Dominic Holden, who works at Seattle’s alt-weekly The Stranger, had an unpleasant run-in with some local cops and isn’t going to take it:
[…] When the US Department of Justice alleged that the Seattle Police Department was routinely using excessive force, federal prosecutors stressed in their 2011 report that officers were escalating ordinary interactions into volatile, sometimes violent, situations. That was followed last summer by a county audit upbraiding the King County Sheriff’s Office for mismanaging misconduct cases and not taking complaints seriously. Now a federal court controls the SPD under a reform plan, and the county’s new sheriff is under unprecedented pressure to discipline his deputies, so the two agencies should be showing more civility on the beat. Or so you’d think.
The Sheriff’s officer involved has a long history of complaints and issues and has been suspended with pay after Holden filed a complaint. Reading the piece, it’s clear that the only reason that the complaint was taken seriously was because Holden wrote it up in The Stranger.
It’s pretty gutsy of Holden and The Stranger to do this. They’re definitely leaving themselves open for petty harassment, being frozen out of stories, and generally being hated by Seattle cops. That’s probably why you don’t see this kind of story in most city newspapers.