By Andrew Engelson

On the evening of May 9, 2022, eight months before Seattle Police Department officer Kevin Dave struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula while driving 74 miles an hour, a different SPD officer, John Marion, was seen speeding south on I-5 without his lights or sirens on. 

A driver observed Marion’s behavior and filed a complaint with the Office of Police Accountability (OPA). After consulting GPS records, body-worn video, and in-car video, OPA concluded that Marion was driving as fast as 106 miles an hour and didn’t turn on his lights or sirens. In addition, Marion was driving fast for no reason: OPA determined he was not responding to an active 911 call. 

The report concluded that Marion had violated the department’s policies on what it calls “emergency vehicle operations,” which specify when an officer can break the speed limit or violate traffic laws. Marion received no punishment beyond an oral reprimand.

SPD’s policies on emergency driving are vague, advising officers that they should engage in emergency driving when there is “legitimate concern for the preservation of life” and “only when the need outweighs the risk.” These guidelines give officers enormous leeway when determining if a call merits driving at high speeds, according to Seattle Community Police Commission (CPC) co-chair Joel Merkel. 

Dave was heading to respond to a call from a person who thought he had taken too much cocaine and was standing outside his South Lake Union apartment building when he accelerated to more than three times the speed limit on Dexter Ave., striking Kandula in a crosswalk. Merkel wonders if similar tragedies could be prevented if SPD had more specific guidelines. “There are a number of circumstances in that situation that the policy doesn’t really address,” he said. “It talks about ongoing risk assessment. But what does the policy say with respect to lighting? Or how much traffic is present? Or how many pedestrians are present?”

Shannon Cheng, the chair of People Power Washington, a group that advocates for increased police accountability, worries that SPD will try to frame the fatal collision as one officer’s mistake rather than a larger pattern of irresponsible driving. “One of the first rules of emergency response is to ensure safety both for yourself, the person you’re going to help and anybody along the way,” Cheng said. “This officer did not follow this basic first rule that every first responder learns. That does raise questions. Is this a more systemic issue within the police department?”

The King County Prosecutor’s Office has hired a consultant to review video of the collision that killed Kandula, and will decide whether to press charges against the officer once that review is complete.

While much of the recent debate over police driving has focused on whether or not to limit pursuits, similar risks associated with responding to emergency calls have largely slipped under the radar. Publicly available data on high speeds and risky behavior by SPD officers is virtually nonexistent. That’s unfortunate, Merkel says, because emergency responses are much more common than pursuits.

“911 responses that demand an emergency response and operating your vehicle outside of normal traffic patterns to effectively respond quickly – that’s far more common than an officer pursuing another vehicle,” Merkel said. “They are both incredibly dangerous to the community.”

What SPD calls “emergency vehicle operations” includes any response to a 911 call that involves violating speed limits or other traffic rules. It doesn’t include pursuits, which have their own, separate policy. Under that policy, pursuits require supervisor approval and are only allowed when the person poses a “significant imminent threat of death or serious physical injury to others.” SPD’s pursuit policy spells out factors to consider before engaging in a chase, including weather, road conditions, and whether pedestrians are present.

SPD’s policy on emergency driving, in contrast, offer only perfunctory guidelines, instructing officers: “The preservation of life is the highest priority. Criminal apprehension and the preservation of property are secondary.” In addition, it advises officers that they should use an emergency response “where there is a legitimate concern for the preservation of life” and “only when the need outweighs the risk.” 

SPD’s policy doesn’t specify what sort of calls justify emergency driving. It’s unclear, for instance, if officers can or should violate traffic rules when responding to violent felonies or in-progress domestic violence incidents. The policy gives officers wide discretion, even allowing emergency driving in response to in-progress misdemeanors or property crimes such as stolen cars.

When asked how the department balances the need for fast response times and SPD’s emergency response policy, which states that officers “drive no faster than reasonably necessary to safely arrive at the scene,” SPD spokesperson John O’Neil declined to answer that question. Instead, he pointed out that SPD’s median response time to priority 1 calls—the most serious type of calls— increased from 6.3 minutes in 2018 to 7.2 minutes in 2022. 

PubliCola reviewed scores of OPA reports and found numerous examples in which SPD officers were investigated for excessive speed, including officers with multiple incidents involving high speeds or aggressive driving.

Before his I-5 speeding incident last year, for example, officer Marion was also the subject of a 2018 complaint for driving aggressively in traffic while not responding to any emergency. According to the report, Marion tailgated a vehicle, accelerated, and sped up to get alongside the vehicle’s driver side. The man who filed the complaint said Marion then “stared him down,” “suddenly accelerated,” changed lanes, and continued driving. OPA did not find that Marion broke any rules, but required him to go through additional training.

In November, OPA issued its findings on a December 2022 incident in which SPD officer Ilya Ivanov started a high-speed pursuit that OPA said wasn’t justified. Chasing a Volvo that Ivanov told investigators he believed was driven by someone involved in drive-by shooting, the officer followed the car at speeds over 100 miles per hour on Martin Luther King Jr. Way S, S. Othello St., and residential streets nearby. 

OPA found in its investigation that Ivanov had pursued two people who weren’t involved in the shooting but “fled out of fear.” The report also noted that one of Ivanov’s supervisors arrived on the scene after the Volvo crashed and said, “That’s not our guy. It doesn’t even come close to the description I put out.” OPA recommended a two-day suspension for Ivanov.

In 2022, OPA investigated another incident in which Ivanov engaged in a high-speed pursuit of a burglary suspect that also reached speeds of over 100 miles per hour. The chase continued south of Seattle to Renton, where the suspect eventually collided with two vehicles not involved in the pursuit, and injured two bystanders.

Investigators found that the risks the SPD officers took chasing the non-violent suspect “grew significantly during the pursuit and, ultimately, outweighed the need to catch the suspect vehicle. At that point, the pursuit should have been terminated.” OPA ordered Ivanov to receive more training.

OPA’s investigations over the past four years include numerous cases of unjustified pursuits; two incidents in which officers drove more than 50 miles per hour in 25-mile-per-hour zones; an officer who allegedly drove 85 miles per hour on her way home from work; a high-speed chase on Aurora Avenue that injured a bystanding driver; an incident in which two SPD officers raced each other;  and an officer who drove his police vehicle to a bar and, after getting drunk crashed his squad car. That officer, Gregory Tomlinson, was briefly suspended, but is still with SPD. The OPA wrote in its report that it “hopes that this behavior is not repeated in the future.”

Cheng says this proliferation of driving-related incidents and lack of meaningful discipline results in a mismatch between what the public expects will happen when officers engage in risky behavior and what the union contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) allows.  “lf an officer did something so bad that they decided that they needed to fire them,” Cheng said, “you still have this issue with arbitration and that the officers have the right to appeal that decision.” Firings, Cheng noted, rarely happen.

Cheng hopes that at a minimum, the new SPOG contract—which has been in negotiations since 2019 —will have tighter arbitration policies, similar to what’s in the contract the city council approved for the Seattle Police Management Association (SPMA) last year. 

“It used to be that if an officer went to arbitration, it was like a whole new trial where they could bring up new evidence that OPA wouldn’t have had access to,” Cheng said. “The SPMA contract tightened that up and said you need to disclose all the information up front, and you can’t bring in new information late in the game to try to overturn a disciplinary decision.”

Martina Morris, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington who has studied the risks of high-speed pursuits, said that SPOG’s collective bargaining process has created obstacles to accountability. Morris worries that SPD will treat both Kandula’s death—and officer Daniel Auderer’s jokes about her “limited value”—as mistakes made by a few bad apples. “Based on [Auderer’s] leaked bodycam audio, it’s clear there is a culture in place at SPD that civil judgements will deflect, and take the place of, systemic assessment and reform,” she said.

Earlier this year, a KUOW report found a significant number of SPD officers did not have the updated emergency vehicle operations training required by a new state law that reduced restrictions on pursuits. In response, the CPC wrote a letter to police chief Adrian Diaz in June asking how many officers had up-to-date emergency vehicle operations training and why SPD’s policies on emergency response are more vague than its policies on pursuit.

SPD spokesman O’Neil said 95 percent of officers are now up to date with the required emergency vehicle operations “refresher,” an hour-long online course that goes over pursuits, braking times, and other safety considerations when driving at high speeds. 

The Washington state legislature passed legislation limiting police pursuits in 2021 and and then relaxed some of those restrictions earlier this year. State law requires “reasonable suspicion” that a suspect has committed a violent offense, sexual assault, or poses a serious risk of harm to others. SPD’s policy on pursuits says an officer must establish “probable cause” (a higher legal standard) that there is an imminent threat of death or serious injury. According to SPD policy, an officer has to get supervisor approval for a pursuit and weigh various factors including weather and road conditions, and whether there are other pedestrians or drivers in the area.

SPD’s emergency response policy, however, is much more open-ended and does not require officers to consider those factors.

“There are some rules with respect to emergency response, but they’re very vague and leave a lot of discretion to the officer—with the overarching goal of preserving life and ongoing risk assessment,” Merkel said. “There are plenty of areas within that vague policy that could benefit from more specific directions.”

Other police departments have more specific policies related to emergency response. In Portland, the city’s police department manual says that police can only break speed limits or traffic laws when responding to Code 3 calls (the most serious), which include a “person’s life in danger, crime in progress, [or] crime with suspects present.” Denver’s police procedures specify when emergency response is acceptable, including “shootings, robberies in progress, explosions, other catastrophes, or major disasters in which lives are endangered.” San Francisco’s police manual goes further, noting that police can engage in emergency response to Code 3 calls “only when an emergency response appears reasonably necessary to prevent serious injury to persons”—regardless of what type of crime is being committed.

The pertinent question, Merkel said, is “does the operation of the vehicle outside of the traffic pattern match the emergency? If it’s a really big emergency, you probably want that vehicle operating far outside traffic rules. But if it’s a very small emergency, you probably don’t.”

While SPD’s pursuit rules require lights and sirens “as necessary,” its emergency response rules require only “audible signals,” which can include shorter “chirps” or intermittent bursts from sirens. Merkel believes officers should be required to use their lights and sirens during both pursuits and emergency response.

In reply to the CPC’s letter, Chief Diaz wrote that SPD was “evaluating edits to make the two policies more consistent, as we fully agree that most of the same considerations, notwithstanding the fleeing driver, are present in both circumstances.”

In response to a question from PubliCola about this review to make SPD’s policies on pursuit and emergency response more similar, SPD spokesperson O’Neil said, “The changes to [emergency vehicle operations] are under review by the policy section and the Community Police Commission has indicated that they will be engaging community on this policy.”

Cheng is skeptical that a change in the policy will result in safer driving by SPD officers. “If we get this pretty piece of paper with strong-sounding words on it, but officers don’t respect that, or feel like ‘well, I can behave however I want, and I’ll still be found to have acted within policy,’ it’s not going to bring the change that we want,” she said.

Making the problem more complex is the movement of 911 call center operations from SPD to a civilian city department in 2021 – now rebranded as the CARE department.

SPD’s emergency response policies don’t refer to the categories that the 911 call center uses to prioritize calls. It’s also not clear if priority 1 calls always require police officers to disregard traffic laws to reach the scene quickly. Dave, for instance, was responding to a priority 1 call when he struck Kandula, but 911 operators and the fire department had already determined that the caller was conscious, lucid, and not in imminent danger well before Dave accelerated to 74 miles an hour on Dexter Ave.

Jacob Adams, deputy director of 911 operations, said the primary reason 911 operators designate a call priority 1 is that it “represents an imminent threat to life.” Adams said that priority 1 calls could also include “possible medical emergency calls, any response with Seattle Fire [Department], serious assaults, in-progress domestic violence-related incidents, and hang-up, abandoned, or unknown circumstance calls.”

However, it’s up to SPD officers to determine if a call requires an emergency response, and nothing in SPD’s policy manual specifically states whether the priority of the call matters when deciding whether or not to break traffic rules. “The 911 center doesn’t determine how they respond in their vehicles,” Adams said.

Merkel would like to see more specific wording in SPD’s manual about when officers should use emergency driving to respond to dispatches, and wants SPD to add considerations such as weather, pedestrians, and traffic to the policy. But he’s concerned the police union will push back against more specific wording.

“A policy that has clear guidelines is arguably something that’s easier to violate than something that’s vague,” Merkel said. “It would be consistent with their past practices to resist policies that provide more prescription rather than discretion.”

SPOG did not respond to requests for comment about SPD’s emergency response policies.

Meanwhile, Cheng is closely watching negotiations over the SPOG contract, especially regarding arbitration, which often reinstates officers who’ve been accused of misconduct. She pointed to an arbitrator reinstating an SPD officer who punched a handcuffed woman (a decision the Washington State Court of Appeals later reversed) as an example of how difficult it is to seriously reprimand officers who engage in excessive speeds or other misconduct.

“If the end goal is that we want to change the culture of the police department by trying to get rid of these bad apples, then we need to fire them,” Cheng said.