Scoop: Ex-Seattle police chief testifies she deleted text messages in bulk

Former Seattle police chief Carmen Finest testified late final month that in 2020 she periodically deleted texts in bulk from her city-issued telephone after independently deciding the messages did not comprise important info that might require them to be saved.

Particulars: A few of these destroyed texts may have been messages Finest exchanged with then-Mayor Jenny Durkan, the ex-cop acknowledged when questioned by trial lawyer Karen Koehler throughout a Might 24 deposition, in a transcript first obtained by Axios.

What she stated: “Simply periodically I deleted messages in bulk,” Finest testified. “I did not look by means of … any particular message … simply in the event that they’re transitory … sooner or later, I simply would delete these off, and that was it.

• Once more, I wasn’t focusing on any particular particular person or something like that.”

Why it issues: Finest’s testimony presents new particulars on the evolving clarification about why months price of textual content exchanges vanished amid Seattle’s controversial dealing with of racial justice protests in 2020.

• Nobody has been held accountable greater than a yr later for deleting the data.

The intrigue: Regardless of lingering questions and requires a probe into whether or not anybody broke the regulation, high metropolis and state officers aren’t urgent for additional investigation.

In the meantime, taxpayers have footed a invoice of greater than $600,000 for a forensic evaluation that didn’t get well the texts and a settlement of a public data lawsuit over the messages.

• A number of different lawsuits are pending that contact on the lacking exchanges as potential proof.

Catch up fast: Finest and Durkan are amongst 9 metropolis officers with lacking texts from the interval overlapping with the June 2020 protests.

• Throughout demonstrations, police used tear fuel and different power to quell activists and deserted the East Precinct, and the town allowed protesters to take over six sq. blocks of Capitol Hill for weeks.
• Finest’s texts are additionally lacking from late June 2020 when two Black youngsters have been fatally shot contained in the protest zone, when metropolis officers thought of slashing the police funds, and when she abruptly retired from the division.

The opposite facet: Durkan has denied that she switched her telephone to a setting that routinely deleted greater than 2,000 texts.

• Finest instructed The Seattle Occasions final yr she had no thought what occurred to her lacking texts and assumed they’d been backed up.

The most recent: Finest’s Might deposition was taken on behalf of greater than 20 folks suing Seattle and King County, together with kinfolk of Summer time Taylor, a 24-year-old activist struck and killed by a motorist throughout a freeway protest march.

• Finest testified that she deleted texts “from all kinds of parents,” together with group members and employees.

Sure, however: At the very least a few of Finest’s lacking messages unquestionably contained city-related enterprise and have been required to be stored.

• The South Seattle Emerald reported final week that metropolis logs of assistant police chief Lesley Cordner present exchanges with Finest about securing and eradicating delicate supplies from the East Precinct on June 8, 2020 — the day police deserted the station.

And, Finest’s deposition suggests she continued to periodically delete what she thought of “transitory” texts from late Might till she left the division in early September 2020.

• By then, a number of public data requests and lawsuits had been filed.
• Meaning whether or not Finest believed her texts have been transitory or not, she was obligated to maintain them underneath public data regulation and proof guidelines.