1. According to a document obtained from the Tucson Police Department, Seattle police officer Kevin Dave, who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula in a South Lake Union crosswalk with his police SUV in 2022, and who formerly worked as a police officer in Tucson, was fired from the Tucson Police Department in 2013 after failing to meet the standards required of new recruits during his 18-month probationary period as a new recruit.
A report PubliCola obtained through a records request reveals that the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) investigated Dave in 2020 in response to an anonymous complaint by a fellow SPD employee. That report shows that OPA looked into several claims against Dave, including an internal rumor that Dave had been previously fired by a police department in Arizona. The report (which was not shared with Dave) said Dave’s “previous employer and reason for separation were known to the SPD Background Unit at the time of the named employee’s hiring by SPD” and determined there was no need for further action.
When asked about the circumstances of Dave’s separation from the Tucson Police Department, John O’Neil, a spokesman for SPD, declined to comment.
OPA found that other claims in the anonymous employee complaint were minor or unsubstantiated, including a complaint that Dave bragged about how easy it was to obtain “bump” stocks for automatic weapons in Arizona, and a claim that Dave suggested playing “Fuck the Police” by NWA at the SPD academy graduation.
2. Leaders in Seattle’s Indian American community expressed disappointment on Wednesday at what they described as an ongoing lack of information and accountability for Kandula’s killing. As PubliCola was first to report, Dave was driving 74 miles an hour, three times the speed limit, in response to a call from a South Lake Union resident who thought he might be overdosing on cocaine.
“Most [SPD] officers out here are some of the best drivers in the world,” SPD Officer Mark Mullens, a Community Police Commission member, said. “Our training is some of the best in the world,” he added, and is “well worth the $500,000” it costs to rent a racetrack in Kent where officers practice high-speed driving.
The Community Police Commission invited representatives from Indian American Community Services (IACS) to discuss SPD’s emergency vehicle operations policy, which establishes vague parameters for when cops can drive at high speeds and violate traffic laws, at their meeting Wednesday morning.
Many of the speakers expressed outrage at the idea that any emergency would justify driving so fast on a city street. Footage from inside Dave’s car shows that he was unaware of Kandula’s presence in the crosswalk until the instant before he hit her; at speeds above 70 mph, the fatality rate for vehicle-pedestrian collisions is almost 100 percent. Had Dave been going 50 mph, or twice the speed limit, SPD’s own forensic analysis concluded the collision would not have happened.
“I have spoken to people in all manners of crises, and I know myself as a human being if I was in crisis, and I wanted a police response, I would still want them to respond to me in a way that doesn’t endanger somebody else’s life,” Bipasha Mukherjee, a longtime crisis hotline volunteer, said.
“I would imagine that as a human being you would think, okay, I am response to a drug overdose … and I need to respond as quickly as possible. But and can should I be driving down Dexter Avenue at 74 miles an hour to do that?,” Mukherjee continued. “I hate to say this, but it just seems like very basic common sense to not do it, which then makes me wonder what was going on in the officer’s mind that made him think that this was a legitimate response.”
CPC member Mark Mullens, an SPD officer, said CPC commissioners should attend SPD’s emergency driving course, which includes high-speed driving on a racetrack in Kent, before recommending any policy related to emergency driving. “Most [SPD] officers out here are some of the best drivers in the world,” Mullens said. “Our training is some of the best in the world,” he added, and is “well worth the $500,000” it costs to rent a racetrack in Kent where officers practice high-speed driving.
New recruits must go through a 40-hour course in emergency driving when they join the police force, but it’s unclear whether SPD conducts re-training on a consistent basis and what’s involved in that training; PubliCola has reached out to the department for more information.
SPD has not released information about what discipline, if any, Dave has received, and the King County Prosecutor’s Office has not revealed whether it will prosecute him. “There’s been a lack of transparency,” IACS volunteer Sriram Rajagopalan said, “and we in the community are left in the dark. .. Officers are making comments that are about [Kandula’s] life not mattering, which is just further making the community feel like we don’t matter.”
—Andy Engelson, Erica C. Barnett