Happy Independence Day

First, I want to wish everyone out there a happy and safe Fourth of July holiday weekend.

Many of you, I hope, have never experienced how frightening and oppressive it can feel to have your freedom forcibly taken away from you. I know it's something I never expected to experience in my lifetime, and something I hope that you do not experience either. It's a dehumanizing and soul-crushing thing to be treated as if you were inferior to everyone else, as if you didn't deserve the same rights as others, as if you were less than human even.

But, one thing it does teach you is that freedom is a precious thing, something that we take too much for granted and give up too easily these days because freedom is much more fragile and tenuous than we realize... something I'm reminded of every time I hear someone say I deserve to be imprisoned, or worse, just for what I write. It's a sentiment that seems so utterly incompatible with the concept of America to me, but apparently it's a palatable idea to most Americans in the freedom-hating security conscious mood that most Americans have these days.

So, during this holiday that marks the day our country won it's freedom, I ask you to not only celebrate your own freedom, but cherish it, contemplate what it would be like if you didn't have it, recognize how dear this thing called freedom really is, and how worthy it is of defending... because, the way I see it, America is in desperate need of people who cherish freedom enough to defend it like the founders of this country did.

Enjoy your holiday weekend...

More Evidence Of Police Misconduct Cover Ups In Seattle

There's an interesting article in the Seattle Times today about the SCCPAP report on police accountability that was presented to the Seattle City Council today. While we reported on the SCCPAP report along with panel member Eric Schnapper's commentary weeks ago, there was some serious accusations in that article that caught our attention.

Apparently, at the same time the SCCPAP report was released, there was another report from the civilian oversight board (the OPARB) that the city has decided to keep secret as it was highly critical of the police department's internal investigations process and appears to suggest that the 180 day loophole was being abused in order to help officers avoid discipline in cases of alleged misconduct.

Abuse of the 180 day loophole is an issue that we've covered and identified as the most serious reform item that was dropped in the latest contract agreement with the Seattle Police Officer's Guild.

This report that's being withheld from the public also appears to accuse the internal investigations director of obstructing the board's efforts to investigate problems with the police accountability program... both the panel and the review board also site a systematic effort to avoid public transparency as a deep concern, a concern that the city seems unable or unwilling to address due to fierce opposition by the police guild.

However, the council has made moves to replace the entire OPARB panel though, seemingly in an effort to quash investigations into problems with the accountability program that this 3 member board has been vocal about. This is another item we covered that appears to be a move to reduce transparency of the accountability process even further than it already is.

These are all issues we've identified for quite some time, they are the reasons why we strongly recommend against reporting misconduct to the police department's "Office of Professional Accountability" (OPA), and it seems clear that we're not alone in our concerns either... so while it is nice to know that the concerns addressed in this site appear justified and validated, it's deeply troubling that it seems that the city's answer to transparency and accountability problems within their government is to reduce transparency even further and hide misconduct problems from the public.

The problem is that secrecy and democracy are never compatible with each other. Eventually, either one or the other will have to give.

Stay tuned.

Poll Results

Well, as you may have noticed, I ran a little poll to see what readers would like to see more of from me. The results are final and here's what you had to say:

First, the most votes expressed a desire that the site would be killed off and that I would be arrested for creating it. All I can say about that is it's not a goal I plan on working towards, sorry.

In second place were the votes to keep things as they are with a mix of political information, legal information, stories of misconduct, and other stuff. We'll try, but what gets posted is often at the whims of what's going on outside of our control and one of the issues lately is that the latest contract between the city and police guild may actually make it harder for news of misconduct to get out in the open instead of making that information more open to the public.

In third place was a request for more legal information and support information for victims of police misconduct... Well, I know from experience that there is definitely a lack of support resources and sources of information for victims of misconduct and abuse in Seattle. But, that's what makes it so difficult for us to provide useful and vetted information to other victims of misconduct.

See, as said numerous times, this site has no support within the city of Seattle. The "civil rights" lawyers don't like to talk with us or answer questions because they don't think there is anything in it for them to do so. Civil rights groups like the ACLU in Seattle are too busy fighting to legalize drugs and organizing politicized Gitmo torture protests while ignoring torture in their own city to pay any serious attention to local civil rights abuses, and while the NAACP has been trying to bring more attention to the issue they don't seem very interested in supporting all victims of misconduct.

So... where will we get that kind of legal and support information victims need in order to make the right choices towards seeking justice once they've been abused and get the services the need to recover? Ah, there's the problem, just as there was no place for me to turn when I was hurt, we still have no place to turn to find people willing to help others who were hurt. Being a victim of official misconduct and abuse is still a wrong within a wrong, you get hurt first by the police and then the public when your avenues to justice and support are cut off just because you've been hurt by the police.

Of course, this is why this site is here. While trying to find out what I could do about what happened to me I heard from lawyers who said they turned away hundreds of victims because their cases weren't profitable due to the way the city makes it difficult to find evidence of misconduct and how the city fights such cases legislatively and judicially. In fact, some of the lawyers who used to take such cases don't anymore because it's so unprofitable for them. Organizations like the ACLU and NAACP just don't take misconduct cases unless it's very high profile and will get them some exposure in the press, they don't even give out referrals anymore since there are so few lawyers who take such cases.

So, since Seattle won't help all these victims of misconduct and won't help us help them, we're reaching out to other cities and states in an effort to find that information our fellow victims desperately need. Once we get enough information we'll publish it and make it accessible to the people who need it, not just on the site either.

We've heard you, we know there's a desperate need out there for more information and support, and we're doing what we can to meet that need. So, stay tuned.

Get Out!

It’s a rare nice day outside here in Seattle. Don’t sit there and read this stuff. Get outside and play! If you don’t have kids, go outside and be a kid for a while. If you have kids, go outside and be a kid with your kids.

One of the unfortunate lessons I learned with everything that happened to me last year and I was taken away from my family so suddenly was that you never know when you won’t have the chance to be a part of your children’s memories. It happened unexpectedly and I never would have anticipated that such a thing would have happened to me. So, the point is that you never know when you'll lose those chances to be a part of their lives and share their joy, you'll never know when you've run out of nice days to spend outside with them. You also never know when they’ll suddenly grow up before your eyes.

See, I wasn’t the only person hurt and changed by the experience. My oldest child, 11 at the time, grew up too quick and learned lessons I had hoped would wait a while longer or that he wouldn't have learned at all. We still have fun together, but it’s different now, he’s more wary and suspicious of the world instead of curious about it and has a lot of anger about what those people did to me. I wished I would have had more time to play with the child he was... but he's now a young man and we'll have to be be content with the times we did have at that stage of his life and the times we have ahead of us.

So, I don’t take those chances for granted anymore. While my oldest is no longer interested in going to the park with his old man, my 8 year old and I are going to go play now and make some good memories to share…

I suggest you do the same with the ones you love.

When Numbers Gamble With People's Lives

Since the mid-1990s, Washington State jail populations have increased exponentially. Obsolete facilities built decades ago to hold a handful of prisoners are now packed like sardine tins, with as many prisoners sleeping on the floor as in bunks. Overcrowding has resulted in numerous problems in terms of security and meeting prisoner medical needs.
- "Washington Jail Prisoners Suffer from Overcrowding, Abusive Guards, Inadequate Health Care and Indifferent Politicians" by Roger Smith at Prison Legal News on 06/27/2008

The Stranger’s Jonah Spangenthal-Lee recently posted that the city of Seattle may not need to build its own jail anytime soon since the projected growth of the jail population in the King County Jail was outdated and that the jail is actually under capacity. Of course, this is with the proviso that three floors of that facility are currently under renovation, which reduces the number of detainees it can hold. While I don’t doubt his numbers, most people don't understand that even with those numbers the jail can still have overcrowding problems due to near constant renovations and floor closures, but also because of the constant influx of short-term detainees that doesn’t get counted in those numbers as they come in for a night and are gone the next day. In any case, the numbers just don't match up with the reality inside that jail.

Let me explain a bit by telling you about my experience there… When I was there in November/December of 2006 (on charges I was eventually cleared of), I spent two weeks in what is called a “holding cell” which is a communal cell that holds about 5-6 wall mounted double bunks (upper/lower for a total of 10-12 beds) and about 6-8 plastic cots for an average of 18 beds per cell. However, on any given night there would be about 25 people held in such cells, many of which would have to sleep on the floor with a very thin ripped mat between them and the concrete, which would always get wet in the morning when people took showers and the drains backed up. Even when someone’s bedding and clothes would get soiled with dirty water they wouldn’t be able to get a change of clothes or bedding.

A rough representation of a typical holding cell at the King County Jail.

Well, detainees are only supposed to stay for a day or two in holding cells because even when you get moved into general population, it can still take up to a week to get a change of clothes and commissary. So, when people are held in holding cells for weeks, you get stuck wearing the same clothes and underwear for 3 weeks or more since when you’re in a holding cell you don’t get the chance to order commissary, which is the only way you can get a change of underwear, and you don’t get a change of sheets nor clothes, which is why there have been so many deadly infections at that facility. This is also why each review of the jail cited the excessive time people were held in holding tanks as a major problem… a problem that still hasn’t been addressed.

Of course, when I was there I had open wounds that were left untreated, so my clothes were encrusted with dried blood for weeks before I finally got a change of clothes. Also, in the holding cells, you don’t have access to books and the televisions will often be broken. Needless to say that when you’re hurt and denied any treatment, this only makes the pain you feel much worse since there is nothing you can do to take your mind off of it. Most detainees pace relentlessly to keep their minds occupied, but since I was stuck in my bunk because of my injuries, what I did was laid in my bunk and made decks of cards (pictured at top), dominoes, and chess pieces out of the extra request forms that nobody used each day, and which the guards wouldn’t take from me since they were ordered to ignore my medical requests. I’d give them out to the others just to keep the peace a bit as well since I made about 6 decks of cards and 2 sets of dominoes during that time.

Now, the numbers given might show spare capacity at the jail, but they don’t take into account the daily inflow/outflow that goes on there which boosts the number of detainees at night but then lets several go during the day and doesn’t account for any renovations or construction going on at any given time. (Even on floors that were used there would be cells here and there that were being repaired due to damage such as TVs ripped off wall mounts). This is how, for a jail supposedly underutilized, you would still see more detainees in each cell than those cells were designed to hold and how detainees would get sick from a lack of clean clothes and bedding because it took overly long to get into a regular cell.

I strongly suspect that King County is now open to extending the contracts it has with the area municipalities isn’t because it has free beds in it’s jails… but because of the severe budget shortfalls they have been trying to address. After all, those lucrative fees the county charges for each detainee, (often pre-trial and potentially innocent), housed in those jails to area cities is extra income the county doesn’t want to toss away just yet. The more they can pack in like sardines is all the better, no matter if it risks their well-being or not.

Of course, I'm not advocating the Seattle be allowed to build its own jail. Give Seattle's record of detainee treatment and police misconduct it wouldn't be a good thing. But perhaps with better officer management to reduce wrongful or unnecessary arrests, improvement of diversionary programs like drug court and mental health treatment, and some needed management changes at the existing facilities to improve detainee treatment and processing procedures there wouldn't be a need for another facility and more money would be saved without risking public safety or human rights.

Some Confessions

First, a story came out from The Stranger that caught my eye about how city councilman and ex-cop Tim Burgess and his Public Safety committee is planning to revise the city’s obstruction laws to put them more in line with the more ambiguous state laws that give officers more leeway to make arrests for obstruction. That story was here and before I go on about it I want you to take a moment and read it for yourself…

Go on… no peeking, read it first then come back…

Ok... When I first read that I thought the worst, I thought they were trying to make it easier for the police to make obstruction arrests. Questionable obstruction arrests and charges of racial bias in those arrests is an issue that the city has gotten called to the carpet on in the news lately and the way this seemed worded at first made it appear as though the city was trying to address this issue by changing the law to make it easier to prosecute people arrested on questionable stand-alone obstruction charges. In other words, it looked like the city was trying to solve the problem of false charges of obstruction by broadening the scope of obstruction so that those charges couldn’t be called questionable anymore.

Well, I admit that was wrong. I was able to look into the issue a bit further and it seems as though my first thoughts weren't the case. From what I can tell, when the news stories alleging bias in obstruction arrests broke, council member Nick Licata sought information from the mayor’s office and city’s attorney about how they handle obstruction arrests. In the course of this it was discovered that the city prosecuted obstruction charges about 33% of the time under state laws because of some legal ambiguities due to the city's laws being very narrowly defined and state laws being broader in scope. But, since the state law doesn’t allow for a defense on the basis of an officer’s orders being unlawful, there were allegations that the use of the state law instead of the municipal code was to avoid the defensible action based on lawfulness of police commands.

So, Nick Licata, Tim Burgess, and Tom Carr started working on legislation to change the law in order to make it so the city was more inclined to prosecute under city law which would still allot for the defense based on unlawful commands from officers and, according to defense attorneys working with the city on this amendment, it should result in a significant improvement in the way this law works and the way the city charges and prosecutes obstruction arrests and the city wouldn’t prosecute under the looser state laws anymore as a result. The amendment, supposedly, will also include language which explicitly states that obstruction charges cannot be used against people just watching, taking pictures, or just talking/asking questions.

So, apparently, my first opinion of this effort was completely off base and I’m glad I was wrong. See, we don’t just want to expose cases of misconduct or efforts to cover it up, we also want to make sure that efforts to improve police conduct and make the justice system in Seattle more equitable and just are also made public. I am personally very happy to see such a good faith effort by all parts of the city government to improve the problems with obstruction arrests in Seattle.

Thanks for proving me wrong guys, I really do appreciate it and I hope you do it more often!!! After all, ultimately, I would like nothing more than to have nothing more to write about on this blog. So thanks for working towards giving me one less negative thing to write about.

Next, on the national front, the FBI has announced today that a series of raids in 16 cities across the US has freed 21 juvenile victims of forced prostitution (read slavery there) and arrested several hundred people on charges of sexually exploiting minors for commercial gain. The FBI claims that it’s freed over 400 children in the last five years as a concerted effort to target child exploitation and enslavement.

While cities, Seattle included, tend to prosecute the juvenile victims as prostitutes while failing to go after their clients and exploiters, the FBI states that it’s been focusing on this as a national effort to prevent exploiters from simply moving out of jurisdictions when municipalities start cracking down on the child sex slave trade.

Time for another confession... even though it will only be used against me the truth is the truth and I like to be honest. Let’s just say, sparing the nasty details, that I had gone through something similar when I was a homeless 14 year old with nowhere else to turn. It wasn’t a time in my life that I like to think back on, but I was lucky enough to get out of it all on my own eventually. I worked my way through the rest of high school by working landscaping and other grunt work jobs, and then was fortunate enough to go on to college at the age of 17. I was lucky to have been able to do that as most kids in that situation can’t get out of it like I did. So, it’s yet another story I identify with personally so I’m happy to see the exploitative adults punished instead of the vulnerable kids for a change.

So I have personal reasons for being glad to see that, for once, authorities are going after the adult exploiters instead of the juvenile victims of such crimes. Thanks guys, for doing that right… but I am curious to find out what happened to the kids and how they were helped (if at all) after they were freed.

That’s enough for the confessionals today.

Update: There might be some hope in Seattle though. A report due Friday indicates that Seattle might finally start treating the 300-500 exploited children that roam it's streets each night, some as young as 11 years old, as victims instead of criminals. We can only hope they do, but so far the mayor's office has been reluctant to comment on the recommendations made by they report that these victims be given support to escape their exploiters instead of being thrown in jail with them.

The Sad State Of Affairs In Seattle

Let’s take a quick look at all that’s going on in Seattle right now, because there’s quite a bit happening here right now, and it’s pretty damn disgraceful.

First, King County officials are still arguing with the US Department of Justice over the US DOJ’s stinging rebuke over the deplorable conditions in Seattle’s King County Jail and the mistreatment of detainees that the DOJ termed so egregious that they were a violation of their constitutional rights. Meanwhile the Seattle press raised more of a stink about conditions in the animal shelters than they did about people dying slow tortured deaths in their jails.

If that weren’t shameful enough, in the face of proposed massive budget cutbacks at the jail, your inability to protect detainees and treat deadly infections at that gulag has gotten you in the crosshairs of a huge class action lawsuit that will further drain your coffers. Gee, maybe it makes sense to care about human rights, huh? It’s downright disgusting, especially when the King County executive still has the testicular fortitude to pretend that he’s some defender of civil rights after declaring that pretrial detainees in HIS jail have no rights to defend.

Ah, next we see that Seattle government is still run by the Seattle Police Officer’s Guild when the government negotiated a record breaking raise for Seattle Police officers and demanded nothing in return… seems that even then it still couldn’t stand up to the guild enough to enact the recommendations that their own panels on police accountability recommended that they implement. The president of the guild has been heard to be laughing all the way to the bank at the payoff he got while still preventing the implementation of reforms that would have closed off the loopholes that spurred the public outcry that caused those two panels to form in the first place.

So, Seattle, not only have you drained the pockets of your taxpayers to pay off the police guild for nothing in return, you’re now facing an onslaught of civil rights lawsuits because of your failures to keep your police officers from violating everyone’s civil rights. We hear there’s a tidal wave of lawsuits in the works and you’ve already been pummeled in the press repeatedly for the suits you already settled or outright LOST.

Gee, maybe you should have figured out that it would be cheaper to ensure that everyone’s civil rights were protected and that your police officers were held accountable for their actions… instead you’ve wasted your credibility and tax income on trying to cover up for their misdeeds while giving them a big fat raise for acting badly.

Oh, but guess what, it's still not the best part... hidden in that little contract is a clause that allows the police department to veto any civilian oversight panel members it wants, that way it can keep those pesky civilian reviewers quiet so they don't raise alarms to spark more reviews like they did last year. So, next time you won't get a warning when a rash of unpunished police misconduct sparks a wave of costly lawsuits that drain your pocketbooks dry. Not only did the city make sure the same loopholes stay in place to cover up misconduct, they made some new ones too.

Well, guess what, those budget woes in King County are going to add to your grief. Not only have you wasted money rewarding cops for costing you more money in lawsuits, the county has to offload it’s cases to the city because it can’t afford to keep prosecuting and holding your detainees on trumped up charges of obstruction. So now you have to waste more money building your own jail and hiring more lawyers.

Oh, but that’s not all folks. Seems the city attorney has been getting pummeled in the press for a bunch of disgracefully failed politically motivated raids on local nightclubs while the police have been harassing club owners in an effort to make way for more condos. Seems you have some motivation for keeping your cops from being held accountable, because then you can use them for political gain without any questions asked... like how you've been risking massive lawsuits by raiding homeless encampments.

Does it end there? Nope… That flawed contract was released less than a week before the city council is about to ratify it and the press hasn’t even bothered to call the city on lying to their faces when the city assured everyone that the contract would enact all 29 recommendations made by their “Police Accountability Review Panel”.

Oh, not only that, but on the same day the city made it’s other panel’s recommendations public… How many news articles on that were there? None… the city paid for the Seattle City Council Police Accountability Panel to turn out 23 recommendations to improve police accountability and oversight… just to completely ignore them and pretend like it didn’t happen!!! And the press doesn’t even bother to notice such an utterly willful waste, such a blatant spit in the face of the public outcry over police abuses and even Seattle's weekly independent papers that were critical of reform efforts at first are giving the city a free pass for lying to their faces.

Seattle, I got to say, you’ve been screwed... and you won't even know it until that tidal wave of civil rights lawsuits slams into your wallets and keeps on flooding your city. You'll wonder why you weren't warned about this encroaching mess, but by then those politicians that lied to you will have moved on and will be laughing at the mess they intentionally ignored and left behind.

Take care out there, because it's all about to get much worse.