SPD officers suspended after waiting 20 minutes to respond to shooting ( www.seattletimes.com )

Drusas , 4 months ago

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.