Real Change News | Human Rights Commission calls for stronger watchdog for cops

January 18, 2012
Vol: 19 No: 3

News

Human Rights Commission calls for stronger watchdog for cops

by: Aaron Burkhalter , Staff Reporter

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The Seattle Human Rights Commission is calling on the Seattle City Council to give more power and oversight to the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) in order to address discriminatory policing by the Seattle Police Department.

Currently, the Seattle police chief has sole discretion to accept or reject disciplinary recommendations from OPA.

Seattle Human Rights Commission Chair Chris Stearns said police actions need an impartial review.

“The way the Seattle system is structured, you don’t have that,” he said. “Everything ends up on the police chief’s desk.”

In a 10-page report released Jan. 8, the commission recommended the citizen-run OPA Review Board conduct independent investigations of questionable police encounters.

The Commission’s recommendations follow an investigation and report from the U.S. Department of Justice showing that the Seattle Police Department has a pattern of using unnecessary excessive force. According to the Department of Justice report, which reviewed SPD from January 2010 to April 2011, more than half of the incidents of excessive force involved minorities.

Stearns said his group interviewed community members, reviewed OPA documents and met with oversight experts from other metropolitan cities to draft the recommendations.

The OPA Review Board previously researched trends in the department and offered recommendations to the police once a year.

The commission suggested a racial equity tool to address concerns over discriminatory policing. The Seattle Office of Civil Rights has already created a tool that shows how communities of color are affected by an action or decision. The Human Rights Commission recommended this tool be applied when analyzing uses of force.

Stearns said the report did not address training or leadership within the police department because that was out of the scope of his commission.

“We are a human rights body. We’re not really the city attorney, and we’re not public defenders,” he said. “What really became important was having due process and an effective remedy.”

The report is just one of many criticisms and calls for reform falling on the Seattle Police Department since December.

Councilmember Tim Burgess, former chair of the Seattle City Council’s public safety committee released his own 14-page report calling for the police to establish community-based crime prevention rather than a “cops and robbers” approach addressing crime after it happens.

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