“Nothing Magical”

An embattled city council “punts” on Ombudsman reform ordinance, as activists and Bob Apple fume.

By Tim Connor
After waiting an extra week to take up a new ordinance that would give independent investigatory and reporting powers to the city’s Office of Police Ombudsman, the Spokane City Council last night voted 6 to 1 to defer action for another month.

The deferral prompted a blistering outburst from the ordinance sponsor, Councilman Bob Apple, who chided both his fellow council members and the city’s legal staff for essentially thwarting a long-anticipated vote on the measure. It also led to a heated, though civil, discussion outside the council chambers where Jon Snyder, Amber Waldref, and Richard Rush (three new progressives on the council who say they favor reforms), tried to explain their votes to defer. Some of their supporters listened, some argued with them, and some just angrily walked out of the room because they didn’t want to hear any more.

The upshot of the evening’s politics is that a measure that would have made substantial improvements in the city’s capacity to independently oversee its police department was iced. It didn’t get to a scheduled vote because a clear majority of the city council express serious doubts about whether it could survive legal challenges from the city’s police guilds. In the interests of full disclosure, the Center for Justice has worked closely with members of the Spokane City Council to try to bring a new ordinance forward. CFJ believes an amended version of the ordinance (which Apple supported) that was deferred Monday night would significantly strengthen the city’s police oversight. The Center also believes that it was well-crafted to resist legal challenges.

The evening’s fireworks came after two hours of public testimony that was  in large doses eloquent, angry, and at times deeply moving. Public testimony solidly supported the proposed new ordinance and no one testified in opposition to it.

For the most part, members of the council listened attentively. The majority of them were clearly shaken, especially by what they were hearing from citizens describing their experiences at the hands of Spokane police. There are at least two sides to every story but three testimonials, in particular, left council members so taken aback that one of them observed, “you could hear a pin drop” as they listened.

For starters, there was a deeply emotional David Edwards, the Community Building supervisor whose story has, in part, been written about here and in The Inlander.

Edwards began by politely removing his baseball cap, with its “509″ lettering above the bill, and using it as a prop to talk about his affection for Spokane, where he has lived and worked for twenty years. His first purpose was to talk about how his traffic stop by police just minutes after leaving the city’s Martin Luther King Day march. Edwards was cited for allegedly making a left turn without using his turn signal, a decision by a Spokane police officer “which turned into a very, very bad day for me,” he said, with the officers’ guns drawn and pointed at him.

“They know there’s nothing wrong with this ordinance. They know that they have snowed you if you don’t vote to pass it. But I am willing to give you those four weeks if you actually think you can put more teeth in it, because that’s what you say you’re going to do. I know you can’t. I know you’d be wise to just pass what’s before you.”–Councilman Bob Apple.

“Has anybody in here ever been so scared that he pissed on himself?” Edwards asked. He turned to the audience in the chamber. “Anybody? Raise your hand? Scared to death? Anybody?”

Edwards then quickly dove into the errors and suspicious accusations that appear in his arrest report–details, he said, that he tried to call to the attention of the the city’s police Ombudsman, Tim Burns, when he met with Burns the day after the harrowing incident.

Burns was seated several rows back in the council chamber as Edwards took him to task for how the former California policeman had handled his complaint. As Edwards rattled off his pointed questions, Council President Joe Shogan interrupted him to say that if he was going to address issues to Burns, “you’re going to have to bring him up here with you.”

Edwards didn’t detect the sarcasm in Shogan’s question and, without missing a beat, he happily invited Burns down front, to join him in front of the council.

“Well,” Shogan interrupted, as the chamber erupted in laughter. “That’s not what we’re here for.”

But the council chamber became silent as Edwards, speaking with deep emotion, pleaded with the council and his community to understand what happened to him and how it made him and his family feel.

“When I came in,” he said, about his first meeting with Burns, “I was really upset. So, Mister Burns gave me this hope. This hope. This hope. He told me that, ‘oh, I’m a show and tell kind of guy. You know what I’m saying? The police got to show me. Because I’m really upset. My son’s upset. My son seen me leave and go to the march, happy and everything. I come back home, I’m pissy and I’ve pissed on myself, I’m soaking wet and I’ve been interrogated by a police officer for a whole hour. And I didn’t even do nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Not only that but I got sold out by Mister Burns,” Edwards said. “For what? For nothing. So we talk about the ordinance. The ordinance is never going to work if we don’t have somebody in there making it work. Mister Burns is going to use this excuse about what the police won’t let him do. You see, you know what I’m sayin’? That lets him keep the citizens at bay because all he’s got to say is the police won’t allow me to do this. But I ask Mister Burns. He could at least talk to my witnesses.”

“This is all I got out of my whole case,” he continued, holding up a May 10th letter from Spokane Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick in which she, defended the actions of the police officers involved.

“It’s a letter that says the case is closed. Now, do you think this makes me feel better? Do you think this makes our community feel better about the police? Do you think what Mister Burns has did [sic] has brought us closer together, or further apart? This is it.”

The upshot of the evening’s politics is that a measure that would have made substantial improvements in the city’s capacity to independently oversee its police department was iced. It didn’t get to a scheduled vote because a clear majority of the city council express serious doubts about whether it could survive legal challenges from the city’s police guilds.

Minutes later, a tall man with a black cowboy hat approached the podium and gave his name as Jim Donais. In a voice streaked with anger, this is what Donais said:

“A couple years ago I was at the north Spokane library, as a single dad. I was identified as somebody who’d just robbed a video store at Northpointe. When I went out to the parking lot to my car, there was about a dozen cop cars out there. I was told to shut up and stand in front of a cop car. I couldn’t say anything. They stood about 15 to 20 feet in front of me. I was standing there. I did nothing, and I said nothing.  And I was tasered. And they did not shut it off.

“My hands went up like this. And another cop gets out his gun. ‘Touch those wires and your dead.’ So, I’m standing there. And it wasn’t a thirty second burst. It was continuous, continuous, minutes, until the batteries were dead. Then they tackled me, cuffed me and put me in the back of the car, where I wait for a couple hours, with my three kids in the library.

After two hours they got the guy from the video store to come down and identify me.

‘That’s not him.’

‘Are you sure it’s not him? Is there any way it could be him.’

‘No, it’s not him, and it’s not his car.’

So, now they know they’ve screwed up. Do they let me go? No. I wait for another hour, two hours, for their captain to show up. He opens the door. He says, ‘you’re pretty tough aren’t you?’

I said, ‘what are you talking about?’

He says, well, they ran that taser out on you, and you didn’t fall down. I found out that’s why they didn’t stop. It’s because I didn’t fall. You’re supposed to fall when you’re tasered. I didn’t know that.

I said, ‘well look, you know I didn’t do anything, why don’t you let me go?’

He said, ‘we’re going to let you go, but we got a problem. You see it’s our policy that once we’ve had somebody in the back seat of a patrol car, we have to charge him with something. And we have no idea what to charge you with.’ And that’s a quote. That’s his very words. So, a little while later they charge me with obstructing a police officer. The only thing I obstructed was the darts in my chest.

Anyway, that’s a felony. And later they told me they would drop these charges if I would sign a statement saying all the police reports were true. I said I can’t do that, that’s a lie. I wouldn’t do that. What I did, was sign, ‘they’re all liars.’ They thought I signed my name, and that’s when I walked out, that’s where it stood. But I didn’t sign their lies.”

Donais thought he was finished and walked away. After Shogan called out the name Kaitlyn Jellison, Donais stopped and yelled back at the council.

“The Spokane police are out of control.”

Those words hung in the air as a slight young woman walked to the podium.

It was Kaitlyn Jellison and she described how, just this past Friday, she was beaten, arrested, and threatened by a policeman. This happened, she claimed, after her father was wrongly arrested and she tried to approach him, outside, as the police were taking him away, in order to say goodbye to him.

“They arrested me for obstruction of an officer and they did not read either me or my father our rights. On the car ride over there I asked the officer why I was not read my rights, and why I was being arrested.

“He said that just because he was a cop, what he said goes and what I say doesn’t matter. He told me that I didn’t have rights. That I was just a stupid, naive 19-year-old girl who didn’t know what I was talking about, and that I did not have rights, that my only right was for me to shut up, is what he told me. And I told him that I knew my rights; that I knew I had rights. And he just repeatedly kept telling me I have no rights, that I was a 19 year-old girl and I did not have rights. And he also threatened to rape me when I got in jail, so I made it a point not to go back into the cell. I made it a point for me to stay on the phone and for me to get out of jail that night because I was so afraid something was going to happen to me.”

Kaitlyn was followed to the podium by her mother, Shar Lichty. Lichty happens to be an intern with the Peace & Justice Action League of Spokane, the lead organization in the coalition working to reform civilian police oversight in Spokane. Her voice cracking with emotion, Lichty talked about her work for PJALS gathering the stories of people in Spokane who say they’ve been abused by Spokane police.

“I never expected this to happen to one of my own,” she said.

It shouldn’t go without saying that the stories offered by David Edwards, Jim Donais and Kaitlyn Jellison were from their sides of stories that are, by definition, one-sided and incomplete.

Other stories, such as Shonto Pete’s and Otto Zehm’s are better known and, by now, are more balanced in their factual inventories by weight of what journalists and judicial proceedings have brought to light. But, for one night at least, Edwards, Donais, and Jellison’s stories seemed to overshadow the oft-repeated legal arguments about what the city can, and cannot do, to hold its police officers accountable. Their testimony provided a remarkable emotional frame around what, in the end, was to many present just another maddening hearing by a city government that, on whole, seems hopelessly cowed by its police unions and its own legal department.

“Has anybody in here ever been so scared that he pissed on himself?” David Edwards asked. He turned to the audience in the chamber. “Anybody? Raise your hand? Scared to death? Anybody?”

A continuing thread in this story line is epitomized by new council member Jon Snyder. On the one hand, Snyder fielded Edwards’s testimony with great sensitivity and compassion. Here’s what he said:

“All the testimony was extremely compelling. Mr. Edwards testimony, in particular, really reaches me because I’ve known him for a while, and trusted him with the safety of my children. He taught my son soccer. I’ve known him for a number of years and the humiliation that he experienced and related tonight is unconscionable and I feel deeply for him, for having to reveal that in a public setting. And I don’t want to single him out. I think everybody who spoke tonight and brought their stories, it took great courage and great determination to do that and air that in a public setting. And I commend them.”

But then Snyder explained, in his words, why the council wouldn’t be voting this night on an ordinance that would give actual investigative and reporting powers to the police ombudsman with whom Edwards had lodged his complaint about his treatment by Spokane police. The goal of the ordinance is stuck in a problematic legal analysis, Snyder said, wherein the city’s efforts to provide independence to the ombudsman is confounded by state laws requiring collective bargaining and open public records.

Snyder’s legal analysis is not one that attorneys for the Center for Justice and PJALS concur with. But it is one that is promoted, principally, by the city’s legal department which strongly asserts the position that a change  to strengthen the independence of the Ombudsman’s office would be met with a lawsuit from the city’s police guilds.

“People have mentioned fear of the guild,” Snyder explained. “And I understand that this fear is real. But what really prevents substantive action here is this state of our state laws and how they relate to working conditions. Now, I’m ready to take this to the PERC (Public Employment Relations Commission) board. I’m ready to go out there and see if we can figure out a good way to narrow the working conditions that accommodates–what we’re asking for is really modest, really, as far as police accountability is concerned. And it frustrates me that it can’t be effectively accomplished with just four votes up here.”

Notwithstanding Snyder’s frustration with the law, it was immediately clear in the chamber that public frustration with the council’s hand-wringing on this long-debated issue is at least as great. For at least three years, lawyers for the Center for Justice have argued that there actually is room, under the state’s collective bargaining law, to give the ombudsman’s office much more power than the council and Mayor Mary Verner have thus far been willing to assign to the office. The broad coalition of citizen groups working on reforming police oversight are aligned behind the Center’s legal analysis. Yet, the council and Mayor have consistently followed the lead of the City Attorney’s office–an office that has been recently and harshly criticized by the U.S. Justice Department for its lockstep support of Spokane police officers.

When he closed public testimony Monday night, Shogan said that, by his count, there may be as many as a half dozen versions of a new Ombudsman ordinance circulating before the council.

Thus, he said, the council wasn’t just going “to pass something, to pass it, knowing that it has legal holes in it.”

“So, it’s going to take us more time,” he added, “and it should. This is obviously very important. It’s important to the citizens in general, to those that have complaints, to the office of the Ombudsman, and to the chief, and to the mayor, and to us as council members. So, there’s nothing magical about May 24th.”

But whether there was anything magical about Monday or not, much of the frustration from citizens in the back of the chamber after the meeting arose out of a cynical suspicion that there’d been a last ditch move in City Hall to kill or at least remove any of the sharper teeth from a new ordinance.

Shogan’s next to last request for a motion to defer the ordinance brought a testy interruption from Councilman Bob Apple, who’d sponsored the ordinance.

“Nah!” Apple blurted, “I would like to testify, or comment at least.”

“I’m sorry Mr. Apple,” Shogan sniped back, “I didn’t see your pen wagging.”

“You know,” Apple said, “anybody who wanted to testify at this hearing and on this matter knew tonight was the night. And thank you for coming.”

Apple then turned to go after the unnamed city lawyers whom, he clearly believed, were working to undermine council support for the new ordinance.

“Now if those people, and we all know who they are, wanted to come forward and share their opinions with us, they have every right to. But they also don’t want to do that either. They want to hide behind their positions here at the city, their titles, and I’d like to say their responsibilities–but lack of.

“They know there’s nothing wrong with this ordinance. They know that they have snowed you if you don’t vote to pass it. But I am willing to give you those four weeks if you actually think you can put more teeth in it, because that’s what you say you’re going to do. I know you can’t. I know you’d be wise to just pass what’s before you.”

Apple cast the lone vote against the motion to defer.

As the meeting was breaking up I asked Councilwoman Amber Waldref if there had been an executive session with council members and city legal staff earlier in the day. She said there had not been, but that one or more city legal staff had met with her, Snyder, and councilman Richard Rush during the day. She acknowledged that the legal advice the three received influenced their votes to defer the ordinance. She also referenced Snyder’s public statements from the council dais as largely reflecting her views.

Apple’s parting blast clearly inspired the heated questioning in the Chase Gallery after the meeting.

There Snyder did most of the talking and, under questioning from veteran Spokane activist Marianne Torres, he disclosed that there actually is a second legal opinion from the city’s lawyers, apparently critiquing the proposed ordinance.

“When will it be made public?” Torres demanded, as a huddle of reporters and citizens looked on and listened in.

Snyder said the problem, from his perspective, is that if the legal analysis is made public, it would be used by those (presumably the police guilds) who would be motivated to challenge a new ordinance.

“Which is why,” he explained, “I am personally against releasing the second of the city attorneys’ opinions that was given to us. We don’t want to be giving the folks who want to challenge this a head start.”

Waldref indicated she agreed.

“Why give them a head start on the case law?” she asked Torres.

But Torres pressed her case, asking the council members about the spirit of their efforts to work with the coalition to bring forward a new ordinance that could strengthen the Ombudsman’s office and withstand legal challenges.

Snyder said he had been meeting with coalition members and been trying to work collaboratively.

“I just need you to realize,” he told her, “that there is a limitation to this collaboration in order to create the best possible result that just won’t write the [police] guild’s challenge for them.”

The early indication from the council is that one or more versions of a new ordinance will be taken up at the council’s meeting on June 21st.

–CFJ