Standing before the city's Use of Force Commission on Thursday, Spokane Police Chief Frank Straub explains the department has embraced a whirlwind of changes in the 12 months since the commission issued 26 recommended reforms for SPD procedures and operations. Those changes have included command shake-ups, new enforcement strategies and increased training — some of which may have proven a little stressful or confusing for both the department and community.
"In the first year, we had to sprint," Straub says. "[But] I'm very happy and satisfied with the direction that we're going in."
The commission, police leaders and city officials gathered Thursday for a follow-up hearing on the department's progress on the commission's reforms. Straubs offered a long list of changes, saying the department had either completed or started efforts on all 26 recommendations.
The five-member commission listened to two and a half hours of police and public testimony on the state of the SPD and plans for future reforms. Commission members offered praise for the apparent progress on training and civilian oversight through the Office of Police Ombudsman. Public comment included lingering frustrations over the new ombudsman model.
Straub wrote a
to the commission, outlining many of the reforms introduced in the past year. He also attached a checklist regarding progress on individual reforms listed in the commission's report. He also noted citywide crime rates had dropped nearly 14 percent compared to this time last year.The chief highlighted several changes he considered significant, including:
• SPD has standardized batons and Taser models as recommended
• The department has cleared its backlog in public records requests, which now allows for a much quicker turnaround on new requests
• Department has started a youth basketball league as well as a Youth and Police Initiative to reach out to at-risk youth
• SPD has created three "police service areas" or precincts to focus enforcement closer to the neighborhood level
Straub also notes the department has put in its order for officer-mounted body cameras, saying the cameras would start appearing on officers this fall. He also expected to hire an additional records keeper to handle video record requests. He plans to host a series of public forums this summer to familiarize citizens with the equipment and explain the department's policies on their use.
Police officials also say more than 90 percent of the department has successfully completed Crisis Intervention Team training on mental health de-escalation tactics and techniques, which we recently wrote about. Only a few new hires have yet to undergo the training.
Commission member Susan Hammond applauded the department's improved partnerships with the local mental health community.
During public comment, several speakers expressed frustration with the negotiated implementation of Proposition 1 and the new oversight framework at the Office of the Police Ombudsman. Tim Connor, with the Spokane Police Accountability and Reform Coalition, argues the new ombudsman procedures leave a significant "gap" between what will be done and what the commission recommended.
"It's one of the issues where the community could not have been clearer," he says. "I just feel sad and defeated by this outcome. … I feel this was a fraud."
Commission vice chair William Hyslop challenged Connor to offer specific changes the commission might recommend, saying, "Hasn't the train already left the station?"
Commission Chairman Earl "Marty" Martin asked Straub whether an ongoing review of the SPD by the U.S. Department of Justice would include an audit of department's culture. Straub responded with a list of things the department was doing to evaluate and improve its culture.
When Martin emphasized the DOJ did not seem to expect to conduct such an audit, Straub clarified the DOJ would help provide a recommendation for a consultant or approach for a cultural audit.
"We have absolutely no problem whatsoever with doing that," Straub says of an audit.
When asked if the SPD still suffers from an "us vs. them" mentality, Straub says he believes the department has turned a corner.
"We would not be here today talking about our successes … if we didn't have a highly motivated organization," Straub says. "Our officers have fully embraced the recommendations. … I believe that we are making significant progress."
An archive of all previous Use of Force Commission meetings can be found here.
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While it's technically spring down here in the valleys, it's still very much winter up on Schweitzer Mountain. They've received about nine inches of snow in the last two days and it's supposed to snow more today and tonight.
To celebrate "winter," Schweitzer is throwing a Winter Fest, replete with all sorts of bells and whistles up on the mountain, including live music from The Rub, a '90s dance party and, perhaps most intriguing, a mini beer festival. There will be 12 different beers on tap from breweries like Iron Horse, Ninkasi, Goose Island (it's in Chicago), Elysian, Widmer, Firestone Walker and, if you'd rather go European, they've got Stella.
$10 gets you a sampling package with a glass and four samples. Additional samples are $2 and full pints are $5. The beer tent opens at 11 am.
Yeah, sunshine might be nice, but fresh snow and cold beer isn't too bad.
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After several years and a recent expansion, The Flying Pig on East Sprague is closing its doors. Its final day will be Saturday, March 29. Erin Rauth, who owns the restaurant with her husband Jacob, confirmed the news this morning and says it’s a matter of getting back to family.
“We gave it our best shot for three and a half years, and now we’re going to let someone else have a go at it,” she says.
Known for its breakfasts and pig decor, the International District sandwich shop and cafe appeared to be on the upswing in recent months. The menu grew after the kitchen was expanded to include a grill and fryer, and the owners took over the former Rainbow Tavern next door to operate a full bar — the Pig’s Pub — after hours.
Here’s the full message from the owners posted on Facebook:
To all our loyal pig customers:
We appreciate your patronage over the past three and a half years. Unfortunately the time has come for us to move on to the next phase of our lives. We will be closing The Flying Pig doors forever on Saturday March 29th at 2pm. Come in before then for your last fix of Flying Pig food!
Thank you all so much. We wish you all the best of luck! This has been a great experience for our family.
~ your flying pig friends,
Erin, Marsha, Hans and Jacob
Excitement and the smell of fresh paint filled the air Thursday at a public information meeting to introduce INK, a new organization that will offer writing and visual arts classes to youth in Spokane. Author Jess Walter is one of the founders of the group, which is housed at 224 W. Sprague and modeled after 826, a national nonprofit that offers writing education and mentorship to students ages 6-18.
Beyond writing, INK will take aim at all arts education that's "under-attacked" in Spokane, Walter said, creating the type of vibrant arts community artists his age wish they'd had as kids.
Organizers plan to hold a soft opening in May, a fundraiser in June and offer a full curriculum — ideally, entirely for free to students — by the fall. Each week, the space will offer two writing and two visual arts classes after school for middle and high school students, with additional weekend workshops for younger students and possibly adults.
Eventually, the space is likely to be home to regular readings, First Friday exhibits of student work and one-on-one mentoring. The group may also branch out to teaching classes at community centers or libraries.
"We are so open about what this should be," Walter said. "We don't want any limits."
For now, INK is looking for volunteers, teachers and class or workshop ideas. If you're interested in volunteering, email [email protected]. Keep up with the group on its Facebook page here.
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Last fall, EJ’s Garden Bistro in Browne’s Addition closed its doors after a fitful first year. Now it will reopen later this spring as Browne’s Tavern, co-owned by Mary Moltke — owner of the EJ Roberts Mansion bed & breakfast next door — and executive chef Floyd Loomis, previously with at Asiago’s Ristorante, an award-winning Italian-fusion restaurant in Boise.
After getting pestered by the local media this week, they put out a press release with some details about what to expect: quick in-and-out lunch specials, a beer garden, extensive outdoor seating, pastries from Chaps and “eclectic variety of dishes with wide international influence” such as spaghetti & sage meatballs, papperdelle with smoky tomato sauce, shrimp and grits with housemade tasso ham, red curry risotto and duck with blood orange reduction.
Loomis attended both Washington State University and the University of Washington (as well as Yale), so the release also notes: “When WSU & UW meet, he roots for the Cougars.”
Read more about that, as well as the opening of the bakery at La Michoacana Mini Market on East Sprague, in this week's Entree newsletter.
Fusion Flours, the exclusively gluten-free bakeshop, has the problem of being too popular. Their current space and equipment can’t handle demand, especially when they’ve been approached about possible restaurant collaborations or wholesale options (think gluten-free hoagie buns). So they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise startup cash for a major expansion, with tasty rewards for those who pledge toward the $22,000 goal.
Five Guys on the South Hill is permanently closed.
Cider news! Liberty Ciderworks (which may be open within a week) won gold for its English Style at the 2014 Great Lakes International Cider & Perry Competition, and One Tree Hard Cider got federal approval to start producing.
Those of you who like planning ahead for your free ice cream, take note that Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day is coming up April 8.
Read previous food news here.
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In the age of improv-driven dialogue, so many dramas and comedies strike a tone by being loose and casual. We have hundreds of shows that feel natural and comfortable, like sweatpants and an old, ratty T-shirt.
But Hannibal, by contrast, is a tailored three-piece suit with a double Windsor knot. Not a wrinkle in sight, not a thread out of place. Absolutely everything, from its perfectly played banquet scenes, to its bloody tableaus, to the crisp carefully-phrased dialogue of the cannibal antagonist, is coordinated, starched and pressed.
It’s a show that recalls Se7en, if uncouth manners and untucked shirts were among the seven deadly sins.
In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter was a caged monster. Here, he is too, but Lecter himself provides the cage. He’s cautious. It’s not like he’s driven by a fear of being caught — it’s just that getting caught would just be a so guache.
But all that cold precision can be wearying. To me, the show was icky but impressive — like a circus freak that can contort his limbs in disturbing ways — more than engaging or entertaining. I’m not alone, either. Time magazine critic James Poniewozik kicked off an interesting TV critic discussion recently by tweeting: “I keep trying to make myself like rather than just admire Hannibal, so at this point I think I just need you to tell me what's wrong with me.”
In that first season, I felt the same way. Credit that dislike, a little bit, to my natural repulsion to gore and horror. Not only do I not enjoy the notion of movies like Saw, I’m a little frightened and judgmental that there are people out there who do.
But more so, I think, it was that so little of the show’s escalating despair, grime and tension was cut by victory or relief: Evil was strong. It consumed, in every sense of the word.
Good, meanwhile, remained Oblivious or Weak.
That weakness was embodied by FBI special investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy.) He has an empathy disorder that manifests — as they tend to do on shows like this — as a superpower of sorts. He’s able to put himself in the blood-soaked shoes of the most twisted serial killers. He imagines — in a visceral, visual way — them killing their victims, with every eye-gougingly gory detail and feels the pleasure they feel in doing so. It takes a lot out of him. It takes everything out of him.
The story of Season 1 is the story of Graham’s march toward madness, with hallucination seeping into reality bleeding down toward nightmare. Dancy played Graham with the bleary haze of someone who hadn’t slept in five days and hasn’t eaten in twenty. You fear an errant autumn leaf will lazily drift down from the sky and knock him out cold.
And as the season progressed, he gets even worse. He begins losing track of time, in the most literal ways: His consciousness begins to skip forward, a la the protagonist from Jess Walter’s award-winning novel, The Zero. Even his drawings of clocks are skewed, with the numbers sloughed off to one side, out of frame.
And frankly, it was difficult to watch. The madness ate away at the show. Insanity, odd as it sounds, needs to be grounded in some sense of reality for the viewer to connect with it, and it increasingly wasn’t on Hannibal. Our hero looked like he could barely breathe — and, no wonder, the show’s atmosphere felt suffocating. It was intentional. It was well-done. But it wasn’t much fun.
But then the season finale hit: Graham begins to realize exactly what sort of monster Lecter is, right about the time Lecter frames him for murder.
So in Season 2, we open with a dramatically different status quo. Now, the tie has been loosened. The sleeves have been rolled up, and there’s a drop of blood splashed on the lapel. Hannibal’s deft fingers are curled into fists, and it’s ready to throw down.
That’s because Will Graham is in prison.
Shows that put their lead in prison often struggle with the new settings. Sons of Anarchy put anti-hero Clay Morrow behind bars, when he really should have been killed a season ago, wasting time in a long-expired plotline. Justified’s weakest plotline in this often-weak season has been Ava Crowder’s stint in prison.
By limiting where the character can go, the shows usually limit the character’s agency. But Hannibal defies the trend. Graham now has more agency than ever.
It’s a winking role reversal of the movie that has long since embedded itself into the American canon: For now, Lecter is the hero investigator. Graham is the caged dangerous animal. He’s the one pacing about his cell. He’s the one being experimented on by the skeevy Dr. Frederick Chilton. And he’s the one pulling strings, manipulating others into position with a few choice words.
For the first time, he’s clear-eyed, full-hearted. He’s through the worst of the mental illness. He’s been broken down, and rebuilt. Yes, he still has those creepy hallucinations, but they provide light instead of darkness. They help him understand what’s really going on. Now, it’s a battle between equals. You believe Graham stands a chance of taking down the cannibal psychologist.
The paradox — free a character by limiting him — makes sense when you look at it dramatically: Were Graham free and trusted, it would not be difficult for him to defeat Lecter. To keep Lecter a free man, Graham needed to remain ignorant about Lecter’s true nature (which would increasingly defy credibility for a genius like Graham) or he needed a serious handicap.
Imprisonment is that handicap.
In a sense it adds to the horror: You know who the monster is, and you know he’s still out there. But who’s going to believe you? You’re the guy in the jumpsuit, the guy in a jail cell, the guy accused of murder. He’s the respected psychologist with impeccable taste in music, art and fashion — and a damn good cook.
But where Graham was up to his neck in the slough of despondency last season, he seems mostly free of despair this season. (Dreams of death by electric chair aside.) He can breathe. He’s buoyed by the epiphany that, while he may be crazy, he’s also crazy right. He begins to understand how much of his mental breakdown was actively catalyzed by Lecter. He makes his skeptical colleagues into his allies. He turns one of his tormenters into an unwitting tool.
Naturally, his increased confidence and willingness to manipulate comes at a price: Set on Lecter’s trail by Graham, one of Graham’s allies stupidly stumbles into Lecter’s lair without backup, violating the most basic principles of Don’t Go In There 101, and paying for it with her life.
It’s a dynamic more fascinating, and frankly fun-to-watch, than all that brooding and angst of last season. And at the same time, Lecter’s become more interesting to watch as well. With his nemesis/patient/friend kept under lock and key, Lecter is willing to take more risks. His dark playful side is free to roam — he turns another serial killer into a part of the killer’s own morbid art installation. And, in last week’s episode, the series reaches its peak with a bold, philosophically fascinating moment where, instead of playing a cruel god by taking life, Lecter plays a cruel god by giving it.
In a few moments in the first season, Lecter lets a smirk — smug, knowing, wryly sinister — play across his lips. This season, the smirk is nearly constant.
But this time, Graham is smirking back. And Hannibal is better for it.
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In the wake of last night's fatal officer-involved shooting, Spokane investigators have again converged on the scene of a deadly confrontation to determine what led to gunfire outside a North Spokane home. Law enforcement officers must often make split-second decisions under life-threatening circumstances, but many throughout the community may see an opportunity to ask how such tragedies may be avoided. In this instance, the Spokane Investigative Regional Response Team (SIRR) will again handle the investigation, led by the Washington State Patrol.
Spokane Police Chief Frank Straub plans to offer a one-year update today at City Hall regarding the department's efforts to adopt new reforms recommended by the city's Use of Force Commission in February of 2013. Those recommendations include implementing officer-mounted body cameras and evaluating use of force protocols.
Last night's incident marks the fourth shooting directly involving a Spokane Police officer since the City Council approved funding last April for body cameras to record controversial encounters. Police officials expect to deploy those cameras this fall after several delays to pin down specific policies and protocols for their use. There have also been three shootings involving Spokane County Sheriff's deputies during that time.
Here is a list of Spokane area officer-involved shootings since the beginning of 2013:
2014
• March 26, 2014: Spokane Police Department officers shoot and kill 30-year-old Steven C. Corkery* in a recent armed robbery investigation after staking out a North Spokane home most of the day. Investigators have not identified the suspect or officers involved. They say a handgun was located nearby. Early reports indicate witnesses captured aspects of the shooting on cell phone video. The Washington State Patrol is leading the investigation.
• March 4, 2014: Spokane County Sheriff's deputies shoot and injure 37-year-old Bonnie Ulrick during a standoff at a Motel 6 in Spokane Valley. Ulrick suffered a gunshot wound to her hand after allegedly making a threatening motion with a firearm. Deputy Mike McNees, a member of Spokane County SWAT, was named as the deputy who fired. The WSP continues the investigation.
• Feb. 11, 2014: Spokane County Sheriff's deputies shoot and kill 23-year-old Jedadiah Zillmer in a confrontation near the Spokane Valley Mall after Zillmer allegedly made a threatening move with a firearm. Zillmer, a former Army soldier, had led authorities on a lengthy highway pursuit. Investigators say he was armed with multiple weapons and made statements he wanted to die. Investigators say aspects of this shooting were captured by the body camera of a Liberty Lake police officer on scene. Six deputies, including Brian Hirzel, Brett Hubbell, Dale Moyer, Jeff Thurman, Ryan Walter and Randy Watts were listed as firing their weapons. The Spokane Police Department continues investigation.
• Jan. 16, 2014: Spokane Police Department officers shoot and wound 29-year-old Aaron D. Johnson outside the Truth Ministries shelter on East Sprague. Johnson, who has a history of minor crimes and schizophrenia, allegedly threatened staff at the shelter before police confronted him behind the building. Officers Christopher Conrath, Holton Widhalm, Michael Schneider and Sgt. Terry Preuninger were named in the incident. Schneider attempted to taser Johnson. Conrath and Widhalm then fired their pistols. The WSP continues the investigation.
2013
• Aug. 22, 2013: Spokane Police Department officers shoot and kill 40-year-old Danny C. Jones in his truck outside the Salvation Army shelter on Indiana Ave. Jones had allegedly struck another vehicle while driving and officers boxed in his vehicle outside the shelter. He then allegedly rammed police vehicles before multiple officers opened fire. Records indicate aspects of this shooting were captured by nearby surveillance cameras. Officers named in the shooting include Lt. Kevin King, and Officers Robert Collins, Corey Lyons and Scott Lesser. The Spokane Sheriff's Office handled the investigation.
• June 1, 2013: Spokane County Sheriff's deputies shoot and kill 48-year-old Roy Jacobs in his living room in Spokane Valley. Jacobs had called to turn himself in on a warrant when deputies responded to his apartment. When they arrived, Jacobs was allegedly drunk and holding a long knife. When he reportedly moved toward deputies, he was shot and killed. Deputy Jerad Kiehn fired the fatal shots. The Spokane County Prosecutor's Office later cleared him of any wrongdoing.
• May 16, 2013: Spokane Police Department officers shoot and kill 21-year-old Justin Cairns during a confrontation following a separate shooting. Investigators say Cairns killed 33-year-old Cyrus Jones shortly before officers tracked him to his grandparents' home in Nine Mile Falls. We had previously written about Cairns' attempts to move beyond his juvenile criminal past. Officers Jake Jensen, Danny Lesser and Adam Valdez were named in the shooting. The Spokane County Sheriff's Office led the investigation.
• Feb. 5, 2013: A Spokane Police Department officer shoots and kills 52-year-old Jacob Dorfman in an early morning confrontation on the South Hill. Dorfman has reportedly fired a handgun into the air and fled officers in a Jeep following an argument with his girlfriend. Officer Adam Valdez says Dorfman raised his gun toward an officer and Valdez opened fire through the window of the Jeep, killing Dorfman. The Prosecutor's Office later cleared Valdez of any wrongdoing.
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