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.”

Cross also left this month. She told PubliCola she was shut out of meetings, asked to do menial tasks, and blamed for fiascos like the SPOG contract meeting, which Cross said she advised Ellis against holding in the first place.

“I kept trying to tell her, the community doesn’t give a damn about that SPOG contract when they’re going to bed with sirens and gunshots,” Cross recalled. “You’ve never been to the community for any other reason, and there’s no comment in any of the meetings, and now you want to show up and check a box? … It wasn’t necessary. You could send out a survey or something, because you haven’t been engaging with the community.”

Although these stories, and others PubliCola heard from former staffers, are dramatic, conflict between CPC leadership and staff is a perennial problem that long predates Ellis.

According to Santillan, “with every executive director, all the staff have had a problem. They all leave. We’ve been through two, three sets of staff since I came on the commission.”

“We’re Calling Police and Armed Security on the Community?”

In addition to its autonomy from the rest of the city, the CPC has another structural quirk that makes it hard to address internal issues: Once appointed, the executive director can only be removed by the CPC’s co-chairs, who are all volunteers (paid stipends of $1,200 a month) who don’t work at the CPC and have no direct knowledge of its day-to-day operations. This structure gives the director an incentive to do what the co-chairs want (such as suppressing recommendations that go against the co-chairs’ political preferences), and it gives the co-chairs tremendous indirect power over CPC employees, since they’re the ones who decide who’s in charge.

The CPC’s three, now two, co-chairs have consistently defended Ellis and accused staff of trying to sabotage her.

“Police and community oversight is not happening the way people think it’s happening,” one CPC staffer said. “We are actively not listening to the community, and it’s clear that the only voices that matter are the co-chairs.”

Merkel, an attorney with the state Attorney General’s Office, is serving his first term, but Walden has been on the commission since 2012 and has enormous power over its leadership and policy priorities, current and former staff and commissioners say.

“She’s had pointy elbows and she has been using them since 2017,” the staffer who described the incident with Argo said.

Walden responded to a list of questions sent in July by saying that one of her sons, Chukundi and Omari Salisbury, would respond, but neither had done so by press time.

CPC commissioners are limited to a maximum of three three-year terms. Walden’s most recent term expired in 2021, but she has continued to serve as a mayoral appointee without a new appointment; her CPC bio, unlike all other commission members’, includes no end date for her term.

Between 2022 and 2023 Walden, a mayoral appointee, held a city contract totaling $300,000; the contract required her to perform approximately 14 in-person or virtual “Virtues Healing Circles” per year, and, in 2023, to appear at city events in a supportive role upon request. In an internal Teams chat in late 2022, a staffer involved in executing the 2023 contract said it was “like they [Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office] want to have Rev. Walden on retainer.”

Walden was rumored to be stepping down from the commission as soon as this month, but she did not do so at the commission’s most recent meeting, on July 24.

Nearly every current and former CPC staffer and commissioner we spoke to raised concerns about Walden’s influence on the CPC, and several noted her direct intervention in personnel decisions at the agency. In those conversations, one incident came up again and again. After the disastrous SPOG meeting earlier this year, Walden and a community engagement staffer had a conversation, in the presence of several witnesses, about what went wrong at the disastrous meeting on the SPOG contract at the Van Asselt Community Center.

According to the staffer, Walden said the community engagement team was to blame for the event’s failure, and they responded by telling Walden she was “throwing them under the bus”; at that point, the staffer and another witness say, Walden started yelling at the staffer, “saying she’s never felt so disrespected in her life.”

The next day, reportedly without speaking to the staffer or conducting a formal investigation, Ellis wrote a memo reprimanding the staffer for “an observed instance where you raised your voice and communicated disrespectfully to one of our volunteer Co-Chairs.” Ellis told the staffer that going forward, they were not allowed to participate in any meetings where Walden might be present; according to the staffer, Ellis did not respond to requests for clarification and they’ve had to stop attending all CPC meetings—a critical part of their job.

“Cali started to lecture me about being disrespectful to Rev. Walden, and I said ‘there’s witnesses— did you talk to anybody?'” the staffer said. “She told me from that point on, I can’t be at any event as long as Reverend Walden’s there. I’m confused; I’m baffled. I’m like, huh, you’re not going to talk to anyone?'”

Another former staffer, who uses they/them pronouns, said Walden told them she was “too old to learn another pronoun” and would often speak disparagingly about community organizations that provide alternatives to police response, such as Choose 180 and Community Passageways. “She would say, ‘They’re awful. Community members are dying because of them. We need to end all this diversion,’ which was really shocking to hear, the former staffer said.

Last year, Walden was also instrumental in shutting down public participation at CPC meetings, after several people, including longtime accountability activist Howard Gale, showed up to support Castill Hightower, a Seattle resident whose brother was killed by police in 2004. For years, Hightower has been advocating for the creation of an Affected Persons Program that would provide funding and direct assistance to help people and families who have been harmed by police.

In May of 2023, after the CPC stopped accepting public comment at its meetings, Hightower and other protesters showed up to a CPC meeting wearing black electrical tape over their mouths and carrying signs that read, “Stopping public comment doesn’t make the public disappear” and “You refuse to hear the community. Can you refuse to see us?”

After sitting through the meeting in silence, one of the protesters told CPC staffers afterward that they should mention Hightower’s name and role when discussing the Affected Persons Program. In response, Ellis told the group the CPC must be “allowed to do our work without interference from the public,” and told them to stop “harassing my staff” before repeatedly saying, “this meeting is over” and telling them to leave the room.

Although Gale briefly raised his voice at Ellis, video of the incident Gale posted on Youtube does not show anyone harassing Ellis, commissioners, or the staff.

During the next CPC meeting in June, Walden characterized the incident as tantamount to violence, saying that “if that ever happens to me again, if someone like that is yelling at me, then I will absolutely make sure that I [let it be known] I feel threatened. I will call the police.” (After this story came out, Hightower told us she considered this a threat to inflict “police violence on me in the same manner that ultimately took my brother’s life.)

At the next CPC meeting, commission co-chair Hunter backed up this version of events, condemning observers for “yelling and personal video recording at the end of our meeting, and [creating] distractions during the meeting itself. Moving forward, as commissioners, we expect to be able to do our work without interference or fear of violence,” Hunter said. Minutes later, the commission amended its bylaws to say that public comment “may,” rather than “shall,” be allowed at meetings, and the commission has not allowed public comment at any meeting since the change.

Back when the commission did allow public comment, Santillan said that “instead of people listening and taking it in, we were silencing, not responding, or deflecting. That’s not to say that every public commenter was correct in their judgment of what we’re doing. [But] we’re in a position of power. You have to sit with that sometimes.”

“They started calling security on people,” a former staffer said. “We’re a community-centered office and we’re calling police and armed security on the community?”

“We Did More Harm to the Community”

Community members have found themselves shut out in other ways as well.

In one incident, the commission nearly shut down a public meeting after a shouting match between Hightower and Cross, in which the commissioners who were present failed to intervene.

At others, the CPC has invited community groups to bring their concerns and proposed policy solutions to them in the form of a formal presentation, siloing community concerns into formal meetings with invited guests. One staffer described these meetings, which function as a kind of walled-off public comment, as “checking a box,” rather than a real opportunity for dialogue.

When she took her job heading up the CPC’s community engagement division, Pardo Garcia said, her understanding was that “the CPC is an arm of the accountability world, and we’re meant to be uplifting the voices of communities.” But “there was always this tension as to who ‘community’ was,” and whether the term referred to the commissioners themselves (who each represent different communities in the city), the public, or specific community groups invited to represent entire racial or other demographic groups, Pardo Garcia said.

When the public has had opportunities to bring its frustrations to the CPC in person, tensions have sometimes burst out into the open. That’s what happened at another meeting in Southeast Seattle in 2023, when Hightower confronted CPC staff about what she saw as their efforts to obstruct the Affected Persons Program and silence community members impacted by police violence, among other issues. The agenda for the meeting featured De’Vonte Parson, the founder of a youth empowerment group, and the room was full of high school students.

The commission did little to defuse a tense situation that erupted after the CPC gave Hightower the mic and then accused her of disrupting the meeting by refusing to stop speaking. Instead of letting Hightower speak uninterrupted—as people in the audience repeatedly suggested—CPC community engagement director Cross, Hightower, and members of the audience engaged in a heated meta-argument about Hightower’s right to speak and what she was trying to accomplish. (Cross: “She is trying to get justice for her brother.” Howard Gale: “No, she’s trying to get the CPC to do its job!”)

Victoria Beach, then the chair of the Seattle Police Department’s African American Advisory Council, jumped in from the front row to address community members who wanted the commission to let Hightower keep speaking.

“You know what? This happens every single meeting,” Beach, who stepped down from the advisory council after taking a job at the Seattle Police Department. “You guys are just seeing it one time. I’ve been there—all of us have been there—and nothing gets solved.”

Near the end of the meeting, a 17-year-old attendee in the back of the room called the adults’ behavior toward Hightower “childish.”

“It’s embarrassing. Our teachers don’t even do that,” he said.

Another incident, at a meeting the CPC called to hear from Seattle’s Indian American community on the one-year anniversary of 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula’s death, went more subtly off the rails. Kandula was walking in a crosswalk when Seattle police officer Kevin Dave struck and killed her while driving 74 miles an hour; Dave is still an SPD officer.

The CPC gave a group of invited community members a little over an hour to talk about their frustration with SPD and suggest policy solutions, and much of that time was taken up by CPC members voicing their own opinions and objections to the ideas the group proposed. After one speaker suggested that SPD needed to adopt better policies to reduce speeding in dense, crowded areas, commissioner Mark Mullens, a police officer who represents the Seattle Police Officers Guild on the commission, retorted that officers needed better training, not new restrictions.

“We drive in a dangerous environment, and I would say that most officers out here some of the best drivers in the world, but if you do not have the training … the statistics will go up substantially,” Mullens said. Hunter added that any new policy SPD might consider should incorporate “officer wellness,” because understanding “what was the officer thinking?” could help prevent future tragedies.

Ellis then asked the community group to come back to the commission with a written set of policy recommendations for the CPC to consider.

“I’m hearing mixed statements from the CPC, so I’m being very honest in that I don’t feel very encouraged leaving this meeting,” IACS director Lalita Uppala said. “The CPC is supposed to keep public safety in mind first. But that’s not what I’m hearing, and it has been disappointing to hear that.” The group would do the research Ellis was asking them to do, Uppala continued—”unpaid, of course, on our part”—but she was discouraged to hear that the CPC didn’t seem to agree that it was importance to prioritize safety for community members over the wellbeing of police.

“It was a shit show,” said someone who was on the commission at the time. “We did more harm to a community. … Nobody should come to our meetings and walk away with homework. We should be doing the work. We’re the ones that get paid to do this. We need someone who is actually experienced at moderating, because that was a disaster.”

“It Didn’t Have to Turn Out This Way”

Can the CPC, which was supposed to be the “community” branch of a landmark police accountability system, be saved—and is it worth saving? Through most of the CPC’s existence, commissioners, community members, and staff have groused that the commission is ineffective and dysfunctional. The staffers, commissioners, and outside observers who spoke with PubliCola offer various theories for why the CPC has not been an effective advocate for the communities whose views it is supposed to channel and represent.

In addition to concerns about a lack of internal accountability at the commission, some observers said commissioners have become disengaged and disinterested in the role, and are no longer representative of communities impacted by police misconduct. By law, two CPC seats are held by representatives from the police officers’ and police management unions, and two are reserved for public defense and civil liberties attorneys. In addition to those designated seats, the CPC currently includes two prosecutors, an environmental lawyer, and a representative from the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce; three seats are vacant.

Merkel said he thinks issues at the CPC stem partly from the 2018 police contract, and the fact that state law allows police unions to bargain away accountability. “If there’s going to be cultural change at the Seattle Police Department, and stronger accountability at the Seattle Police Department and in the Seattle accountability system, then our elected leaders need to give greater weight to the input from the community-led commission,” Merkel said.

Daugaard, one of the original CPC commissioners, said the 2018 contract between the city and SPOG, which invalidated much of the landmark 2017 accountability law, was one of several factors that “undercut” the commission’s effectiveness. Ever since then-mayor Jenny Durkan and the city council “agreed to a contract that undid virtually the entire accountability framework we’d spent years getting buy-in on, including from police,” Daugaard said, it has “been clear that the Commission lacks the ability to hold public officials accountable for poor decisions in this realm.”