Brian Maxey is the chief operating officer for the Seattle Police Department. He said after five years, Seattle is in the home stretch on meeting the goals of its consent decree, so he doesn’t see the need for any big changes.
Maxey said initially the DOJ’s findings on excessive use of force at SPD “came as a shock.” But he said the department is stronger for having gone through the process.
“I think in fixing the actually rather limited problems within the scope of the consent decree, it drew attention to a lot of other issues including management and structural issues, all of which ultimately have benefited the police department,” he said.
Maxey said the question of whether these consent decrees undermined respect for police is complex. “I do not think this process has been easy for the police officers. I think there has been a lot of criticism, some of which was warranted, some of which was not. It certainly has had an impact on morale. But overall I think we’re seeing a pretty large recovery in that morale and I think we’re pretty optimistic about the direction of the police department.”
Maxey said he’d like to think the department could have resolved the concerns collaboratively, without a consent decree. But at this point there’s a sense of accomplishment.
“It’s real. It’s measurably real,” he said. “We actually have had tangible change in our department. I think we’re one of the few departments that can actually point to that change, show it statistically, and I think at the city level we’re finally beginning to celebrate some of those successes.”
Maxey said the latest SPD statistics show encouraging results on the use of force generally and toward people in crisis. “We just issued our first internal assessment of our force data, about uses of force, and what we’re finding is in a huge number of contacts, they might exceed a million, only .3 percent of those contacts ended up with any kind of use of force. Those are remarkably low statistics,” he said.
And he said while the DOJ investigations highlighted the need to address these issues, those concerns have now been embraced by police chiefs around the country.
Audio @ 1:30.
https://kuow.org/stories/mixed-feelings-seattle-doj-backs-away-police-monitoring