Tacoma must reckon with all police use of force, not just kind that killed Manny Ellis
On the one-year anniversary of Manny Ellis’ death at the hands of Tacoma police, his family and friends are naturally bereaved and angry about the slow grind of justice, waiting to learn if any officers will be criminally prosecuted. But they can take solace in the knowledge his 33 years of life had meaning and his death won’t come to nothing.
Several law enforcement reform bills are gaining ground in the Washington Legislature, including a big one that passed the House Wednesday; it would ensure arm’s-length state investigations when cops kill civilians.
Tacoma has launched its long-delayed police body-camera program and pledged a citywide antiracist transformation, among other initiatives.
And now Tacoma police leaders have promised a fresh examination of their use-of-force practices. It couldn’t come at a better time; a News Tribune investigation, published in this weekend’s editions, found Black people were on the receiving end of force at more than five times the rate of whites over a five-year period.
The TNT’s findings should raise red flags for the whole community, as they did for Interim Police Chief Mike Ake. “We need to do a deep dive into this problematic issue to determine root causes and figure out: Is it our policy, practices, our culture, or a combination of multiple practices?” Ake told our reporters.
Clearly there’s a lot to dive into, and much to learn from an ocean of data that includes not just deadly force incidents like the Ellis case and the eight other killings since 2015, but all uses of force — running the gamut from hands to guns, Tasers to batons, pepper spray to police dogs.
In a three-part report, TNT staff writers Stacia Glenn and Allison Needles found that TPD officers were involved in 1,452 uses of force from 2015-19, and wielded it against 657 people. More than three out of four Tacoma cops had used force at least once in that span.
Granted, it’s hard to draw conclusions without knowing the unique circumstances of each police call. And the number of force incidents is a miniscule fraction of the hundreds of thousands of total calls for service over the same period — well under 0.5 percent.
What may be more distressing than the raw data is the fact that police brass didn’t catch the racial disparities. As Ake acknowledged, they failed to “step back and look at this problem from an equity lens.”
Police shouldn’t need journalists to tell them that officers used force about 22.56 times per every 10,000 Black residents versus about 4.5 times per every 10,000 white residents. Or that Native Americans were also disproportionately impacted, subject to 2.7 percent of police force incidents while representing just 1.6 percent of Tacoma’s population.
That, along with TPD’s failure to collect race data for traffic stops and routine service calls until recently, reveals blind spots inside the department’s top ranks.
Our police force can do better — simply must do better.
One area of improvement: Readily share Tacoma’s use-of-force data with the public. (The TNT got access through a public records request.) State Attorney General Bob Ferguson has credited a handful of Washington cities — including Spokane, Vancouver and Bellingham — that already do this in one form or another.
Ferguson backs a bill in the Legislature that would create a centralized, publicly accessible database of use-of-force incidents covering all law enforcement agencies across Washington. With strong bipartisan backing, it has an excellent chance to become law, and we hope it does; it would be a great resource for police transparency not just in Tacoma, but all over Pierce County.
Another important bill gaining momentum in Olympia would change the landscape of acceptable police tactics and equipment, banning practices such as chokeholds and no-knock warrants. The House approved it on a party-line vote last weekend.
But the crowning achievement, in our view, would be creation of a state office to conduct deadly-force investigations. Gone would be the practice of assigning cops from neighboring jurisdictions to investigate fellow cops — a practice that led to the Pierce County Sheriff Department’s sloppy handling of Ellis’ homicide.
The revelation that a sheriff’s deputy arrived on the scene that night, and held Ellis’ leg while police restrained him, only amplifies public mistrust of locally led inquiries.
On Wednesday, March 3, as the Office of Independent Investigation bill advanced from the House to the Senate in a split vote, the timing certainly wasn’t coincidental.
“In honor of what happened in my hometown Tacoma one year ago today, I will say his name: Manny Ellis,” said House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma, her voice beginning to break. Then she pounded her gavel and called a short recess.
There’s no question the memory of Elllis undergirds all the police reform measures in the Legislature this year. It also inspires the ongoing campaign for racial justice in Tacoma, and the need to carefully scrutinize TPD use-of-force incidents.
This man who died of oxygen deprivation late at night on a dark Tacoma street will never know the fresh air he released and the bright light of accountability he ignited.