Two Programmers Expose Dysfunction and Abuse In the Seattle Police Department

reifman writes: Programmers Eric Rachner and Phil Mocek are now the closest thing Seattle has to a civilian police-oversight board. Through shrewd use of Washington's Public Records Act, the two have acquired hundreds of reports, videos, and 911 calls related to the Seattle Police Department's internal investigations of officer misconduct. Among some of Rachner and Mocek's findings: a total of 1,028 SPD employees (including civilian employees) were investigated between 2010 and 2013. (The current number of total SPD staff is 1,820.) Of the 11 most-investigated employees—one was investigated 18 times during the three-year period—every single one of them is still on the force, according to SPD.

In 569 allegations of excessive or inappropriate use of force (arising from 363 incidents), only seven were sustained—meaning 99 percent of cases were dismissed. Exoneration rates were only slightly smaller when looking at all the cases — of the total 2,232 allegations, 284 were sustained. This is partly why the Seattle PD is under a federal consent decree for retraining and oversight. You can check out some of the typically excellent Twitter coverage by Mocek from his #MayDaySea coverage.

Comments

Re:I'm shocked ...

[Brett Buck]

On the other hand, we find that various mooks make spurious brutality claims, the vast majority of which are complete bullshit.

Re:To think I once subscribed to this site

[tlhIngan]

And though they have only combed through a small portion of the data, they say they have found several instances of officers appearing to lie, use racist language, and use excessive forceÃ"with no consequences. In fact, they believe that the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) has systematically "run interference" for cops. In the aforementioned cases of alleged officer misconduct, all of the involved officers were exonerated and still remain on the force.

"We're trying to do OPA's job for them because OPA was so explicitly not interested in doing their own job," said Rachner.

When the police ignore the law without consequence, someone needs to be doing something, because clearly the damned police are incapable of it.

Blah blah blah.

You do realize that an accusation doesn't mean it's true, right? There's things like evidence and other things that are required to sustain the conviction.

Just because a cop "appears" to use excessive force doesn't mean it wasn't justified in the end. Or perhaps the victim believed he was brutally assaulted because he got in the end a bruise.

And that's the problem with the article - it's all couched in language that basically says "we think this happened, we believed the victim, the police are hiding something" than "this is really happening, here's the evidence of it, and despite this, you can see this police officer is still actively serving".

Yes, I advocate more cameras on both sides, as well as the standard that lack of camera footage shall be interpreted in a way most beneficial to the other party (i.e., against the officer).

And that's the real problem - it's all he-said she-said, with no evidence. In a lot of places said officers who were dismissed could sue to get their jobs back and win because of lack of evidence.

And yes, most officers lie. The only way to keep them honest is video because in a he-said she-said, the one who appears more credible wins, and that's rarely a bystander.

Re:I'm shocked ...

[drinkypoo]

I will be the first to say that 1.4% is far too much, but you can also note that 98.6% follow procedure

What? No, you can't note that. We don't know anything about what they're doing at other times from that statistic.