SEATTLE — The federal judge overseeing the last vestiges of more than 12 years of reforms to the Seattle Police Department acknowledged Wednesday that the end of his role is in sight.
U.S. District Judge James Robart had high praise for some of what has been accomplished: The creation of the city’s Office of Inspector General, public access to data and better transparency around discipline are examples he mentioned.
But he made clear during a 90-minute status conference that he remains deeply concerned about the city’s ongoing struggles with a policy governing crowd control and the twin issues of officer accountability and discipline — the only areas where the court had retained jurisdiction after last year’s finding that the city was in full and sustained compliance with most of the provisions of a consent decree signed by the city and the U.S. Department of Justice in 2012.
On Wednesday, Robart said he is giving up on trying to ensure officer accountability from the bench since it is an issue the city and police guild are negotiating in collective bargaining, which is outside the court’s purview.
So the last remaining issue to be addressed before the city and DOJ can move to dissolve the settlement agreement is crowd control. Assistant City Attorney Kerala Cowart said a crowd-control ordinance that complies with policies agreed upon by the court, its monitor and the city needs to be put in place.
Cowart said Mayor Bruce Harrell on Tuesday sent to the City Council proposed legislation that would resolve the issue and fix a policy passed by the council in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests over the murder of George Floyd that the Mayor’s Office and the Police Department have found to be too restrictive to accommodate the needed changes.
Robart said he had just three words: “Get it done.”
Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, who attended the hearing along with interim Police Chief Sue Rahr and members of the Police Department’s command staff, said he believes the mayor has the council’s support and will pass the legislation quickly.
Antonio Oftelie, the court-appointed monitor of the consent decree, said he expects the DOJ and city will move to dissolve the agreement “sometime in the first quarter” of 2025.
In comments, Robart pointedly said the city’s revolving-door efforts to appoint a permanent chief of police and repeated changes in city leadership have complicated the efforts. He noted that, counting interim and acting chiefs, the department has had seven leaders since 2012 while the city has seen five mayors in that time.
“Having multiple police chiefs with multiple backgrounds, multiple interests and multiple levels of support for the consent decree has made this job more difficult,” Robart said. “Seven chiefs in 12 years is not good for the stability of the department and has not been good for the consent decree.”
However, Robart conceded the court has done about all it can do to enforce the provisions of a consent decree and that his merely having concerns does not mean he has the authority to address them, although he has tried in the past.
“I have to question why I keep pushing this rock up the hill, only to have it roll back,” he said.
Officer accountability and discipline are intertwined with collective bargaining between the city and the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which has opposed many of the reforms brought about by the settlement agreement and Robart says the court has no authority to intervene in that process.
A particular bugaboo for the court has been the ability of officers to appeal a chief’s disciplinary decision to an outside arbitrator. It was just such an incident in 2019 — involving the forced reinstatement of an officer who punched an intoxicated, handcuffed woman in the face, fracturing bones — that resulted in Robart finding the city had fallen partially out of compliance with the consent decree in what was a significant setback at the time.
That won’t happen again. Robart said Wednesday that federal precedent makes it clear that the court does not have the authority or jurisdiction to interfere in collective bargaining. He made it clear that he will not hold up the dissolution of the consent decree over those issues any longer. The city, he said, will have to make sure police are held accountable and that discipline is meted out when needed without the court making it so.
“I’m not going to continue the consent decree if I can’t make changes,” he said.
Assistant City Attorney Kerala Cowart said those issues have been “a longstanding priority” and said a recent retroactive contract signed by the police officers guild, giving officers a 23% raise, contained language that states a chief’s disciplinary decision should be given “deference” by an arbitrator.
“Tell me about deference,” the judge said, then launched into a recitation of a case last year where an arbitrator reinstated an officer, Tabitha Sexton, who was terminated by former Chief Carmen Best for firing a rifle repeatedly into the rear of a fleeing vehicle in violation of the Police Department’s use of force policy.
The judge noted that the same contract established a higher standard of review to fire an officer when that termination might affect the officer’s ability to get another job or remain in law enforcement.
“Tell me that’s an improvement,” he said sharply.
Robart said he found the circumstances around the Sexton arbitration “very troubling … but nothing the court can change under the consent decree.”
Even so, Robart said tremendous strides have been made since the early days of the consent decree, when the Police Department could not tell the court how many discipline cases it had “or that most of them had wound up in the garbage can.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Mygatt from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., acknowledged to the judge that the “consent decree can be undermined by collective bargaining,” but said “I don’t think that’s what is happening here,” noting that the city has made “slow and incremental” improvements in the contracts.
“I believe we are nearing the time” when the DOJ can join the city in asking for the consent decree to be ended. Even so, “I want to be clear that if we do that, it does not mean that police reform in the city of Seattle is finished.”
The city and the police officers guild remain in negotiations for a contract for the current year going forward.
Cowart assured Robart that “all of the accountability goals” sought by the court last year remain on the bargaining table.
Robart also heard reports on the city’s attempts to understand sharp disparities in the use of force across racial demographics found in a report issued by the court monitor earlier this year. Mygatt, who oversees or monitors consent decrees in Baltimore and Chicago, said the issue is widespread and vexing.
“I agree that work has been done, and continues to be done,” Mygatt said.
