For the fourth time in the nearly two years since she joined the department, police chief Kathleen O'Toole has overruled the disciplinary findings of the department's civilian-led watchdog, the Office of Professional Accountability.
In an interview, the head of the OPA, Pierce Murphy, defended his conclusion that three officers who opened fire at a man driving a car, on the night of New Year's Eve in 2014, did not have enough evidence to believe the man was the one shooting at them.
Essentially—and this is me paraphrasing, not his words—Murphy believes the officers were too quick, under department policy, to use deadly force: too trigger-happy. And they could have mistakenly killed an African-American bystander.
In judging what a reasonable police officer would have done in that situation, "It was not reasonable for them to decide to open fire on the people in that car," Murphy said. He recommended 15 day suspensions.
O'Toole disagreed. In a letter, she said she wouldn't have acted any differently in the same situation.
"I did not engage in what the chief and what the SPOG [Seattle Police Officers Guild] president called 20/20 hindsight," Murphy said. "That's not what I'm supposed to do, and it's certainly not what I did."
To review: On December 31, 2014, three officers—Anthony Belgarde, Christopher Brown, and Michelle Sieg—were in the midst of a questioning a man in Rainier Valley when bullets whizzed by their heads. They crouched down and, within seconds, fired back at a car moving toward them. Here's the video:
The officers trained their fire at the driver's area of the car—in effect, firing at a Cornielous Morris, the African-American man who was driving, who they could not see at the time in the glare of the headlights. It turned out that Morris was the target, not the source of, of the gunshots. The occupant of another car, out of view of the officers, was firing on Morris—that assailant was later arrested.
Morris jumped out of the car, somehow unharmed, and yelled at the officers that someone in a car behind him was shooting at him.
Any use of deadly force by Seattle police officers is investigated by the department through multiple prongs, under the process created by federal reforms. In this case, the Force Review Board—an internal panel made up of officers—considered what happened and referred it to the Office of Professional Accountability—the civilian-led watchdog, headed by Murphy—for an investigation into possible violations of policies on use of force.
Murphy concluded that the officers reasonably feared for their lives, which is one element that justifies use of deadly force under the SPD's policies.
But even if that element exists, the policy doesn't grant officers license to shoot at whatever happens to be nearby. Murphy found they had no concrete reason to believe the vehicle itself was the source of the gunfire.
"They didn't see a gun in anybody's hands, or muzzle flashes coming out of the car, or any other indication that the car was the source of the gunfire," he said, citing the OPA's interviews with the officers. "Why that car? Could it be a parked car? Could it be someone in a house?" As he wrote in his findings memo (PDF):
The only correlation known to named employee #2 [Brown] at the time between the gunfire and the car was temporal and spatial proximity. He saw the car after hearing the sound of the shots and observed that the car was coming from the same direction as the shots. Other than this, named employee #2 had insufficient factual basis to conclude that the driver or other occupants of the vehicle were acting or threatening to cause death or serious physical injury, or that they had the means or instrumentalities to do so.
Murphy said he "very explicitly and cautiously" did not consider any factors that the officers weren't aware of at the time; he did consider that officers were on heightened alert that night, due to recent shootings in the area and later-discredited rumors of "Kill a Pig Night" talk on social media. Graham v. Connor, a 1989 Supreme Court ruling, mandates that officers be judged for their use of force based on the perspective of an officer on the scene, "rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight."
The issues at play—whether officers were justified in firing at a car they reasonably believed to be a imminent threat—are similar to those in a 2014 Los Angeles case. In that instance, amid a manhunt for rogue cop Christopher Dorner, eight officers opened fire on a car they believed matched the description of Dorner's pickup truck. Two women delivering newspapers were injured, one seriously.
In that case, LAPD chief Charlie Beck and a civilian commission agreed with one another: The officers were too quick to assume that Dorner himself was driving the truck. "I sympathize with the officers, but I have a very high standard for the application of deadly force and the shooting did not meet that standard," Beck said.
"I'm not advocating for 100 percent certainty before an officer fires his or her weapon," Murphy said. "But the standard is reasonableness... They have to have a reasonable belief that the source of the threat is what they're firing at."
