SEATTLE — Use of force by Seattle police officers dipped to record lows during the pandemic but incidents are creeping upward as service calls increase and continue to show disturbing and persistent racial disparities, according to a court-ordered assessment by the Seattle Office of Inspector General.
However, the report states that while the overall number of force incidents increased slightly over the past three years, the number involving serious or deadly force has decreased. The OIG notes that some of the overarching increase may be due to better reporting.
“Think of this as a snapshot of where we are — this is a point in time,” said Seattle Inspector General Lisa Judge, who said more nuanced reviews of the department’s efforts to address policing disparities are forthcoming.
“There are disparities,” Judge said. “The question is how do we address, and what do we change, to better determine which are improper uses of force and which disparities can be attributed to other, upstream factors.”
The 65-page assessment was ordered by U.S. District Judge James Robart as the court winds up 12 years of federal oversight of the Seattle Police Department after a Department of Justice investigation found SPD routinely used excessive force during arrests. The OIG is stepping into the role of key policy coordinator and oversight monitor for the department as the involvement of the court and its outside monitor come to an end.
Robart in September released the city from much of its responsibility under a settlement agreement between Seattle and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division signed in 2012. However, issues surrounding the use of force, crowd control and officer accountability remain under the court’s jurisdiction.
The OIG assessment confirmed the department’s continued progress in using force less often and in using the least amount necessary. The analysis focused on 2021 through 2023, the years following the anomalous year of 2020, when SPD’s sometimes violent response to the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd skewed the numbers and proved a setback to efforts to end court oversight.
Judge, the inspector general, found those three years brought the lowest frequency of force by officers since 2015, the year the department began keeping detailed data following the adoption of stringent use-of-force policies and reporting requirements implemented as part of the settlement agreement. with the Justice Department.
At the same time, the data underscores troubling numbers from an assessment by a court-appointed monitor released in 2022 that found force was used by Seattle police on Black people and Native Americans at rates that far outstrip their representation in the city’s population.
It also reiterated concerns by the monitor and OIG from 2022 that officers failed to record the race of the subject of police force in a significant percentage of the incidents. The department says it has responded by entering “nonwhite” as a default in any report where the race of a victim of police force is not identified.
“In other words, by design, SPD errs on the side of overestimating any disparity for analytic purposes,” according to a recent “Outcome Measures Update” filed in federal court in conjunction with the OIG assessment.
SPD said there is “no reason to believe officers are somehow subverting the system” and blames confusing and clumsy data reporting systems for some of the disparities.
The department categorizes police force into four types: De minimis, which involves physically guiding or directing someone without injury or pain; Type I, which causes transitory pain, or involves pointing a firearm; Type II, which causes pain or physical injury (pepper spray, fists, impact weapons) and Type III, which causes significant injury, unconsciousness or death.
According to the OIG’s assessment, the overall use of force by officers increased 18.5% over the three years, however most of that increase was due to an increase in the use of Type I force and more stringent reporting. The use of Type II and Type III force is near an all-time low, the report said.
Judge also noted that shootings by police officers have decreased, with two in 2023, the fewest since 2017.
Even so, Judge, in an interview, acknowledged that racial disparities continue to turn up in the data and that further research is needed to understand why and what can be done to address them.
The assessment shows that, while Black people make up 6.7% of the city’s population, they accounted for 31% of all uses of force by SPD officers during those three years. White people, who make up 64% of the population, were involved in 35% of all reported uses of force. American Indians make up just 0.6% of the city’s population, but accounted for 1.8% of all instances where police force was used.
Black subjects made up 33% of all Type II uses of force and 41% of Type III deadly force applications, according to the data.
The assessment also shows that police were far more likely to point a firearm at a Black person over the past three years, although the overall rate of firearm-pointing decreased over that period. The report states that in 2022, for example, 49% of all instances in which an officer pointed a gun at someone involved a Black person. That dropped to 43% last year.
Data also shows that Black people make up roughly 40% of all investigative stops by SPD officers, although the overall number of those stops has decreased along with department staffing, according to SPD.
“Future OIG work will focus on exploring other benchmarks aside from Seattle’s population for a more accurate analysis,” the OIG assessment says. “Potential
approaches to analyze racial disparity in SPD use of force include area use-of-force rates, area crime-complaints rates, circumstances of presumed race-blindness, and officer and subject shared racial characteristics, among others.”
Judge wrote that while these approaches have drawbacks, “they may provide a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to future analyses.”
Likewise, the Police Department’s 209-page Outcome Measures Update states it is “critical to step away from methodologies that do nothing but perpetuate a narrative that disproportionalities in police data are a proxy for police bias,” adding that “methodological reviews have not identified explicit bias or racism at the department.”
That document updates the court on innovations and progress within SPD in areas including use of force, stops and detention, bias-free policing, supervision, early intervention for troubled officers and other areas of concern raised by the consent decree.
