Ready or Not, Seattle Police Department is About to be Freed from the Consent Decree

We are now in the thirteenth year of the consent decree between the City of Seattle and the U.S. Department of Justice to remedy various unconstitutional acts by the Seattle Police Department. In 2012 when this process began, it’s doubtful anyone imagined it would go on this long – especially not U.S. District Court Judge James Robart, who has overseen every moment of it. But Wednesday morning, at a status conference called by Robart, he and representatives of both the city and the feds seemed to agree that the end may finally be in sight.

In September of 2023, Robart issued an order laying out fifteen steps that SPD would need to complete before he would terminate the consent decree. This week both the DOJ and the city told him that only one item remains incomplete: submitting an updated crowd-control policy that incorporates learnings from the events of the summer of 2020.

SPD now claims that it knows the policy it wants to issue, but doing so requires changes to city law. That’s because in 2021 the City Council passed an ordinance broadly prohibiting SPD from using so-called “less lethal” weapons for crowd control (with only a few exceptions). The city argues that SPD officers must have less-lethal crowd control weapons available to them – and that public safety experts (and the DOJ) agree.

The 2021 ordinance also prohibited SPD’s partner agencies, such as the King County Sheriff’s Office and the Bellevue Police Department, from using less-lethal weapons when assisting SPD with an incident under a “mutual aid” agreement. According to Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, all of SPD’s partner organizations have informed the department that they will not respond to mutual aid requests from the city with that rule in place. So the next time there is a large-scale protest in Seattle, SPD will get no help from its peer law enforcement agencies.

https://www.postalley.org/2024/10/17/ready-or-not-seattle-police-department-is-about-to-be-freed-from-the-consent-decree/