Farrell makes many good points and proposals concerning public safety and how to fix the inequities of the criminal justice system. But this piece is titled "Seattle Can't Afford to Backslide on Police Accountability... Again," and it is on the issue of police accountability that her understanding and analysis fail.

Farrell states:

"Advocates for police reform were successful four years ago in getting our City Council to strengthen accountability measures."

If by strengthen she means some marginal improvement over what existed prior to June 2017 then that would be a correct statement.

However, this statement ignores the fact that the 2017 accountability measures were severely compromised well before the SPOG contract further whittled them down in the fall of 2018. In brief, the original 2017 legislation (1) gave no power to the Community Police Commission (CPC), kept the CPC isolated from the community, and legally ensconced the requirement that the CPC not speak about individual cases, (2) left selection of the OPA director up to the mayor, not the community, (3) provided no way for complainants to appeal bad decisions or investigations, and (4) allowed the OPA director to decide how many police they want to use as investigators of police (!), as opposed to simply banning any current or recent officers from being investigators.

Her analysis also ignores the fact that in 2017 Lorena Gonzalez, the CPC, and others decided to investigate accountability systems in other cities, but excluded Newark, New Jersey from consideration (despite visiting NYC!) because it was too much of a community based and civilianized model. Her analysis also ignored the flawed process that allowed Andrew Myerberg to become OPA director, despite a sordid history of being a police apologist (see: https://hjgale.tumblr.com/post/643859576948654080/february-2021-interviews-with-opa-dir-myerberg )

Farrell goes on to state that under her mayoral administration "I’m extremely clear about where Seattle cannot afford to compromise accountability: we cannot allow the next SPOG contract to hamstring the Office of Police Accountability by unacceptably limiting staffing levels for investigators." This entirely misses the point: we should have no police investigating police, and decisions like these should not rest in the hands of a single individual appointed by the mayor.

The fact that the SPD has killed more people in the decade after the start of reform (after the 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams) versus the decade before, along with no real accountability (reprimands do not count as accountability!) for all the SPD beatings administered over the last year shows how much of a failure this system is. Farrell's proposals will not change this.

We need community controlled accountability where the community chooses a police oversight board with real powers to investigate and discipline, where complainants have the right of appeal, and oversight directors are chosen through a community process, not via mayoral fiat.

See SeattleSTOP.org to see what this would look like and how we could do that in Seattle.

Sigh. We are so screwed.