Category: discrimination

discrimination, gender, Mayor Harrell, Police

Officers Describe SPD Under Diaz as a “Dictatorship” Where Retaliation was Routine
Former police chief Adrian Diaz answers questions at a press conference announcing his replacement by Sue Rahr.

By Andrew Engelson

Two weeks after Mayor Bruce Harrell announced he was removing Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz and replacing him, on an interim basis, with former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr, several current and former Seattle Police Department officers say Diaz established a “dictatorship” at the department in which officers who speak out against the chief and an inner circle of leadership have been demoted or subject to retaliatory investigations. 

Several women have sued Diaz, along with others in the department, alleging gender discrimination and harassment. 

Harrell announced that Diaz would take a new role as head of “special projects,” which were rumored to include work prepping for the FIFA World Cup in 2026. A spokesperson for SPD said “it has not been determined if he is working on the logistics for FIFA World Cup.” 

The spokesperson said Rahr has not decided what rank Diaz will have when he returns or what his salary will be; currently, Diaz’ salary is around $340,000 a year. 

One SPD officer who used to be part of SPD’s command structure spoke at length with PubliCola and asked to remain anonymous because of an active lawsuit. She said she was the subject of at least five complaints to the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) in a period of two months, which she claims were in retaliation for speaking up against Diaz and his circle of advisers.

 “The chief surrounds himself with very, very loyal subjects who will not question any of his activities or any of his decisions,” she said. “Any dissenting voices are immediately silenced.”

Though Diaz is no longer chief, that core leadership circle remains. The high-ranking officer said that without further staffing changes, the pattern of retaliation and frivolous OPA investigations will continue. 

“OPA is supposed to be for serious misconduct,” the officer said. “And it has been weaponized by Adrian [Diaz], by Jamie [Tompkins], by John O’Neil, and by Dan Nelson to punish people that speak up. And to put the atmosphere of fear into everybody so that nobody will speak up,” she said.

Tompkins, a former evening news anchor for Q13 FOX, is SPD’s chief of staff; John O’Neil is communications director and co-defendant in a discrimination lawsuit filed by four female officers; Dan Nelson is an assistant chief appointed in 2023.

Tompkins and Nelson declined to comment for this story and O’Neil did not respond to a request for comment.

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In response to a question about whether a climate of retaliation exists at SPD, interim chief Rahr recently told PublCola, “I am spending time talking with as many SPD members as I can to learn why these perceptions exist so I can take steps to address them.”

Diaz and the department are currently facing at least three lawsuits by six SPD officers. These include a lawsuit former assistant chief Eric Greening filed against Diaz in May, alleging racial discrimination and retaliation; a $5 million tort claim four female officers—Valerie Carson, Judinna Gulpan, Kame Spencer, and lieutenant Lauren Trucsott—filed against Diaz, public affairs director John O’Neil, and SPD human resources director Rebecca McKechnie in April; and a gender discrimination lawsuit against Diaz filed in January by former assistant chief Deanna Nollette.  

SPD and the city of Seattle are also the subject of of a race and gender discrimination lawsuit filed by detective Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, a 43-year SPD veteran. 

In addition, Steven Hirjak, a former assistant chief who shot and killed 25-year-old Herbert Hightower in 2004, sued Diaz and SPD for discrimination and retaliation, and SPD settled with Hirjak for $600,000 last December.

Although interim chief Rahr told reporters at press conference announcing her appointment that she didn’t plan any changes to SPD leadership, she made it clear to PubliCola that she could make other personnel changes in the future. “If I need to make a staff change, I will make it,” Rahr said. “The mayor was very clear. He said you will have the ability to change staff as you need to.”

Rahr did act quickly to undo one recent high-profile Diaz decision, reinstating assistant chief Tyrone Davis, whom Diaz put on leave a week before Rahr’s appointment because of an open OPA complaint. The King County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that it is conducting a criminal investigation of Davis, putting the OPA complaint temporarily on hold, but declined to share details about the investigation. Davis declined to comment on the investigation.

In addition, the Pierce County prosecutor’s office confirmed that the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office is conducting a criminal investigation of assistant chief Eric Barden based on at least one OPA complaint. The office would not confirm what the allegations against Barden are. OPA declined a public records request for details on the complaint against Barden, saying, “the contents of an active investigation are categorically exempt in their entirety.” 

Tammy Floyd, a former SPD lieutenant who thought she was on a path to become SPD’s first female assistant chief responsible for patrol, says a climate of misogyny and infighting among leadership pushed her out of SPD.

Floyd says she was transferred out of patrol, where she had spent her entire career, into investigations—a department in which she had no experience—soon after Diaz became interim chief in 2020. She was sent to the chaotic East Precinct, which was still recovering from the 2020 protests. “We felt abandoned in that building in the East Precinct,” Floyd said. “Nobody knew what the mission was, what the vision was. You knew that nobody in [Diaz’s] inner circle cared, that he didn’t care.” Continue reading “Officers Describe SPD Under Diaz as a “Dictatorship” Where Retaliation was Routine” →

discrimination, Mayor Harrell, Police, Privacy

Harrell Nixes Shotspotter-Style Gunshot Locator In Scaled-Back Surveillance Proposal
Graph showing Murder and weapons arrest rates per 100,000 population among large metropolitan counties, by ShotSpotter Implementation Status 1999-2016
Murder and weapons arrest rates per 100,000 population among large metropolitan counties, by ShotSpotter Implementation Status 1999-2016; Source: Impact of ShotSpotter Technology on Firearm Homicides and Arrests Among Large Metropolitan Counties: a Longitudinal Analysis, 1999-2016

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell announced on Friday afternoon that he has abandoned plans to install acoustic gunshot locators—colloquially known as Shotspotter, for the largest company selling such systems—”[n]ow that more specific cost estimates have been received.” The news, buried in the sixth paragraph of a late-Friday press release, ends more than a decade of efforts to install the recording devices in neighborhoods around Seattle (for now.)

According to a spokesperson for Harrell’s office, the cost to implement the full “Crime Prevention Technology Pilot,” which also includes CCTV camera surveillance and deployment of automatic license detectors on most police cars, was $2.5 million; the gunshot locator system made up about $800,000 of that total.

“In receiving updated cost estimates and aligning more closely to the allocated budget, the implementation package for the first year of the pilot will only include CCTV and RTCC to remain within the authorized budget,” the spokesperson said. Conveniently, nixing the gunshot surveillance system will get the total cost for the pilot down to the amount budgeted for the entire pilot program—around $1.8 million.

The city still plans to install CCTV cameras in three neighborhoods where police already do regular “emphasis patrols” —Aurora Ave. N, Third Avenue downtown, and the Chinatown-International District—and connect them to the city’s “real-time crime center.” Research suggests that while surveillance cameras may reduce crime within direct view of the cameras, that “deterrence effect” is offset by a “displacement effect” when people simply move a short distance away.

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Shotspotter and similar systems, which have been around since the 1990s, are not new or particularly innovative technology. They use microphones, recording devices, GPS, and cell networks to detect and record sounds that resemble gunfire, identify their approximate location, and transmit them to “acoustic experts” who listen to the sounds, filter out false alarms, and alert police. False alarms are common; in Chicago, which recently ended its contract with the company that manufactures Shotspotter, fewer than one out of ever 10 dispatches from Shotspotter alerts produced any evidence of a gun-related crime.

Critics have argued that gunfire detection systems can result in overpolicing in communities of color, put police on high alert whenever they’re in neighborhoods under gunshot surveillance, and waste time and resources on false alarms. Evidence from cities that have deployed Shotspotter and similar systems shows that although they slightly increase police response speeds, faster responses don’t result in more arrests or a reduction in crime.

Harrell has supported acoustic gunshot detectors since at least 2012, when he backed then-mayor Mike McGinn’s plan to install a gunshot detection system, calling it an “effective technology.”

discrimination, Mayor Harrell

“Outstanding Leadership”: Harrell Effusively Praises Embattled Police Chief Adrian Diaz While Announcing His Replacement
Outgoing police chief Adrian Diaz speaks at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, flanked by Mayor Bruce Harrell and incoming interim police chief Sue Rahr.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell officially announced that Police Chief Adrian Diaz will be stepping into an unspecified new role in “special projects” this afternoon, at a crowded press conference in which Harrell also announced that former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr will serve as interim police chief while the city does a national search for Diaz’ permanent replacement.

As we reported in our initial story on Harrell’s decision to remove Diaz this morning, at least half a dozen women and one man, former assistant chief Eric Greening, have accused Diaz or other department officials of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and creating a misogynistic culture. Two of the lawsuits, by veteran police detective Denise “Cookie” Bouldin and Captain Eric Greening, also allege racial discrimination. Bouldin and Greening are Black; Greening applied for the permanent police chief position when Diaz was interim and was demoted from assistant chief after Diaz won the permanent job.

In his remarks, Harrell did not mentioned the allegations against the chief and others in the department, instead praising Diaz as a visionary leader who had turned the department around and deserved nothing but respect. “His integrity, in my mind, is beyond reproach,” Harrell said. “He’s a human being, and a good human being at that.”

In his own brief remarks, Diaz cited his own accomplishments, including the creation of a course for police recruits that includes trainings by representatives from marginalized communities and meetings with community groups, before breaking down in tears. “I’ve accomplished so much in four years as chief, but there’s more work to be done. I passed that challenge along to [Rahr], and I’ll continue to support the city in [its] transition,” Diaz said.

Harrell would not elaborate on what Diaz’ “special projects” role would entail, or what his rank and salary will be. Diaz’ most recent rank in the department was lieutenant, but Harrell suggested it was unlikely he would be demoted back to his previous rank.

Asked to respond to the allegations against Diaz, which include sexually harassing female subordinates and putting them in situations that made them feel uncomfortable, Harrell declined, citing the fact that the lawsuits are ongoing and that the city has appointed an outside investigator to look into the allegations against Diaz and others in the department.

“I will not comment on any litigation, and that’s an unwise move by any stretch of the imagination,” Harrell said. “There’s a process for that, and it’s called due process for a reason, and so we’ll let the litigation and the claims play out.”

But by praising Diaz at length while verbally waving away the allegations against him, Harrell gave tacit credence to a vocal contingent of Diaz supporters who claim he is the victim of an internal conspiracy based on fabricated allegations.

Two of these supporters, Community Police Commission member Rev. Harriet Walden and SPD African American Advisory Council member Victoria Beach, who is an employee of the department, have suggested that all of the women who’ve sued the department are liars. In a press conference last week, Walden and Beach blamed the women’s allegations on racism and an internal “mutiny” at SPD. Both women expressed support for Diaz from the audience during Harrell’s press conference when he called on them during a question and answer period.

“I know for a fact that he’s going to be proven innocent,” Beach said. “I’m not the chief, but I would say the hell with all of this, and I would be out of there, and I would have the biggest lawsuit ever. This is wrong. Nobody is safe in the Seattle Police Department.”

Prior to working as an employee at SPD, Beach had a $63,000 contract through 2023 to “assist in the coordination of the various advisory councils that the department works with.”

In 2022 and 2023, Walden held a contract with the Human Services Department to conduct around 14 in-person or virtual “Virtues Healing Circles” per year; in the circles, participants draw “virtue cards” from a deck and discuss how the virtue listed on the card resonates with their personal experience. The goal is to create healing and supportive environments for people who have experienced trauma, such as gun violence. Walden’s contract also required her “to distribute Virtues Cards at community events and encourage others to host their own circles” and “attend events at the request of the City to respond to crises whenever feasible for Rev. Walden.”

When PubliCola reached out to Walden earlier this year to ask about her contract, she said that “until you have the experience [of participating in a Virtues Circle] I don’t have anything to say to you,” adding, “I’ve never had a contract with the city before, so why shouldn’t [I] have a contract with the city?” Beach did not respond to our request for comment at the time, and approached me on Wednesday to say that she did not “owe” me an interview (which, of course, neither she nor anyone else does.)

While the lawsuits wind their way through the courts, several insiders observed that Harrell’s effusive comments about Diaz’ performance could help him find a job as police chief elsewhere, which Diaz said he would be open to doing in the future. After Diaz broke down crying during his own brief remarks, Harrell said, “You can’t make up that kind of heart,” and claimed Diaz “gets calls all the time to lead other departments.”

“The city should have ultimate faith in the police department,” Harrell said. “We don’t make panic moves, we make strategic moves… If there’s one takeaway from this press conference, it’s that I stand with this fine leader.”

Rahr is an advisor for SPD’s 30 by 30 initiative—an effort aimed at increasing the number of female police recruits to 30 percent by 2030—and a national expert on police recruitment. At the end of the press conference, PubliCola asked Rahr whether she was concerned about the allegations of misogyny, harassment, and discrimination in the department and what she would do, if anything, to address what many women have described as a misogynistic culture at SPD.

“I’ll be honest with you, I have concerns about the culture of all police department,” Rahr said. “I don’t think the Seattle Police Department is worse or better than others. I think we have work to do in every department. One of the reasons I was very anxious to jump in is, I think the Seattle Police Department is open to doing something meaningful and implementing systemic change.”

Councilmember Rob Saka, who came to the press conference along with Councilmember Tanya Woo, said he stood by Harrell’s decision and declined—in response to a reporter’s repeated questions—to say that he “stands with” Diaz.  In a statement, council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle said the “gender equity issues identified by women within the department in the 30×30 Report. … are serious, they are real, and they need to be addressed. I am excited to work with Interim Chief Rahr to continue that work.”

During the public safety committee’s meeting on Tuesday, Saka raised questions about Diaz’ frequent use of security detail, asking rhetorically whether it makes sense to pay for the chief to have full security at all times, the same way the mayor does.

Speaking to PubliCola after the meeting, Saka said, “I do think it makes a lot of sense for the mayor to have executive protection at all times. And I think as a policy matter, we should question whether it makes sense, as a standard practice, to have the chief of police have equal executive services protection rather than protection in response to a specific threat. We are grossly understaffed and under-resourced today… We’re in a $260 million and growing budget deficit. So always thinking about how we can best help drive efficiencies and streamline things and optimize our investments,

Harrell said he anticipates the search for a new permanent police chief will take between four and six months; Rahr does not plan to apply for the job.

Density, Development, discrimination, housing, Mayor Harrell

Mayor’s Office Removed All New Anti-Displacement Proposals from Draft “Anti-Displacement Framework”

By Erica C. Barnett

As Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office prepared to release the proposed 20-year update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan earlier this year, an advisor sent an email to key staffers at the Office of Planning and Community Development, including OPCD director Rico Quirindongo, raising concerns about an “anti-displacement framework” the office submitted to the mayor’s office last year.

OPCD developed the anti-displacement strategy as part of a proposed comprehensive plan update that included significantly more density throughout the city than the plan the mayor eventually released; that plan, as we’ve reported, reluctantly complies with a new state housing law while preserving the city’s exclusionary housing patterns.

The mayor’s office had already deleted sections of OPCD’s proposal “that would suggest some commitment of new dollars or policy pivots that haven’t been vetted” with his office, the staffer wrote, but OPCD still needed to “really beef[…] up” sections of the plan that highlighted the city’s existing anti-displacement interventions, “with a ton more detail (including the millions we [are] spending on these efforts!)”

For example, the staffer wrote, “We should really be talking up our affordable housing investments—I wouldn’t be surprised i[f] Seattle residents are spending more per capita on this than anywhere else in the country.”

When he announced the draft comprehensive plan in March, Harrell said that his experience growing up in the historically redlined Central District “has informed my belief that we need more housing, and we need to be intentional about how and where we grow, addressing the historic harms of exclusionary zoning and embedding concrete anti-displacement strategies every step of the way.”

But a comparison between the 2023 draft of the plan and the version released in March reveals that the mayor effectively vetoed an ambitious plan to combat displacement and replaced it with a list of laws that are already in effect, including the “record high” $970 million housing levy.

The changes aren’t mere trims or cuts. The August draft, which OPCD finalized after four months of community engagement, described itself as “a toolbox for robust anti-displacement strategies needed to achieve equitable growth” and concluded with an appendix titled “Examples of current City anti-displacement tools.”

In the 14-page version Harrell released, that appendix is the plan.

The changes reflect a dramatic shift in the city’s official strategy for addressing displacement through smart planning and investment strategies. Instead of endorsing policy proposals to prevent displacement in the future, the draft plan repeatedly pats the city on the back for policies adopted years or even decades in the past.

For example, OPCD’s draft included five strategies to “Expand Tenant Protections” in the future, such as expanding access to information about vacancies in affordable housing, expanding tenant protections to more people, funding tenant organizing efforts, and paying for short-term rental assistance to prevent evictions.

In contrast, under a section retitled “Protect Tenants,” the framework released in March summarizes existing tenant protections without proposing any new ones. These include the Just Cause Eviction ordinance (1980),  the Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance (1990), the Rental Housing Inspection Ordinance (2010), the Economic Displacement Relocation Ordinance (2021), and the winter and school-year eviction moratoria (2020 and 2021, respectively.)

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Similarly, the unreleased draft suggested the city expand or establish investments in strategies like land banking (buying land for future use), social housing, and right-of-first-refusal laws that would give community-based organizations or tenants the right to buy buildings that house low-income tenants when they go up for sale.

The March proposal eliminates these proposals, instead listing two existing city programs that help homeowners at risk of displacement from historically redlined communities—the Equitable Development Initiative and a density bonus for religious institutions that build affordable housing on their properties, which has been required by state law since 2019.

A spokesperson for OPCD told PubliCola the slimmed-down anti-displacement strategy “reflects many of the existing City policies and programs that were identified, through extensive stakeholder engagement during the summer of 2023, as strategies that collectively play an important and ongoing role in addressing displacement throughout the city.”

“Before assuming new and different policies are needed, the City needs to assess the efficacy of current policies and where there might be gaps. To the extent current policies are effective, the City may want to double down on those,” the spokesperson added.

As with the draft comprehensive plan update released in March, the draft anti-displacement plan avoids discussion the ongoing impacts of explicitly racist past practices like redlining, portraying displacement as the result of market forces rather than ongoing policies the city has the power to change. But market pressures don’t exist in a vacuum, a now-deleted section of the draft plan reads. They are exacerbated by the preservation of “exclusionary zoning” in whiter, wealthier single-family areas, which “limits access for lower-income people and contributes to displacement in other more vulnerable areas as people priced out of these neighborhoods look elsewhere for housing and bid up homes in relatively lower-cost areas”—not in some distant, racist past, but in our present, because of policies in place today.

These deleted sections, which span pages, weren’t just rhetoric; they directly informed city planners’ proposals for the policies they included in the early draft of the plan, including new tenant protections, more apartments all over the city, and “substantial” increases in funding for existing and new anti-displacement strategies. (I’m not referring to the early draft’s pages of historical context, which have been moved to a different part of the plan, but to the sections describing how past discrimination has reverberations in existing city policies.)

A spokesperson for Mayor Harrell’s office pointed out to PubliCola that the draft plan, including the heavily edited anti-displacement strategy, is “not the final plan, and we are still gathering feedback from residents. We see this process as an opportunity to have a conversation with community about how and where our city should grow and will be reviewing every aspect of the plan in the context of the public feedback we receive.”

Based on an earlier round of community feedback, however, there’s little reason to believe the city will change its plan in response to community input now. According to OPCD’s own report on a series of meetings held across the city between November 2022 and February 2023, Seattle residents overwhelmingly said they wanted to see more affordable housing in their neighborhoods, that the city should allow new density, in general, “everywhere” or “spread throughout” the city, and that their favorite thing about where they lived were amenities they could access without leaving the neighborhood, like grocery stores and transit.

Digging into the database of comments, which OPCD links on its website, “density without displacement” is a common theme, with many people identifying the need to allow more housing everywhere while adopting specific strategies to stall displacement in areas that are being rapidly gentrified. OPCD’s original anti-displacement strategy appears to have incorporated many of these concerns by proposing specific policies to address them. But by the time the plan emerged from the mayor’s office, all those proposed policies were gone.

Density, Development, discrimination, housing, Mayor Harrell

Mayor’s Office Edited Ambitious Growth Plan for Seattle to Preserve the Status Quo

By Erica C. Barnett

Last August, Seattle’s Department of Planning and Community Development produced a draft update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan that would have allowed for significantly more density in more parts of the city, including single-family neighborhoods, than the final version Mayor Harrell released in March.

The never-released draft plan, which PubliCola obtained through a records requests, would have allowed more density near bus lines, more apartments in areas historically reserved for single-family houses, and more housing of all types in the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

The unreleased plan zeroed in on the city’s history of racist zoning restrictions, and left no question that wealthy, white Seattle residents continue to benefit from exclusionary policies today. Areas that once had explicit covenants banning Black residents “remain disproportionately white, restrictively zoned, and characterized by high-cost detached housing,” according to the original draft, thanks to “facially race-neutral standards like minimum lot size and prohibitions on multifamily housing — both of which remain in Seattle’s zoning today.”

Instead of releasing that plan, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office spent six months taking their red pens to the document—watering down the density requirements, removing provisions that would have allowed more housing in single-family neighborhoods (such as Laurelhurst, Wallingford, and east Queen Anne) and ensuring that the new comprehensive plan would preserve the status quo while just complying with a new state law designed to allow more density everywhere.

Here, for the first time, is a look at some of the changes Mayor Harrell’s office made to the plan that will guide how and where Seattle grows over the next 20 years. The comp plan is an important document: It sets goals for the coming decades and establishes policies to make them happen; these policies become the framework for future decisions about zoning, land use, greenhouse gas reductions, and much more.

The most obvious and high-impact changes to the plan are reductions in the amount of density the city will allow in every neighborhood, especially historically single-family areas. Many of the reductions in density are fairly subtle, but the first one is glaring: The August version of the plan would have created a new land use designation called “corridors,” where buildings of up to five stories would “generally” be allowed, although “higher heights may be appropriate in areas of mixed-use zoning or other focal points.”

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Urbanists (including PubliCola) have raised issues with the idea that apartments should be restricted to big, busy arterials. But that isn’t an argument against tall apartment buildings on streets with bus routes; it’s an argument for denser housing throughout the city.

The proposal the city released in March completely eliminates the corridor designation, taking large swaths of land surrounding streets like Sand Point Way, Ravenna Ave. NE, and East Madison Street off the table for density. According to a spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, Seferiana Day, “the Mayor’s Office considered the corridor option but ultimately decided not to include it as part of its Draft Plan as the other zoning changes contemplated in the Draft Plan can readily accommodate any amount of future growth that does occur.”

According to Day, the city has not calculated how many new apartments and other types of housing including the corridors would have added to the plan.

“[T]his seems to be calling for more housing well beyond what is needed based on projections,” Harrell’s staffer commented. A long-range planner with OPCD responded, “Yes, that is intentional. We have not kept up with past job growth and want to ensure there is a buffer of housing capacity in anticipation of potential future housing demand exceeding the adopted projections (which were low-ball last update).”

For decades, there has been a tension in Seattle between “accommodating” the number of people who are expected to move here—by allowing enough additional housing for a theoretical maximum number of new people—and providing an abundance of options for everyone already living here as well as those who will move here in the future. The comprehensive plan draft the city release in March takes the former approach, creating “capacity” for about 100,000 new homes over a period when at least 200,000 new people are expected to move into a city already facing a critical housing shortage.

Notes between city staff on a draft of the plan show that there was internal debate on this point, and that the mayor’s office prevailed. In one copy of the draft that included staff notes, a staffer for the mayor’s office questioned the plan’s original recommendation to “Plan for expected growth over the next 20 years while also providing additional housing capacity to enable the city to respond to existing unmet needs and potential demand from future employment growth.”

“[T]his seems to be calling for more housing well beyond what is needed based on projections,” Harrell’s staffer commented. A long-range planner with OPCD responded, “Yes, that is intentional. We have not kept up with past job growth and want to ensure there is a buffer of housing capacity in anticipation of potential future housing demand exceeding the adopted projections (which were low-ball last update).” Continue reading “Mayor’s Office Edited Ambitious Growth Plan for Seattle to Preserve the Status Quo” →

discrimination, Police

SPD Officer Demoted for Protest Response Claims Discriminatory Treatment
Former Assistant Chief Steve Hirjak

By Paul Kiefer

The Seattle Police Department commander demoted two months ago for his role in the department’s handling of a protest last June filed a discrimination and retaliation claim against the city on Thursday.

Captain Steve Hirjak, whom Interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz demoted from Assistant Chief after deeming him responsible for SPD’s widely criticized use of tear gas and blast balls against protesters on Capitol Hill on June 1, 2020, argued through his attorney that Diaz unfairly shifted blame for the incident away from Lieutenant John Brooks, who was the on-site commander during the protest.

In a letter accompanying the claim, Hirjak’s attorney criticized Diaz’s decision to demote Hirjak instead of Brooks, pointing to findings by the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) that held Brooks responsible for violating SPD policy on June 1. When Diaz unexpectedly diverged from the OPA’s findings in May, he drew criticism from members of the Community Police Commission and city council member Lisa Herbold, who questioned what evidence the chief had to hold Hirjak responsible for the protest response; Hirjak included a letter from Herbold to Diaz in his claim.

In a subsequent letter to Herbold, Diaz wrote he “must have confidence that each and every member of this department’s sworn Command Staff… be able to step into an incident command position as circumstances may require.” Hirjak’s demotion, he added, was “a reflection of my lack of confidence in [Hirjak’s] ability to do so.”

But in his claim, Hirjak contends that Diaz—and his predecessor, former SPD Chief Carmen Best—treated him unfairly because of his race (Hirjak is Korean-American) while allowing white commanders who made mistakes during the department’s protest response to avoid accountability or rise in the ranks. Hirjak became SPD’s first Asian-American assistant chief in 2018.

His attorney’s letter points out errors by an array of Hirjak’s colleagues, including the decision by Assistant Chief Thomas Mahaffey to abandon the department’s East Precinct without informing Best, as well as Assistant Chief Deanna Nollette’s “failure… to gather or understand relevant intelligence” ahead of the protests, which he cited as a reason for SPD’s inadequate preparations for large-scale demonstrations. Neither Mahaffey nor Nollette faced discipline.

The letter also notes that both Brooks—who was the subject of 14 misconduct investigations in 2020—and Bryan Grenon, who was the captain above Brooks on June 1, both received promotions within the past year: Brooks is now the acting captain of a unit that leads SPD’s protest responses, and Grenon replaced Hirjak as assistant chief.

According to his attorney, the demotion has done serious damage to Hirjak’s reputation and career opportunities, as did the two months he spent without a unit assignment after his promotion. While Diaz recently appointed Hirjak to lead the Special Victims Crimes section, which includes the domestic violence and elder crimes units, Hirjak’s attorney argued that his new assignment “lacks visibility or significant contact with outside agencies and only serves to perpetuate the damage associated with his demotion.”

Meanwhile, his attorney added, “the more prominent position of Captain with the Force Review Unit remains open and Mr. Hirjak, who helped create the unit, is the most qualified person for the job.”

The city has until early August to agree to a mediation before Hirjak can file a lawsuit.