The City of Spokane’s explanations in the Sgt. Pete Bunch case confirms what many suspected, that the city has a double standard when it comes to investigating criminality by uniformed officers.
By Tim Connor
First the good news. With the sudden departure of nationally-renowned journalists Karen Dorn Steele and Bill Morlin from the Spokesman-Review three weeks ago, it became an open question as to whether, and to what degree, Spokane’s only daily newspaper retained the capacity, or will, to do the kind of aggressive public affairs reporting that Dorn Steele and Morlin were so good at. (And here, I should say, that whatever deep and legitimate questions there have been about whether the Cowles newspaper exists to serve the public interest, versus its owners’ interests, Spokane has been remarkably blessed by Dorn Steele’s and Morlin’s exemplary work over the past 30 years). An encouraging signal in that regard has been the terrific and dogged reporting of Tom Clouse, in the past week, as he has skillfully covered the curious and now very revealing case of former Spokane County Sheriff’s Office Sergeant Pete Bunch.
Clouse’s work is just a classic example of why inspired investigative reporting is necessary for a healthy democracy. There’s not only an art to this kind of work, but there’s a signature of commitment to it that readers should appreciate. What do we, as readers, get for this? Well, we get answers that frankly we wouldn’t get if the reporter didn’t take serious his or her professional responsibility to be an advocate for the truth, and an advocate to help readers understand what the story is about.
In this case, thanks entirely to Tom Clouse, the public got a key answer to an important question at a crucial time. That question is this one: what is the city’s basic policy when it comes to holding public safety officers accountable? The question was answered when, as a result of Clouse’s reporting, the city felt obliged to send out a press release Wednesday to explain why City Attorney Howard Delaney had just concurred with the decision by city Prosecutor Jim Bledsoe not to pursue misdemeanor charges against Sgt. Bunch.
You can read that explanation for yourself, here. But this is a fair distillation of it: Delaney, working with two other lawyers in the City Attorney’s office, determined that Bledsoe “did not abuse his prosecutorial discretion” in not charging Bunch. Bledsoe decided not to pursue charges against Bunch despite the (now) undisputed fact that the prosecutor acknowledged to a SCSO internal affairs
investigator that there was probable cause to charge the off-duty sheriff’s deputy and that Bledsoe himself believed Bunch violated the law by obstructing Spokane police officers who’d been called to the scene and resisting arrest.
According to the SCSO internal affairs investigator, Bledsoe said that “although what Sgt. Bunch did was a technical violation of the law and at times obviously unprofessional that he felt their job was to go after criminals and not law enforcement officers demonstrating a temporary lapse in judgment.” And this theme was repeated throughout the report.
“Mr. Bledsoe told me he was not certain what caused Sgt. Bunch to react the way he did during his contact with the Police that day. He told me he was not certain if he was having personal problems at home, was feeling picked on or what. He told me that he did not want to ‘grind on the guy’ for his use of bad judgment. He said the case was going to be dismissed without prejudice. He told me he wished Sgt. Bunch well.”
What isn’t in the SCSO report were the sprawling and mushy explanations offered up in Wednesday’s press release about unspecified “factual inconsistencies” that could “lead to plausible defense arguments” that would likely include the defense “that officers didn’t have a clear right to stop Bunch or frisk him for a possible weapon.”
“The constitutional issues presented make these types of cases difficult to win cleanly, without the probability of a year or more of defense appeals,” the city explained. “Our Spartanly funded Prosecutor’s Office has a fixed amount of resources and must make tough decisions every day about where they will invest scarce prosecutorial assets. The City Prosecutor had no real option except to weigh the actual risk of re-offense against the time and expense associated with a jury trial and related appeal.”
Again, what’s conspicuous is that this is not what Bledsoe told the SCSO investigator, the content of which Clouse had zeroed in on in an April 8th article: “Report suggests Bunch got a break.”
Here’s the thing about Clouse’s fine work, as powerful as it has been here: All journalism can do is inform citizens about the things they need to know to hold people–in this case elected and appointed public officials–accountable. The accountability is the hard part, and it’s up to all of us.
Make no mistake. It was Clouse’s reporting that forced the city’s hand. Bledsoe, through a city spokesperson, initially disputed what was in the SCSO report about what Bledsoe had said. So, what was the city, through Howard Delaney, going to say about what SCSO investigator Lt. Bill Rose had reported about what Bledsoe said to him?
Well, here it is: “Upon reconsideration of the conversation, the Prosecutor acknowledged to me that part of his conversation with Lt. Rose certainly (sic) were interpreted differently than he intended. In the Rose conversation, Bledsoe believed he was attempting to express empathy for the tough situation the law enforcement agencies were experiencing, while at the same time relaying the difficulties of prosecuting Bunch for his actions, especially considering the accused’s long career in law enforcement, lack of a criminal record, and the limited prosecution resources available.”
Moreover: “In retrospect, the Prosecutor acknowledged that conversation failed to convey either the appropriate information or to to Lt. Rose. Bledsoe took responsibility for the communication breakdown with Rose and regretted any implication that Rose had erred in his report.”
You’ll notice that what’s altogether missing from the Rose report is any mention of prosecutorial difficulties or “spartan” working conditions or fears of long-running appeals–all the things that the city belatedly tried to cobble onto the decision in Wednesday’s press release. But also note that the explanation that the prosecutorial discretion not to charge Bunch is due to Bledsoe’s expressed “empathy for the tough situation the law enforcement agencies were experiencing,” [whatever that means] and “the difficulties of prosecuting Bunch for his actions, especially considering the accused’s long career in law enforcement, lack of a criminal record, and the limited prosecution resources available.”
It’s this last statement–about the difficulties of prosecuting Bunch because of his status as a veteran law enforcement officer–that begs scrutiny based, again, on Clouse’s first-rate reporting.
Observes the Center for Justice’s Chief Catalyst, Breean Beggs: “The city’s newly enunciated policy of prosecutions seems to be that if an accused person has factual grounds to mount a credible defense or legal grounds to mount a credible appeal, the city’s policy is not to use its ‘spartan’ resources prosecuting them. That would be an extraordinary policy for a city but, in theory, the city might be able to legally justify it as a cost savings measure, so long as it was applied evenly. The net effect would be that very few people would be prosecuted–only those who had no reasonable chance of being found not guilty. What would be illegal would be to apply that policy to preclude prosecution of only one class of people–law enforcement personnel. Doing so not only violates the democratic social contract we have with our government, it would also provide a new defense to every other alleged criminal in Spokane–that their constitutional rights of equal protection were being violated.”
Of course, the other thing that’s noteworthy in this context is that if there was a distinguished career in law enforcement behind Bunch’s badge, it was not one that prevented County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich from publicly apologizing for Bunch’s behavior on April 2nd when the embattled sergeant resigned just hours before Knezovich said he would have fired him. Indeed, the Sheriff told Clouse that he “sustained the findings of the alleged violations,” through his own investigation. Moreover, Clouse reported that while Bunch’s career had certainly been long, it was also a career checkered by disciplinary action against him for “filing false time sheets, lying to superiors, obstructing a Fish & Game officer and mishandling the investigation of a hit-and-run crash by an off-duty WSP trooper who had been drinking.”
Clouse also reported that Bunch, whose salary had reached $77,000 a year, had been accused in two separate incidents (one involving former County Prosecutor Don Brockett’s son-in-law) of using excessive force in slamming people onto the hoods of cars.
And that leads to the unpursued questions in this case about just what Bunch was doing in Mahalia Thompson’s yard on February 6th, the day after Thompson, who has a 14-year-old daughter, received a lewd phone call from someone she described as a pedophile.
“He’s pretending likes (sic) he’s looking for a dog,” a terrified Thompson told a 9-1-1 operator after she saw Bunch in her yard, “but he’s not, he went to the bedroom window.”
Bunch would later claim he was looking for a lost dog, but that hardly satisfied councilman Bob Apple who, when he learned Bunch wouldn’t be charged, was beside himself.
“If someone is peering in the windows of kids and there is no explanation why and when they get caught they fight back, any citizen in Spokane would be arrested and thrown in jail and charged with a couple of charges,” Apple told Clouse. “I don’t know how you have a double standard like that and allow it to exist.”
And that, plain and simple, is what this is. A double standard, a knee-jerk response to protecting a person simply because that person wears a law officer’s uniform. What Clouse’s fine reporting did, here, is pressure the city into reaffirming an attitude and, indeed, a policy that uniformed officers are held to a different standard than the one you and I could expect if we were the ones skulking around someone’s yard and then obstructing and resisting arrest when the police arrived. This “double standard,” as Apple put it, has been long suspected but is now corroborated as much by the “prosecutorial discretion” not to charge Bunch as it is by the city’s tortured and empty explanations for that choice. That’s not going to make the terrified (and understandably outraged) Ms. Thompson, or anybody else, sleep any better.
If there’s any silver lining in this story it comes from Sheriff Knezovich and from Tom Clouse. But here’s the thing about Clouse’s fine work, as powerful as it has been here: All journalism can do is inform citizens about the things they need to know to hold people–in this case elected and appointed public officials–accountable. That’s the hard part, the accountability, and it’s up to all of us. We have to take it from here.
–tjc
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