widely seen as more of a lapdog than a watchdog. During her tenure, the department fell under a federal consent decree, requiring it to address a pattern of excessive force and concerns about racial bias.

The day after the state supreme court ruling, Rachner filed a public records request for all OPA records from 2010 to 2013. Six days later, the head of the SPD public disclosure unit responded in an e-mail message, “The estimated cost for the records you have requested is $29,370.00 (plus postage).” (That amount was later revised down to $21,500, plus postage.)

“At the time,” Rachner said, “I had no money to spend, and I was like, fuck. So I dropped it.”

He rues the decision now. Under the department’s contract with the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, the largest public union in the state, OPA is required to shred its records after three years. That means that from 2011 to 2013, the department was destroying records covering the period from 2008 to 2010—the crucial period leading up to the federal government’s investigation of SPD and the initiation of the consent decree.

Then, Rachner got a break—in the form of another payout for a violation of the Public Records Act. In the fall of 2012, Ben Livingston (a past Stranger contributor) was the subject of a Washington State Patrol traffic stop. Livingston requested dash-cam video of the traffic stop, but the Washington State Patrol denied possessing such footage. The following year, Livingston, Rachner, Mocek, and Seattle civil rights attorney Cleveland Stockmeyer created a nonprofit called the Center for Open Policing (COP). Their first effort was to sue.

They won, and the state patrol settled to the tune of about $23,000. “I particularly enjoyed that case,” said Mocek.

Perhaps more significantly, Rachner and COP had suddenly come into possession of the funds they needed to follow through on the public records request for Seattle’s OPA data. On December 9, 2013, Rachner walked into SPD headquarters and wrote a check for $2,150—a down payment that would get the disclosure process rolling.

“The guy at the public-records desk was like, ‘I’ve never seen one this big!'” recalled Rachner, flashing a sheepish grin.

In the intervening 17 months, however, the SPD has delivered less than 10 percent of the records, according to Rachner, and some of the files are incomplete. At this pace, the SPD won’t fully comply with his records request until 2028. “We’re never going to catch up at this rate,” he said, calling the flow of records an unacceptable “trickle.” He plans to file more requests for post-2013 OPA data.

A recent City of Seattle audit of the police department’s public disclosure unit found that it relies on an “antiquated and inefficient system,” and is “risking legal liability and endangering the public trust,” the Seattle Times reported on March 18.

Rachner believes that the big problem with policing right now “is that police misconduct is evaluated from the standard of the police, and not the standards of the community.”

The name of their nonprofit (COP), Mocek said, originally stood for “Citizens Overseeing Police.” “That was one of our goals,” he said. “Empower regular people to perform their own investigations of police.”

But even with the “trickle” of records coming from the SPD, Rachner and Mocek are already overwhelmed by reams of data—thousands of pages, along with hours of dash-cam videos and 911 dispatch calls. “We’re sitting on a heap of records,” Rachner said.

“We’re just a group of people who are fully employed,” doing police accountability work in their spare time, Mocek added.

COP considered dumping the raw data online for anyone to view, but decided against it because it would involve the publication of sensitive personal details—things like mental illness, drug addiction, or cases involving minors.

The solution they have in mind involves applying for grants, or even some kind of crowdsourcing. But they’re not sure how to do it.

In the meantime, Rachner and Mocek will continue to file requests and comb through the data, attempting to hold police officers accountable.

“Ideally, we should be able to evaluate these things through the OPA process,” said the ACLU’s Jared Friend. “I think the work they’re doing is great, and I think we should be able to learn a lot from it, and hopefully it will stimulate some change.”

Originally published on thestranger.com by Ansel Herz

SEATTLE — Prosecutors have confirmed that a coroner’s inquest into the death of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, an unarmed Mexican migrant shot and killed by Pasco, Wash. police, would likely not be held until this summer.

Antonio Zambrano-Montes, an unarmed Mexican migrant, moments before being shot in Pasco, Wash.

Franklin County Prosecutor Shawn Sant said it could take months before his office considers the possibility of filing charges against the officers who shot and killed Zambrano-Montes. The officers, who fired 17 bullets at their victim, struck him 5 times. Police allege that the unarmed man was throwing rocks at officers and “acting erratically.”

Sant cites one reason for the long delay is that there is a tight schedule involving other inquests.

“After the inquest we will review whether any charges are appropriate. We may have reports in two or three weeks, but no guarantee. We are also awaiting reports on the second and third autopsies.”

“Realistically with the schedule of other homicide cases set to go May 27 and June 24, the inquest will likely be in July or August time frame,” he said.

The Washington State Commission on Hispanic Affairs and Consejo Latino, two civil rights groups, have called for an independent prosecutor on the case, saying Sant has “conveyed the impression that he had taken the side of the police officers” at media appearances. Sant, who is himself a former police officer with a close relationship to the police department involved in the killing of the unarmed man, defended himself by claiming those appearances were intended to make it easier to distribute information.