Supreme Court ruling
In February 2006, King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Mark Larson, chief of the office's criminal division, wrote a memo telling attorneys in the office to be diligent in keeping track of officers with credibility problems.
He reminded the attorneys of their responsibility to abide by the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brady v. Maryland. That 1963 ruling states a prosecutor is obliged to provide the accused with any evidence that might help his or her defense, including information that could be used to challenge the credibility of police officers or other witnesses.
If that information isn't handed over, cases could be dismissed, allowing suspects to go free. The lawyers could face discipline by the Washington State Bar Association.
Moreover, the law presumes that if one attorney in a prosecutor's office knows of a credibility issue with a law-enforcement officer, then the entire office is on notice, Larson wrote. The next time that officer's name comes up in a case, the prosecutor is obligated to turn information over if it is relevant. There is no excuse, even if some in the office don't know about it.
Larson's memo got prosecutors to begin compiling the list of "Brady cops."
But it wasn't until the Neubert and Tietjen investigation that the prosecutor's office started contacting local law-enforcement agencies to raise the question of better tracking of officers with credibility problems.
The Brady list is a legal obligation, Van Olst said, but that doesn't necessarily mean that every person on the list is a bad cop or that cases in which they were involved can't be successfully prosecuted.
For its part, the Police Department doesn't use a "Scarlet A" to single out officers who have made a mistake or error in judgment in the past, said Deputy Chief Kimerer.
At this point, nobody in law enforcement knows what sort of misconduct should trigger the addition of an officer's name to the prosecutor's list.
"It hasn't been on our radar," said sheriff's spokesman Urquhart. "I don't think it's been on the prosecutor's radar either, until now."
Kimerer said that "very few issues of honesty and integrity are present among officers who are currently working."
Indeed, the list is tiny compared to the numbers of officers and deputies. The Sheriff's Office has 750 deputies, and about 1,300 officers work on the police force, including the police chief and other administrators.
Sgt. Rich O'Neill, president of the Seattle Police Officers' Guild, says the bar for placing an officer on the list should be very high: a rare disciplinary finding of dishonesty against an officer.
But the prosecutor's office wants to know about more than just those officers who have been found to be dishonest. Already, it has included on its list some who were not disciplined by their employer. The standard for prosecutors is whether the defense could attack the credibility of the police officer or deputy.