In an appearance before area Democrats, Breean Beggs makes a non-partisan appeal for public accountability and major reforms in Spokane law enforcement.
The Center for Justice’s Chief Catalyst, Breean Beggs, is not a podium-pounder. But in his own way Monday he challenged his audience at the Warren Magnuson Club to help lead the way for Spokane citizens in taking ownership and framing solutions for what, by now, appears to be a major crisis of public confidence in Spokane area law enforcement.
If confirmation of the problem was needed it also came, yesterday, from Bob Apple, the chair of Spokane’s Public Safety Committee. Councilman Apple is 
quoted in a front page story in Tuesday’s Spokesman-Review as acknowledging that the public “is not happy” with recent events involving Spokane police and prosecutors. He also told reporter Tom Clouse that “I’m taking heat like you would not believe” from the public over the Otto Zehm case.
On behalf of Zehm’s mother and his estate, Beggs and the Center filed suit against the city on March 13, alleging civil rights violations for the unnecessarily violent manner in which Spokane officers tried to arrest the cognitively impaired janitor three years ago. The suit also alleges that the police department “falsely portrayed” Zehm as the instigator of the altercation in a north Spokane convenience store that led to his death at the hands of the police.
Many in the packed banquet room at the Inn at the Park wore small “Otto” lapel buttons yesterday to hear Beggs talk about the Center’s work on the Zehm case and other controversial episodes involving Spokane-area law enforcement officers.
While Beggs said he was more than willing to answer questions about the Zehm case and other specific cases, it was also part of his purpose, he said, to implore people to look at the bigger picture. While the facts of individual cases are compelling, he said, “we’ve been working on these issues for four years now and I’ve seen a larger pattern of what’s going on that I want to share today.”
“Right now,” he continued, “we are really stuck in this community and nationwide between citizens fearing the police and, frankly, police fearing citizens.”
Beggs talked at some length about the public and official reaction to the March 13th jury verdict that found Spokane police officer Jay Olsen not guilty of assault and reckless endangerment charges in the shooting, two years ago, of Shonto Pete. Pete is a young Native American man who, fortunately, has recovered from having one of the officer’s bullets lodged in his head. Olsen, who was off-duty at the time, had been drinking and claimed that Pete tried to steal his truck, a charge against which Pete was later acquitted.
“At the end of the Olsen trial,” Beggs said, “when the officers are pumping their arms celebrating that a drunk guy shooting a gun in a residential area got free, you know, you’re like, ‘how does this happen?’ There’s cognitive dissonance in our reaction. We all know juries can do strange things. That’s one of the reasons almost all cases settle, so that’s not surprising to me as a lawyer. But the celebration by the police for that sort of lawless conduct, that was a big shock.”
Beggs said he expected police chief Anne Kirkpatrick and other top city officials to at least acknowledge that the celebration was inappropriate but he, like the public, was instead struck by the chief’s public statement that the department and its officers were holding their heads high in the wake of the verdict.
“We just keep asking them questions. ‘What’s going to happen differently?’ And the thing in the Otto Zehm case is, ‘tell me what you’re going to do differently, so that the next one doesn’t die.’ And they don’t answer that question. And the longer they don’t, then people are going to go, okay, something needs to change.”–Breean Beggs.
In his view, Beggs said, there are explicable reasons why Spokane residents have been enduring what he characterized as an “epidemic” of deaths in recent years of people at the hands of law enforcement. He cited outdated use of force policies as one of the reasons and the de-institutionalization of people with mental health problems as another.
But, picking up on the celebratory police reaction to the Olsen verdict, Beggs emphasized that a major part of the problem is that “there seems to be a culture of denial” from the leadership of the department down through its officer ranks that includes an unwritten rule against ever admitting wrongdoing.
“They just can’t do it,” he said. “And the problem with that is that if you can’t admit that it’s wrong, then you can never change and make it better.”
The results of this can be seen across the board, he said, in the plummeting level of public confidence and support for local law enforcement and the embattlement of Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick.
Beggs expressed deep admiration for the way in which the leaders of Spokane’s Native American community prepared and handled a potentially explosive meeting with Mayor Mayor Verner, Council President Joe Shogan, Chief Kirkpatrick, and Assistant Chief Jim Nicks on March 24th. But he made special note of the sorrow and fear expressed at the meeting, especially from parents gravely concerned about the welfare of their children at the hands of Spokane police.
Just a few days ago, Beggs said, he was recognized in a local coffee shop by a woman who approached him and thanked him for the Center’s work in the community. She then told him, he said, that she’d removed her son from Spokane ‘because I’m afraid of what will happen to him.”
He connected this experience and others with the hardened attitude being projected by the police and by city leaders that the police have done and can do no wrong.
“It comes from that denial,” Beggs said. “And then of course what happens and you see [from the videotape] that Otto is not lunging [at the officer], and you see that the police [with the Olsen verdict] are cheering, then you don’t trust the police, even though most of them are doing a great job and putting their lives on the line. And then the [tax] levy doesn’t pass for what they need, and in the media people are attacking them and writing letters to the editor and you go to a public forum and people are screaming that the police are horrible, and so then the police are even more bunkered down, and nothing’s happening. So that’s kind of where we are.”
“Folks like you are going to make the difference in whether or not our elected leaders are called to action , or [whether] we just stay in the same stalemate we are in and wait for it to get probably much worse before people get motivated to really change it. I just want to leave with you that, really, legally, we get to determine the priorities for our police and how they conduct themselves, if we are willing to step in and make those determinations.”–Breean Beggs.
Getting from “where we are” to a better place will require, he said, a new level of active engagement by citizens in Spokane’s public life. Beggs used the remainder of his talk to outline what he sees are the basic and specific reforms he thinks are needed. The most important change, he said, is that citizens “have to recognize and advocate that we, the citizens, hire the police to protect us.”
“There’s a sense,” he said, “if you listen to the rhetoric of the police union, that we sort of work for them, that they’re the experts and that they know what we want from police and that they should be left to their own devices to protect us.”
“That is not democracy,” he continued, “and that’s not what works. The truth is that the citizens through their city council, their mayor, initiative, we get to determine what the values are for what we want. So, for instance, if we wanted, in the city, to say that tasers should only be used as a substitute for guns, not just random compliance, citizens could make that law and there are cities that have that rule.”
“The law enforcement industrial complex has done this great number on our world that there are these non-lethal weapons, these tasers, and other kinds of stun guns. And they aren’t. I’ve been involved in so many of those kinds of situations. They are not non-lethal weapons. What we want from our police is to make an assessment. Is this a potentially lethal situation? Is there a weapon? Then I am going to respond in kind with lethal force. Or is this a non-lethal situation in which I don’t have this kind of intermediate kind of force, but I respond with truly non-lethal force? That’s the standard that we want to establish for our police and I plead with all of us that we make that case to our police because that’s what Breean is telling us.”–Dr. Kim Thorburn
As for other specific prescriptions, Beggs noted that the Center had made its top priority getting independent police oversight. He also candidly acknowledged that the Office of Police Ombudsman that the Center had advocated is only “three quarters” of what the Center thought was needed, given the restrictions in the new ordinance that prohibit the Ombudsman from initiating independent investigations without the consent of the police department.
“The quarter piece that isn’t there yet,” he said, ‘is they [the Office of the Ombudsman] have no power, explicitly yet, to do their own independent investigation. Now, when we were negotiating this, the city council said, ‘hey, we like the fully independent one, but we’re in the middle of a contract, and we can’t change that without going to court, and even then it probably wouldn’t work.’ So, negotiations for the new police contract start in July. And there’s no legal obstacle to having independent police oversight with the power to investigate. Whether there’s the political will to do that or not, that’s another thing.”
Beggs also advocated for a re-prioritization of public safety resources, away from incarceration and prosecution of minor drug offenses to encouraging and helping police better evaluate and handle altercations involving people with mental health problems.
He and Chief Kirkpatrick agree, he said, that one of the main threats to public safety is the lack of mental health treatment funding.
“She and her officers are just beleagured by having to be social and clinical workers without the training and resources to do that. And so that’s something we can do as a city to change, how we direct those funds, and one way to get those funds is to reduce the amount of money we spend on incarcerating people.”
During the question session after his talk, Beggs got strong support from former Spokane County health officer Dr. Kim Thorburn for his call for major changes in how tasers are used. Beggs spent several minutes detailing why tasers–contrary to their marketing image as non-lethal devices–can be fatal under real world conditions. And Thorburn, from her experience, roundly agreed and asked others in the audience for their support in changing local police policies on taser use.
“The law enforcement industrial complex has done this great number on our world that there are these non-lethal weapons, these tasers, and other kinds of stun guns. And they aren’t,” Dr. Thorburn said.
“I’ve been involved in so many of those kinds of situations,” she continued. “They are not non-lethal weapons. What we want from our police is to make an assessment. Is this a potentially lethal situation? Is there a weapon? Then I am going to respond in kind with lethal force. Or is this a non-lethal situation in which I don’t have this kind of intermediate kind of force, but I respond with truly non-lethal force? That’s the standard that we want to establish for our police and I plead with all of us that we make that case to our police because that’s what Breean is telling us.”
Buell Hollister, a highly-regarded civic activist in the inland Northwest, picked up on what Beggs candidly described as his personal lack of clarity about whether and how strongly Mayor Mary Verner and Chief Kirkpatrick are committed to reforming the Spokane Police Department. Hollister said he saw Kirkpatrick arriving in Spokane in September 2006 in the midst of “an entrenched police culture” and under political pressure “to politically support those cops.”
“That would be a daring thing for her to do,” Hollister said, “to initiate those dramatic changes, which are necessary. But it’s tough.”
“I have empathy for her and the mayor both,” Beggs replied. “I’m glad it’s not my job to do. Still, it’s required.”
But Beggs also stressed, he thought it was important to de-link the reforms from the personalities involved and to avoid attacking specific individuals.
“And this is really what we do at the Center,” Beggs said. “We don’t really go on the attack very often. If you read what we say in the newspapers, we don’t attack the officers who kill and hurt our clients, personally. We just keep asking questions. What’s going to happen differently? And the thing in the Otto Zehm case is, ‘tell me what you’re going to do differently, so that the next one doesn’t die.’ And they don’t answer that question. And the longer they don’t, then people are going to go, okay, something needs to change.”
–Tim Connor
