The city will spend up to $50,000 for “an objective and unbiased review” of Tacoma police’s handling of the Zina Linnik abduction and murder case four years ago, the City Council confirmed Tuesday.
City officials must work out final contract details before formally hiring a Texas lawman selected to conduct the probe, Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland said.
Mark Simpson – a retired Arlington, Texas, police sergeant-turned-consultant – has signed a contract with the city that would pay him $150 per hour, plus expenses. City officials likely will sign off on that agreement in the next few days, Strickland said.
The council’s latest move comes amid demands from the union representing the city’s rank-and-file police officers that it be allowed to help set the scope of the review.
Earlier Tuesday, Tacoma Police Union Local 6 representatives separately met with city labor negotiators to discuss the review’s details. City officials arranged the meeting after union representatives contacted City Manager Eric Anderson to contend that the review was subject to bargaining – and that the city faced legal action otherwise.
“We’re not trying to be obstructionist about it,” detective Terry Krause, the union’s president, said Tuesday. “There’s procedure that needs to be followed. If they talked to us first, as they should have, it wouldn’t be an issue.”
City labor negotiators will remain open to discussion with the union, Strickland said Tuesday. But union issues won’t derail the review, she added.
“We’ve said we’re going to do this,” Strickland said. “So, we’re planning to move forward.”
The council’s unanimous vote Tuesday authorized paying for the review from its contingency fund. After completing the review, the investigator will be tasked with submitting a report to the council that will be made public. The review’s goal is to strengthen the police department’s effectiveness and improve public trust, Strickland has said.
After Tuesday’s meeting, Police Chief Don Ramsdell said his department will work with the investigator.
“As an organization, we’re obviously going to cooperate with the review and provide any records the investigator might need,” he said.
The council’s formal approval of the review comes two months after city officials announced no further investigation of the Zina case was needed.
In April, The News Tribune revealed new details about why the city delayed issuing an Amber Alert after the 12-year-old girl was abducted from behind her Hilltop home in July 2007. New statements in court records showed the delay was partly caused by Officer Mark Fulghum falling back to sleep instead of issuing the alert as requested in a phone call.
Ramsdell later apologized to the newspaper for not divulging those details during previous public statements about why it took 12 hours to issue the alert. The information about Fulghum also was left out of the department’s after-action report on the case.
In light of the new case details, the council met privately in April, then announced it would take no further action. Anderson also said he would not pursue disciplinary action against Fulghum or Ramsdell.
But after The News Tribune filed a request for Fulghum’s pay records from the day of the delayed alert – records showing he was on “stand-by duty” at the time he fell asleep – Anderson announced he had reprimanded the chief and would conduct an internal investigation of Fulghum.
He and Strickland also called for the outside review of the entire Zina case.
In May, Strickland announced Simpson, a consultant who specializes in child-abduction cases, as her choice to conduct that probe. Among his experience during a 32-year police career, Simpson led a task force in charge of investigating the unsolved 1996 abduction and slaying of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, whose case led to development of the Amber Alert.
Other than bargaining its parameters, the police union has no objections to the review, Krause said.
”I think an investigation is going to show that everything was done well,” he said. “We’re not trying to hide anything or stop them from doing this.”
Lewis Kamb: 253-597-8542
lewis.kamb@thenewstribune.com
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