It is no secret that neither City of Spokane Police Chief Meidl nor Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich likes it when legislators at various levels pass laws that members of law enforcement think of as critical of their performance and restrictive of how they do their jobs. No one likes to feel criticized or restrained. It should also be clear, at least from Ozzie’s recent videos (a topic for another day), that law enforcement takes a partisan view of the restrictions, i.e. they consider that Republicans approve of their current work while Democrats are critical and restrictive. Having law enforcement weigh in on politics is not new: the Spokane Police union (self-designated a “Guild”, presumably to pretend it is not a union) routinely endorses candidates for state and local office. Meidl’s post is nominally non-partisan. Ozzie’s post is partisan. He is an active, outspoken Republican.
Most of us probably would prefer that law enforcement did not engage in partisan politics—especially in the context of current political divisions. So what do we make of recent very public spat between the Chief Meidl and the Spokane Public Schools, a spat made public by Chief Meidl rather than working out differences between the parties? It is hard not to smell a partisan political rat in Meidl’s use of the media. Without presenting hard data—or even specific instances, Meidl publicly plants the idea that crime is rampant in the Spokane Public Schools and the school administration is hiding it. This is right out of the Republican playbook of “Permanent Offense”—always keep your opponent on their back foot trying to explain away vacuous accusations, leaving the sensational accusation to stick in the public mind…
Luke Baumgartner and Valerie Osier of RANGE Media expressed my unease with Chief Meidl’s grandstanding in an article entitled “Custody of the Kids”, copied below. I’ve been reading RANGE for a month or two. This article convinced me to become a paid subscriber. We need more of this sort of in depth analysis of local issues. I urge you to support what RANGE is doing by clicking on the title and signing up.
Spokane Public Schools and Spokane Police are fighting about when to put kids in jail. It’s a conflict years in the making. Plus, more PFAS contamination news.
Mar 25, 2022
Adam Driver as Craig Meidl: “You never tell me when the kids are committing crimes!”
It’s time for Additional Context: a weekly look at news that was underreported, misunderstood, or could benefit from a little additional background.
Luke | You know a divorce has gotten messy when it ends up in the press.
Especially when one side says, “let’s meet and talk about this” and the other side runs to a reporter. As with all breakups, there’s a bit of a backstory.
None of the reporting from that time includes quotes from the Spokane Police and the only mention of community comment was in favor of the change. Other than a change.org petition opposing the decommissioning of CROs that barely got 800 signatures (there are approximately 30,000 students within the SPS system), the changes didn’t seem to cause much stir, and the relationship between SPS and SPD seemed pretty normal.
That is: until a couple weeks ago.
On Friday, March 11, in a move that seemed to catch a lot of people off-guard, Police Chief Craig Meidl wrote a letter to Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Adam Swinyard accusing the district of ignoring “a pattern of assaults and threats to students and staff” that the District is legally bound to report under Washington State law.
By Monday, the district had sent a response to Meidl saying, actually, they believed they were following that law to the letter.
In an apparent show of solidarity, the district letter was signed by School Board President Mike Wiser, Vice President Nikki Lockwood, and Superintendent Swinyard, along with Paul Gannon and Jeremy Shay, presidents of the Spokane Principals Association and the Spokane Education Association, respectively. They requested a meeting with Meidl, Mayor Woodward, City Council President Beggs, and City Civil Rights Officer (and former school board president) Jerrall Haynes.
It’s unclear when or if that meeting is going to happen, but that same day, Meidl granted an interview to KREM’s Laura Pepetti in which he made grave but vague allegations that educators and administrators were suppressing “the full gamut [of crimes]. It’s assaults. It’s threats. It’s assaults of every magnitude. It’s threats against other students. It’s threats against staff members. So, uh, it’s the full gamut.”
By Tuesday, the local FBI office was looking into the matter, expanding the “full gamut” of crimes to include “assaults, sexual assaults, threats of violence, and drug use.” It’s important to note the reason we know the FBI is involved was a different city official [Michael Cathcart, no surprise here] leaking an email on Facebook, further prosecuting the case through the media – social media this time.
It is hard to overstate how irregular it is for law enforcement to go straight to the media with complaints about another institution like this. And in using scary language without offering real details, Meidl is working from a playbook that both SPD and Sheriff Knezovich have used a lot over the years. Remember the fearmongering about antifa?
It’s absolutely possible that the school district is failing to report serious, specific crimes, but we haven’t seen any evidence of that yet. If Meidl has information to that effect, he has a duty to the people of Spokane and the kids in its schools, to be as specific, precise, and public as possible. But because this is the court of public opinion – the court Meidl chose – he is able to get away with innuendo.
And the press, to this point, has let his narrative drive coverage. With the exception of Rebecca White of Spokane Public Radio – who publicly said she filed a records request and whose coverage we will talk about momentarily – and a tweet from KXLY News Director Melissa Luck, we haven’t seen public questions asking Meidl for specific details of the allegations.
We have seen calls for the school district to respond. Of course we should want to hear more from the school district here, and not just through letters. But we also need to acknowledge that when the police come straight to the media, they know exactly what they're doing. Fear and uncertainty feed into their power as an institution, and they approach reporters or let letters get leaked to establish a narrative. It's our job as journalists to clarify it, not follow it.
Do schools have a legal obligation to report crimes? Certain ones, absolutely. Smoking weed under the bleachers? Probably not. The law Meidl cites, RCW 26.44.030, also known as “Duty to Report,” is pretty specific in its language about when teachers and school officials (and also any for-profit or non-profit with “official supervisory capacity” over kids, such as daycares, for that matter), have an obligation to report crime:
When any practitioner … has reasonable cause to believe that a child has suffered abuse or neglect, he or she shall report such incident, or cause a report to be made, to the proper law enforcement agency.
The law elaborates that yes, this includes suspicions of abuse by teachers and other school officials.
So let’s take a closer look at Meidl’s words. When he says, “It’s threats against other students. It’s threats against staff members,” [emphasis added] he is clearly saying kids are threatening each other and they are threatening staff. Presumably he also means kids are assaulting each other. Getting in fights and whatnot.
He does not insinuate teachers are beating up kids, or staff is letting signs of abuse at home go unreported.
While the law draws a broad definition of who is capable of abusing or neglecting a kid, it does not specifically call out other children. Spokane district policy, however, does. The policy reads, in part: “Children (including other students), family members, and any other adult can engage in child abuse, neglect, or exploitation.”
And fair enough. As a kid who got bullied pretty badly at points in my life, it sure felt like abuse.
But while it’s possible, under the district’s own interpretation of the law, for one student to abuse or neglect another, there’s nothing in state law or district policy that suggests a kid threatening a teacher or staff would trigger Duty to Report, despite Meidl’s claims. The law doesn’t mention anything about drug use.
In its response, the District goes on the offensive, saying it has information Meidl has had these unspecified reports since the beginning of the school year and he has never brought them up, even when meeting with district leaders recently.
Surely, if the behaviors were serious enough to trigger Duty to Report and staff failed to do so, it would be equally negligent of Chief Meidl to wait to let the district know its staff was asleep on the job.
Beyond their respective interpretations of the law, it’s clear the Chief and the District are at odds over a matter of legal — and really, societal — philosophy: When and for what acts should kids become justice involved?
Perhaps more bluntly: What good is criminal punishment for kids?
In de-commissioning its CROs and adopting policies to limit contact with police, SPS has made its position clear since mid-2020. The Chief still hasn’t clearly stated his. And in not actually providing the reports he claims to have read, we don’t know the severity of any of these crimes, (or indeed whether evidence would support charging), so we can’t even hazard a guess.
As the story stands, there are more questions like this than concrete answers. Another question: if Meidl had sat on these reports for this long, what made him write the letter on March 11?
He hasn’t said, but just two days prior — in what we are sure is pure coincidence! — SPS approved a new safety policy that urges staff to take every reasonable step to de-escalate without calling the cops, “using law enforcement only as the absolute last resort and only for incidents for which law enforcement is necessary to address a serious threat to school safety.”
That language seemed to be on Meidl’s mind in that interview with Spokane Public Radio, saying, “we need also for the school district to acknowledge that law enforcement does have a role to play. If it's the last resort, that's ok, but let's make sure we're following the law.”
The irony of that statement is that law enforcement had a primary role in starting the district’s transition away from arresting kids in the first place, during an incident happened at Ferris High School in early 2019, and involved the most public example of reportable child abuse on Spokane Public Schools property in recent memory.
The abuser? A former Spokane Sheriff Deputy: Resource Officer Shawn Audie, who is shown in this video pressing his elbow into a Black teen boy’s neck and restraining him in a way that the child’s parents contended caused trauma. Off-camera, witnesses described Audie also putting his knee to the child’s neck. Later, the Inlander uncovered that Audie had left the Sheriff’s department to avoid termination after multiple accusations of excessive force, including striking an elderly man in the head with a baton and later killing another man with a vascular neck restraint — law enforcement jargon for a choke hold.
Thankfully, the child survived his encounter with Audie. Audie resigned when his past came out and the district eventually settled with the boy’s family for $275,000.
RANGE is a reader-supported publication. Help us grow by becoming a paid subscriber.
