In a conversation with Mike Solan, the head of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, Seattle Police Department officer and SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer minimized the killing of 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula by police officer Kevin Dave and joked that she had “limited value” as a “regular person” who was only 26 years old.
In the video, taken in the early morning after Dave hit Kandula in a crosswalk while speeding to respond to a call from a man who believed he had taken too much cocaine, Auderer says he has talked to Dave and he is “good,” adding that ” it does not seem like there’s a criminal investigation going on” because Dave was “going 50 [mph]—that’s not out of control” and because Kandula may not have even been in a crosswalk. Auderer added that Dave had “lights and sirens” on, which video confirmed was not true.
In fact, as we reported exclusively, Dave was driving 74 miles an hour in a 25 mile per hour zone and struck Kandula while she was attempting to cross the street in a marked and well-lighted crosswalk.
“I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then when he hit the brakes, she flew off the car. But she is dead. No, it’s a regular person. Yeah, just write a check. Yeah, $11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.”—Seattle police officer Daniel Auderer, joking with police union president Mike Solan about the death of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula earlier that night.
“I don’t think she was thrown 40 feet either,” Auderer told Solan. “I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then when he hit the brakes, she flew off the car. But she is dead.” Then Auderer laughed loudly at something Solan said. “No, it’s a regular person. Yeah.”
We have asked SPOG via email what Solan asked that made Auderer clarify that Kandula was a “regular” person, as opposed to another type of person Dave might have hit.
“Yeah, just write a check,” Auderer continued. Then he laughed again for several seconds. “Yeah, $11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.” At this point, Auderer turned off his body camera and the recording stops.
Joel Merkel, the co-chair of Seattle’s Community Police Commission, called the video “shockingly insensitive.
“I was just really struck by the casual laughter and attitude—this was moments after she was killed,” Merkel said. “You have the vice president of SPOG on the telephone with the president of SPOG essentially laughing and joking about the pedestrian’s death and putting a dollar value on her head, and that alone is just disgusting and inhumane,” Merkel said.
Right-wing commentator Jason Rantz attempted to pre-spin the video as an empathetic response that included a bit of “gallows humor,” saying the comment was “being described as a ‘leak’ of the content to media members who are hypercritical of police.”
Rantz also claimed the two police union officials’ comments were meant to “mock city lawyers” who work on cases in which police officers kill or harm civilians, which, Merkel says, “doesn’t make it any better and possibly even makes it worse! Because [in that case] you have SPOG complaining or mocking or joking about police accountability, which is really at the heart of the consent decree.”
Last week, US District Judge James Robart lifted the majority of a federal consent degree over SPD that has been in place since 2012, finding the department in full compliance with the portions of the agreement that dealt with use of force and bias-free policing, while maintaining federal oversight of the departments crowd-control and accountability policies. The city is currently locked in contract negotiations with SPOG. The city’s most recent contract with SPOG erased or neutralized reforms the city council, which included now-Mayor Bruce Harrell, passed in 2017.
Although Robart has said he has no authority to get involved in SPOG negotiations, Merkel said he was encouraged that he also said he “felt he had the jurisdiction to impact the contract to the extent that it affects accountability” during last week’s court hearing in which the judge largely terminated the agreement.
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PubliCola requested videos and documents related to the collision through the ordinary public disclosure process several months ago and has been receiving installments through the regular public disclosure process.
SPD did not respond to a request for comment. Half an hour after this post went up, the department posted the video on its website, along with a statement. According to the post, an SPD employee “identified” the video “in the routine course of business” and alerted their supervisor; when the video made its way to Police Chief Adrian Diaz’s office, the post says, his office sent it to the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) for investigation.
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We need national licensing for police. And an overhaul of training (which should be much, much longer and much less violence-oriented). We need to take military equipment out of their hands. We need to largely disarm them (firearms, not other, "less lethal"methods, necessarily), except for certain specialized officers, such as they do in England. Training requirements should be the same throughout the entire country. Repeated training should be required. Training on the actual law should be required (before they get their license to become a cop). Some sort of organization that provides serious oversight, which is not comprised of politicians or anybody related to the justice system in any way, should be required.
It’s so easy for them to commit a crime in one jurisdiction and then just move a town over on the off chance that they lose their job over the crime they committed. And they never go to prison for the things they should (well, rarely), so we also need to get rid of qualified immunity. Which is a made-up concept invented by SCOTUS to begin with.
I agree completely with everything you’ve said. The way it is now, the police are pretty much just a legally protected gang. It doesn’t feel like they’re here to protect civilians at all. I just have one question - does it make sense to take guns away from cops when the US has a gun problem? In England there are significantly fewer guns, which is just one of several reasons why it works for the police there. I feel we would need significant overhaul to be able to get to the same point, and only after we did so could they start to build trust with the public again.
Cops pull out guns on traffic stops. Talk about an escalation. I would be surprised if cops weren’t much more likely to escalate to firearms than the suspect is.
They absolutely are. Hell, one of my most vivid memories is getting into my buddy’s grandmother’s jeep tracker at a hobby store parking lot, and a cop walked up and unholstered his gun to talk to a couple teenagers.
Our crime? Using a handicap stall while driving a car with a handicap placard in the license plate.
They can keep their guns if they pass mandatory training.
Most cops don’t ever fire a weapon on duty over the course of their entire career, so most of them don’t actually need to be armed all the time.