In a milestone for the enforcement of Spokane’s revamped police oversight ordinance, Ombudsman Tim Burns files his first five closing reports.
Beginning today, Spokane citizens will finally get a chance to see what independent civilian oversight of the Spokane Police Department looks like in the hands of Tim Burns, the former California police officer that the City hired two years ago to be its police Ombudsman.
Today’s “milestone,” as City Council member Jon Snyder put it, was the delivery of the first handful of case “closing reports.” The reports provide the results of the Office of Police Ombudsman’s independent inquiry and assessment of citizen complaints filed against Spokane police officers.
The requirement to produce the reports was embedded within a major overhaul to the Ombudsman ordinance that the council passed unanimously last summer. Spokane’s police unions vigorously fought the changes, including a change strongly advocated by the Center for Justice and other public interest groups that instructs Burns’s office to produce its own reports about whether specific complaints had merit and whether police policies and procedure should be changed.
The Spokane Police Guild claims revisions to the ordinance violate the terms of its collective bargaining agreement with the city and has filed a grievance against the city as a result. In a closed session two weeks ago the grievance was subject to an arbitration hearing, the results of which have yet to be decided by the arbitrator.
Burns was on travel today, so it was left to his assistant, Jennifer Stum, to present the city council’s Public Safety Committee with the office’s first five closing reports.
1) From a November 18, 2010 complaint stemming from a residential search where officers were accused of verbally abusive conduct, refusing to display a search warrant, property damage and the seizure of marijuana being grown for medicinal purposes, Burns recommended that officers should bring extra copies of warrants and provide them “upon request to those affected by the search warrant.” He also recommended that if a same sex officers is available and a request to interact with a same sex officer is requested, that it be accommodated.
2) After a December 18, 2010 collision in a snowy South Hill intersection, a motorist whose vehicle was struck by a skidding police car claim to have been harmed in the effort to obtain compensation because the city was late in providing a copy of the accident report. Burns agreed with the police department’s decision to reclassify the complaint as an “inquiry” but also recommended more efficient processing of reports in such instances.
3) After a December 23rd incident, street musicians lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman’s office regarding the alleged misconduct of an officer responding to a noise complaint against the street musicians who were performing in downtown Spokane. Although Burns said he could not resolve the “he said she said” dispute over the officer’s demeanor, he made several recommendations to the police department regarding training, officer education about the noise ordinance, and “public outreach.”
4) From a New Year’s morning complaint in which a police officer was accused of striking a man in the chest with a rifle butt, Burns found that the injury reported was inconsistent with the “type of injury the complainant would have received had the complainant been struck with the butt of the gun the officer was carrying at the time of the incident” and that “the complainants consumption of alcoholic beverage (sic) impaired the complainants decision-making process.”
5) From a January 5, 2011 complaint involving a remark by an officer called to a Child & Protective Services (CPS) office in an incident where a citizen was attempting a citizen’s arrest on a caseworker, Burns concurred with the Police Department’s decision to investigate it as an “inquiry” rather than a complaint.
In her report to the Public Safety Committee, Stum said the Ombudsman’s office, though not finished preparing closing reports for 2010 complaints, was putting special attention toward keeping pace with the 2011 complaints.
The full copies of the five closing reports can be found here, as attachments to the monthly Ombudsman report that Stum presented this afternoon.
—CFJ
