For there to be felony charges, prosecutors say they would have to prove that Officer Dave was consciously disregarding safety. They did have enough evidence to prove that in this case.
Dude was going 74 in a 25 while not using the sirens his vehicle was equipped with for this very purpose and killed a pedestrian in a marked crosswalk. Sounds like a fucking conscious disregard if ever I’ve heard one. If this guy were a civilian he’d be serving at least one life sentence for second degree murder already. A disgusting miscarriage of justice.
It's even worse than the headline makes it sound. These are 17-year veterans, one of whom said responding to priority calls stresses him out, while the other is a trainer.
According to a case summary published late last month by the civilian-run Office of Police Accountability, it took the two officers over 20 minutes to arrive, only to report “everything looks fine” and initially write the incident off as a disturbance.
Shortly thereafter, a man showed up at Harborview Medical Center with a gunshot wound to his arm, suffered in the shooting the officers didn’t investigate, according to the case summary.
OPA found the two officers had violated professionalism standards and failed in their job to protect the community. Chief Adrian Diaz agreed with the findings, giving both officers nine-hour suspensions, which were first reported by DivestSPD, a digital site associated with the Seattle Democratic Socialists of America.
The OPA removes the names of disciplined officers from its published case summaries.
One of them, a 17-year SPD veteran, said he was relying on his experience to determine when a priority call is actually a priority. In this incident, he told OPA investigators, he was sure the victim would be gone when police arrived, which turned out to be the case.
Moreover, he said that a lights-and-siren response “heightens my stress level” and can become a public-safety issue for other drivers on the road.
“We showed up. We didn’t find a scene. We didn’t find any shell casings,” he told investigators.
The other officer, also a 17-year veteran and a training officer, speculated that they had stopped at the rank-and-file union headquarters to have dinner, take a break, get snacks or use the restroom.
He acknowledged that a “typical response” to a priority one call is: “Drop the meal, drop the report, and go.”
“[The officer] did not recall why he did not do that for this call,” the OPA case summary explains.
A day off without pay? A day off? In a line of work where it’s common to work well beyond full time job amounts of hours per week? That’s a reward not a punishment. They probably couldn’t have got a day off without pay otherwise even if they wanted to.
At least it’s a suspension without pay this time? That’s the tiniest marginal bit off improvement. But really, if one of my coworkers barged into my office to tell me there’s a life-threatening emergency, then I proceeded to finish my lunch break before helping, my ass would get fired.
I don’t care if they install shot-spotter or not, it’s not like SPD is gonna fucking protect the public. There are shootings ALL AROUND spd south precinct and they rarely if ever respond.
Took me 5 minutes while I read the statements from the people running for the position. It seems a bit sketchy they only ask for your first, last, and DOB in order to allow you to vote. I’m hoping in the backend they are looking at other data points like source IP, timestamp, etc. to ensure no election hijinks.
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