Pierce County Sheriff Swank downplays investigation over his inflammatory posts
Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank is downplaying an investigation that threatens his certification as a law enforcement officer, an inquiry that comes on the heels of the sheriff’s inflammatory posts on social media.
Swank, who has a history of making negative comments about transgender people online, posted on X last week to ask if trans people should be banned from owning guns. In the replies, he agreed with posts calling transgender people mentally ill.
On Friday, Swank said on X that he had received a complaint from the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission regarding his social media posts. The CJTC maintains law enforcement officers’ certifications to work and investigates complaints about misconduct, which can lead to the officer losing certification.
“This is what the left does to shut people up. I won’t be silenced,” Swank wrote Sept. 5 on X.
“They think they can decertify me, and then I will no longer be the sheriff. That won’t work. I’m still elected,” Swank said in a reply to his post.
Swank told KOMO News the certification case was “a joke.” Among the reasons the CJTC could suspend or revoke an officer’s certification or require that person to undergo remedial training, per RCW 43.101.105, is if they make online posts that involve prejudice or discrimination against a person on the basis of their religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or other protected groups.
“This investigation (intimidation) will not stop me from exercising my 1st amendment rights,” Swank told The News Tribune on Tuesday in a written statement. “No other elected official is subjected to this. I look forward to challenging this in the court system, hopefully all the way to the US Supreme Court.”
A spokesperson for the CJTC said Tuesday that Swank’s certification cases were in very early stages — they have not yet been assigned to an investigator — but he could share that Swank was the subject of three cases, two initiated by complaint and one initiated by notice of an initial disciplinary decision from his former employer, the Seattle Police Department.
After Swank was elected sheriff in November 2024, former interim chief of the Seattle Police Department, Sue Rahr, issued a disciplinary report in January that Swank would have been fired for his social media posts if he hadn’t resigned in 2023 after an investigation into his online activity began.
A backlog of certification cases at the CJTC could delay any investigation into Swank’s most recent posts. A spokesperson said in July that there were 1,265 open cases with two chief investigators and nine investigators to work them.
It’s unclear what would happen if Swank’s law-enforcement certification were revoked. Candidates for the office of sheriff are required to have certification within 12 months of assuming office, but Kyle Haugh, an elections manager with the Pierce County Auditor’s Office, said his office doesn’t investigate a candidate’s qualifications for office beyond determining that they are registered to vote in the county or district. Candidates are required to file a declaration of candidacy that attests they are qualified to hold the office they are seeking. He said a candidate losing eligibility is beyond the authority of the Auditor’s Office.
Swank, who has run for U.S. Congress as a Republican, but is in a nonpartisan office, said during his campaign for sheriff that his provocative online posts were designed to increase his name recognition. His latest posts mirror some of the attacks on transgender people and their rights that President Donald Trump’s administration has launched since January, including the Department of Justice’s suggestion that transgender people should be restricted from owning guns.
That idea sparked condemnation from across the political spectrum, according to the Associated Press, and it came after the shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school carried out by a person that federal officials have referred to as transgender.
Afterward, social media commentators falsely claimed that mass shootings in the U.S. were disproportionately committed by transgender people. The fact-checking website Snopes reported that a January 2023 Secret Service report on mass attacks between 2016 and 2020 showed that three of 180 attackers were transgender men, 172 were men and the remaining five were women.
