The most disturbing news I’ve read recently involved a massive government bureaucracy’s adherence to standard operating procedure.
I’ve thought about that a lot the past few days.
It’s not related to revelations in The Herald this week about the Everett Police Department. Those include acknowledgements that Everett Police Chief Jim Scharf decided to hold off on an internal investigation of the 2009 police shooting death of Niles Meservey in a restaurant parking lot, and also that no internal police investigation followed a 2008 fatal shooting by police outside an Everett home.
Department policy that would normally result in internal investigations was not followed in either case.
In the 2009 case, Scharf told an attorney representing Meservey’s family last month that he decided to wait for criminal and civil cases to be resolved before launching an internal investigation. After the 2008 shooting, police decided against an internal investigation after a probe by the Snohomish County Multi-Agency Response Team and the decision by county prosecutors not to file charges.
There may be solid reasons the police department didn’t follow its own protocol. Still, isn’t that policy in place, at least in part, so the public isn’t left with a shred of doubt when something so grave happens?
Meservey and Dustin Willard lost their lives in these shootings.
A police policy of conducting its own investigations, separate from adversarial legal cases, makes sense when an officer’s continued employment is at stake.
All that said, there are times when official policy should not be sacrosanct.
I’m convinced of that after reading about the U.S. Army case in which five soldiers are charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Army prosecutors allege the soldiers plotted to kill three Afghan civilians.
According to an Associated Press article published in The Herald on Feb. 24, the father of one accused soldier called an Army staff sergeant at Joint Base Lewis-McChord last year with a dire warning.
Staff Sgt. James Michael Beck, in a statement disclosed to the AP by the soldier’s attorney, said the worried father warned him that soldiers in his 21-year-old son’s platoon were deliberately killing Afghan civilians. Beck said the father, Christopher Winfield of Florida, told him that soldiers in the platoon had already killed one civilian and planned to kill more.
The staff sergeant, according to AP, told Army investigators he did not report the 12-minute call to anyone or note it in a duty journal because there is no standard operating procedure for reporting “incidents of misconduct from unofficial sources.”
That frantic father called the Army on Feb. 14, 2010. The staff sergeant, in his statement to the defense attorney in September, said he advised the father that his son should alert his chain of command — which by all accounts the young soldier didn’t do.
Standard operating procedure, or lack of an official policy, apparently kept the relatively low-ranking staff sergeant from passing the warning along.
Spec. Adam Winfield is charged with joining other soldiers in killing the last of three Afghan victims. That slaying happened in May, months after the father’s dire call. The soldier’s court martial is scheduled for later this month.
On the face of it, nothing connects the Everett police chief ignoring official policy to the U.S. Army’s failure to act due to standard operating procedure. Yet something does tie these things that happened so far from each other — and that is judgment.
It can be folly to exercise established policy only on a case-by-case basis, for whatever reason. On the flip side, it can be disastrous not to act because doing so would be outside standard operating procedure.
Making the right call takes judgment and courage.
I see poor judgment in both awful stories. Police should investigate a killing by an officer in a timely way. And the military should heed terrible warnings.
We’re left to wonder why those things didn’t happen, and to remember this: These cases are in the end about the same thing — killings by people we arm and we trust.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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