New Police Blog Praises Old Jail Accreditation

The Seattle Post Intelligencer's new (and pretty biased) police blog recently praised the King County Correctional Facility (aka KCCF or King County Jail) for obtaining a National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCHCC) accreditation for detainee medical care.

Their blog spins this as if it's some new development that demonstrates some measure of improvement for the same jail that, less than a year ago:

• was roundly condemned by the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division for inadequate detainee medical treatment that directly caused at least one death.
• sued to fight off a potentially embarrassing inquest into a detainee's slow tortuous death due to a lack of medical care that resulted in a doctor on it's staff resigning.
• now faces a class action civil suit filed on behalf of several dozen detainees who had contracted MRSA infections from that facility due to unsanitary conditions and a lack of suitable wound care.
• was roundly lambasted in the news over insisting that the sexual abuse of detainees by guards found to be going on in the jail was merely a "training issue".
  

The problem with this report is that it's not new news... the King County Jail has had NCHCC accreditation for several years already because it was forced to obtain and maintain that accreditation due to the requirements negotiated during the Hammer v King County lawsuit in the mid 1990's. In fact, King County executive Ron Sims even cited that same accreditation last year when he issued a statement defending the jail and insisting that no detainees had their rights violated there when the DOJ stated the conditions and treatment there were in violation of constitutionally protected rights.

So, the jail already had that "prestigious" accreditation when all those problems occurred last year, so nothing has really changed between then and now... in other words it's not news. But the county government is spinning it like it's some great new thing and the reporters are allowing the jail to skate by without actually fixing the problems that still occur there by parroting news releases without doing their own research to verify what they are being told to print as news.

So long as the press is too lazy to research questionable press release claims made by the government and is willing to give the jail a pass on murdering and torturing detainees there is little chance that the jail will actually commit to any real changes, even in the face of several legal actions on behalf of detainees and the federal government. So, shame on the Seattle Post Intelligencer's staff writers for not doing the job the public entrusts them to do; to do their due diligence when reporting on the news in an unbiased and professional manner.