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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Shawn Vestal: Police contract better, but remains far from the spirit of voters’ call for independent oversight

Breean Beggs, Spokane City Council President, came out of City Hall and spoke to protesters during a small Black Lives Matter protest in front of City Hall on June 8 in Spokane.  (TYLER TJOMSLAND)

“The police ombudsman and any employee of the OPO must, at all times, be totally independent. Any findings, recommendations, reports, and requests made by the OPO must reflect the independent views of the OPO.”

—Spokane City Charter, Section 129, Subsection C

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The mayor and members of the City Council are telling us that the new police contract satisfies the terms of the city charter for the ombudsman office.

In particular, the proposed contract between the city and the Police Guild is said to achieve this by giving the Office of the Police Ombudsman the ability to produce its own closing reports on investigations into police misconduct.

That’s right. Eighteen years into the fight for independent, civilian oversight of the Spokane Police Department, the big victory is something you might have thought would have been automatic: the ability of the OPO to tell the public what it knows.

That’s the kind of victory this contract represents.

It requires a lot of, um, context.

The new Guild deal is on the fast track to a yes vote from the City Council, foreshadowed by a news release from the city packed with supportive quotes from Mayor Nadine Woodward, City Council members and, significantly, Council President Breean Beggs.

No figure in the city’s recent history has had a larger role in pushing us forward on police reform than Beggs, from his time as the Otto Zehm family’s attorney to his current position as council president. Beggs says this new deal satisfies the city charter, which calls for the ombudsman to monitor police complaints and issue reports, and which does not explicitly call for independent investigations by the OPO.

Beggs says it’s a good step forward, given the legal realities, and he’s not wrong. The tough truth of it is, the issue is complicated by state law, by the unfortunate fact that oversight was added to the Guild contract years ago, and the some of the concessions and half-measures built into the charter itself.

It may be naïve and impractical to call for true independence for the ombudsman – and yet I want to tilt at that windmill once again. The people who voted for independent civilian oversight of the SPD in 2013, which was 70 percent of voters, called for something very simple: An ombuds and an ombuds office empowered with “independent investigative authority” to look into complaints about the police.

We didn’t vote for an ombuds who is told by the cops when and how to investigate. Or an ombuds who is told what can and cannot be revealed to the public. Or an ombuds buried in “shalls” and “shall nots” from the Police Guild.

This contract proposal simply doesn’t meet the ideal we voted for. It makes significant progress and it’s definitely better than the last proposal Woodward brought forth – which actually tried to gave the Guild more authority over the ombudsman.

But it does not cross the finish line. If it satisfies the letter of the city charter, it falls far short of its spirit: a “totally independent” OPO.

The contract proposal comprehensively sets the terms for the activities in the OPO, including:

• Establishing the time limits on when the ombudsman can open investigations after an incident subject to a complaint, and determines the manner of how that complaint must be recorded.

•Outlining what kinds of questions the OPO is allowed to ask before turning the complaint over to the department’s internal-affairs process.

• Limiting the participation of officers all through the process, barring them from interviews with the OPO before an IA investigation and making it clear that they don’t have to participate at any point.

• Setting the deadline for the OPO to certify an IA report as “timely, thorough and objective” – or to notify the department that it believes more investigation is required.

• Establishing the process by which the OPO may conduct or contract for an independent investigation, and limits that to “serious” matters.

• Preventing the OPO from identifying any officer in its closing reports, and prohibiting it from making any comment whatsoever about discipline or whether a law or policy was broken.

• Barring anyone at the city from using any information that might arise from an OPO investigation to open a new complaint against any officer, or to reconsider any past disciplinary decisions.

• Granting the Guild a pre-release review of the closing reports, giving it a chance to check it for “potential contract violations” and if it finds any, allows the Guild to grieve those to the mayor, and eventually, to binding arbitration – the secretive process where police accountability goes to die.

These are just a few lowlights. The contract also maintains the prominent role of police union representatives on the board that hires the ombuds – two of the five spots are union spots, and the fifth position is voted on by the other four board members, essentially giving the unions the ability to exert great control.

A funny kind of independence, that. Does it really meet the charter? If it does, it does so legally and technically. The spirit of the charter remains unsatisfied.