Mi'Chance death: King County Sheriff responds to oversight office claims

“I want to be very clear that the allegation that reforms were left to die on the vine was simply not true,” Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht said on Tuesday.

Johanknecht was responding to claims from a report released two weeks ago by the county’s Office of Law Enforcement Oversight.

The report outlined what led to the fatal shooting of Mi’Chance Dunlap-Gittens and called for 43 policy changes to internal shooting investigations.

The council chambers were packed with reporters and supporters and family of Dunlap-Gittens, a 17-year-old black youth who was shot to death by deputies during a botched sting operation in 2017.

Officers posed as a teenage girl in search of alcohol, and set up a meeting with a black teen they were investigating. Dunlap-Gittens came along with the 16-year-old black male who officers planned to contact, according to a federal lawsuit filed against the deputies involved in the teen’s death and King County. He was shot multiple times.

“When I took office I immediately began to examine the internal policy procedure,” Johanknecht said, adding that some of the changes requested in the 43-page report had been implemented in 2019.

Johanknecht ultimately defended the 48-hour practice the Sheriff’s Office exercises when collecting deputy statements, which was called into question by the oversight office.

She said there’s a disagreement between what the report states — that the best approach would be to interview deputies involved in a shooting investigation during the same shift — versus what Johanknecht said are practices backed by science and other law enforcement agencies.

The sheriff said she “steps up for reform,” but there are aspects of law enforcement oversight that must be bargained with King County Police Officers Guild.

“I'm not saying that collective bargaining keeps me from doing everything,” she said. “What I’m saying is in particular the 48-hour window was bargained and so in this state it has to be continued to be bargained.”

Oversight director Deborah Jacobs said by email that the department was pleased the Sheriff’s Office responded to some of the claims made in the report, and hopes there will be a broader community dialogue to follow.

“It will be important to sort through the significant remaining differences between community and the Sheriff’s Office about the policies for reviewing officer-involved shootings,” she wrote. However, what was presented by the sheriff “did not satisfy [the oversight committee’s] expectations on those specific recommendations.”

Frank Gittens, Dunlap-Gitten’s father, called Johanknecht’s statement “justifying wrong doings.”

“We need to change the culture so that we don’t have to sit here after the fact of someone getting killed to fix it,” Gittens said. “The culture of the whole department has to be changed.”

James Bible, a Seattle-area civil rights attorney, also weighed in. He’s evaluated similar cases for over two decades, he said.

“I’ve sat in rooms just like this, while we discussed situations in this sort of neutral sanitary environment,” Bible said. “What I’ve learned unfortunately is that justice rarely occurs here in rooms like this.”

He said that policies are only as good as the people that implement them, and scrutinized the sheriff, who left the meeting before public comment. He asked that everyone present at the meeting for Dunlap-Gittens stand.

Nearly every person stood.

“If this sheriff is in a place where she’s not prepared to do the best for all the people in this room ... she will not be our sheriff much longer,” Bible said.

Because the meeting ran late, the Officer of Law Enforcement Oversight wasn’t able to present.

However, before the meeting ended, Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said legislation had been drafted. It requested that the Sheriff’s Office respond to each of the 43 recommendations and provide a date for when the recommendations would be put in place.