Aaaargh, what a punishing event that must have been for people willing to show up and participate. Thanks for covering it, and so properly acidly.

Here is what I posted before.

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McGinn will do nothing, nor will the city council, nor the OPA, nor OPARB, nor Holmes. They're beholden to and terrified of any manner of political or personal retribution from the SPOG leadership. Nothing will change without a citizen initiative of some sort that ties the hands of the city as to the manner of contract agreement that they are allowed to engage with SPOG.

Social justice and civic groups need to do a city initiative that mandates the city is only allowed to enter into SPOG contracts that include the following;

A) Independent civilian leader/commissioner of SPD that answers to and is appointed to fixed terms by the Council. Chief position is now second in command.

B) Civilian oversight/OPA that SPD has no authority, veto, input, or control over. Fair and transparent appeals process, but the ability and authority to discipline police has to come from outside of the police department. The City Council appoints the senior staff and directors of OPA. Police have no control over who is placed in these roles.

C) Mandatory, better than state legal requirement compliance for SPD with public records requests, including those related to OPA actions.

D) Civilian oversight and review of OPA. Let each member of the Council nominate one person for a term, and the Mayor one as well. They city council as a whole signs off on each proposed member by simple majority vote. This 3rd party review board should be stakeholders with legal backgrounds that have full access to review and if needed disclose to the public and media irregularities or problems with the OPA process.

That's how you fix it. That way SPOG has nothing they can do about it, because the city would be unable to legally enter a contract without such terms. SPOG can make all the fuss they want. Those four points aren't there, they get no new deal. The 99.5% of SPD that are good, fine cops will be unaffected by all this. It's the bad cops that would need to be on notice.

Are local groups going to stand up and do something since McGinn and the Council are unwilling to?

Or do we wait for the Federal government to smother SPD to death and cost the city millions with an uncertain end result that may not get minorities what they really need?

The OPA is fucking useless, which makes the OPARB even uselesser. The only accountability facing the SPD is our slow and expensive legal system, and unless you can afford your day in court, the SPD will continue to get away with murder (literally).

@4 Given that he is I believe a sworn officer? Probably only God.

This is why the head of SPD can't be a cop.

@4: The mayor.

And hell yeah, Joe. SPOG is the problem no one wants to address. There's nothing fundamentally broken with police unions. They function in many other jurisdictions without imposing a stranglehold on management. But the structure of the contract and the current leadership at SPOG -- and that means you, Rich O'Neill -- are the main reasons we'll soon be operating under a consent decree.

Look at the DoJ report -- less than 10% of the officers in SPD are responsible for the majority of use-of-force issues. Who's been protecting them? Take a guess...

Look for every hood who has been hassled, there's a bunch of 13 year old kids quietly trying to get to school and get an education so they can move the hell out of the ghetto.

The problem with SPD -- and PDs everwhere in Washington -- is they have been too tepid in dealing with the hard criminals that rule the streets.

Rather than Community Policing, I would have a general Crackdown on all the thugs, psychos and vagrants that have camped permanently on the sidewalks, making it impossible for regular folk to walk the streets at night.

In my estimate the problem is collusion between property owners downtown, who want to keep their values high, and the Mayor's Office starting with Nickles who clearly allowed a whole half of Seattle to decay into criminal anarchy.

"It was literally the most worthless presentation I have ever sat through in my two years of professionally sitting through worthless presentations. "

I am so sorry... So sorry that this shitshow is all you got, at what should have been a pivotal public meeting to begin fixing problems and healing the community.

Most of all, I'm sorry that your line above made me laugh out loud, when the situation is so dire. Seriously, I love that line and its emphatic characterization of the proceedings, not to mention the shittier aspects of your job.

It's great living in a Dictatorship.

Great article, Cienna - and the Best Headline Ever.

It's true, that's how Seattle likes to do things... or rather, how Seattle likes to pretend that it's doing something when really it's just sitting around taking meetings...

That sounds truly awful. It also sounds like it wasn't so much a failure of public process, but a complete lack of public process. What did you get? Not what I expected to hear about: the usual interminable meeting filled with thoughts from the bad, the mad, the good, and the brilliant, but a ridiculous irrelevant condescending presentation which took up over half the meeting, followed by a poorly facilitated q lacking any a.