The CPC, which is supposed to represent community views and come up with recommendations to improve police accountability, has struggled for years, with frequent staff upheavals, political disputes, and a lack of internal accountability.

By Erica C. Barnett

In late April, as the Seattle City Council considered a contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild that would give all police officers a 24 percent pay increase, the city’s Community Police Commission held a public meeting at the Van Asselt Community Center in Southeast Seattle to get the public’s input on the agreement.

The CPC is the community-based arm of the three-pronged police accountability system Seattle established in response to a federal consent decree in 2012; its mission is to listen to feedback from diverse communities and advocate for policies that improve police accountability. In 2017, the city adopted a landmark police accountability law that professionalized the CPC and made it fully independent.

“This is the first of many meetings that we’re going to have on the contract,” CPC executive director Cali Ellis told the small crowd, who were sparsely distributed on folding chairs throughout the community center’s gym.

Right away, though, it was clear that most people hadn’t shown up to talk about the SPOG contract. Donnitta Sinclair Martin, whose 19-year-old son, Horace Lorenzo Anderson, was fatally shot in the CHOP protest area in 2020, stood up. The city, she said, had failed to take accountability for her son’s death—and the CPC had failed to put pressure on them to do so. “And we sit here having these meetings. I came here to ask you: What are we going to do? And when are we going to do it?”

CPC co-chair Joel Merkel, sitting with Ellis at the front of the room, responded, “Thank you,” prompting Martin to snap, “No, that’s not the answer!” Ellis remained silent, wearing a placid smile. “Don’t smile at a mother that lost their child. Please don’t smile. Because you could be in the same position. What happened to me can happen to you. So don’t. Don’t smile. This is not funny,” Martin said.

Other speakers criticized the CPC and the city’s police accountability system, prompting the CPC’s other two co-chairs, Rev. Patricia Hunter and Rev. Harriett Walden, to argue that the CPC’s role was to recommend policies for SPD to adopt, not protest against the police. “Marching in the street is important,” Hunter said. “We may feel good at the end of the day because we marched the street, but if the policies didn’t change, then nothing happened.”

As the meeting wound down, SPD staffer Victoria Beach stood up and apologized to Ellis and Merkel. “I have to say, this was a waste of time coming here. This isn’t the time or place for these kinds of conversations,” she said. “I’m sorry about you being humiliated. I support you. This is ridiculous.”

Afterward, accusations flew about who was to blame for the poorly attended forum, which ended up being the only meeting the CPC ever held on the contract, despite the commission’s promises that it would be the first of many meetings. One staffer told PubliCola that the CPC had failed to engage with the community before holding the meeting, which was scheduled on the same night as a major public safety forum in the Central District. Another said the fact that the CPC had not allowed public comment for more than a year made it inevitable that pent-up frustrations would come pouring out. A consultant who was hired to facilitate CPC meetings filed a critical internal report about the meeting, and was quickly relieved of her duties. And commissioners pointed the finger at staff, saying they failed to rise to the occasion or had even tried to sabotage the event.

It was, in other words, a mess. And if it had been a one-off planning failure, it probably wouldn’t matter. The CPC could figure out what went wrong, regroup, and hold another meeting. It could do better outreach in the future. Heads, if necessary, could roll.

But the fiasco was a sign that something was fundamentally amiss with a group whose primary purpose is to channel public input on police accountability and turn it into policy

For the better part of a decade, the CPC’s internal and external problems have recurred on a predictable cycle, suggesting that the flaws in the agency aren’t due to any particular director, set of staffers, or group of commissioners, but are endemic to the body itself. After more than a year of dramatic upheavals and messy meetings—including a different public forum, last February, that devolved into a tearful screaming match—the CPC is once again at a critical inflection point. I wanted to understand why this commission, among all the other agencies in the city, keeps falling apart.

Over the past two months, I spoke to many current and former CPC members, staff, and people involved in establishing the CPC. They describe a top-down organization where employees have no formal outlet to complain about abusive behavior by management or commissioners; where community engagement staffers are devalued and required to carry out menial tasks; where communities affected by violence are ignored or harmed; and where a few people at the top dictate the priorities and practices of an organization that was meant to be a bottom-up reflection of community values.

Most of the people I talked to have come to the conclusion that the CPC isn’t workable in its current form. While many, especially current and recent staff, were deeply critical of Ellis’s leadership, they also described structural issues that go beyond current staff and commissioners—issues that have been present for many years.

In addition to the CPC, the 2017 accountability ordinance established two other “accountability partners”: The Office of Police Accountability, which investigates police misconduct claims and the Office of  the Inspector General, which oversees OPA and SPD. Of the three city-funded bodies, only the CPC is administratively separate and independent from the city, with no direct line of accountability to the executive or legislative branch. Three of its 15 members serve as co-chairs; these co-chairs are the direct supervisors of the executive director, who in turn oversees of staff of about seven people.

Of the three accountability agencies, the CPC is supposed to be the one most responsive to, and representative of, communities impacted by violence and police misconduct.

“For the CPC’s first five years, it functioned as it was intended—as a platform for the combined insights of various community sectors on public safety, policing and police accountability,” said Lisa Daugaard, a founding CPC member who served through 2019. Daugaard is the co-director of Purpose Dignity Action (formerly the Public Defender Association), which created the LEAD diversion program. “The whole point was to ensure that community expertise was not shoved to the side or steamrolled over by officials’ pronouncements that everything was solved.”

“We were also intended to forge consensus from divergent points of view, and we did that, bridging the gap from accountability activists to active duty police officers and commanders,” Daugaard said.

But since the city formalized the three-prong police accountability structure in 2017, the CPC has struggled to have an impact. For years, commissioners have complained that the city ignores the CPC’s recommendations, and over time, many insiders say, the commission has become less like a committee of dedicated subject matter experts and more like a club overseen by an insular group of leaders who preside over a constantly changing cast of characters.

Former commissioners described arriving to their first meetings eager to gather community feedback and come up with policy recommendations that would make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, only to leave months or years later, convinced that their time had been wasted.

“The CPC is a great idea in theory, but the CPC does not have the power to change things,” a former commissioner, Alina Santillan, said. “The entire time I was there, we wrote a lot of letters, recommended a lot of things, expressed disappointment. … I don’t think the CPC has ever been bold in the statements we’ve made or the things we’ve advocated for, and that has resulted in a lot of harm, both internally and externally.”

“A Lack of Leadership”

Current and former CPC staff point to the current executive director, Cali Ellis, as the source of recent problems within the agency.

Ellis, originally hired as the CPC’s policy director, was promoted to the top position after the commission put then-director Brandy Grant on leave in late 2022 (Grant subsequently resigned.) Although some on the City Council questioned  whether Ellis—an academic and policy expert who had never held a management position—was prepared to take on the permanent job, the council approved her appointment in December 2023 after a delay of about four months. Ellis’ husband, Steven Ellis, is a legislative aide for Sara Nelson, who is now city council president and who voted to approve Ellis’ appointment.

Several staffers and commissioners praised Ellis’ work as policy director, where her job involved overseeing a small staff of analysts who do research and come up with proposals to improve police accountability in Seattle. But once she became head of the entire CPC, staff began raising concerns about her management style, which staffers and a CPC commissioner described to PubliCola as condescending, indecisive, and controlling.

As an example, several people independently mentioned a CPC work group that was asked to research and make recommendation on two potential police surveillance tools—a Shotspotter-style acoustic gunshot locator system and CCTV cameras—earlier this year. Ellis assigned a CPC staffer to help the group with their work.

Once the group was ready to present their recommendations, however, Ellis and the CPC co-chairs used a flurry of procedural objections to delay their presentation, telling the group that commission bylaws required them to attend the commission’s governance subcommittee meeting, which is made up of the CPC co-chairs and Ellis, prior to the regular CPC meeting. Members of the group, which was made up entirely of Black commissioners, expressed frustration that they were being sidelined, and some suspected that the reason was that the recommendations didn’t explicitly support the surveillance technologies.

Co-chair Harriett Walden, who has served on the commission since 2013, is a veteran of the police accountability movement, founding a group called Mothers for Police Accountability in 1990. In recent years, Walden has become a vocal advocate for more police presence in communities of color, and she was an avid supporter of the surveillance tools, arguing they would help reduce gun violence in Black communities.

Her views are generally shared by her co-chair, Rev. Hunter, and decried by other Black advocates for accountability—a reminder, if anybody needed one, that no group of people impacted by city policies is monolithic. (Hunter resigned her CPC position in June, leaving Merkel and Walden as the two co-chairs).

The delay in the Shotspotter and CCTV recommendations led one staffer to make the unusual move of calling out Ellis in a public meeting for her “lack of leadership.”

“This was something that we were asked to do by our executive director, Cali, with the expectation that we would be talking about it today,” the staffer said during a regular CPC meeting in February. “It was something that we were told was urgent and a priority for the CPC, and that we needed to work really quickly to get it done. So we got together and we got it done, and then we were told that we couldn’t talk about it today.” Moments later, the staffer said Ellis had instructed them over Teams to stop talking, so they did.

The work group was finally able to present their recommendations in March. But at the following meeting, the CPC didn’t even bring the recommendations up for a vote. Instead, they put out a statement written by a white CPC member, attorney Lynne Wilson, who was not involved in the work group; it said the CPC “does not oppose a time-limited and location-limited surveillance pilot with the primary aim of reducing gun violence in our City,” given that “a significant number of CPC Commissioners report that the communities they represent are profoundly suffering from the daily trauma of increasing gun violence in Seattle.”

At a meeting in March, Wilson said she worked with Walden on the statement and had proposed it on a fast time frame in what she called “my Mothers [for Police Accountability] mode,” which she had developed over 30 years of working with Walden.

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The statement did not go over well with those who researched and drafted the original recommendations. “All the people who worked on it were people of color, and what we used was something one white lady put together from her own brain,” one CPC staffer said. “They felt super disrespected by that, and since then they have been super disengaged from the commission and the work groups.”

Ellis was abruptly put on administrative leave in late July for reasons co-chair Merkel declined to discuss; she did not respond to questions sent to her personal email. The commission’s co-chairs are currently in the process of hiring a deputy executive director to support her or a future executive director—in the hope that that person can share the load of a role that has been a challenge for every person who has filled it over the past eight years.

“A Vacuum of Accountability”

Current and former staffers say they were unable to get anyone to listen or take action on issues with Ellis’ management—not the City Council that approved of her appointment, not the mayor, and not the human resources department that ordinarily adjudicates internal workplace disputes. This, they say, is because of the CPC’s unique position as an independent agency: Other than the appointment process, the council and mayor are supposed to have no direct involvement in internal CPC decisions, and the CPC’s bylaws provide no recourse for staffers to complaint to HR about the director.

In practice, staffers say, they did talk to HR and the CPC’s internal ombudsman about Ellis but were told nothing could be done. This lack of internal accountability, current and former staffers said, is a key reason internal issues tend to escalate to the point where everyone goes on leave or quits.

“We were operating in a vacuum of accountability,” a former staffer said.

As the council deliberated over Ellis’ appointment, several staffers who opposed her appointment sought a meeting with then-City Council public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold, a longtime champion for police accountability who held considerable sway over the decision. Ellis, who had access to the email account of another staffer who had just quit in response to her nomination, found out about the meeting from an email to that staffer and ordered her staffers not to go, according to several people who were on staff at the time.

Eventually, staffers did meet with Herbold to express their concerns about Ellis. Although Herbold ultimately voted to approve Ellis’ appointment, she conditioned her support on the requirement that Ellis get executive coaching, according to emails PubliCola obtained through a records request.

The CPC’s three co-chairs—Walden, Merkel, and Hunter—pushed back on the coaching requirement, according to an email exchange. They argued that Ellis had performed “admirably” in the face of “unprofessional and insubordinate conduct” by staff, including the request for a meeting with Herbold, and showed “emotional intelligence, professionalism, and clarity on the vision and goals of the CPC.”

Herbold, who was wrapping up her final year on the council, told PubliCola that the four-month delay in Ellis’ appointment “was related to a number of factors ranging from the budget process to my efforts to secure agreement from the CPC co-chairs on several matters related to the confirmation process.” Herbold declined to comment on Ellis’ performance.

“We Were Constantly Told That We Weren’t Doing Work”

Community engagement is the core of the commission’s work; as the city’s only police accountability agency designed to reflect and represent community input, the CPC’s small community engagement staff is critical to its mission. But current and former CPC staffers and commissioners say community engagement staffers, and their work, have been devalued for many years.

At the CPC, community engagement involves listening to community concerns, gathering feedback for the commission, and helping direct the policy staff toward solutions the commission can then advocate for with the mayor, city council, and state legislative leaders.

Current and former staffers said Ellis’ behavior toward the community engagement staff could be dictatorial and demeaning.

“One of the things that has been consistent with the CPC is their lack of respect for community engagement staff and not valuing community engagement as much as they value policy work,” Roxana Pardo Garcia, who served as the CPC’s first community engagement director, said. Commissioners told staff that they suspected them of not doing any actual work, Pardo Garcia said, and that “we were resistant and defiant.” In reality, she said, “we would do all this work and it would never make it to the CPC agenda.”

Exit interview documents from several other staff paint a similar picture; according to a memo submitted by a former community engagement staffer when she quit, “Commissioners and executive directors repeatedly characterized the Community Engagement team as untrustworthy, lazy, and unskilled,” and accused them of “riding the gravy train.”

Last year, all three community engagement staffers went on medical leave because of stress and stress-related illnesses, as did Ellis’ executive assistant; all four are Black, and three have since left the agency. (Historically, community engagement staffers have been mostly people of color, and policy staff have been mostly white).

According to one staffer, CPC employees “take the appropriate avenues by going to HR and [the CPC’s internal] ombudsman, but there is literally nothing they can do or are willing to do. “They were like, ‘You can take unpaid medical leave,” so that’s what they all did.”

Two community engagement staff, both Black women, quit the CPC while I was reporting this story.

One, Mergitu Argo, is a former SPD community service officer, OneAmerica staffer, and case manager who chaired SPD’s East African Advisory Council and served on the Seattle Women’s Commission. She said Ellis often treated her more like a personal assistant than an experienced community advocate and subject-matter expert.

“She would pull me out from staff meetings—like, ‘Come here,’ from the hallway, saying ‘Go make phone calls to remind the commission about the meeting,” Argo recalled. (Other staffers backed up this account.) “I said, ‘I can do it when I finish the staff meeting,’ [but] she said, ‘No, you can do it now.” According one former staffer , “she was dismissed—literally waved out of the meeting to go make phone calls.”

On another occasion, multiple staffers recall, Ellis ordered Argo to carry commission co-chair Walden’s purse across the street to her car. Felicia Cross, who was Argo’s supervisor, recalls telling Ellis, “She will not. And [Ellis] is saying, ‘Well, somebody needs to carry Reverend Walden’s purse,’ and I said ‘Why don’t you take it?’ I said, ‘Mergitu’s not leaving, and if Reverend Walden can’t carry her own purse she shouldn’t bring it.'”

On another occasion, prior to the November 2023 election, commission co-chair Joel Merkel asked a community engagement staffer, Felicia Cross, if she could  volunteer for his wife, Sarah Reyneveld’s, King County Council election campaign, and ask others to volunteer. Argo agreed to pose for a group photo, and later volunteered to doorbell for Reyneveld, but later felt that “I was being used” to make it look like Reyneveld had support from diverse communities.

“I’m an immigrant and a Black Muslim woman,” Argo said. “I’m always afraid when someone in that position—someone white—talks to me because I feel like I just have to get up and do it.”

Shortly after the incident when Ellis reportedly asked her to go make phone calls, Argo said she decided to take medical leave  to deal with stress-related health problems; the other community engagement staff took leave around the same time, also citing stress-related medical issues.

When they returned this past March, Argo and other staffers recalled, Ellis told them she was going to “micromanage” the community engagement team, deciding when they could take breaks and requiring them to keep a detailed accounting of how they spent their time. Cross recalled that another staffer asked Ellis, “is that just for us? Because you let all the white people go.’ And she said, ‘You’re the only ones I have trouble with.'”

Argo announced her resignation during the most recent CPC meeting. “I really love what I do with community as a community engagement person,” she said. “But I was not allowed to do this job. And that’s why I’m resigning from this position.” Continue reading “Seattle’s Community Police Commission, a Key Part of the Police Accountability System, Is In Trouble” →