Spokane Human Rights Commissioner Anwar Peace called it a “courageous conversation.”
Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall sat down publicly last night with people who have lost loved ones to police violence. The chief said his department can and must use less deadly force, and outlined steps to get there.
It was an event that Peace has been trying to host for years. Police violence, he says, affects "both sides of the badge." Despite repeated efforts, previous chief Craig Meidl and previous Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich never showed up.
But in front of dozens last night at Spokane’s Central Public Library, Hall shared the microphone with Debbie Novak, Cynthia Manycolors, and Jim Leighty, whose sons or friends were shot and killed by police.
Despite an invitation, current Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels did not attend.
The victims spoke at length about how their grief has been compounded by lack of empathy from the public, lack of information from law enforcement, and lack of change in the culture of policing.
“The officer who killed my son had also killed another person in a similar way – in the back, running away,” Manycolors said.
Novak said that it’s "torturous" for a family when they don’t get information from the police because of convoluted public records laws. If the family doesn’t know what happened for months or years, they don’t know how much to stick up for their family member in the face of a public that is eager to assign blame.
Police ombuds Bart Logue, who’s responsible for police oversight, and Kurtis Robinson, previous president of the NAACP, also shared their perspectives.
“We just came out of a deadly force review board,” Logue said. “I asked a question to a lieutenant. He said, ‘We have four or five shootings every year. It’s just going to happen.’ It’s not just ‘We’re going to have four shootings.’ That’s four or five impacted lives with all the people that are connected to them. It has to matter.”
Robinson emphasized that police violence is a “gnarly human issue,” and that the humanization of both officer and non-officer is necessary to combat trauma inherent in the law enforcement system.
Hall told a story of a recent police shooting where the victim survived, and so did two children who witnessed the shooting. Hall asked his department and the investigative agency responsible to help set up support for those two kids.
“We were told ‘No, that’s not going to happen,” Hall said.
There are plenty of policies that need some reform, he said – both before and after incidents.
“Sometimes we forget in both policy and training the sanctity of human life,” Hall said. “The sanctity of human life is and should be our guiding light. And that means we slow down, we take more time, we use our critical decision-making skills.”
Seventy five Spokanites have been killed by the police in the past two decades.
In only one case – Otto Zehm’s – did the county prosecutor find the use of force unjustified.
But Hall says the question shouldn’t be whether force was justified. The question should be if and how force could be avoided in the future.
“You have to teach cops to back up,” Hall said. “They're not used to retreat – we call it tactical egress. But you actually have to teach that.”
Next month, Hall is bringing new training to his department – Integrated Communications, Assessment, and Tactics, or ICAT. It’s a guide for defusing critical incidents that’s associated with a 28% reduction in use-of-force incidents, a 26% reduction in citizen injuries, and a 36% reduction in officer injuries.
Novak and Leighty are currently pushing for changes at the state level they believe would move the needle on investigations into deadly shootings.
A bill that has failed in previous sessions tried to set up the Office of Independent Prosecutions, which would choose how to prosecute police incidents.
“It’s an inherent conflict of interest for a local prosecutor to be making these decisions, whether it’s here in Spokane or another county or another state,” Novak said. "It’s just been proven time and time again.”
Not to mention that it would save Spokane money, she added.
The Washington state legislature created the Office of Independent Investigations in 2021. Novak says the two offices were intended to work together to improve police accountability statewide. But legislators have yet to create the prosecutor’s office.
Logue asked the audience to call their city council representative before the next collective bargaining agreement with the police guild. Thanks to the current agreement, the police ombuds office currently faces plenty of red tape and long wait times to get the information it needs to investigate uses of force.
Robinson, who calls himself a “justice-involved individual” for the time he spent behind bars decades ago, encouraged listeners to think about the people behind the uniforms.
“We have failed this family on the other side of the badge,” he said. “Their suicide rates are off the charts. We’re failing them, so they’re failing us.”