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Grant, right, side-eyes Burgess, left, during a recent debate.Seattle Channel

"It's time to fire Cynthia Whitlatch," said citywide council candidate Jon Grant in a statement this morning, joining the Seattle-King County NAACP in calling for her dismissal.

"The Seattle Police Department and the City of Seattle need to start taking actions that restore the trust of the community in the police department," Grant continued. "This starts with firing Cynthia Whitlatch for inexcusable behavior harassing a 70 year old African American man using a golf club for a cane." (Wingate was 69 at the time of his arrest.)

Grant—who earned 31 percent of the vote in the August primary to make it into the November general election (all praise due to the SECB)—is endorsing a recommendation from the SPD's Office of Professional Accountability that Whitlatch's employment be terminated. That recommendation arrived in July after nearly six months of investigation into the incident. Whitlatch pleaded her case before Chief Kathleen O'Toole on August 21. Now, it's up to O'Toole to make a decision.

Incumbent Tim Burgess, the council president and a former Seattle police officer who Grant is challenging, did not respond to a request for comment on whether Whitlatch should be fired. When the two candidates debated this issue at a forum earlier this year, Burgess retorted, "You’ll learn if you ever get to the city council that council members don’t discipline city employees whether they’re police officers or anybody else. I think we’re making great progress."

Grant shot back in a recent Seattle Channel debate: "Tim Burgess is correct that it's not the job of the city council to fire those folks, but it is their job to set policy to enable the police chief and the OPA, the auditor, to take corrective action."

Yes, Burgess and the city council members don't make decisions to discipline individual city employees.

But Burgess does sit on the influential and secret Labor Relations Policy Committee, which is overseeing active labor negotiations with the Seattle Police Officers' Guild (SPOG), the union that represents rank-and-file officers. The ability of the city to discipline officers depends in large part on the outcome of those negotiations. SPOG alleged last week that because the OPA took too long to investigate Whitlatch, their contract with the city prevents the department from imposing any penalty on her.

I'll update this post if I hear back from Burgess.