WA criminal investigator who stiffed Tacoma server over her BLM button has been fired

A Washington state Attorney General’s Office investigator and former Seattle Police homicide detective who in September stiffed a Tacoma server for wearing a Black Lives Matter button and caused a scene in the restaurant has been fired.

In a termination letter dated Oct. 7, deputy attorney general Todd R. Bowers said Cloyd Steiger, a manager of the office’s criminal litigation unit and the Homicide Investigation Tracking System (HITS), showed poor judgment and had “irreparably compromised” his credibility while shepherding “significant disruption and embarrassment to the office.”

Dan Jackson, spokesperson for the office of Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, confirmed the termination in an email, saying, “The letter speaks for itself.”

Steiger’s attorney Steve Fogg, in a phone call with The News Tribune last month, emphasized his client had the right to speak his mind in private settings. The Attorney General’s Office acknowledged that defense in its determination letter but countered that it must be balanced against the public’s trust in the legal system to carry out justice efficiently and fairly.

In an email to The News Tribune Friday afternoon, Fogg said they will contest the dismissal, describing it as “both a mistake and illegal.” He pointed to Steiger’s decades of public service and “spotless” record while working for the Attorney General.

“The AG is firing Cloyd not because he didn’t do his job (he did it well) and not because he didn’t tip a waitress and raised his voice — if the AG fired people for that sort of private behavior, the ranks of the AG would be thin indeed,” Fogg said. “The AG fired Cloyd for expressing political opinions as a private citizen with which some members of the AG’s Office disagreed.”

He reiterated First Amendment protections in an amended letter sent to the Attorney General’s investigative team in September.

“Anyone who knows Cloyd ... knows that he speaks his mind, and typically does so with both humor and intelligence,” Fogg said in the letter, adding that Steiger “spoke with more heat than was necessary or than he intended” during the incident and “regrets publicizing” it.

In the weeks following stories published in The News Tribune and The Seattle Times, the Attorney General’s Office reviewed more than 150 phone calls, social media posts and constituent mail.

“A running theme throughout this public feedback is that your behavior evidences racial bias towards Blacks and people of color and that you — and by extension the AGO — cannot be trusted in your role as a criminal investigator to remain unbiased,” Bowers wrote in the termination letter.

STEIGER FIRED AFTER LEAVE

Steiger was placed on leave two days after the Sept. 6 incident at The Fish Peddler, a waterfront seafood restaurant in Tacoma.

Server Reese Vincent, then 19, told The News Tribune that he and his wife ordered drinks and calamari in what was largely a normal interaction, though she admitted in retrospect that he seemed “standoffish.” When she returned to their table with the bill, she said she noticed a “Thin Blue Line” sticker on Steiger’s wallet, a detail Steiger’s lawyer Steve Fogg refuted last month.

Vincent, who is white, was wearing a BLM button, which she and sometimes other staff wear regularly, she said. She did not immediately return a request for comment Friday.

She departed the table with her regular sign-off of “have a beautiful day” and stepped outside for a break. What happened next is at the crux of Steiger’s dismissal.

On his way out of the restaurant, Steiger approached a worker he believed to be a manager and said Vincent’s BLM button made him uncomfortable. According to the Attorney General Office’s investigation, detailed in the 11-page letter, toward the end of the “20-second” conversation, Steiger said the restaurant should not permit employees to wear “political paraphernalia” on the job. He asked if management would allow staff to wear a Blue Lives Matter button. When the worker responded yes, Steiger raised his voice and said “bullshit” and flipped him off.

He also told Attorney General’s Offices investigators, unprovoked, that only “white” patrons and “a couple of Asians” were in the restaurant at the time.

The letter adds that the office’s investigation generally mirrored Vincent’s recounting of the incident.

After leaving The Fish Peddler, Steiger posted on his Facebook page an image of his receipt, where in the tip line he had written, “BLM Button = No Tip. That’s how socialism works.”

Vincent, who has since turned 20, would have let the lack of tip slide — servers get stiffed all the time, she said — but his posting on social media with her name and the restaurant visible changed her mind and led her to post about it on her Facebook page. On Steiger’s post, which he removed as the conflagration grew in the public sphere, he had typed, “I may have caused a scene,” with a smiley face.

That comment, said the Attorney General’s Office, “indicated that you were proud of your disturbing behavior in the restaurant.” Though now private, Steiger’s Facebook page at the time was public and showcased his role as the chief criminal investigator for the Attorney General’s Office and as a member of law enforcement, the letter continued.

Steiger told investigators he took issue not with the BLM acronym but with the Black Lives Matter organization. He compared it to the Ku Klux Klan, calling them both hate groups, and said that many people “supporting BLM are white people and they use the term to move toward a socialist government.”

Two of Steiger’s sons are officers in the Seattle Police Department, and one has been injured in protests, he told investigators, adding that he was acting as a “father of two cops and independent thinker” when he posted the receipt on Facebook.

Fogg previously told The News Tribune that Steiger regretted how he handled himself at The Fish Peddler but held he had the right to express his political opinions. Several former and current coworkers and a psychiatrist submitted affidavits in support of Steiger, saying he has always carried out his duties without regard to race.

According to the dismissal letter, in conversations with Bowers and office investigators, Steiger did not “express regret or apologize” for how he treated Vincent or the employee he flipped off on his way out of the restaurant.

This story was originally published October 9, 2020 at 12:40 PM.