After questions about the Seattle Police Department’s oversight
process arose earlier this year—following allegations that the
SPD’s investigation into George Patterson’s drug arrest last January was tainted—Mayor Greg Nickels and Seattle
City Council President Nick Licata both scrambled to assemble their own
police-accountability panels. The NAACP has also announced that it’s
creating a committee to police the police.
Nickels’s approach is the loudest, but probably useless when it
comes to ushering in a new era of police accountability. The mayor
rounded up a high-profile posse, the Blue Ribbon Task Force for the
Office of Professional Accountability, made up of big names like former
governor Gary Locke, former mayor Norm Rice, and Judge Terry
Carroll.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Nickels’s all-star team is stumbling
over the same hurdles that have plagued previous accountability panels
in Seattle. Nickels’s new panel is at the mercy of the Seattle Police
Officers’ Guild (SPOG), which, due to ongoing contract negotiations,
could block any of the panel’s recommendations from taking effect until
the next round of bargaining in 2009. What’s more, Nickels’s panel is
still waiting to hear back from the city about whether the SPOG
contract also prohibits them from getting open access to the SPD’s
files.
Some members of Nickels’s panel are already getting frustrated. At
their first meeting in July, Hubert Locke—a former UW
public-affairs professor—voiced his frustration with the red
tape. “We risk having the integrity of our entire process muted
[because] anything we do won’t happen until 2009. I don’t know if I’d
have agreed to sit on the panel [if I’d known that].”
While Nickels’s panel bangs its head against the police-contract
brick wall, Licata—along with Council Members Richard McIver and
David Della—are sidestepping SPOG. It makes sense that the group,
led by Licata, is savvier than Nickels’s panel: Licata’s been working
on police accountability for more than a decade, and he was there for
the birth of Seattle’s current police-accountability system, when
then–council member Jim Compton was working to devise an
oversight system to deal with SPOG’s barriers.
That system includes three levels of review—the Office of
Professional Accountability (OPA), the OPA’s civilian auditor, and the
OPA Review Board. The system works to the extent that the Patterson
investigations were able to keep accountability on the front burner
(and the front pages), which forced the remaining flaw, Nickels, into
the spotlight. So, Licata’s panel is sidestepping the dog and pony show
approach and—rather than engaging in another tiresome pissing
contest with SPOG—Licata is doing what Nickels should have done
in the first place. He’s working to gather up the authority to hold the
police chief accountable when the current three-tiered system makes it
clear that wrongdoing has occurred.
Last week, Licata and company sent a letter to Seattle Police Chief
Gil Kerlikowske, asking him to appear before the city council on a
quarterly basis and explain why he overturned the OPA’s recommendations
for officer discipline. The chief says he’ll need to check with SPOG
before he commits to any sort of review, but he’s agreed to meet with
members of the city council in the meantime.
While Nickels’s best-in-show panel runs in circles and Licata
tiptoes toward progress, the NAACP has also entered the fray, forming a
seven-member panel—working without the resources, constraints, or
credibility of the panels out of City Hall—composed of
sociologists, attorneys, and “victims of police brutality.” 
