Federal oversight of Seattle police could soon end after 13 years

U.S. District Judge James Robart on Monday scheduled a hearing for Sept. 3 to consider a motion filed last month by Seattle city officials to end 13 years of federal oversight of the Seattle Police Department.

Robart previously concluded that the city has achieved full, sustained and lasting compliance” with the provisions of a settlement agreement between the city and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. They reached the agreement, also called a consent decree, in 2012, after a scathing DOJ investigation the previous year found Seattle officers routinely used unconstitutional levels of force during arrests, lacked supervision and displayed evidence of biased policing.

In the ensuing years, the department has adopted sweeping changes to many of its policies, including stringent guidelines on when officers can use force, and created a trio of outside accountability agencies to investigate and monitor those changes. Most recently, the city hired police Chief Shon Barnes, who has promised to build on those changes.

The move to end federal oversight is supported by the DOJ and the Seattle Community Police Commission, one of three “accountability partners” formed as a result of the settlement agreement.

However, the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington last week sent a letter to Mayor Bruce Harrell and the City Council, signed by several community organizations, condemning the move and “urging leaders to reject the notion that ending federal oversight signals the completion of reform.”

It was a letter sent by the ACLU in 2011, backed by nearly three dozen community organizations, that prompted then-U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan and the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to open the investigation that led to the consent decree in the first place.

“Ending the consent decree cannot be treated as mission accomplished,” wrote Jazmyn Clark, the smart justice police program director at ACLU-Washington, in last week’s letter. “The Seattle Police Department is not a reformed institution,” she wrote, citing evidence that racial disparities in stops and use of force by Seattle officers persist.

Robart, who has overseen implementation of the consent decree, has expressed concerns over officer accountability and crowd control in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and violent clashes between police and crowds since then.

While the City Council passed an ordinance this year to resolve concerns around the use of weapons on crowds, the twin issues of officer accountability and discipline must be addressed through collective bargaining with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which Robart concluded is outside the court’s purview.

The court, along with the ACLU and the Community Police Commission, have been critical of the city’s inability to implement an accountability ordinance passed in 2017 that was subsequently undermined during negotiations with SPOG, which has been hostile toward reforms from the outset.

The Community Police Commission, in a “friend of the court” brief filed in federal court on July 24, agreed that “the time has come to return authority over law enforcement in the City to the ultimate guarantors of police accountability: the people of Seattle.”

However, while recognizing that “substantial progress” has been made over the years, the commission said “much work remains to be done to ensure that the Seattle Police Department provides fully accountable, nondiscriminatory policing and eliminates any pattern or practice of unconstitutional policing.