How soon after someone dies during an encounter with cops should public be made aware?
Last month, two people died in Tacoma following public, disruptive incidents involving local law enforcement agencies. Police released little information, if any, regarding the deaths until the next day.
On the morning of Aug. 10, social media posts from witnesses and others alerted The News Tribune to an incident involving state troopers who used less-than-lethal weapons on a motorist who crashed into a building around 7:40 p.m. the night before. Officials did not confirm eyewitness accounts provided to The News Tribune that the man had died until issuing a news release several hours later.
In the Aug. 28 case, it was Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards, not a police agency, who announced a man was killed in a shooting with officers several hours earlier. A mayor’s office spokesperson told The News Tribune that Woodards thought the community should be aware of the incident after she conferred with City Manager Elizabeth Pauli. Police say Chief Avery Moore informed Pauli of the fatality but did not speak with the mayor.
Some people who monitor police agencies said delayed communications about deadly encounters damages relationships between law enforcement and the public. They also said a lack of communication can contribute to rumors and misinformation.
“Part of their job is to inform us about what’s taking place. And when they don’t, it harms us and erodes the trust that the police so desperately want from the community,” said Anwar Peace, a member of the Spokane Human Rights Commission and former police accountability activist in Seattle.
For under-served communities, “it continues perceptions that they don’t matter,” said Leslie Cushman, an attorney and member of the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability.
Cushman was the citizen sponsor of Initiative 940, a 2018 campaign to build trust between law enforcement and the public around police use of force. It aimed to institute safeguards for the credibility of investigations while also prioritizing transparency and communication.
After Washington state law mandating independent deadly force investigations went into effect in 2020, legal experts and Washington law enforcement officials told The News Tribune, some agencies became hesitant to release information about deadly encounters out of concern they’d violate rules barring their involvement in outside probes or appear to be withholding key details from the public.
“We were trying to make sure the involved agency was not interjecting any bias into the (investigative) process, but that needs to be balanced with keeping the public informed,” Cushman said. She added, “We did not anticipate that law enforcement agencies would default to sharing no information.”
In Pierce County, law enforcement officials created a system where local agencies handle public communications for deadly force incidents they are not involved in, except for in extenuating circumstances, such as when a public information officer from an uninvolved agency isn’t available. In those cases, the Pierce County Force Investigation Team, or PCFIT, might ask a spokesperson for the involved agency to communicate with the public.
Law enforcement agencies in the Spokane area have a different strategy. Before an outside agency takes over, a department involved in a use of deadly force will notify the public the same way it would during a major crime or traffic collision.
“When we’re an involved agency, we want to supply that information to the people we serve,” Spokane County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Cpl. Mark Gregory told The News Tribune.
A February editorial from The News Tribune was critical of PCFIT’s transparency and communication, particularly in relation to naming involved officers.
Since then, Lakewood Police Chief Mike Zaro, who chairs PCFIT’s executive board, said that the regional investigative team has generally released information about deadly force incidents in accordance with its internal guidelines: about 24 hours for an initial news release and within two weeks for the names of officers.
“A day after is pretty quick,” the Lakewood chief told The News Tribune recently. “With all the moving parts, I think it is working well.”
A new statewide civilian Office of Independent Investigations was slated to take deadly force probes out of law enforcement’s hands in July, but the director, who was appointed in May, is still building his staff.
“I’m looking forward to the new state agency’s work because it will not be hampered by the same conflicts of interest,” said Cushman.
In the meantime, PCFIT remains the authority on deadly police force in Pierce County.
Shots fired in South Tacoma
Just before 3 p.m. on Aug. 28, Tacoma police officers reported that an assault suspect was shooting at them in the 6700 block of South Monroe Street, according to PCFIT.
Police had arrived about 40 minutes earlier in response to a 911 call from a man who reported his uncle had fought with him. Although he didn’t use a weapon, the man said his uncle had access to guns and might shoot police.
The suspect, later identified as 40-year-old Peter T. Collins, refused to come out of the house after police gathered enough evidence to arrest him, according to PCFIT.
Dispatch recordings indicate an exchange of gunfire ensued. Collins died of a rifle wound to the chest a block west of the house he was holed up in.
Law enforcement shut down about four square blocks.
In an interview for this story, Tacoma police spokesperson Wendy Haddow told The News Tribune she learned about the shooting from news media calling her on her day off. She had little information to give reporters and stopped her inquiries after a Tacoma lieutenant at the scene told her that PCFIT had been activated.
“You have to have that line of separation,” Haddow told The News Tribune.
The incident received little media attention that afternoon with only scant details from Haddow to report.
“Officers responded. An officer-involved shooting occurred. Investigation turned over to PCFIT,” Haddow told The News Tribune in a brief statement the Monday morning after the mayor’s announcement of a fatality on Sunday night.
Haddow said the threat from the shooting was over by the time she learned about it. With so many officers at the scene, she concluded that roads would be blocked off and determined there was no need to tell the community to avoid the area.
The Tacoma police spokesperson said she assumed a PCFIT news release was on the way.
Haddow didn’t learn someone died until later in the day and wasn’t privy to conversations between the chief, city manager and mayor, she told The News Tribune. She said she gave city officials the same information about the shooting as she gave local media, but the mayor’s office did not ask her to review Woodards’ statement.
“PCFIT normally has a press release out sooner than they did,” said Haddow, who referred to the Aug. 28 case as a “one-off.”
Zaro told The News Tribune that nothing prohibits agencies involved in uses of force from releasing initial information to the public.
So the delay in alerting the public about the shooting or that someone had died?
“That’s not a PCFIT breakdown,” Zaro said.
Man dies in troopers’ custody
The Aug. 9 incident began about 7:40 p.m. when a trooper attempted to stop a truck in the 3700 block of Pacific Avenue that had nearly hit a pedestrian and ran a red light, according to PCFIT. The trooper believed the driver was severely impaired.
The driver either jumped or was ejected from the truck as it turned onto 84th Street then crashed through a light pole and into the wall of a gas station. Troopers said the driver was waving around a knife.
PCFIT said the man did not comply with police commands, and Tacoma police assisted troopers in arresting him.
Police radio traffic indicated officers fired a bean bag round and shocked him with a Taser to subdue him.
The man allegedly kicked at law enforcement and firefighters who were providing medical aid, according to PCFIT. Within a few minutes, the man stopped breathing, and he died after more than 30 minutes of CPR.
Nearly a month passed before PCFIT released the names of the five state troopers and Tacoma police officer who were involved.
“That is completely unacceptable,” said Peace, the Spokane activist.
Peace said waiting more than a few days to release officers’ names is inappropriate. The identities of police can tell the public if an officer was connected to a prior use of force or disciplinary investigation.
The Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office released the name of the 35-year-old man who died last week but has not determined a cause of death. The family of Ronald Hasek told The News Tribune he struggled with mental illness.
Tacoma mayor makes a statement
A mayor’s office spokesperson did not elaborate on why Woodards, not city police, announced the Aug. 28 fatal shooting beyond the fact that PCFIT was handling the investigation.
“She just wanted to make sure that people who may have been concerned with the level of activity in the neighbor or just what happened knew that the city was aware and that it was being handled properly,” Bucoda Warren told The News Tribune this week.
The mayor’s office emailed the statement to news media at about 9:30 p.m., more than six hours after an apparent exchange of gunfire that ended a block east of where it began.
The top priority for responding officers is to ensure a scene is safe, and TPD’s newer sergeants and lieutenants don’t always remember to call Haddow, the police spokesperson said. Many times it’s reporters, not police officers, who alert her to large police responses.
“It may not be the best system,” said Haddow, noting that a police supervisor can sometimes take 45 minutes to an hour to get to a scene and send her information.
Tacoma police have released initial information about deadly force incidents in the past when no PCFIT public information officer was available to respond, such as a fatal police shooting outside the Tacoma Mall in March.
But Haddow says that only happens when PCFIT asks her to. In those instances, PCFIT has approved the text of a news release for TPD to publish.
“I follow the direction of PCFIT when they advise to put one out,” Haddow said.
Spokane County’s force investigation team
Spokane-area law enforcement had a head start on many Washington departments when I-940 passed in 2018.
The county sheriff and city police department had been operating a regional team for deadly force investigations going back a number of years.
The makeup of the Spokane Independent Investigative Response Team, or SIIR, is nearly identical to PCFIT.
The team includes the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, Spokane Police Department and Washington State Patrol, as well as smaller jurisdictions that joined after the implementation of I-940 in 2020.
After a use of deadly force by a member agency, the uninvolved agencies confer to determine which of them has the resources to act as the “case-managing agency,” said Gregory, the Spokane sheriff’s spokesperson. That department takes the lead in coordinating investigative resources from other uninvolved agencies.
The system is similar to PCFIT’s use of incident commanders who marshal resources from departments across the region.
SIRR’s protocol for notifying the public about uses of deadly force is different from Pierce County’s.
A Spokane-area agency involved in a use of deadly force issues an initial news release as it would for other significant public-safety incidents involving its officers. The involved department also releases the names of the involved officers, generally within a few days, according to Gregory.
“The point of having the involved agency do the initial [release] is so they’re responding to their public,” Gregory said.
Separately, the uninvolved SIIR agencies coordinate what resources are available to begin investigating. SIIR publishes a news release within a few days of the incident, in addition to the weekly updates required by state law.
Cushman, the I-940 sponsor, said Spokane’s system is useful for getting information to the public quickly but that must be balanced with a need for involved agencies to be objective.
“Really, the benchmark is, ‘Am I interfering? Am I influencing?’” Cushman said.
Peace, the Spokane law enforcement activist, disagrees with SIIR’s practice of involved agencies releasing information because some details can appear to frame a use of force as justified and the might turn out to be incorrect.
“The lasting impression the public has is what the police narrative was originally,” Peace said.
Ideally, Peace said, an outside agency would release public safety information about a use of deadly force — such as the time, location and details about injuries or ongoing danger — within hours of an incident.
“The turnaround time needs to be immediate because it’s a public safety issue,” Peace said of police shootings and in-custody deaths.
Within the 24 to 48 hours, Peace said, outside agencies should release a fuller narrative and the identities of officers. Peace said independent deadly force investigation teams also should codify public communication timelines in policy to increase accountability.
PCFIT’s investigative process
After I-940 first went into effect, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department and Tacoma Police Department investigated one another’s deadly force incidents.
Smaller jurisdictions, like Puyallup and Lakewood, formed a separate team with other cities and the Washington State Patrol.
All of Pierce County’s agencies formed PCFIT during the summer of 2020, shortly after the state Attorney General’s office announced a review of I-940 compliance in 30 cases and disclosure that the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department was investigating the death of Manuel Ellis in Tacoma police custody despite a deputy being involved in restraining him.
That inquiry found few agencies were fully compliant with I-940 regulations. Pierce County agencies saw violations primarily related to transparency and communication.
Zaro, the Lakewood chief and PCFIT chair, provided The News Tribune with an overview of a general PCFIT response.
When police use deadly force in Pierce County, officers notify South Sound 911 dispatchers.
Dispatchers then start dialing numbers from the phone tree of four trained PCFIT commanders, each of them from the Sheriff’s Department, Tacoma, Lakewood or Puyallup. If a commander’s agency was involved in the incident, they are excluded. There’s no set rotation to assign commanders to cases.
“It’s whoever is available,” said Zaro.
From there, PCFIT assigns detectives from any of the commanders’ agencies, as well as a number of smaller departments, such as Gig Harbor and Bonney Lake. Some smaller PCFIT member agencies, like Fircrest, don’t have trained investigators but provide other resources, such as traffic control for large crime scenes.
PCFIT calls on spokespeople for three Pierce County law enforcement agencies — TPD’s Haddow, Lakewood’s Lt. Chris Lawler and sheriff’s Sgt. Darren Moss — to work as public information officers, or PIOs, on cases not involving their own departments.
Those three agencies are involved in the majority of deadly force incidents in the county, which can leave PCFIT with only two spokespeople to choose from. In some cases, the PIOs from the uninvolved agencies are unavailable.
That’s why Haddow, the Tacoma police spokesperson, sent out a news release about the fatal police shooting outside the Tacoma Mall in March. That’s also why PIO duties for the Aug. 28 fatal shooting fell to Zaro, the Lakewood chief.
WSP’s interpretation of I-940
State patrol officials met with the state Attorney General’s office recently about public communication for deadly force incidents and I-940 compliance, according to Chris Loftis, a WSP spokesperson.
“We recognize there are incongruities in the interpretation of this regulation among various law enforcement agencies,” Loftis wrote in an email statement to The News Tribune.
The Attorney General’s office advised WSP that anything beyond a short news release or Tweet from an agency involved in a use of deadly force “could be problematic,” Loftis said.
Trooper Rick Johnson, a WSP public information officer for King County incidents, confirmed in a Tweet last week that a shooting involving troopers occurred in Federal Way and referred further inquiries to outside investigators.
The WSP public information officer for Pierce and Thurston counties, Trooper Robert Reyer did not answer questions from The News Tribune about the public communication process for the in-custody death in Tacoma on Aug. 9.
Reyer, who has released initial statements about shootings involving troopers before, referred all inquiries about the Aug. 9 case to PCFIT, citing the active investigation.
Loftis said WSP did not communicate with PCFIT about the Aug. 9 in-custody death in Tacoma.
“WSP is very leery of putting an investigation at risk by doing something that might challenge the veracity of effort but also leery about being the author of a statement that seems less than authentic, transparent, or informative due to legal restraints,” Loftis wrote in a statement. “So it’s a balance in each situation.”
Lawler, the Lakewood lieutenant, was assigned as the PCFIT public information officer for the Aug. 9 incident.
He released a required weekly update to local media on Wednesday with no new information, including the identities of the troopers involved. In the same email, he sent an update for the week prior that was not previously provided to The News Tribune or posted on the PCFIT website.
Loftis said the state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission, which provides training for basic law enforcement academy and sets standards for independent deadly force investigations, is convening a group to provide a clearer interpretation of public communication guidelines.
“In the meantime, WSP will continue with our original interpretation that we should allow the independent investigating agency to handle all public communications,” Loftis wrote.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with a clarification from Tacoma police spokesperson Wendy Haddow that PCFIT approved, rather than provided, the text for a TPD news release related to a shooting involving police officers.
This story was originally published September 13, 2022 at 7:00 AM.
