The killing of Good, Pretti is indefensible. Swank shouldn’t try | Opinion

Both traditional and social media, including this newspaper, have given much attention to the pronouncements of Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank in the wake of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. The subsequent hostile exchange between Swank and Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders on the subject — including multiple personal attacks — has served as a distraction from the larger peril of Swank’s words for the people of Pierce County.

The world watched in horror as an ICE agent shot Good, a mother of three young children, in front of her wife, for seemingly doing nothing but recording and documenting the actions of these agents, and refusing to refrain from doing so. According to the officer’s own video, Good was engaging the officers in a calm and unthreatening manner until a few seconds before he put three bullets into her and then called her a “f---ing b--ch.”

Swank’s reaction, explicitly to this incident, was to post on social media what he called a public service announcement: “If law enforcement tells you to stop, STOP. You can always sue them later if your rights were violated. Even if you are right, do you want to be dead right?”

In other words, do what any law officers tell you to do no matter how dangerous, unreasonable or plainly unlawful, or they might kill you. If you think officers are acting unlawfully, hire a lawyer and sue them. In the meantime just suffer abuse in silence. Really?

The implicit message of Swank’s posts is that you should fear police; but more pernicious than this is the unfortunate converse: Police should fear the citizens — even you.

When the parties to a police encounter approach each other with fear, how does this make us safer? It doesn’t. Fear robs reason and when an encounter is clothed in fear someone will inevitably do something stupid. Is this really the relationship between citizens and deputies that the county sheriff promotes?

I do understand, better than most, that police perform one of the most dangerous jobs anywhere. I was the legal representative for local law enforcement, and they were the lifeblood of criminal prosecutions that I later oversaw in eight years in prosecution in this state — from legal assistant in Pierce County in the 1980s, to chief civil deputy prosecutor and eventually county prosecutor in Okanogan County in the 1990s. A domestic violence or burglary call, or even a traffic stop can be freighted with unknown danger to bystander, suspect, the general public and, of course, to the responding officer. Trained and experienced officers learn how to diffuse, de-escalate and resolve, and yes, to effect arrests of armed and very dangerous subjects safely.

Plainly, neither the law, nor the policies of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, nor those of any local law enforcement agency in Washington, permit shooting observers or even shooting criminal suspects, just for failure to properly follow law enforcement direction.

Many of us have seen first-hand that ICE agents’ execution-style killing of Good, and now Alex Pretti, are simply the most extreme examples of many abusive, extra-legal and extra-constitutional acts by — and seeming mandates given to — federal enforcement officers, especially ICE. We have seen them on display repeatedly and not only in Minneapolis. That agency has now been fortified with thousands of new agents and has escalated the sowing of chaos in parts of Minnesota. It is steadily increasing such behavior here in Washington as well.

The citizenry in Washington has very little direct control over the behavior of federal law enforcement even when they act here. But we do ultimately have control of our local and even state enforcement officers. In the case of county sheriffs, we hire them directly with our ballots, and our ballots also choose the people who hire law enforcement leadership in our cities and towns.

Here is the sum: Police undertake to protect and serve the citizens who elect their leadership.

That is a hallmark of democracy. When police demand that the citizens serve them, it is called a police state.

Barnett Kalikow is a retired Olympia attorney and former Okanogan County Prosecuting Attorney and former adjunct professor of state and local government law at Seattle University Law School. He is currently co-chair of the Criminal Justice Committee of the Thurston County NAACP working on issues of police relations with persons and communities of color. The opinions expressed are his own entirely and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of that or any other organization with which he is affiliated.