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: Injustice in Seattle

Planned Site Updates

By David Packman

I'm planning on restructuring the site so that it's easier for people to review cases of misconduct. While it would work better on a regular hosted website instead of a pure blog like this, I don't have the resources to host a site. As you know, I do this on my own without any public or private support and I'm still in (growing) debt from my own encounter with police misconduct and prisoner abuse.

So we're going to be using this format for quite some time.

Anyway, I digress... Here's what I have planned, let me know if you like it or not

1. Refining the "Seattle Misconduct in the News" sidebar by splitting it into a list of years and case titles only.

2. Each year link will go to a blog post that lists all news stories of misconduct for that year with descriptions and links ordered by date.

3. Each case link will go to a blog post dedicated to that specific case with a timeline of news stories so that each case can be viewed in entirety, this way you can see the whole story from start to finish even if it's spread across different news sources and articles.

4. Otherwise, posting will occur as stories come in, but in addition any new post that is relevent to an existing case will also be followed up by an update to the posts dedicated to those specific cases.

It'll take me a lot of time to make these changes, but I think it'll really help people get a better idea of the magnitude of misconduct problems that are occuring in Seattle and give people who are trying to follow and make sense of any specific cases better resources with which to do so.

Unfortunately, the one thing we can't do is give people any idea of what happens to the officers involved with any specific case because the Seattle Police Department is the only department in the state of Washington that does not make it's disciplinary files public and refuses any freedom of information requests issued for such information. So keep that in mind when you read these cases, we never know if anything at all happens to officers even in the rare events when internal reviews and the Office of Professional Accountability finds those officers at fault for misconduct.

...given Seattle Police Chief Gil's record for clearing officers found guilty of misconduct, it's safe to assume nothing happens at all.

So, anyway, let me know what you think, and thank you for reading. Being aware of and staying informed of problems is the first step in fixing those problems.

Full post as published by Injustice in Seattle on January 10, 2008 (boomark / email).