Nick Metz, a 32-year veteran of the Seattle Police Department who is now the chief of police in Colorado’s third biggest city, violated SPD policy by failing to document an allegation of racially biased policing against Officer Cynthia Whitlatch, records obtained by The Stranger show.
On September 4, 2014, four community activists, including former State Representative Dawn Mason, met with then-Assistant Chief Metz and Captain Pierre Davis at the East Precinct. The activists had a purpose: They wanted redress for William Wingate, who Whitlatch had arrested in July as he walked through Capitol Hill with a golf club he used as a cane. They believed he was singled out because he was black.
“Now don’t tell me that [meeting] wasn’t about racial bias,” Mason told me in August. “Come on. Everything I said was racial.”
On October 21, police chief Kathleen O’Toole sent a letter to Metz notifying him that she’d agreed with the internal investigation’s finding that he should have documented the complaints. Department policy, in the wake of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the SPD, contains a section expressly written to mandate the reporting of any allegation of racial bias.
The chief said in a statement that she sees Metz’ failure to follow the policy as an innocent mistake.
“He simply did not document the incident in a GO report as required by policy,” O’Toole said. “I have discussed the finding of this technical policy violation with Chief Metz and I have no reason to doubt his good intentions in his response to community members’ concerns. I consider this matter closed.”
Metz is now the chief of police in Aurora, Colorado. He declined to comment.
The department doesn’t seem the least bit concerned with an outstanding, glaring inconsistency: SPD itself is now on record confirming that the community activists made an allegation of biased policing in that September meeting. But Davis—who is still with the department, as the captain of the Southwest Precinct—is on record making the bizarre claim that no one ever brought race up. The activists say that’s bullshit.
Davis isn’t facing any misconduct findings as a result of this investigation.
Office of Professional Accountability Director Pierce Murphy, who oversees investigations into department personnel, refused to comment when asked about the contradiction.
But he did acknowledge that the outcome of the case is “convoluted… there are intersecting policies.”
Initially, Murphy reached a straightforward conclusion: He sustained two separate misconduct findings against both Metz and Davis, respectively, for 1) failure to report misconduct and 2) failure to document an allegation of racially biased policing.
But he went on to change his findings, twice.
On July 23, the day after a meeting to discuss the case with members of the chain of command, Murphy amended his findings—exonerating Davis because of a single line in the SPD’s policy manual that requires officers to report misconduct “to a supervisor or directly to OPA.”
According to Murphy, this means Davis had no obligation of his own to report the misconduct allegations against Whitlatch—since Metz, his supervisor, was already aware of them.
Try to square that with what Murphy told me back in early 2015, when I first asked him about the department’s complete and utter failure to investigate Whitlatch up until that point: “There is a clear policy that any SPD employee, when a member of the community expresses an allegation or complaint or dissatisfaction with the conduct of an officer, whether they want to go to OPA or not, they’ve got an affirmative duty to notify OPA that they’ve been told of this complaint.”
Five days later, Murphy amended his findings again. He looked back at interview transcripts and decided, he said, that it’s unclear whether the community activists ever alleged any act of misconduct had taken place.
“I think this shows how much more work the city has to do,” said Joey Gray, one of the community members who tried to warn the department about Whitlatch and seek redress for Wingate. She’s currently the Director of the Daybreak Star Native American center. “For so much community work to be put into this one incident, and then to have the feeble response of the institution that’s supposed to be looking out for citizens—that’s a call to do more.”
You can read Murphy’s final, twice-amended certification memo in the case here. The department took two months to disclose this single document, finally delivering it on Monday.
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