Insider Out
Police watchdog leaves behind a complex legacy

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

Sam Pailca is leaving her city job in February, and the Seattle Police Officers Guild couldn’t be happier.

Since the day she entered the police department in 2001 as head of a now six-year-old civilian oversight office, the union and its members have fought the feisty attorney tooth and nail, from suing the city to stop the creation of the Office of Professional Accountability to the latest move: filing an unfair labor practices claim to stop OPA from getting unredacted police reports showing officers’ names.

Seattle’s citizens have fought Pailca, too. When the City Council created the OPA, some hoped it would provide a check on the police abuse that many say they see, particularly in communities of color. What they got instead was something of an Office of Policy Improvement that investigates every complaint, but, even if Pailca finds an officer was abusive or violated department policy, the police chief regularly overturns her findings.

In 2004 and 2005, for instance, Chief Gil Kerlikowski reversed Pailca’s findings on 17 separate allegations against officers, ranging from the use of excessive force to making false or misleading statements. That was at a time when investigations of complaints were climbing, from 149 to 163 in 2004 and from 163 to 174 in 2005.

That’s not to say Pailca hasn’t made strides. As a deputy chief with an office next door to Kerlikowske, she set up the OPA and its complaint system from scratch, generating reports on trends and statistics that Pailca, an attorney who will start in Microsoft’s legal department Feb. 26, says brought transparency and important policy changes to SPD.

When Pailca first started her job, which is restricted to two three-year appointments, the disrespect she faced as a female civilian was so bad that she had to call in a mediator just to get her own staff to work with her. Today, despite the glaring mistakes observers say she made early on, Pailca cites a new acceptance among officers that civilian complaints must be dealt with openly.

“That sounds small, but seeing that expectation take hold has been really fundamental and transformative,” Pailca says. “And it has survived changes in personnel and leadership.”

Kate Pflaumer, a civilian police auditor whose work is part of the Office of Professional Accountability, says that plus the policy changes Pailca has championed count. “That’s an important aspect people don’t often recognize,” she says.

Whether the system Pailca created benefits citizens is another issue. One of the big mistakes Pailca acknowledges early on was allowing an officer accused of using excessive force — an unprovoked pepper-spraying of protesters in 2001 — to see a confiscated videotape of the incident without revealing the tape’s existence to the reporter who filed the complaint and was himself knocked down by the officer.

Trevor Griffey, who was on assignment for Seattle Weekly at the time and later settled a lawsuit over the matter, says he’d have never known of the tape if he hadn’t filed public disclosure requests. But he points out that, because of their sensitivity, the results of OPA investigations aren’t subject to public disclosure law.

In Pailca’s six years on the job, the total number of citizen complaints (which can include multiple allegations of misconduct) also increased, from 260 in 2001 to 287 in 2005, with allegations jumping from 356 to 466 in the same period.

In 2004, Pailca, whose work is overseen by a three-member OPA citizen review board, sustained at least one allegation in 34 cases. Twenty of those allegations pertained to excessive use of force, which a report Pailca released last week shows is also up, particularly among people of color. Members of minority groups filed 42 percent of 79 use-of-force complaints in 2004 and 52 percent of the 90 incidents reported in 2005.

The numbers are high or low, depending on who you talk to. Sunil Abraham, a public defender who follows racial disparity issues, says the Seattle Police Department needs to address the high proportion of force complaints that are made by citizens of color.

But Sgt. Rich O’Neill, president of the police guild, says that, overall, Pailca sustains very few complaints of any kind, raising a question for him as to why she investigates every single complaint that comes through the door — a practice he hopes her successor will drop.

“I am originally from the Northeast,” O’Neill says. “A lot of the things Seattle [OPA] would choose to investigate” — for instance, a citizen complaining an officer was rude — “would get you a dial tone in Baltimore or New York City.”

“We’re spending an enormous amount of time investigating things so minor they’re laughable,” something that could be avoided, O’Neill says, if the new director has any common sense and, better still, actual police experience.

Peter Holmes, an attorney and member of the OPA review board from the beginning, says it’s time for the guild and Mayor Greg Nickels to show some respect for the OPA director’s role.

“What was surprising to me was the resistance at the top — the chief and the mayor’s office — and that continues,” Holmes says. “It’s a top-down problem we face now and that Sam’s replacement will face.”

For her part, Pailca remains optimistic about OPA’s prospects in the future. Even with the police guild trying to overturn a City Council ordinance that calls for turning over unredacted files, she has upbeat advice for her successor.

“Never lose hope,” she says. “The opportunities for change are there.”

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For more on the OPA, or to find out how to file a complaint about a Seattle Police officer’s actions: seattle.gov/police/OPA.