To Protect and Serve by Norm Stamper

Author:Norm Stamper
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568585413
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2016-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

CONSIDER A SEATTLE COP who came face to face with just such a specimen on July 9, 2014. The officer may well have set a record for a cop repeating herself. Captured in living color on her patrol car’s video and audio cam, she stops an African American man on a street corner in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Minding his own business, the elderly veteran leans against a golf club, a putter, as he waits for the light to change. The officer gets out of her car, tells him to “drop the golf club!” To which William Wingate replies, in explanatory but firm fashion, “No. This is my golf club . . . I’ve had it for twenty years.”4 The response of a Real American, I can hear Thompson say. I can only imagine his reaction had he known what was about to happen next.

As the video rolls, Officer Cynthia Whitlatch yells at Wingate, repeatedly ordering him to drop the club. “I’m going to ask you for the, I don’t know, thirteenth time” to put the club down. She even tells him, twice, that their interaction is being “audio- and video-recorded.” By actual count, she tells Wingate twenty-two times to drop the golf club.

Oh my.

In my imagination, with each new order, Whitlatch shrinks a couple of inches. By the time she’s bellowed the order almost two dozen times, to zero effect, she’s the size of a munchkin. Speaking munchkinese, no less. While the object of her ire stands tall, a study in dignity and genuine puzzlement, his trusty putter at his side, asking her to “call someone.”

Finally, she approaches Wingate, seizes the “evidence,” handcuffs him behind his back, and escorts him to a prisoner van, which he has difficulty boarding, for transportation to jail. But with no “audio- and video-recorded” evidence to support her claim that the man took a swing at her, or otherwise threatened her, he’s released. The charges are quickly dismissed, and his makeshift cane, used on his daily ten-mile walks, is returned to him.

William Wingate, seventy, is suing the city in federal court, seeking at least $750,000 in damages. Apart from the obvious complaint, against the officer and the City of Seattle, it is further alleged that Whitlatch personally lobbied the City Attorney’s Office to have Wingate charged with obstructing a police officer. She claimed he was “one of the most obstinate, uncooperative and obstructive suspects” she had encountered during her seventeen years in patrol.5

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