Federal Judge Ends Seattle PD Oversight. Now What?

Thirteen years and at least $129 million spent on Seattle’s federal consent decree ended like a flap of air out of a Whoopee cushion on Wednesday. 

After Judge James Robart ordered the termination of the consent decree, a gaggle of Seattle Police Department (SPD) brass and Mayor Bruce Harrell gathered for the press outside of the federal courthouse. Noticeably absent at the press scrum were any community members or civil rights organizations. SPD’s federal monitor, Antonio Oftelie, who was sent one last $13,525 check from the federal court on Tuesday was also noticeably absent and has not even released a statement.

“This is a different department than it was in 2012,” Mayor Harrell said to the court, “it’s a different department than it was in 2020.” 

SPD has certainly changed while under the consent decree. The Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG) leadership is different, now more intertwined ideologically with Trump’s MAGA movement, and SPD’s current chief, Shon Barnes, who was secretly selected by Harrell without public input, appeared to be in North Carolina in 2020 while SPD officers were carpeting Westlake and Capitol Hill in carcinogenic chemical soot. 

The ACLU of Washington had their own thoughts, releasing a statement shortly after Robart closed the consent decree for good. “The Seattle Police Department is not a transformed institution, and ending the consent decree does not make today’s court decision the success the city claims it to be,” wrote the ACLU’s Jazmyn Clark. “This is not a moment for self-congratulation, but a time for city leaders and the department to prove they are committed to transparency, oversight, true accountability, and real transformation that centers the needs of communities, particularly those historically targeted by police misconduct.”

Police killings increased while SPD was under federal oversight. The SPD also stopped investigating sexual assaults. Black Seattleites, as of 2023, were roughly ten times more likely to be the victim of SPD violence than white Seattleites, up from eight times more likely in 2021. 

So what should we be paying attention to now that the consent decree is over?

Two men, Judge Robart and monitor Antonio Oftelie, who could order or strongly suggest how the city should operate, at one point even unilaterally blocking Seattle’s own democratic process, are now out of the picture.

Oftelie did his job and he got paid. He served as a surrogate voice for SPD leadership, worked to block ground made by the Defund movement, all while writing glossy reports filed in federal court while asking SPD execs what “data points/analysis” they thought should be dialed down.

Oftelie raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars funneled from Seattle taxpayers, through the federal court, to his elusive personal business that popped up in one state and dissolved itself in the next. At one point Oftelie had even contracted with another SPD executive to work for him in Minneapolis. 

“Fake it till I make it I guess.” Oftelie wrote in one text to SPD’s top lawyer and other executive while serving as SPD’s federal monitor.

Oftelie also traveled the country developing a plan aimed at boosting the legitimacy of police. With Trump’s goons kidnapping and caging random people off the street, Oftelie’s services might be needed now more than ever by our current Homeland Security state. Watch what he does and where he goes after this. 

Thirteen years of the monitoring team's internal records will likely remain secret and be destroyed, a deliberate feature of the consent decree which exempted the monitor's records from public disclosure. Without divine intervention, what happened behind the monitor's closed doors will be lost, a shame for Seattle history.

For now, a new Seattle oversight regime has been barnacleizing for the last decade, spawning alumni like Andrew Myerberg, whom whistleblowers called “dangerous,” and who was later promoted by Mayor Bruce Harrell to the post of Chief Innovation Officer, now serving as Harrell's Chief of Staff after he oversaw the shuttering of thousands of Office of Police Accountability (OPA) complaints during the 2020 protests, whittling them down to only 133 OPA investigations, resulting in only four officer suspensions without pay. 

The top dog for police oversight in Seattle is now Inspector General (IG) Lisa Judge. 

That means you should be paying attention to the dirt Carolyn Bick has been dusting up, reporting that IG Judge used public funds to pay for her own private parking spot and that her Office of Inspector General (OIG) apparently is “withholding, altering and destroying public records as a matter of routine practice” in an apparent effort to “cover up information that may have been publicly perceived as scandalous.” One OIG whistleblower has also filed a lawsuit against the city, saying she was retaliated against.

I previously reported that the OIG delayed, and then terminated an audit into the SPD’s use of law enforcement mutual aid, one month after the Urbanist published another one of my reports showing that SPD’s use of mutual aid was absolute chaos. 

One Snohomish County Sheriff deputy who backed up SPD during the 2020 protests reported that “SPD patrol officers are just lounging around the precincts and not responding to calls, so SCSO going to many calls and normally alone.” For the OIG, none of this was worth reporting. Now, the OIG is Seattle's leading edge of police accountability.

More revelations are inevitably to come. 

Within one public records request I made to the OIG, the office officially claimed that communications between IG Judge and SPD’s top lawyer Rebecca Boatright were attorney client privileged communications, exempt from public disclosure. 

For a brief moment in time, that essentially meant that the OIG felt it was a client of the SPD. That official position was illustrative and eye-opening, however was later waived under my challenge to obtain the records in their unredacted form.

Keep an eye on IG Judge, who was unanimously reappointed by city council to serve until 2031.

With Seattle’s city attorney and mayor up for election in November, challengers Erika Evans and Katie Wilson could theoretically force changes to SPD transparency and accountability, root out overtime fraud and free up more resources for holistic public safety programs outside of police, if the will exists. 

Most importantly, there continue to be victims of SPD violence. People who are wrongfully arrested and caged, killed and abused, their lives transformed forever after an encounter with Seattle Police. The city’s response to this has been abysmal, denigrating victims by publicly releasing their medical history, while forcing victims and their families to start grassroots organizing aimed at providing help to those affected by SPD violence.

I continue working on a forthcoming investigation that has now taken over a year to draft out and should leave you with a taste of how Seattle’s police accountability system operates.

As Guy Oron reported, city spending on lawsuits against the SPD has ballooned over the past decade. While a federal court has dismissed one lawsuit against the department on Wednesday, people continue to file their own complaints where it counts, in court.