Community Solutions: Law Enforcement Working Group Update
A Community Solutions Letter signed by 60 organizations and 1000 individuals was released on September 10 to urge elected officials to take action for immigrant community safety and First Amendment protections. The letter was written by Manzanita House, Mujeres in Action, Nuestras Raices, Creole Resources, Spokane Immigrant Rights Coalition (SIRC), FUSE Washington, Citizen Nine26, Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane (PJALS), Spokane Community Against Racism (SCAR), and Spokane NAACP.
Together, we called for an Emergency Fund for immigrant communities and other actions for immigrant safety, support for a 2026 legislative action to increase enforcement of Keep Washington Working, and other demands. Here’s coverage from the Spokesman: 60 Washington organizations call for protections for immigrants, decry federal overreach.
Organizational representatives of the thirteen organizations have continued to advocate for the Community Solutions through direct, grassroots lobbying and relationship-building. Since July, we have met with Chief Hall, the Mayor’s office, City Council, and County Commissioners 8 times.. Updates from these efforts will come from the working groups leading specific efforts.
The Community Solutions Letter included this demand for law enforcement accountability and transparency:
Ensure the Spokane Police Department and Spokane County Sheriff protect the right to peaceful protest by:
- Providing clarity on how decisions are made during interagency response and when incidents occur within Spokane City limits. In these cases, the Spokane Police Department should retain clear authority.
- Avoiding preemptive shutdowns of protests or use of force against demonstrators engaged in peaceful protest, and providing clear and transparent rules of engagement before, during and after protest activities.
- Providing immediate transparency on communication and deescalation tactics and process including when and how the department and City of Spokane chooses when and when not to use said tactics.
As a working group on this topic, leaders of PJALS, SCAR, NAACP, Mujeres in Action, and Citizen Nine26 have met with SPD Chief Hall and Lt. Kyle Yrigollen five times. Here is our update.
1. What’s the status of the investigation by the Office of Police Ombudsman about June 11?
SPD’s RESPONSE:
Mayor Brown and Chief Hall requested that the OPO investigate June 11. This investigation requires negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding with the City, the Police Guild, and the Office of Police Ombudsman (OPO) to allow the OPO to do more than is currently allowed under the Collective Bargaining Agreement (contract) between the Police Guild and the City of Spokane.
When these negotiations conclude and the Memorandum of Understanding is signed by all parties, the OPO will begin its investigation. The investigation will include community complaints as well as SPD documentation.
OUR ANALYSIS:
It’s important and good that the Mayor and Chief are requesting and committing to this investigation. The fact that it has to be negotiated with the Guild shows that the next full Collective Bargaining Agreement between the Guild and the City (which will be renegotiated this year) needs clear language allowing for this scale of investigation. Community members need to pay attention and stay vocal to keep an investigation of the Spokane Police Department’s response to June 11 in the spotlight.
The Sheriff response warrants the same transparency and scrutiny. When we met with County Commissioners Waldref and Jordan, they seemed unaware of concerns about misconduct by the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office on June 11, and had received no complaints about June 11.
In the County, there is no independent complaint or review process or any community oversight such as the City’s Office of Police Ombudsman. Currently the only way to make complaints regarding the Sheriff’s Office is to request a complaint form, which is submitted to the Sheriff’s Office directly and investigated by themselves internally. Commissioners Waldref and Jordan said community members could cc them in emails with complaints.
2. What are the lines of authority between SPD and the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO)when both are responding to an incident inside Spokane city limits?
SPD’s RESPONSE:
The SPD’s authority is within the City of Spokane; they are not authorized to police anywhere else unless invited by a law enforcement agency with jurisdiction in that location.
State law gives Sheriffs the authority to respond anywhere inside of their County limits but leaves a grey area about what situations require SCSO to seek City consent to respond to incidents inside the city. This is especially true if, in SCSO’s view, SPD was not available to respond, not able to respond sufficiently, or had no response at the location.
SPD and SCSO have “mutual aid agreements” with law enforcement in neighboring counties, including Kootenai County, for the purpose of responding to incidents in each other’s districts if invited to by a law enforcement agency with jurisdiction.
When the SCSO and SPD provide a joint response to incidents within the City, the SPD is “incident command.” This means SCSO officers are supposed to follow the norms of the SPD. There is no way for SPD to hold other agencies accountable to this standard.
OUR ANALYSIS:
SPD Chief Hall has made an effort to shift police culture and tactics, and build trust and credibility within the community. Chief Hall’s efforts are put at risk by an unaccountable Sheriff’s department which continues to operate within a “use of force” culture and authoritarian mindset.
3. What is the Spokane Police Department’s Dialogue Team?
SPD’s RESPONSE:
The Dialogue Team is a new and developing team within SPD. They are visually distinguishable by their blue shirts or winter uniforms instead of black shirts. The Dialogue Team’s general role is to attend protests and community events, talk with organizers and participants, not engage in enforcement, and watch for potential problems.
SPD’s creation of the Dialogue Team is a response to general distrust of armed police response to First Amendment actions and is an effort to approach First Amendment events with a different culture.
Previously, the Event Team deployed to protests and community events was made up of SWAT team members. Now the Event Team and the Dialogue Team are separate from the SWAT team.
In Chief Hall’s own words: “This team is expected to respond to and engage with groups who are expressing their 1st Amendment rights. It is a crowd management philosophy, not a crowd control philosophy. The officers are expected to foster communication, focusing on liaison, de-escalation, and collaboration to ensure a safe and peaceful event. The strategy rejects the concept of ‘mob mentality’ that pervades American policing and instead focuses on proactive engagement, facilitation, de-escalation, and safe management without using force. This philosophy should be the foundational cornerstone of SPD Crowd management and response strategy for any event.”
OUR ANALYSIS:
SPD’s creation of the Dialogue Team is important and good. They are continuing to train, develop, and expand it. This shift does not require increases in funding.
We were disappointed that the Dialogue Team was not used on June 11, 2025, and Chief Hall has repeatedly said it was a mistake not to have sent them. Our experience seeing the Dialogue Team in action at protests, such as the October 18 2025 No Kings 2 and others, shows a change in culture and an increase in trust and respect for the community.
We look forward to holding Chief Hall and the SPD accountable to continuing to improve this standard.
4. Definition of Deescalation:
SPD’s RESPONSE:
SPD’s definition of de-escalation no longer includes any use of force.
OUR ANALYSIS:
Removing all use of force from the SPD’s definition of de-escalation is an important and good change from previous policy. Law Enforcement training centers escalation as the main strategic level of action. Any effort to retrain law enforcement away from escalation by use of force requires a significant culture change.
5. What is SPD’s position on “kettling”?
(Kettling is when law enforcement surrounds a crowd, and does not create a path for people to exit, and often then arrests people for failure to disperse.)
SPD’s RESPONSE:
Commitment to Supreme Court ruling banning kettling: Chief Hall shared he has directed officers to clarify and maintain exit paths when issuing orders to disperse. He stated his agreement that kettling is clearly unconstitutional and acknowledged that sometimes not everyone at the protest can hear orders to disperse.
OUR ANALYSIS:
Many people experienced what looked and felt like kettling on June 11th. We look forward to holding Chief Hall and SPD accountable to their commitment not to use kettling in the future.
After June 11, SPD requested to purchase two Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) in recognition that people cannot respond to instructions they cannot hear.
The choice to approach a communications problem with militarized equipment, combined with a lack of community engagement and transparency around the intended use for the LRAD, challenged community trust in SPD.
Unfortunately, no one with authority made an effort to share with the public what we have since learned: that State law prohibits law enforcement from purchasing LRADs unless the weaponized features are removed by the manufacturer. Washington State RCW 10.116.040 prohibits law enforcement agencies in Washington from purchasing “military equipment” which includes LRADs. To meet the expectations of this law, the device SPD was preparing to buy would have had the weaponized features (such as the ability to emit harmful tones) disabled by the manufacturer.
6. Why book people into jail and require cash bail for a misdemeanor “failure to disperse” charge (i.e. not leaving a physical location when instructed to by police) that’s later dismissed?
SPD’s RESPONSE:
SPD does have some discretion over whether someone is booked into the jail. Chief Hall has now stated that the SPD will operate with a presumption of cite and release for a misdemeanor failure to disperse charge, in absence of other charges and dependent on circumstances.
OUR ANALYSIS:
On June 11th 2025, those arrested were cited, taken to wait at the jail for hours while cuffed, their clothes and belongings taken, were booked in jail, and were required to pay bail ($500 on average) for a misdemeanor which was later dismissed. This was an intentional choice by law enforcement.
SPD’s new cite and release presumption is an important and good change from previous policy. We look forward to holding Chief Hall and SPD accountable to this norm.
Our Conclusion
Building the relationships necessary to effectively hold law enforcement accountable is a complex process, and we want to be transparent about our assumptions going into these meetings.
The Spokane Police Department and Spokane County Sheriff’s office have a track record for disproportionately violent response to protestors. We know that the presence of any law enforcement at an action is the greatest indicator of violence. We want to reduce harm of state violence at protest actions and in our community.
Presently, we are at risk of violence on many levels from many factions of law enforcement.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) continues to disappear and terrorize people, and may be monitoring protestors as well.
FBI surveillance was happening; we should assume it is still happening.
Spokane County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) escalated violence on 6/11 and has demonstrated commitment to retaliate after the fact by charging Justice and likely assisting Feds.
Spokane Police Department (SPD) was recently the 3rd deadliest PD in the nation. In 2025, the number of people killed by SPD was zero. As SCAR shared, this is an unequivocal victory for the Spokane community and the role of SPD leadership — particularly Chief Kevin Hall, who joined the department in late 2024 — must be acknowledged. And it is also the reality that the average protestor holds an incredibly low level of trust or respect for SPD. When Mayor Brown was elected in 2023, former Chief Meidl left the Spokane Police Department after 29 years as a career SPD officer and 7 years as chief. Mayor Brown appointed Chief Kevin Hall in 2024 as the result of a community-engaged selection process. Chief Hall is still newish and is making honest attempts at a less harmful and more transparent SPD. He leads a divided house; not all SPD is on board for this approach.
Kootenai County Idaho Sheriff Norris has demonstrated a threat to mobilize (outside of protocol) against Spokane residents to support Spokane Sheriffs
Militia group members are both a risk on their own AND likely present in all local LE offices.
It is strategic to assume information may be shared at all times between each of these, conspiring at all times
Over 40 unique arrests have occurred related to Spokane Protests on June 11. Many of these people were NOT choosing to risk arrest, and all of them faced harsher than expected treatment compared to historical treatment of civil disobedience. We are firm in our solidarity with all arrested and with the three people facing federal trial in May.
SPD has released their Protocol for interactions with ICE, however we cannot assume there has been thorough training, nor do we expect the community trusts SPD enough to utilize them in this way, nor do we trust average SPD will be skilled to reduce violence in this situation. SPD has also recently clarified the departmental policy prohibiting SPD officers from masking to conceal their identity.
We keep our consistent, rooted analysis while we notice when and how conditions change. It is strategic to acknowledge the changes Chief Hall and SPD are making so that they can be held accountable to the new standards. People also respond to positive reinforcement.
Chief Hall seems to be in agreement that community safety can’t happen without community. When we approached these meetings it was in shared commitment that if SPD was reaching to community for solutions to safety, we wanted people with a grounded commitment to justice and collective liberation to be asserting our perspective and goals to shape how they operate.
We expect and need sustained years of public outcry through protest, many kinds of noncooperation, and civil resistance against authoritarianism and fascism. To be successful in this, we need a strong grounding in knowing our rights, collective care, and collective grassroots power.
The Trump administration is threatening our constitutional rights by weaponizing federal systems of “justice” against the public – including DHS/ICE/CPB, FBI, Federal Prosecutors.
SPD and Spokane County Sheriffs are our resources that belong to our community and we reject efforts to see the federal administration turn them against us or align them as tools of federal overreach.