Seattle Police Department Killed At Least 30 People Under The Consent Decree

U.S. District Judge James Robart ended 13 years of federal oversight of the Seattle Police Department on Wednesday, returning full control of the cops to the City. But City leaders' victory lap over the long, expensive road to reform, seems somewhat unearned. Afterall, the consent decree came in response to the community outcry when a cop shot and killed a civilian — those incidents have only increased under federal oversight.  

In 2010, almost 15 years ago to the day, Officer Ian Birk killed First Nations woodcarver John T. Williams. Birk, unprovoked, ran up to Williams who was holding a piece of cedar and a closed pocket knife, tools a woodcarver tends to carry. The cop told Williams to drop the knife, he gave him just four seconds to react, then shot and killed him. 

Outrage erupted throughout the city. Protests, lawsuits, and a letter from 30 local community groups calling on the federal government to investigate SPD’s pattern of excessive force and discriminatory policing. After a nine month investigation, the Department of Justice found SPD had indeed engaged in excessive force and discriminatory policing and the consent decree was born. 

Now, 13 years and $127 million in reforms later, use of force appears to have dipped, but bias still remains: Cops used force against Black people most often, accounting for 33% of all incidents, despite the fact that Black people make up just 6% of the population. And, as no City official bothered to mention while they were patting themselves on the back Wednesday, police keep killing people. 

Between 2013 and most recent data in 2022, SPD officers shot and killed 30 people, according to the City’s “officer involved shooting” dashboard. The data does not give a complete view of police killings — sometimes cops don’t use a gun to kill people and they have certainly killed more people in the three years since 2022.

The dashboard does not record far enough back to compare those nine years to the previous, but between 2006 and 2012, SPD shot and killed nine people. Unless the SPD killed more than 21 people, in 2004 and 2005, SPD has not killed less people under federal oversight.

But the police monitor has taken issue with a similar line of analysis in the past when data scientist Sherry Towers asserted that police killings had increased under the consent decree. The monitor argued that the analysis did not account for how many of these killings may be “justified” by department policy, a point that might sway some moderate reformers and offend most abolitionists. The monitor also said it was misleading to count 2013, 2014, 2015, and even 2016 as “post” consent decree as the City had not implemented many of the reforms and training until 2016.

But even playing by the monitor's rules and comparing the number of killings in 2017 to 2022 to those in the five years before the consent decree, 2007 to 2012, the theory holds. SPD shot and killed 9 people between 2007 and 2012 and 16 between 2017 and 2022. That’s an increase even considering the population change between those two time periods. 

However you want to interpret the data, these are real people that Seattle cops have killed. SPD does not appear to keep a log of the names of the people they have killed, but while City leaders pat themselves on the back, remember Charleena Lyles, Shaun Fuhr, Iosia Faletogo, and all the other people killed by cops under federal oversight.