The Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) system, charged with monitoring complaints of police misconduct in the City of Seattle, has been shown in past weeks to have serious flaws. These flaws go far beyond the issue of the single odd arrest highlighted in the media, where Seattle Police Chief Kerlikowske overturned recommended discipline. At issue are questions about Kerlikowske’s repeated behavior of ignoring OPA protocols. While Kerlikowske is allowed to overturn recommendations regarding discipline of the OPA Director, he can do so with two caveats:

1. He must have cause.

2. He must provide an explanation.

He has done neither. His conduct provides a window into why OPA, a badly constructed entity, is a broken system.

The current crisis involving oversight of the Seattle Police appears born of a police chief who chose to override protocols to prevent bad publicity. Such failures are not localized to Seattle. Other cities before Seattle have undertaken comprehensive examinations of police misbehavior. Perhaps the most extensive was the Mollen Commission in the early 1990’s in New York City. The commission examined a police department whose corruption was institutional. Its officers would go to crime scenes and pocket valuables. Its officers went into a brothel, chased out the johns and then raped prostitutes. Its officers took drugs from drug dealers and gave these drugs to other dealers to sell. The Mollen Commission, most of whose members had worked in law enforcement, noted that the institutional mindset was to sweep corruption under the rug because of the demoralizing effect it would have. Hence misconduct, even of the proportion described, was buried. The commission wrote:

“…the (Police) Department allowed its own systems for fighting corruption virtually to collapse. It had become more concerned about the bad publicity that corruption disclosures generate than the devastating consequences of corruption itself. As a result, its corruption controls minimized, ignored and at times concealed corruption rather than the devastating consequences of corruption itself…. This reluctance manifested itself in every component of the Department’s corruption controls from command accountability and supervision, to investigations, police culture, training and recruitment.”

The actions of SPD Chief Kerlikowske, documented in the July 2 report from the Office of Professional Accountability Review Board, appear to mirror that of the department in New York — a department more afraid of exposing problems than it is afraid of the problems themselves. The report’s authors, OPA Board members Peter Holmes and Bradley Moericke, note there were another 12 cases reversed by Chief Kerlikowske. Kerlikowske failed to provide cause or reasoning in any of these cases, including ones where:

1. An SPD Field Training Officer who appeared at Harborview Medical Center to transport an intoxicated man already in handcuffs, to jail. Video and at least six witnesses caught this officer striking the restrained man with both fists and batons. This training officer had a trainee with him at the time.

2. Another officer who jumped on the back of a man who had lain down on his stomach to surrender. The jumping officer popped the man’s lungs and broke several of the man’s ribs.

3. Another officer administered “serial spankings” to a juvenile.

4. Another officer used his authority to enter a private residence, attempting to recover nude photos of his sister-in-law and intervene in an affair she was having.

Kerlikowske intervened to stop the OPA Director’s recommendation of discipline in these cases. In none of these cases did Kerlikowske provide cause. In none of these did Kerlikowske put his reasoning for overturning these decisions in writing.

A source of the problems with OPA goes to the structure of the Office of Professional Accountability itself. As former OPA Director Sam Pailca has frequently stated: OPA was not designed to do the job of overseeing police misconduct. OPA was formed and designed for the very different purpose of looking at employment related issues within the Seattle Police Department. Hence, it is not revelatory that this organization fails to perform its newly assigned task of investigating police misconduct, particularly when the investigations are done by the police and the ability to overturn investigators’ findings is given to the Chief.

The issue of Kerlikowske’s intervention in these examinations must be addressed. Beyond Kerlikowske’s interventions, questions must be raised about the structure of the OPA itself. While OPA is far from the only vehicle interfering with issues of police accountability, a more independent structure would go a long way to correcting this inequity.