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Firing bad cops

By djw

On August 28, 2015

At 3:44 pm

In General

1373 Views

Setting aside her pathetic racial resentment, what’s striking about SPD officer Cynthia Whitlatch’s account of her unjustified arrest of William Wingate is that even if we take her self-serving account entirely at face value, it paints a clear picture of an officer unfit for duty:

Murphy noted that Whitlatch admitted she “did not see Mr. Wingate swing his golf club at the police car and hit the stop sign; instead, she admits that she only saw movement out of the corner of her eye and heard a noise, leading her to assume he swung at her car and hit the stop sign… The Named Employee observed Mr. Wingate look at her with a furrowed brow and assumed that he was purposefully directing an ‘angry’ look at her.”
Whitlatch seemed fixated on Wingate’s alleged furrowed brow, which she said she could see through her rearview mirror as she drove away from Pike and 11th. She said she knew he was glaring at her because he was angry.
Her patrol car’s dashcam video shows that when Whitlatch confronts Wingate at an intersection one block away, Wingate appears to have no idea who she was or why she is asking him to drop his golf club, which he was using as a cane.

So she hears a strange noise and comes is, in her mind, a perfectly logical and plausible explanation–an elderly black in her vicinity inexplicably attempted to strike a passing police car with his golf club/cane. Furthermore, his “furrowed brow” constituted sufficient supporting evidence for this hunch that it’s off to jail on a ‘contempt of cop’ charge for him. And this is her story; the best she can come up with to try to save her job. Happily, her ability to present an exonerating, self-serving account of the incident was hindered by her dashcam.

This is kind of a big deal in Seattle because, if her appeals aren’t successful, she’ll be one of the first police officers fired for excessive force or misconduct in a good long while. It’s easy to see why previous chiefs have not bothered–their firings can be overturned by a review board stacked 2-1 with current SPD officers. (This is in sharp contrast with the King County Sherrif’s department, where Chief John Urquhart, who is much less shy about moving aggressively to remove problem officers.)

As an aside, while the quality of The Stranger’s news section generally and political coverage in particular has declined noticably in recent years, their ongoing coverage of police misconduct (the now-departed Dominic Holden and Ansel Herz in particular) has been excellent, and is probably part of the reason the effort to remove such an obviously unfit officer as Whitlatch has made it this far.