It’s a small miracle that Shonto Pete can walk, let alone talk, but his presence and his voice are a living reminder of City Hall’s moral bankruptcy on the issue of police violence.
Put yourself in his shoes. A young Native American husband and father, he was shot in the head while fleeing from a drunken, off-duty Spokane police officer who claimed that Shonto Pete was trying to steal his truck. Only Pete was tried and acquitted of trying to steal the truck. Then a jury, without knowledge of Pete’s acquittal, turned around and found the cop not guilty of first degree assault and reckless endangerment. As if it’s just fine for people, let alone police officers, to run after and open fire (in a residential neighborhood, no less) on people who’ve done nothing violent toward the person with the gun.
The gun, in this case, was one that officer Jay Olsen was legally allowed to conceal and carry on account of his position as a Spokane police officer. 
As city councilman Bob Apple told The Inlander’s Nicholas Deshais this week, “I’ve been appalled at this thing the whole way through. The courts did a great injustice,” adding: “There’s the stench of rotting flesh. I smell it. People smell it.”
For now, that stench is on our judicial system and it lingers in the air at City Hall, where neither the council nor the mayor have exercised the moral leadership to address it in a way that smacks of decency and fair play.
Because he was acquitted of shooting Pete, Olsen got to collect $153,000 of back pay, covering the period between his suspension after the shooting and his resignation, a resignation entered in lieu of termination. Shonto Pete not only had to endure a near-fatal injury, but now owes nearly $40,000 in legal and medical bills.
Technically, at least, the city is off the hook in Pete’s case because, a week ago Friday, Federal Judge Edward Shea concluded, in a near-apologetic ruling, that because Olsen was off-duty the city couldn’t be held liable for his actions.
Judge Shea’s decision, for me at least, prompted something of a flashback to a very tense but, in many ways, amazing gathering at the N.A.T.I.V.E. project in west Spokane a year ago this week. That was when I first met Shonto, his wife, and his mother as they sat in a large circle and listened as many fellow Native Americans in Spokane shared their sorrow and terror, frankly, at not just what had happened to Pete, but about what has happened to them and their family members over the years at the hands of Spokane police. Coming just days after Olsen’s acquittal, the emotions were raw.
One of the more memorable things said that evening was from Colville Tribe member Shelly Boyd. “It was wrong what happened to Shonto,” she said. “It was so wrong that wrong isn’t even the word. Maybe there’s an Indian word for it, that I don’t know.”
The police chief was there. The assistant police chief was there. The city council president was there. The mayor was there.
What Shea’s ruling reminded me of is what Mayor Verner, who is capable of deep listening, said when she got her chance to speak near the end of the evening. Our mayor, who speaks as soulfully and eloquently as any politician, began by acknowledging the honor of her sharing “sacred ground” with her Native American hosts. Though she acknowledged hearing a call for an independent inquiry, Verner said what she really thought she could subscribe to was a workshop. Right. A workshop to educate people without legal training on how the legal system works (and doesn’t work) because “we can’t reform it until we know what it is.”
How’s that for leadership? I think I can fairly describe the reaction in the room as collective, silent groan.
The last person to speak that evening was Shonto, and he spoke only a few words in a soft voice before ending the evening with a farewell song.
What struck me then, and since, is not Pete’s anger, but his quiet resolve and dignity. There is a cinematic quality to Shonto’s story that is of the same timber as Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil, John Berendt’s elegant and quirky account of the mysteries and intrigues surrounding a 1981 fatal shooting in Savannah, another town where everybody seems to know everybody else. In Berendt’s book justice arrives like a fog emanating from the Spanish moss of a cemetery.
Justice hasn’t arrived in Spokane, yet, and perhaps if it does it will fall from the sky like volcanic ash. Whenever I see Shonto Pete, his very bearing tells me that he is the living symbol of a movement, a resilient human witness to the bitter pain and anger that resides throughout our community because the city’s leaders just don’t care enough about this unaddressed and deepening wrong to move with the courage necessary to resolve it, and to begin restoring public trust in the police department.
Would it have been unreasonable for the city to settle Shonto’s claim by offering to pay his legal and medical bills? Would it be so unreasonable, now, to give the people of Spokane the independent police oversight they’ve been seeking for at least a generation?
Shonto didn’t take a turn on the bullhorn at Thursday’s gathering at a Spokane convenience store on North Division to memorialize the killing, four years ago, of Otto Zehm. That’s because Shonto Pete is not a shouter. He was there, he told me, not only to honor Otto and his family, but to be with the many friends and supporters who’ve been present with him over the past three years. He’s also consistently shown up at rallies to lend his name to the demands for independent police oversight.
In light of Judge Shea’s ruling, I asked him Thursday, as we stood near the Zip Trip gas pumps, about his spirits.
“My spirits are high,” he said.”Just like when I got shot, I never gave up then and I won’t give up now. You can shoot me, you can kick me, you can do whatever you want to me. You can cut my hair, you can take my language. But you can’t take my spirit.”
–Tim Connor
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