Slow start for Washington office tasked with probing police violence

Family, friends and community members gathered at a 2019 vigil in remembrance of Stonechild Chiefstick, who was shot to death by a Poulsbo, Washington, police officer after a confrontation earlier that year. Chiefstick’s case is one of five under review by the new Washington Office of Independent Investigations, which is considering whether to open a new investigation. (Ashley Ann/Kitsap Daily News)

An hour before the fireworks went off at Poulsbo, Washington’s annual Fourth of July celebration in 2019, three police officers approached Stonechild Chiefstick, a citizen of the Chippewa Cree Tribe of Rocky Boy Reservation and father of six. 

The officers had received a report that Chiefstick was threatening people with a screwdriver. Less than 10 seconds later, following a brief confrontation, Officer Craig Keller shot Chiefstick twice. 

An hour later, the celebration returned to normal. The fireworks went off as planned. The Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office investigated. And as is overwhelmingly common with police shootings, local prosecutors declined to charge Keller, who is white, with a crime. 

In 2021, Washington lawmakers created the nation’s first state-funded office to investigate police killings like Chiefstick’s, providing an extra layer of accountability for deadly use-of-force incidents that disproportionately impact Native Americans but that are rarely prosecuted.

Three years since the legislation passed, however, the office still hasn’t officially launched any investigation. Chiefstick’s case is one of five put under “review” by the office. But that means little to Trishandra Pickup, who shared four children with Chiefstick.

“They need to do an investigation, a review is not enough,” Pickup said.

Legislation passed in 2021 as part of a spate of police reform laws in the wake of the killing of George Floyd created a new agency, the Office of Independent Investigations, and tasked it with reviewing past fatal uses of force, then conducting full investigations in some cases, as well as investigating new cases involving serious use of force. The office was meant to use civilian investigators to add transparency and accountability in cases where people challenge the use of deadly force and subsequent investigations by law enforcement and prosecutors. 

But reform advocates who pushed the legislation are criticizing the office’s slow pace in opening investigations, its focus on hiring investigators from within the world of law enforcement, and its failure to begin even monitoring uses of force in the three years since the law was passed. The agency will begin investigating current use-of-force complaints for the first time in December, in just one of six regions in the state.

“Families affected by police violence have been waiting too long for independent investigations,” Dominic Campese, spokesperson for the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, said in a written statement.

Three of the five cases under review by the office involve the deaths of Native Americans. Native Americans encounter disproportionate police violence in Washington and across the country, with statistics showing they die at the hands of law enforcement at a rate five times higher than whites nationally.

After Chiefstick’s death, Pickup filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Poulsbo, alleging negligence, excessive force and inadequate training, which it settled for $2 million in 2021. The shooting caused outrage in the local Indigenous community and strained relations between the city of Poulsbo and the nearby Suquamish Tribe, where Chiefstick had kinship ties and long resided. Poulsbo, a predominantly white town of 12,000, directly abuts the Suquamish Tribe Reservation.

Pickup sees the shooting — and the response — as representative of systemic racism against Native Americans.

“None of this would be happening if Native lives were important in this country,” Pickup said. 

A slow start

Only a small percentage of law enforcement officers are convicted in connection with killing a civilian in the line of duty — it was roughly 1% nationwide in 2022, according to the police data nonprofit Mapping Police Violence. 

Experts say that’s true for a variety of reasons. Laws protect police officers’ right to use force to protect themselves and others, and the vast majority of uses of force are deemed justified by the involved agency, but critics also cite bias in internal investigations by police and prosecutors who often work closely with the officers they must investigate. Investigations into fatal use-of-force cases have long been criticized by police reform advocates as lacking rigor and independence, given that they are carried out by the officers’ own agency or a neighboring one. Charging decisions are made by local prosecutors who work closely with police.  

In Washington, there have been roughly 200 fatal police shootings since 2015, according to the nonprofit Alliance for Gun Responsibility. In 2018, Washington voters passed an initiative creating regional teams made up of local law enforcement officers to investigate police killings, but reform advocates continued to push for more independence in those investigations.

“For us to feel safe we need to have a body to investigate those that we must trust,” said Waldo Waldron-Ramsey, political director for the Washington Community Action Network and former regional director for the NAACP who served on the task force that recommended the creation of the Office of Independent Investigations. 

“Part of public safety is that the public trusts those who are doing the job and who are responsible for our safety — law enforcement and prosecution,” Waldron-Ramsey said.

In the aftermath of the police killing of Floyd in 2020, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee convened a task force to examine independent oversight of uses of force. 

The task force’s primary recommendation was the creation of an independent state agency to investigate police uses of force. Eventually, legislation creating the office tasked it with probing past police killings in cases where new evidence is presented and taking over the process of investigating deadly and serious uses-of-force by local law enforcement departments.

The agency is unique in the nation as a state-funded, fully independent agency with investigative powers, and it has emphasized that it will be overseen by civilians and employ civilian investigators. Although other states like New York have agencies with independent investigative functions, the Washington office’s mandate goes further by empowering it to look at past cases when new evidence arises. Other states like California employ their Department of Justice in certain high-profile cases, but typically only at the request of local agencies or the behest of the state’s attorney general. 

Still, in the three years since its inception, the Washington office’s effects have been muted. The agency cites staffing shortages and the difficulty of building the agency up from scratch as the primary challenges. 

Hector Castro, community relations and communications director for the Office of Independent Investigations, said the agency has had a “lengthy to-do list” since its inception, and that there’s “no set timeline” for the agency’s review process — but that it involves a comprehensive and thorough consideration of all relevant information in the case.

The office is under the state’s general budget and has struggled to secure funding since its inception. Its $23.9 million budget through 2025 is far less than the $67 million it requested. The agency has been slow to hire staff, according to Castro, and only secured a director — former prosecutor, defense attorney and judge Roger Rogoff — shortly before it was originally supposed to begin investigations in July 2022. Since then, it has proceeded with the painstaking process of hiring and training investigators, leaving it with limited staff to prepare to accept current use-of-force complaints and deal with past cases, according to Castro. 

Reform advocates expressed concern that multiple investigators with the office have worked in a law enforcement capacity in the last 24 months, which Campese said is “contrary to the spirit” of the legislation creating the agency.

The agency has also faced challenges with restrictions on the materials its investigators can use. After a use-of-force incident, law enforcement agencies compel officers to make statements about the incident, known as “Garrity statements.” However, these statements and any evidence from the internal investigation based on them cannot be used in the independent investigation to protect officers against self-incrimination. As a result, the agency has to rely mainly on other evidence, which may be biased or incomplete, for its case reviews.

“One thing that we’ve learned at this agency as we’re starting out is you need to be able to adapt,” Castro said. 

Tensions remain between reform advocates, legislators and law enforcement groups over independent investigations. Reformers want to add an additional layer of accountability to the process by creating an independent state prosecutor to handle use-of-force cases, rather than local elected prosecutors, who have opposed what they perceive as a possibly unconstitutional circumvention of their jurisdiction. Law enforcement groups also have opposed the prospect of an independent prosecutor. 

“We take significant issue with the idea of spending $12 million to hire two dozen people whose sole job it is to charge police officers with murder,” James McMahan, policy director for the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, said in 2023 testimony against the bill. 

So far, two bills that would’ve created an independent prosecutor’s office have died in committee. Washington Rep. Monica Stonier, D-Vancouver, who sponsored the bills, said it’s an important component of independent investigations into uses of force and was always envisioned to work alongside the OII, but she acknowledges obstacles remain to getting her bill through the House of Representatives.

Waldron-Ramsey said that a state prosecutor would be a vital element of creating a truly accountable oversight system.

“We don’t have trust in local prosecutors investigating police killings because they work so closely with those local law enforcement agencies,” he said. 

Cases under review

Although the office has yet to announce any official investigations, it has identified five cases that passed its initial requirements and are under full review. Three of the five victims were Native American.

For a case to meet the standard for a full review, there must be new evidence that was not considered during the initial investigation, including new witnesses or photo or video evidence that was not previously considered. The review process differs from an investigation — in a review, investigators are examining existing materials and the purported new evidence rather than conducting fresh interviews. 

In the aftermath of Chiefstick’s death and before creation of the state office, Pickup and her lawyer, Gabe Galanda, met with representatives from Inslee’s office, asking for an independent investigation into his killing. Months passed, and no news came, so they requested and received a second meeting with the governor’s office, shortly after Inslee signed legislation creating the new office. Pickup said she left the second meeting feeling reassured that there would be a full, independent investigation. 

Instead, it was referred to the agency for review. Pickup said her lawyer also referred Chiefstick’s case to the office, presenting evidence of multiple new witnesses to the shooting. Police, witnesses and the family’s wrongful-death lawsuit offer conflicting narratives of the confrontation between Chiefstick and Keller. Police say they went to arrest Chiefstick in the crowded festival after a woman reported he threatened someone with a screwdriver and a physical confrontation between Chiefstick and Keller occurred, causing Keller’s body-worn camera to fall to the ground.

Chiefstick’s family members dispute that he threatened bystanders or police with the screwdriver and contend that he retreated, tripped and dropped what he was holding before Keller shot him twice. Keller later said in a statement that he feared for his life and the life of others, and that Chiefstick tried to stab him with the screwdriver. 

The case is still under review, and the agency can’t say when it will announce a decision on an investigation. Castro says the agency stays in regular communication with families so they understand the agency’s progress and decision-making.

“They want to try to put on a show with these reviews,” Pickup said. “Until they open a case and put their money where their mouth is, and do an investigation, it’s only talk, and I’m not falling for their smoke and mirrors.”

The historical relationship between Native American communities and law enforcement is fraught with violence and abuse on the part of the latter, and multiple police shootings of Native Americans in Washington have outraged Indigenous communities. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent data shows Native Americans were more than five times as likely to die from police violence than whites in 2020.  

Apart from the Chiefstick case, the office is reviewing the police killings of Native American victims Cecil Lacy Jr. and Jacqueline Salyers.

Lacy, a citizen of the Tulalip Tribe, was walking along a road on the reservation in September 2015 when police stopped him for wandering into the street, according to news reports. The street had no sidewalks. Following a brief confrontation, Snohomish County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Pendergrass tased Lacy before he and two other officers pinned Lacy to the ground. Lacy reportedly told officers, “I can’t breathe,” while he was pinned by Pendergrass, until he became unresponsive and died. 

Local prosecutors declined to file charges against Pendergrass. Lacy’s family won a $1.75 million settlement from Snohomish County in a wrongful death lawsuit.

In the case of Jacqueline Salyers, a pregnant citizen of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, police shot and killed her on Jan. 28, 2016, as she fled from them in a vehicle with her boyfriend, who was wanted by law enforcement, according to news reports. Police allege that she tried to run them over, which her family disputes. Prosecutors declined to file charges against the officers, Scott Campbell and Aaron Joseph. The Puyallup Tribe alleges that new evidence in the case demands further investigation.

The state office is reviewing two additional cases. Jason Hale was shot in the back of the neck by Cpl. David Reed of the Stevens County Sheriff’s Department on Aug. 19, 2015, during a confrontation where Hale was walking away; police said he pulled a handgun before the shooting but witnesses disputed that, according to news reports. On Sept. 20, 2020, Redmond Police Officer Daniel Mendoza shot Andrea Churna six times as she surrendered to police after she called 911 while in crisis. Her family settled a wrongful death suit with the city of Redmond for $7.5 million.  

Carrying a memory

Pickup and Chiefstick have four children together. The youngest recently graduated from high school, surrounded by loving family and community members — but their father’s presence was missed.

Although their relationship didn’t work out, Pickup said Chiefstick was a good parent, known for playing and joking with kids in the community. Now, Pickup forges on. On a recent morning, she was sitting in the living room of her home in the Suquamish Tribe Reservation making the final preparations for Halloween, when she goes “all out for her kids” in the neighborhood.

“I bought an old pizza warmer from a pizza shop, the kind that holds like four pizzas at once, and I fill it up with Costco pizza,” Pickup said. 

A mother of six, Pickup dedicates much of her time and energy to her family, stitching homemade powwow regalia and homeschooling. She became heavily involved in the police accountability movement after Chiefstick’s death, driving around Suquamish Nation in her car emblazoned with “Justice for Stony” on the windows.

Today, she serves on the Criminal Justice Training Commission as a civilian commissioner and keeps track of Chiefstick’s case. She works closely with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability and other families affected by police violence. She juggles child care, homeschooling and advocating for Chiefstick, all while waiting on a decision from the agency.

“They’re meeting with us just to meet with us because they need to,” Pickup said. “There is no information, they’re not giving us any information because as far as I know they don’t have any information.”

This article was first published by InvestigateWest (investigatewest.org), an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest.

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