Seattle’s city prosecutor has announced a rather novel decision to toss out all tickets issued for the public use of marijuana through the first seven months of this year after concluding that virtually all of them were written by one officer who opposed the legalization of pot. City Attorney Pete Holmes announced the dismissal of roughly 100 tickets and moving to refund those people who forked over $27 ticket. Officer, Randy Jokela, 52, reportedly addressed some of the tickets to “Petey Holmes” or wrote that he considered the pot law “silly.”
The fact that one officer would write roughly 80 percent of the tickets for a single crime is a rather telling indicator of abuse.
Jokela reportedly wrote on one ticket that he played a type of Roman game with a couple. He wrote: “(Suspect) lost the coin flip so he got the ticket while the other person walked. (Suspect) was allowed to keep his pipe.” On another ticket, he wrote to the new law of legalization as “silly.”
Now here is the kicker. Jokela is obviously under internal investigation but the department decided that there was no reason not to return him to duty where he continues to write tickets and enforce laws. Police spokesman Drew Fowler said “Chief O’Toole and (Office of Professional Accountability) Director Pierce Murphy conferred and believed that nothing in the ongoing investigation precluded him from returning to his patrol duties.” Really? An officer goes on an unhinged ticketing spree mocking the law, prosecutor, and forcing citizens to compete to avoid citations . . . and there is
“nothing . . . [that] precluded him from returning to his patrol duties”? What exactly does it take in Seattle?
By the way, when they dismissed all of the tickets, officials added that they suspected Officer Randy Jokela of unfairly and arbitrarily targeting the homeless and African-Americans.
Jokela was named co-officer of the year for the West Precinct in 2005.
Even Ron Smith, president of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, could not defend Jokela’s actions:
“The involved officer is by far the hardest-working officer on this department I have known in my 20 years. Whether it was working in the Rainier Valley in a patrol car, or since he’s been downtown on bikes, nobody can hold a fiddle to his work ethic. However, I cannot defend the comments that he allegedly made on the backs of the tickets.”
I simply fail to see how an officer who reportedly went on a vendetta spree can be returned to duty. He not only used citations to mock the law and prosecutors but took the extraordinary step of playing games with citizens like some little Caesar. The most unnerving as to this scandal is not that an officer can go over the edge of sanity but that Chief Kathleen O’Toole (who was just sworn into office in June) sees no reason why he should not be able to continue to enforce the law.
Source: USA Today
Darren,
Perhaps you are right. But history has taught me to be sceptical. Too many times there are tough words until the media moves on. Then it’s business as usual.
Bailers,
Being skeptical is a good approach to any enforcement action taken by government against a citizen. 😉
Darren,
Because he isn’t fired, don’t you think that there’s a message to the rest of the force that they too can be flippant and disrespectful to the public?
What’s to stop any officer from flipping a coin to see if he’ll arrest me for disorderly conduct? Bank Robbery? This certainly gives the appearance of a police force that doesn’t care if its officers are applying the law reasonably.
Sure sounds like abuse of power to me.
Bailers:
Officers in Washington have large discretionary powers as to the enforcement of civil infractions, as is the case here. So it really is not a matter of whether or not he could or could not choose to issue an infraction notice. So from a statutory point of view, there is authorization for this officer to utilize a decision to charge or not based upon whatever criteria he or she decides.
The problem comes in the means of selective enforcement which if very strong, especially against protected groups, it calls this discretion into question. Washington is a state where the courts have been cracking down on pre-text issues with violations. But, unless there is no further action as a result of using a minor violation to go on a fishing trip for a more serious crime, then it doesn’t apply.
There technically is only a few examples where an officer must make an arrest; in reply to your question about the robbery example: Arrest Warrants; and Domestic Violence related cases. So in theory an officer can decide not to arrest someone for armed robbery upon probable cause but that type of situation is extremely rare.
The actions of this officer seem from what I have read to be unbecoming of an officer. It would have to be addressed by the department not the courts because I doubt the courts would sanction an officer over this. The prosecutor does also have wide discretion to drop the cases against those cases that were pending with the marijuana cites. As for the ones that were already adjudicated, I don’t know much about the City of Seattle’s infraction procedure, which is different from Washington generally as they rely on municipal codes for their non-felony violations but from the standard legal system in the state, and what is usually adopted by reference by cities, I would expect the city attorney’s office would need to go through the court to expunge a finding of guilt. Maybe this took place but I do not know.
The only way the city could probably sanction the officer is either unprofessional conduct, which I would agree could be argued by the brass against this officer, or for writing the extraneous remarks in the narrative of the notices of violation. The department cannot go against him for enforcement of laws when he has probable cause to do so. Believe it or not in police culture an officer going after these homeless would be frowned upon by most, if not outright resented. In the grand scheme of things it is akin to writing speeding tickets for someone going 3 miles per hour over the speed limit. I don’t see this officer getting away with this scott-free.
If there was probable cause to issue these citations the officer can enforce this ordinance. Even if he had the highest rate of cites, that in itself is not a sign of abuse.
The question is a matter of reasonableness.
First, if the officer was citing people for smoking weed on the sidewalk at a bus stop, not many would say this is abusive. But, going down to the railroad tracks to a vacant lot under a bridge and citing the homeless that is in my view unprofessional. There might be probable cause but most would say it was “unfair.” Doing this over and over, you have to wonder about a guy who does this.
The coin flipping is one thing, but writing this down in the narrative of a citation? What a fool. You don’t write nonsense like that in official reports and he knows it. This is not a big joke, especially to the person being cited. If I was a muni-court judge and saw an officer do that on a chippy citation I would toss it on that alone.
I don’t see this as a firing offence on behalf of the officer but he certainly needs some corrective action and be put on a short leash. Guys like this cause management some major headaches and the department much embarrassment. Somehow I envision this won’t be the only incident for him if he does not change his attitude.
I agree with Davidm. If there is a law on the books about smoking pot in public and this cop is enforcing the law then do not force the cop not to enforce but force the city hall to repeal the law. itchinBayDog is probably gonna chime in on this one.
Why doesn’t anybody blame the City Council for passing the stupid law that Jokela was enforcing?
I would like to see how many citations were written by Jokela for other categories of offenses and compare this with what the number of citations written by other officers. Maybe he was just more aggressive overall and not picking out just marijuana use. This kind of analysis would be especially interesting in regards to drinking alcoholic beverages in public, because that falls under exactly the same ordinance.
“Jokela is obviously under internal investigation but the department decided that there was no reason not to return him to duty where he continues to write tickets and enforce laws. ”
This is why I, a middle class white male with no criminal record, have lost all faith in police and their desire to protect and serve. They only protect themselves, and expect us to serve them (see column by LAPD Sgt. Sunil Dutta for examples).
And worst of all, police get mad at US for not 100% supporting them, and act like hurt children that we would DARE question them or their methods.
When you have a President, the chief law officer in the nation, ignoring the laws, enforcing the ones he likes, changing the laws willy nilly and refusing to enforce other laws……why should ANY one obey the law. We should all have the right to pick and choose which laws we feel like obeying.
Like the IRS commissioner said. “IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said the tax agency follows the law “wherever it can.” http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/09/11/irs-commissioner-we-follow-the-law-when-we-can-n1890034
Um…yeah…..I pay my taxes, whenever I can. I follow the law, whenever I can or when it is convenient.
A fish rots from the head down.
When the American Public sees so many officers, endorsed and supported in full by their department’s Administrations, who have absolutely no respect for the law or the rule of law; how can anybody be surprised that so many of the American Public have lost their respect for the law and those charged with enforcing it (capriciously).
RIL….
The sub headline should also note the union did not support the officer….he is in a very small club.
At least he did not shoot them all! Better outcome than I can say for many US cities and the homeless, downtrodden and minorities who are the victims of the police. It offers a glimpse into the real state of our nation when ‘not killing an innocent citizen’ is the only compliment the police deserve in this case.
Please be seated everybody, I am going to pass sentence on officer Randy Jokela. Officer Jokela I find you guilty of being a sore-losing marijuana prohibitionist. I am just, I don’t know, blown away, if you will. I have decided that leniency is appropriate in your case, because of the fundraising aspects of attempting to write all those tickets – but don’t do it again. We have to face these hippies like we aren’t sore losers, they beat us fair and square, we can’t overcome their disciplined and hard working ranks, so we should get on with our lives.
I sentence you to bow down, kneel down, admit the hippies beat us, admit the hippies were right all along, and list 10 things about hippies that are better than us.
I seem to be missing some understanding that the professor and others have. If Seattle has a law against the public use of marijuana, why is this officer in the hot seat? Isn’t this really a problem of having a law on the books that many other officers do not enforce? Or maybe it is a problem of the policy of issuing warnings instead of citations whenever practical? What am I missing here? I do not see grounds for removing this officer. Maybe he was the only one doing his job enforcing this ordinance.
Following is the ordinance for the citations:
http://clerk.seattle.gov/~scripts/nph-brs.exe?s1=&s3=117989&s4=&s2=&s5=&Sect4=AND&l=20&Sect2=THESON&Sect3=PLURON&Sect5=CBORY&Sect6=HITOFF&d=ORDF&p=1&u=%2F~public%2Fcbory.htm&r=1&f=G
You say he’s abusing his position. He says he’s doing his job. I don’t know, but my guess is that it may be almost impossible to fire him.
He’s been paying tributes to the Seattle Police Officer’s Guild, the largest police union in the Northeast, to negotiate employment contracts covering the terms and conditions of his employment. As with all public employee union bargaining, there is nobody on the other side of the table vigilantly representing the taxpayers, so the public employee unions not only often negotiate gold plated compensation and retirement benefits, but also protectionist measures that make it hard to fire derelict union member employees. I don’t know that’s the case here, but it’s plausible.
In today’s America police act more and more like law unto themselves. It is ubiquitous. The new dichotomy is police or civilian. How’d that happen?
What if there has never been as much as one human (biological, not legal fiction) person who has ever been fit for duty, and vastly less fit for return to duty?
What the (swear word) (swear word) (infinite sequence of unique swear words) is “duty”?
Who has the duty to decide who has what duty, and who does so in a purely dutiful manner, and how does who does that truthfully and accurately do it?
What is authoritarianism, and by what form of authoritarianism is it decided that all human (biological, not legal fiction) people are subject to dutiful duty in the service of tangibly unidentifiable authority?
Or, “What is neurological trauma”?
For the record, I am decidedly not an anarchist. I do work toward the development of a rule of law that human (biological, and not legal fiction) persons can actually understand accurately and, through accurate understanding, live in consciously willful, rigorously truthful, understanding thereof.
I arranged for a bumper sticker company to make a bumper sticker for me, as a form of social experiment. The text of that bumper sticker, which I have not been stupid enough to put anywhere on public display, is:
People Don”t Violate Adversarial Law
Adversarial Law Violates People
When I first noticed that the rules of human society were significantly adversarial, during my age of so-called infancy, before I learned to speak aloud using two more English-language words, I had noticed children, somewhat older than I was, being taught, in diverse ways, that they had been told to do something, or had been told to not do something, had not done as they were told, had been disobedient, and deserved to be punished to learn to not be disobedient.
What I noticed, well within a year of being born, was that parents, and people who took upon themselves a parenting role, who taught children that they deserved punishment for having been disobedient, were disobeying truthfulness about how infants actually learn.
Yes, I was sufficiently autistic and, perhaps sufficiently savant, to have really done that. Yes, after nearly 60 years of living in accord with my understanding that actually-avoidable accidents and actually-avoidable mistakes are invariably always actually avoided, and never actually happen, I happened to write and defend a bioengineering doctoral thesis and dissertation at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1997 which demonstrates scientifically and rigorously that it is impossible for anyone to truthfully describe any event which would truthfully allow finding anyone guilty of anything.
Many of my Turley blog comments have been aspects of my field work which has been leading toward my submitting a scientific paper to a peer-reviewed journal, the better to test whether my work is truthful or whether the adversarial system is truthful.
I have constructed my research approach as a pure dichotomy to the adversarial system, such that accurately establishing the falsehood of my work will constitute the scientific validation of the adversarial system and, concurrently, failure to establish the scientifically accurate falsehood of my work will be the scientific falsification of the adversarial system.
Fortunately, if the adversarial system is rigorously and accurately demonstrated to be a falsehood built upon falsehoods built upon human ignorance, the alternative to adversarial law has been thoroughly developed, tested, and validataed over the past many thousands of years through the lives of people who have, even to the death, refused to capitulate to the inextricably deceptive dishonesty that is inescapably intrinsic to any adversarial system of law and law enforcement.
Belief in guilt, to use a perhaps-uncommon, perhaps-accurate, word, is an exercise of apophenia.
Guilt, as a social convention, so it seems to me, is, from a frequentist statistical stance, a form of Type I error, an illusory correlation based on inaccurate observation and incomplete understanding.
However, learning experiences seem to happen, regardless of whether those who encounter learning experiences want, or do not want, to have them.
Jokela’s behavior seems to raise the question which one is rational and which one is high?
Once again cop do their best to earn my opinion of them.
Barney Fife lives in Seattle. But the Chief ain’t no Andy Taylor.
It is time to replace the Chief. It is clear SHE is not fit to return to duty.