Bad Cops & Prosecutors

King County Executive Ignores Civil Rights Abuses While Arguing For Social Justice

Posted on March 17, 2008
King County Executive Ron Simms has started a so-called crusade to examine issues of social injustices. This would be admirable if this weren't the same Ron Simms who insists that abusing pre-trial detainees and denying them medical care in the King County Jail wasn't a violation of their constitutional rights in response to a Department of Justice investigation that found deadly rights violations at the jail...

West Seattle Teenager Missing

Posted on March 17, 2008
I know, it's not a police misconduct story, but I have an autistic son so it's a personal thing.This girl, Jordan King, has been missing since Thursday and she is autistic so doesn't do well with remembering directions or phone numbers... So if you see this 14 year old girl, last seen wearing light pink denim pants, a black tank top, black tennis shoes, and black hoodie with silver detail, please help her and call 911...

Help End Childhood Hunger

Posted on March 17, 2008
This Lavender Cupcake is just one of the many goodies you can eat to help end childhood hunger!Not too long ago, before we came to Seattle, things were bad for us. I had lost my job, my wife was too ill to work, one of our sons had died of a congenital defect called Potters Syndrome (Bilateral Renal Agenisis), and we were evicted from our home because we had to make a choice between feeding our children and paying the rent...

Washington State's Anti-Crime Bill May Be Unconstitutional

Posted on March 15, 2008
Washington state's legislature has passed an "anti-gang bill" that includes provisions to fund police anti-gang taskforces, increased penalties for gang-related crimes, and supposedly deter recruitment by punishing adults who recruit teens into gangs...

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Woman Reports Mistreatment By King County Sheriff's Deputies

Posted on March 14, 2008
We received a rather disturbing email earlier this week from a single mother of two who told us her story of a very frightening encounter with King County Sheriff's deputies who had ransacked her house without a warrant despite her refusing them permission to search it, detained her when she insisted that they stop searching her home, drove her to an abandoned lot to intimidate her while she was partially dressed in the back of a cruiser in an attempt to garner a coerced confession...

Woman Recovering From Surgery Denied Medication At King County Jail

Posted on March 13, 2008
Imagine receiving a call one day telling you that your sister, who was heavily medicated and recovering from reconstructive surgery, had gone missing. Imagine searching everywhere with your family and friends for days, only to discover that she was in the last place you thought to look...

The Police Guild's Multi-Pronged Assault Against Accountability

Posted on March 12, 2008
A number of developing stories have caught our concern, not individually, but when paired together in the context of the current battle between the city of Seattle and the Seattle Police Officer's Guild over police accountability reforms.Contract talks had been derailed for over a month between the city and the guild over pay raises and the widely-hailed accountability reforms proposed by mayor Greg Nickels' Police Accountability Review Panel...

Our Communication and Reporting Policy

Posted on March 10, 2008
Last week we received a few rather nasty and uncivil complaints about our site, (aside from the usual threats to have the site taken down that we often receive). To be precise, we received complaints about the matter of providing sources for our claim that we?ve received information about ongoing abuses at the King County Jail as jail representatives and the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division are in continuing talks to determine whether the jail will take sufficient steps to resolve the deadly constitutional rights violations it has been found to be committing at that facility...

Councilman Burgess Asks For OPARB Applications

Posted on March 07, 2008
Jonah Spangenthal-Lee "double-dog dared" me and a few other persons who talk about police accountability issues (one other was anti-accountability vs my pro-accountability stance, not sure about the third) to apply for vacant positions on the City of Seattle's Office of Professional Accountability Review Board that acts as a civilian oversight component of Seattle's police oversight and accountability system...

While DOJ Investigation Continues... So Do The Abuses

Posted on March 05, 2008
As negotiations between the US Department of Justice and the King County Jail continue over findings of deadly constitutional rights violations that the DOJ investigation found to have occurred at the Seattle jail in November 2007, we've continued to receive credible reports that those same abuses are still occuring at that facility...

Police Accountability Jeopardized By Editorial Spin

Posted on March 04, 2008
Just days after a stunning series of articles by the Seattle Post Intelligencer that served to expose instances of institutionalized misconduct within the Seattle Police Department, the same paper issued forth an unfortunate opinion piece from it's own editorial staff entitled "Seattle Police: Healing Reviews"...

180 Days

Posted on March 01, 2008
The contract talks between the Seattle Police Officer's Guild and the City of Seattle appear to be completely shut down after the city revealed details about the salaries the guild was turning down. The guild's refusal to accept all 29 of the mayor's Police Accountability Review Panel's (PARP) recommended reforms to the Seattle Police Department's police accountability and oversight system cost members as much as 33...

Sick Day

Posted on February 29, 2008
Sorry folks, hate to do this with so many stories coming out on the heals of the Seattle Police Officer's Guild refusal to accept accountability reforms which resulted in the utter breakdown of contract talks... But my headaches have been really wearing me down these last few days, they're making me physically ill and it's really hard to concentrate...

The 100th Post Pause

Posted on February 28, 2008
Well, more than 100 posts actually and we had planned something for that post... But even though we carried past that landmark because of the guild contract talk fiasco, we've decided to share a few statistics about our site for any interested readers as a little break anyway...

Video Of Hays Arrest Released

Posted on February 28, 2008
Busy day...The Stranger has put up the video of the brutal assault on Mark Hays by the Seattle Police Department's "Anti-Crime Team" for jaywalking has been put up on YouTube...Sorry, I'm not offering any additional commentary, my head hurts so bad today it's making me feel like throwing up, watching this brings up some painful memories...

Great Series At The Seattle Post Intelligencer

Posted on February 28, 2008
If you need any more reasons to demand that the Seattle Police Officer's Guild stop obstructing the city's efforts to introduce accountability reforms, read the new series of reports at The Seattle Post Intelligencer called "The Strong Arm Of The Law"...

A Council Member's Reaction

Posted on February 28, 2008
Today the Seattle Post Intelligencer ran an article about how some people in Seattle are more at risk for being falsely accused of "obstruction" (otherwise known as "Contempt Of Cop"), which is often a cover for police brutality, as part of it's ongoing series called "The Strong Arm of The Law"...

A Plea... And An Offer

Posted on February 28, 2008
Dear Seattle Police Officer's Guild (aka. SPOG)All we want is for you to accept the OPARP's 29 police accountability recommendations. We want to be able to say that we don't fear our police officers, that we respect them, that we like them, that we are proud of them and the way they conduct themselves in the line of duty...

A Second Council Member Responds

Posted on February 26, 2008
As a part of our coverage of the broken-down contract talks between the city of Seattle and the Seattle Police Officer's Guild and what it means for the 29 proposed police misconduct accountability recommendations submitted by the mayor's review board, we've sent out requests to city council members to see what their thoughts are about the possibility of the reforms making it through the battle between the union and the city...

Guild Threatens City After City Releases Contract Offer Details

Posted on February 26, 2008
The Seattle Police Officer's Guild has threatened the city of Seattle with even larger pickets than were originally planned and lawsuits over the city's move to bypass the guild and reveal the details of the contract the guild was turning down in stalled contract talks...

Nightmares

Posted on February 25, 2008
A break, I suppose, from the constant onslaught of misconduct news stories and the battles between a public that demands an accountable police force and a police force that refuses to be accountable to the public.The thing is, there is no support group for survivors of police misconduct, there are no meetings in coffee shops or places where we can go and talk about what happened to us at the hands of people who have the power to destroy lives at a whim...

We're National

Posted on February 23, 2008
No, it isn't what you think, we still focus almost entirely on Seattle police misconduct and detainee abuse issues... but some of our content just got picked up by Reuters and The Chicago Sun Times.For any new readers, we focus on problems in Seattle because we feel keeping things local are our best chance to making changes, but we also feel it is important that others see what happens here in Seattle to learn from Seattle's failures and successes in our efforts to improve police oversight and accountability...

A Seattle City Council Member Responds

Posted on February 23, 2008
In a previous article, we had sent out an invitation to Seattle city council members to share with us what their thoughts were on the current police accountability reform efforts and the Seattle Police Officer's Guild's seeming intransigence in regards to those reforms...

How Many?

Posted on February 22, 2008
This video, aside from further confirming my utter fear of how easy it is for anyone with a badge to retaliate against anyone they please, makes me ill because I wonder just how many of the millions in US jails and prisons don't belong there because of dishonest cops like this...

The Waiting Game

Posted on February 22, 2008
It appears as though an uneasy silence is hovering over the city of Seattle as a few different shoes are preparing to drop... Here's a look at the issues currently waiting for resolution:The US Department of Justice investigation into deadly constitutional rights violations at the King County Correctional Facility(KCCF) is still ongoing...

The Evergreen College Incident

Posted on February 22, 2008
Again, not a Seattle story, but a reader sent in this link to a blog that put up the video footage of what occurred a few days ago down at Evergreen College. (Thank you, by the way!)A few questions pop into my mind after watching the videos and reading the different accounts of what happened...

Debunking The Police Guild Propaganda

Posted on February 18, 2008
As the Seattle Police Officer's Guild prepares to bully the mayor and city council into backing down on demands for police accountability reforms again, it has been making some rather dishonest claims that have gone unchallenged in the media. Let's take a look at some of the history involved and how it debunks the guild's dishonest statements about how they don't feel the need to fix a system that is currently so easy for bad officers to cheat...

A Call to Counter-Protest SPOG

Posted on February 15, 2008
As you may know, the Seattle Police Officer's Guild plans to picket city hall soon, in order to demand a pay raise even though they refuse to accept any police accountability reforms.In case you're wondering, I am currently checking to see what it takes to legally counter-protest the picket to demand that the SPOG accept all recommended accountability reforms before any talk of pay increases...

Copy Cat Cops Revisited

Posted on February 15, 2008
A while ago I posted about how Bainbridge Island cops were being sued by a lawyer who was manhandled by a cop for giving her husband legal advice over, what ultimately boiled down, to nothing more than a speeding ticket. While it wasn't a Seattle story per se, it tied in with a Seattle story of a woman having her face broken by a Seattle cop for giving a friend legal advice...

Lawfirm Urged OPA To Stop Misconduct Investigations

Posted on February 14, 2008
The Seattle Post Intelligencer ran a piece today that criticized the city for paying a private lawfirm millions of dollars to defend cops in misconduct cases on a no-bid contract. But burried in there is a startling revelation, this lawfirm told the internal investigation unit (the OPA) of the Seattle Police Department to stop investigating misconduct cases when civil rights violation lawsuits were filed because "the risks are it can create information we are not aware of that can harm our case...

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