Miscellaneous News

Just some random news items for you so far today...

Seattle Police Oversight
The Stranger has gotten a hold of the proposed candidate list for the Office of Police Accountability Review Board members. (The OPARB is the public-facing portion of Seattle's civilian oversight system). The list appears pretty unremarkable but we are looking into it.

Remember though, that the police guild does have the right to fight against any proposed OPARB members put forward by city council; so if they aren't happy with any of these proposed members, the list might change before it goes forward. From a preliminary glance though, it appears to have a majority of police-friendly members so we doubt it will change much.

King County Police Oversight
King County Sheriff Sue Rahr has announced the sheriff department's new budget and, due to county-wide budget cuts, she has dropped all recommendations made by an oversight review panel to enact changes to the police misconduct and investigative processes and policies in her department. We're not sure yet how this will affect the proposed addition of a civilian oversight component for the sheriff's department that was negotiated into the latest contract agreement between the county and the King County Police Guild... but it probably doesn't bode well.

Miscellany
I might be on the radio tonight talking about the latest contract agreement between the city of Seattle and the Seattle Police Officer's Guild. As you know from reading the site, I tend to be a bit verbose, but to make matters worse I was a bit nervous during the recorded interview so I really rambled on when I should have been more concise than usual instead. Hopefully I'll sound better than I think I did and the interview will make it on to the show... we'll see.

Even if I'm not on the show, tune into KBCS 91.3 FM tonight at 6:00 for One World Report, it's a really good show that has done a great job covering police misconduct and accountability issues as well as many other interesting and important topics not usually covered in the news.

Update: The interview did make it on to the show, which is available online at their site as well. I guess I did ok, but I really could have done a better job explaining the issues. Improving the way I frame and present these issues is definitely something for me to work on. So, at the least, it was a good learning experience for me.

To get a better idea of what we were discussing, here's the link to the article on how the police contract fails to implement accountability reforms.