The bonhomie’s great. Some accountability would be even better.
I’ve been fascinated the past two mornings to read Tom Clouse’s reporting in the Spokesman-Review about the remarkable case of Pete Bunch, the Spokane County Sheriff’s Department sergeant who was arrested by Spokane Police on February 6th. Bunch resigned last week, as he was about to undergo more questioning about why he was found in a South Hill neighborhood after a woman called 911 to report that a man wearing a hood had approached her teenage daughter’s bedroom window. Bunch, according to Clouse, offered that he was looking for his dog.
The story is no longer about Bunch, so much as it is about why he was not charged by Spokane City Prosecutor Jim Bledsoe. We now know that Bunch’s former employer, the sheriff’s office, conducted its own inquiry into Bledsoe’s decision not to charge the sergeant. The SCSO learned that Bledsoe did find probable cause to charge Bunch with resisting arrest and obstruction of justice but later said that Bunch’s “career” in public service was one of the reasons no charges were filed. Moreover, Bledsoe reportedly told the SCSO investigator that he didn’t want to “grind on the guy” for bad judgment and that “he wished Sgt. Bunch well.” Bledsoe now denies saying this but, as Clouse reports, offers no other reason for why Bunch was not charged.
We’ll see how this story unfolds, but among those thoroughly unamused is former Spokane County Prosecutor Don Brockett and Coucilman Bob Apple, who chairs the city’s public safety committee.
“Saying it’s a lapse of judgment and wishing the guy well so he can peer in windows of kids other communities isn’t a good idea,” Apple told Clouse. “The public is upset. And I’m upset. I want answers, too, and we are not getting them.”
Doug Clark, the S-R’s humor columnist is sure to have a lot more fun with this than I can fashion, but the phrase that jumped to mind when I read Clouse’s story was “Spokane-nice.”
You may remember “Spokane-nice” as the tag line that got Shane Mahoney, an Eastern Washington University Professor of Government, some notoriety and blow-back in 2004 when he used the phrase in a research paper looking at the regional culture of the Spokane-area and how it adversely affected the area’s economic development. In fairness to Mahoney, he used it because the phrase kept-coming up in his interviews as a term that implies “a deferential tendency to avoid certain topics in public.”
In a section entitled “The Sounds of Silence,” Mahoney wrote this:
“A well-developed theme that surfaced in nearly all of the interviews was that some of the issues that require discussion in a public conversation are difficult to raise in that venue. Talk, at least public talk, is neither easy nor cheap in the region.”
I should note the timing of this in relation to what, in recent times, is Spokane’s biggest black eye. In the spring of 2001, lawyers for Nuveen and other investment houses filed what turned out to be a devastating securities fraud case naming the City of Spokane and the River Park Square real estate companies owned by Spokane’s most powerful family. As my editors and I at Camas Magazine described the mound of evidence that the plaintiffs’ filed in a December 2003 pre-trial brief, the breadth of the case across social and business networks made Spokane look like “Fraudville.” It was this very brief that the city, four months later, agreed to pay nearly $40 million to the bondholder plaintiffs so it could make the case against the city go away and bring the bondholder claims against the remaining defendants.
In this way, the bond houses extracted a princely sum of accountability from Spokane. But you may have noticed that Spokane, on an intramural level, um, well, we don’t do accountability so well. Although the voters, en masse, do routinely throw out mayors after one term, you will seldom find people with power in the community holding other people with power accountable. It rarely happens and then usually only to lance a scandal to prevent further public embarrassment.
In that respect, Mahoney’s findings were directly to the point–we’re culturally uncomfortable with even the open discussion of accountability. By and large (and I’m not being facetious) we leave this to the aforementioned Doug Clark, a gutsy, singin’, newspaper columnist. And, of course, we all know the elephant in Doug’s tent is that he can’t well aim his acid wit back at his employers, the powerful Cowles family, whose current officers and minions handed us the aforementioned River Park Square debacle.
I don’t mean to turn too quickly away from a broader analysis because it’s still very important to how the press and other major institutions in our area conduct themselves in relation to one another. But I also think it’s fair to examine and think about the inter-personal aspects of “Spokane-nice” and the way it can undermine important personal and professional relationships that need to be part of the healthy root systems of our agencies, companies, and professions.
The way I’ve experienced “Spokane-nice” is that we’re world class with bonhomie and we value it more than other places. On one hand, I really enjoy this (as I hope most of you do) as part of a quality of life. On the other hand, it’s disquieting to be told by people that someone whose judgment I’ve questioned publicly or privately is really a heckuva nice guy or gal, and I just don’t know them well enough to put their obvious mendacity or ethical lapses in proper perspective. I should give them a break, or at least the benefit of the first sixteen doubts.
That’s what troubles me. I don’t dismiss the spiritual rewards of looking for the best in people. But not through rose-coloured lenses. I actually think we have to actively work to resist not just a personal aversion to conflict, but a collective and intruding attitude that trying to hold people accountable is unwelcome or inappropriate. It’s one thing to wish every person well but quite another to accept, tolerate, and even excuse those whom we know are behaving unethically or dangerously. It may actually be, because of our sunny public culture in Spokane, that we actually have to work harder at this than other communities do, or at least harder then we think we should.
I wouldn’t suggest it’s easy. But the circumstances around the Bunch case–coming when the public (as Bob Apple clearly acknowledges) is already desperate for some sense that its public safety officers work within a system that actually makes people safer–clearly point to the alternative. That would be chaos and it would be expensive to fix.
–Tim Connor
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