The Stranger

A Police Chief and His Cameras

Carolyn Bick — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:28:00 -0800

After a failed pilot program in Madison, SPD Chief Shon Barnes is leading a department trusted with yet another controversial camera program: the network of police CCTV cameras on Seattle’s streets, which the public protested in City Hall as recently as this week. The programs have concerning parallels: In Madison, the pilot program failed to collect necessary data and ignored instructions from their City Council; in Seattle, Barnes didn’t even wait for data from the pilot to push an expansion of the program. And like Madison’s bodycam program, Seattle city leaders are counting on the police department to observe “guardrails” and “accountability.” by Carolyn Bick

Classic Seattle weather—cold, wet, and grey—graced Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes’s first day on the job this January. But inside the hallowed chambers of Seattle’s government, City leaders were positively glowing. Finally, they said, following a closed-door police chief selection process, the city had a model of accountability and progressive policing it needed to see the City into a new, Consent Decree-free era.

He had the resume. Barnes had briefly served as the director of training and professional development with the Civilian Office of Police Accountability in Chicago. He’d led the police department in Madison, Wisconsin, which had recently implemented a body-worn camera pilot program. He talked openly about leading the Salisbury Police Department into greater accountability. He was a former school teacher. In short, he was the police chief who would prioritize transparency and reform.

And Barnes leaned into that reputation. In an opinion piece in the Seattle Times after his first 100 days, he wrote: “My earliest efforts led with transparency and accountability to the public and to our officers—creating an open-door policy with SPD employees, removing access restrictions to our executive floor and encouraging people to reach out directly to ask any and all questions. I believe every voice should be heard and can be instrumental in helping us move forward. The hard truth is that SPD has weathered a difficult five years, marked by leadership changes, staffing losses and shifting public trust. But we are charting a new course.”

But a report released in Madison in October brings that reputation into question. Months after Barnes left the Dairy State, Madison’s Office of the Independent Monitor (OIM) dropped a report on their old chief’s police body-worn camera pilot program, Barnes’s pet project.

The civilian oversight agency report lampooned the former MPD chief. It was a litany of Barnes’s failings. Four chapters of the report began with the word “failure.” Barnes had ignored City Council’s “multiple directives” for essential, specific guardrails, which likely violated state law, the office wrote.

The OIM specifically made sure to note that the failure was Barnes’s, not the department’s current leadership.

Then, in the weeks between the November election and Mayor Katie Wilson taking office, speculation swirled about whether or not Barnes would remain in charge of SPD. Wilson was reportedly on the fence about the decision for weeks, and, according to one Stranger source familiar with the situation, Barnes himself allegedly told fellow officers he was certain he would be out of a job come 2026.

But in December, newly-elected Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she plans to keep Barnes on as police chief.

“My administration will work with Chief Barnes to make SPD a place where professionalism, integrity, compassion, and community partnership are at the center of every action,” she said. It was reportedly an effort to maintain stability and continuity. To set expectations for the Chief, and give him a chance to meet them.

That leaves Barnes leading a department trusted with yet another controversial camera program: the network of police CCTV cameras on Seattle’s streets, which the public protested in City Hall as recently as this week. The programs have concerning parallels: In Madison, the pilot program failed to collect necessary data and ignored instructions from their City Council; in Seattle, Barnes didn’t even wait for data from the pilot to push an expansion of the program. And like Madison’s bodycam program, Seattle city leaders are counting on the police department to observe “guardrails” and “accountability.”

Neither Barnes nor SPD returned The Stranger’s multiple requests for comment.

Bodyworn cameras

Barnes stepped into the role of Madison’s police chief in January 2021, almost a year after a police officer murdered George Floyd in Minnesota. Black Lives Matter protests against racist policing had dominated American life that June. “Defund” and “abolition” had entered the common vernacular. Police accountability was in the air, and a popular response was to strap body cameras to the chest of every officer in their department.

Barnes had every reason to think the department deserved scrutiny: at the time, almost half the time the Madison Police Department (MPD) used force, it was against Black residents. And while Barnes didn’t start the conversation about bodycams in the MPD, (the department’s SWAT team had used them for years, and the debate about outfitting the entire MPD had been underway since 2014), he was a vocal proponent of them from day one.

Not everyone in the community agreed with him. The Black- and Southeast Asian-led nonprofit Freedom, Inc. led the charge in Madison. They had been longtime vocal opponents of body cameras, arguing that they’re a double-edged sword: Technically, they were a tool to record potential police misbehavior, but those same body cameras could be used against civilians—specifically to surveil and criminalize Black and brown people. Plus, nationwide, even when videos clearly show officers attacking Black people, those videos don’t guarantee justice.

Freedom Inc. is backed up not only by several Madison City alders, but also by a chorus of alarm bells from journalists, civil rights groups, and think tanks: A 2017 study found that bodyworn cameras do not deter officers from treating Black people with disrespect at traffic stops; the Brookings Institute wrote in 2022 that, with the rise of facial recognition technology combined with the federal government’s historical surveillance of Black communities, bodyworn cameras could be used to increasingly track, profile and surveil not only Black communities, but Chinese communities, too, under Trump 1.0’s China Initiative through the Department of Justice; and the NAACP and the ACLU both share these concerns.

So it should be no surprise then that Madison’s own Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee—which was tasked with analyzing a body-worn camera program prior to implementation, and drafting a policy for the MPD to follow in a pilot program—highlighted concerning data that Barnes should have taken into account, in his creation of the MPD’s body camera pilot program.

Their final report said that the issue deserved further evaluation, particularly given the researched and documented potentials for police abuse of body cameras. Specifically, the committee noted that the available scientific literature regarding body-worn video cameras shows that they allow for heavier surveillance and intrudes on privacy, and that the available data suggests body-worn cameras “expand criminalization of marginalized populations.”

While the report concluded that the MPD could adopt a body-worn camera program, its first stipulation was that the department should do so only if the MPD “formally adopted the BWC policies recommended by the Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee with, at most, minor modifications” to the proposed policy.

That policy included a rule that officers would not be allowed to review the bodycam footage before completing their reports, unless it was required, in the field, to address “an immediate threat to life or safety.”

But that didn’t happen.

The Pilot Program

According to the OIM’s October report, Barnes’s department disregarded a number of council’s demands. It failed to create a real, randomized sample to test the program, ignored council’s directive to track officer time spent on the pilot, and failed to measure key metrics in the program.

Perhaps most crucially, the pilot broke that committee’s rule about reviewing footage. Barnes allowed officers to review their tapes before writing any police report, even if they’d shot someone or broken the department’s code of conduct. But the department also had the power to limit their access on a case-by-case basis.

The report focused on this loophole.

Once exposed to video footage of an incident, the report said, officers’ memories may be altered or influenced. Officers who are allowed to review footage ahead of giving a report may also consciously choose to lie about incidents, based on what action or angles the body-worn cameras caught. This can lead to an increase in everything from inaccurate court testimony to justifications for officers shooting and killing a person. The office backed up these statements with a hefty number of in-report citations from multiple credible sources, including accountability experts and the ACLU.

“The Single Most Important Metric”

On top of the procedural flaws, the report called Barnes out for failing to collect key data that would inform the risks of continuing the program.

The office also links the use of body-worn cameras to higher rates of prosecutions, where prosecutors know body-worn video exists. Even in cases where the person was innocent, prosecutors are more likely to drag a person through trial and force them through ultimately unnecessary and potentially expensive legal hurdles.

The committee called this “the single most important metric specified in the Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee report.” And, once again—as with many other gaps in Barnes’s policy—the office noted that the pilot program failed to measure and test it.

“Most BWC studies (albeit not all) that have tracked criminal charges have shown an increase in prosecutorial charging rates, particularly for lower-level offenses,” the report reads. The report found an approximate 150 percent increase in the likelihood of misdemeanor charges being filed by prosecutors in cases with BWC video.

The report states that prominent accountability investigator, OIR Group’s Los Angeles-based Michael Gennaco, “noted that prosecutors would tend to automatically bring misdemeanor charges in cases where they knew BWC video was available,” including cases where the charged individual was innocent.

“The charged individual would often then plead out to get out of jail and get on with their life,” the report reads. “In Madison, such an effect could most heavily impact communities of color, given the neighborhoods that are most heavily patrolled (and that would receive the most exposure to BWCs).”

The office noted that it was odd for the pilot program not to have included this metric in its measured outcomes, particularly because the officers themselves make initial charging decisions, recommending cases to prosecute.

Parting shots

The OIM report wouldn’t come out until months after Barnes left the MPD. But before he left, he was already showing his distaste for the department’s accountability structures.

It starts with Greg Gelembiuk, an evolutionary biologist, who would eventually go on to become the OIM’s data analyst. Gelembiuk declined to be interviewed for this story, but at a public meeting, he chimed in during the public comment section, pointing out that, contrary to what Turner and Barnes were saying, a body camera program is actually quite expensive. Amelia Royko Maurer, a police accountability activist who was at that meeting, told The Stranger what Gelembiuk said and how Barnes and Turner responded.

The numbers provided accounted neither for officer training time, nor the cost of time associated with officers fulfilling body camera-associated administrative tasks, Gelembiuk said in the meeting. Someone has to then spend time reviewing and logging the camera footage, and redacting footage for public disclosure. He estimated the program could cost $23 million over the course of five years.

“Chief Barnes turns to Dr. Broderick Turner and says, ‘Have you ever heard of body cams costing $23 million?’” Royko Maurer recalled. “And Turner says, ‘No.’ And they both chuckle.” (This was another metric that MPD failed to track, despite the Madison City council’s directive to do so.)

When Barnes announced that he was leaving the Madison Police Department to lead SPD, he gave exit interviews to a number of outlets throughout the city. And in several, he took direct aim at the OIM and Gelembiuk, in particular.

Madison’s OIM exists under the oversight of the city’s Police Civilian Oversight Board (PCOB). The OIM is empowered to investigate the MPD, and is meant to analyze and identify problems within the department and recommend policy changes.

All of this is impossible to do without data and information—Gelembuik’s job.

But Barnes seemed to disagree, and he had a bone to pick about it.

“I think the office of the independent monitor and the independent monitor were on a great path,” he said in an interview with the Madison365 podcast. “I think they were showing some promise, and then they decided to hire a data analyst, and they switched their focus from actually taking complaints and investigating or creating an investigative process to asking for data from the police department so (they) can find a problem…They are a hammer looking for a nail, and probably pose one of the greatest threats to the trust and legitimacy that we have built up between the police department and the community.”

That data analyst was Greg Gelembiuk, who challenged Barnes’s cost analysis in that public meeting years earlier.

“That is a complete misunderstanding of our role. That is 100 percent misunderstanding of our role,” Gelembiuk told Madison365. “We are not just the complaint department. That was never the idea. Our most important role is … to do analysis and to identify problems in the department, and then recommend policy changes or ways in which those problems can be rectified.”

Madisonians tell The Stranger that these were just the last jabs in an ongoing conflict between Barnes and the OIM. Royko Maurer says that before these interviews, she called Barnes in late October, because she had learned that Barnes had allegedly started an internal campaign against the data analyst position, following OIM’s decision to hire Gelembiuk.

“I called Barnes to tell him, ‘Independent oversight will help you,’” Ryoko Maurer said. “‘It is a friend to the chief. It puts pressure on your officers to do the right thing. It puts pressure on them to ask for help when needed, before something bad might happen—before they find themselves in a situation of officer-created jeopardy.’”

“And he says, ‘I’m going to call you back. I’m going to call you back tomorrow, I promise, because I want to discuss this with you,’” Royko Maurer said.

Barnes did not call her back, she says.

Instead, Royko Maurer learned that Barnes increased pressure against the data analyst following her phone call to him.

Royko Maurer said that Barnes approached people in city government, and “was telling individuals within city admin and [government] that the OIM didn’t need a data analyst, that it was redundant and that the OIM and PCOB were doing great until the data analyst showed up,” Royko told The Stranger in a later email. “It was an obvious effort to divide and conquer within the OIM and PCOB and to stir up bad feelings among those in city admin, [government], the PCOB and OIM and direct them specifically towards a data analyst he [Barnes] could not control.”

“The chief is the most powerful person in the city,” Royko Maurer says, “and people are easily swayed when someone with such rank pays them special attention.”

One Madison official Barnes had approached confirmed this to The Stranger. That official asked to remain anonymous. According to this official, Barnes insinuated that MPD could handle that accountability work themselves.

Surveilled in Seattle

Barnes’s push for cameras has since surpassed Madison’s borders. He’s been a vocal proponent for increasing surveillance cameras in Seattle, in the Seattle City Council’s recent passage of legislation expanding its use of CCTVs around the city. Notably, the city will place more cameras in the Chinatown International District and the Central District, both areas with larger communities of color.

The expansion was met with huge community pushback, not the least of which was based on the fact that the city council voted to expand the program in its infancy, less than four months after the program’s pilot began last May—before the pilot was complete, and before any data could be collected about its effectiveness.

Both the Seattle Office for Civil Rights and the Community Police Commission strongly opposed the City’s decision to expand its surveillance program. Both agencies noted that data regarding surveillance cameras do not support claims that they reduce crime. Their concerns hearken back to experts’ concerns regarding body-worn video.

But since Barnes first started dabbling in community-opposed camera programs in Madison, the stakes have gotten higher. For one, the current president and his supporters are doing everything in their power to establish an autocracy, and immigration enforcement has repeatedly accessed surveillance camera programs to track immigrants throughout the US.

While the council committed to certain measures that allegedly make the program safer, the wording of those accountability measures are lukewarm, at best. For instance, the council unanimously passed an amendment that would institute a 60-day “pause” of the program, if the City is subpoenaed by the federal government—meaning that one subpoena would have to be fulfilled before they could shut it down. It also does not address any circumstances under which the city would release data without a subpoena.

As recently as this week, protesters have flooded City Hall to protest the surveillance program. The cameras in the expansion program haven’t been installed yet, but the original CCTV cameras are still in place. Right now, the City is depending on Barnes—who disregarded many of the Madison council’s parameters for the bodycam program—to now observe the City Council’s simple guardrails to keep Seattleites safe from the federal government, let alone overpolicing.

Zahid Chaudhry Could Be Home by Thanksgiving

Carolyn Bick — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 14:48:00 -0800

The Army veteran and husband of a former Congressional candidate has been detained by ICE since August. If he's detained much longer, he could lose his eyesight.

by Carolyn Bick

As time creeps by in the Northwest Detention Center, pressure builds in the muscles behind Muhammad Zahid Chaudhry’s eyes. The swelling tissue puts pressure on his optic nerve. For Zahid, as he’s called, the world blurs into a series of muted tones. Subtitles he could once read look like characters in a language he doesn’t understand. His eyesight is fading. And if he stays untreated in the stressful, dirty conditions of the detention center for much longer, it might never return.

The decorated, disabled veteran and legal permanent resident suffers from thyroid eye disease, a degenerative condition that can result in blindness if not treated. He’s originally from Pakistan, and has lived in the US for more than 25 years. He’s married to Melissa Chaudhry, a US citizen who ran for Congress against Adam Smith last year. The pair has two young children together.

Zahid has lived with the threat of deportation for years, stemming from the government’s claims that he was dishonest about a long-ago fraud conviction on his visa application. He applied to stay in the country based on his service in the military.

On August 21, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained him based on an old final removal order from 2008. He was taken directly from what was allegedly his citizenship interview. Based on court documentation and emails between Rep. Adam Smith’s office, USCIS, and ICE that Zahid’s family obtained after he was taken, the alleged interview appears to have been a vehicle to arrest him.

According to these pieces of documentation, even before Zahid’s citizenship interview, ICE had decided to act on the old order of removal, while USCIS had decided to deny his citizenship application.

While Western District Court of Washington appears to have recognized the medical emergency and has paved the way for his release—possibly as early as this week before Thanksgiving—it still may be too late to save his eyesight.

But neither Zahid nor his wife know for sure. After all, since his detention on August 21, no qualified doctors have been sent in to see him to assess the state of his sight. It was only after the court ordered ICE to come up with a briefing schedule so that the court could consider Zahid’s emergency release petition—called a habeas corpus petition—on medical grounds, Melissa says, that “all of a sudden, people started approaching him at [the NWDC] to coordinate his treatment.”

Melissa, their shared family, and their supporters have been working to get Zahid out of detention since the day agents took him. Melissa told The Stranger that on November 20, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals transferred an emergency motion for release pending decision to the Western District Court of Washington. The court immediately accepted the motion and, the following day, turned around an order that both forces ICE to hastily move on Zahid’s case—think hours, not weeks—and allows Zahid to respond to what ICE files.

Melissa says that ICE sent the filing on Sunday, November 23, and Zahid expects to receive it by physical mail. However, because Zahid is representing himself pro se, no one else can see his legal paperwork. Melissa told The Stranger that, to avoid further delays, Zahid requested that the family file his response, based on what he believed ICE would say.

She shared the majority of that response with The Stranger, excluding personal information, such as the couple’s children’s birth certificates. The response includes Zahid’s declaration stating that staff at NWDC only started coordinating his medical care the day the federal court issued its order. University of Washington (UW) neuroscientist and researcher Micaela Romero also wrote a five-page declaration about how the conditions in the facility and the lack of care worsen Zahid’s degenerative eye disease and traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Earlier in Zahid’s detention, Romero advocated to get Zahid removed from nearly a full week in solitary confinement, where detention staff subjected him to 24-hour bright lights. Because he uses a wheelchair, he could not stand up to cover up the lights with anything, and could not easily move to cover his face or head.

Zahid suffered significant harm from these conditions, Romero’s declaration states. Such lighting conditions are a known form of torture that cause severe psychological distress.

In addition to lack of proper treatment, Zahid is also subject to the conditions of the NWDC, Romero noted in her declaration on Zahid’s behalf. As La Resistencia has extensively detailed through direct testimonies of those inside, these conditions include extremely dirty spaces, inadequate and spoiled food, and medical neglect.

Stress has consequences on the body, Melissa says, and those consequences are showing up in Zahid’s.

“There are neuroinflammatory cascades that happen that make immune function decrease, that increase cardiac stress and risk of heart attack — that just make all kinds of inflammation worse, including the … muscles behind his eyes,” Melissa says. “All of the stress is increasing that pressure on his optic nerve. And that's the real issue, if his optic nerves will be damaged. Other forms of blindness you can kind of fix. You can swap out lenses in the case of cataracts, other things like that. Optic nerve damage you cannot fix.”

It’s not hard to imagine how his eyesight could deteriorate so rapidly in such a place.

The deleterious conditions have also worsened his other health issues, including a service-connected traumatic brain injury (TBI). This increases the overall stress on his body: The worse one condition gets, the worse they all get, as his body fights to work.

Since his imprisonment, Melissa says that Zahid has also been denied his usual medications.

“He doesn't have his standard medications for pain or for his thyroid issues or for his migraines or for anything else. I don't know what they're giving him,” she says. “He says it's mediocrely sufficient for him to not be excruciating all the time. Just some of the time.”

But at all times, Zahid is in pain on some level, she confirmed—“It's the point.”

“This is someone who has always come here legally, has never broken any US laws. He’s been here for 25 years doing nothing but contributing to his community and raising a family. Please wake up,” Melissa says, when asked if there was anything she wanted to say to readers. “If you haven't already, please look at this and wake up. This was never about following the rules. He was taken at a citizenship interview.”

Melissa filed Zahid’s response on November 24. As far as she knows, she told The Stranger, the court has not yet ruled on anything. She’s already emailed his doctor to coordinate an appointment for eye treatment this week, and plans to set a place for him at the Thanksgiving table. She lives in hope.

What Jamie Tompkins Says Really Happened at SPD

Carolyn Bick — Fri, 02 May 2025 10:25:00 -0700

Jamie Tompkins, the former Seattle Police Department Chief of Staff, is challenging the narrative of her dismissal—and the dismissal of former SPD Chief Adrian Diaz. by Carolyn Bick

Jamie Tompkins, the former Seattle Police Department Chief of Staff, is challenging the narrative of her dismissal—and the dismissal of former SPD Chief Adrian Diaz.

In a letter hand-delivered to City Hall, addressed to both Harrell and Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson on November 27, 2024, Tompkins alleges that SPD officers ranking as high as assistant chiefs participated in widespread, targeted sexual harassment, including stalking, and that SPD leadership dismissed her attempts to bring it to light. Part of this harassment was linked to and involved spreading the rumors that she and Diaz slept together. The letter, obtained by The Stranger from the City Attorney’s office, is part of Tompkins’ settlement demand against the City of Seattle for $3 million, for the sexual harassment she allegedly endured during her time as SPD’s Chief of Staff.

Readers might be familiar with the saga that unfolded last year, wherein KUOW largely led the reporting that Tompkins and Diaz had allegedly been carrying out an illicit affair for years, and that this alleged affair was why Diaz had hired Tompkins to become his Chief of Staff. Diaz was ultimately fired over the allegations, following an Office of Inspector General (OIG)-directed independent investigation that upheld the allegations. Tompkins abruptly resigned in November.

Tompkins’ demand letter lays out serious allegations against several top officials, many of which she says she directly experienced—things like Assistant Chief Eric Barden, lately reinstated by former interim Chief Sue Rahr, telling her that she would not experience sexual harassment, if she looked different.

The letter also includes allegations regarding conversations that Tompkins was not part of. When asked about those, she told The Stranger that she learned about them from others, who would tell her about such conversations daily.

The Stranger obtained additional documentation, including interviews with officers named in the letter and Tompkins’ unemployment benefits decision, that appear to support some of the allegations made in the letter.

The Stranger reached out to SPD, Harrell, Nelson, and the Seattle City Attorney’s Office (SCAO) about the letter, as well as several officers named in the letter.

SPD’s communications officer Sgt. Patrick Michaud declined to comment. Named officer Eric Greening’s email sent back an automatic message: “I am currently out on extended leave and I will not be checking email.”

The SCAO said that it “can’t comment on matters like this.”

Nelson did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to The Stranger’s request for comment, Harrell’s office said, “The City takes allegations of this nature seriously, and we are committed to creating a Police Department that reflects our Seattle community and where women have the opportunity to succeed in leadership and in the department.”

Harrell also addressed the matter at a morning press conference on Monday, April 28. During the press conference, meant to highlight the City’s increase in officer hiring, conservative social media personality and Discovery Institute Fellow Jonathan Choe recorded himself asking the mayor about the demand letter.

“I can’t comment on either litigation or threatened litigation,” Harrell said, “but as you heard, we take all allegations seriously — very seriously.”

When asked by Fox13 reporter Hana Kim about the fact that the Washington State employment department found that Tompkins should receive full unemployment benefits originally denied her, and that Harrell had known about the letter. The mayor told Kim that she "should not make assumptions.”

Harrell then turned away from the podium, towards the City staff and SPD officers standing behind him, as he said with a raised voice, “We’re moving forward!”

“You guys are with me, right?” Harrell said to the City staff standing behind him.

“Yessir,” one officer mumbled.

“We are moving forward," Harrell repeated, “taking our city back into a situation where we are protecting people. That’s why we are here today.”

“So,” he continued, “the lawsuits will take care of themselves.”

Just before Tompkins’ start date at SPD, the letter says that Tompkins received a call from a fellow reporter. The letter says that a reporter told her that an assistant chief at SPD had told the reporter that Tompkins and Diaz were involved, and that former assistant chiefs Deanna Nollette and Eric Greening, as well as current police captain, Steve Strand, had been involved in spreading rumors about the alleged sexual relationship. (Later, in August 2024, Tompkins would, according to the letter, independently learn from Sgt. Michael Dunkle that he had determined that Nollette and Greening were among those behind the rumors.)

The reporter also told Tompkins that SPD officers were surveilling her. This means officers had started surveilling Tompkins before she had officially joined the department.

“One SPD officer, Tay [Gray-Mcvey], told his colleagues he would watch Tompkins’ news broadcast every night to see whether she was wearing a wedding ring,” the letter continues. “[Gray-Mcvey] also admitted to regularly checking Tompkins’s bio on the Fox 13 website.”

The Stranger has obtained documentation of official interviews showing that Gray-Mcvey was one of the few officers whom independent investigator Shayda Le, of Barran Leibman, LLP, interviewed in the course of investigating Diaz for the alleged affair between himself and Tompkins. Le was investigating the case on behalf of the City’s Office of Inspector General.

The letter also says that, later a fellow former Fox 13 colleague, Dace Durand, admitted to Tompkins that he, Officer Valerie Carson, and Officer Gray-Mcvey, had spread rumors about Tompkins’ alleged relationship with Diaz among several groups of people, including reporters and police officers.

Later, the letter says, Durand admitted to SPD’s employee relations and equal employment opportunity manager that in the spring of that year — just before Tompkins’ start date — Gray-Mcvey had told him that officers had seen Tompkins and Diaz at Tompkins’ apartment together, and that he and Gray-Mcvey had discussed Tompkins’ marital status. Durand’s meeting was part of an internal investigation, regarding the rumors of a relationship between Tompkins and Diaz.

“Dace conceded that he had no factual basis for believing that there was a sexual relationship between Diaz and Tompkins,” the letter reads.

The Stranger has obtained full copies of Durand’s interviews.

In his first interview on the matter, Durand affirmed that he believed the rumors regarding a relationship between Tompkins and Diaz were “absolutely … not true.”

In response to the interviewer’s question regarding whether he ever came to believe that there was a relationship between Tompkins and Diaz, Durand said in his second interview, “No, I just got caught up in the rumor mill and to this day I still do not believe, and will say this unequivocally, that there was an affair or any type of inappropriate relationship between [Tompkins] and Chief Diaz.”

Durand also cited both Gray-Mcvey and Carson as having been heavily involved in the circulating rumors, and mentioned both officers several times in each interview.

Following his termination, Durand told KUOW in September 2023 that he was made to be “the fall guy” and that the investigation was targeted and rushed.

Also just before Tompkins began her tenure with SPD, the letter says that Diaz held a meeting, wherein he told SPD command staff that allegations of an affair between himself and Jamie were false, and directed them not to allow other members of SPD to sexually harass her.

Diaz also contacted Seattle Ethics and Elections head, Wayne Barnett, to see whether the rumor should be investigated, the letter says. Barnett declined to investigate it. In response to The Stranger's request for comment, Barnett said he was "not aware" of Tompkins' letter and had no further comment.

All the rumors flying around about her and Diaz, as well as the knowledge that officers were tailing her, prompted Tompkins to seriously weigh withdrawing her acceptance of the position.

But she didn’t.

And the harassment got worse, Tompkins’ letter alleges.

The same week that Tompkins told Maxey and SPD’s general counsel, the letter says that Tompkins told Rebecca Boatright, and, separately, human resources, the same thing, “[former] Assistant Chief Eric Barden told Tompkins if she looked like [fellow SPD colleague] Heather Marx, she wouldn’t be treated this way.”

Barden isn’t the only one to have allegedly said something like this.

“Officer [Gray-Mcvey] told Tompkins that he could find her anywhere because he could track her scent,” the letter reads. “He also told her that he watched her on surveillance cameras. He questioned her about her tattoos and where they were located on her body. [Gray-Mcvey] would take photos of Tompkins without her knowledge and show them to other SPD employees.”

According to the letter, Gray-Mcvey also allegedly later told another SPD employee that he’d bet he could get Tompkins to sleep with him, if he got her drunk enough.

The letter also said that Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) president, Mike Solan, allegedly told Diaz in July 2023 that Tompkins was hot and that “everyone” would sleep with her, so Solan wouldn’t blame Diaz if he had.

According to the letter, at some point that same summer, Tompkins walked into the lunchroom to get an energy drink. The letter says that two officers sitting in the lunchroom spotted her.

“Do you think,” one officer said, “the Chief fucked her?”

“I don’t know,” the other replied, “but I sure would fuck her. She’s hot.”

Tompkins immediately left the lunchroom. She never went in again without someone she trusted, the letter says.

Tompkins' letter also alleges crude comments from Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell.

“In June 2023,” the letter reads, “you met with Diaz about his alleged affair with Tompkins. You told him that you weren’t worried about the rumor and that it was ‘completely alright’ if he had slept with her.”

“Diaz told you he had not slept with Tompkins and that it wouldn’t have been “alright” if he had,” the letter continues. “You responded that you would ‘do’ Tompkins, and it’s fine.”

When contacted by The Stranger, Harrell's office vehemently denied the alleged conversation between Harrell and Diaz in the letter. “Those remarks are crass and repugnant, the mayor didn’t say them, and he doesn’t talk that way,” Jamie Housen, the mayor’s spokesperson, said in an email to The Stranger. “This conversation – alleged by Adrian Diaz – did not happen. Beyond this, we cannot comment on pending or active litigation.”

The Office of Police Accountability (OPA) even fielded an anonymous complaint that Carson had helped to spread the rumor about Tompkins and Diaz sleeping together, and that Carson had unlawfully surveilled Tompkins’ apartment.

But while the report found that Carson had “admittedly spoken about the rumored affair,” there was not enough evidence to prove that she had initiated or propagated it.

“‘By all accounts the rumor was widespread and covered by traditional and social media,’” the OPA declared.

The OPA concluded that it could not “discipline Carson because it would be ‘selective enforcement,’” — an apparent admission, the letter says, that the OPA knew how widespread the rumor was — “even though Carson admitted to commonly discussing the false sexual rumor both with SPD employees and members of the media.”

The letter includes the OPA’s opinion, as one of three exhibits.

The following year — after Boatright allegedly told Tompkins that she had “a massive sexual harassment case” against the department, given all she had gone through — Tompkins filed a formal complaint of sexual harassment against Carson. According to the letter, Tompkins also later told interim Chief Sue Rahr about the ongoing sexual harassment she was experiencing.

In the letter, she says, Rahr dismissed her concerns. “Grow a thicker skin,” Rahr allegedly told Tompkins. It happens all the time in law enforcement, Rahr allegedly said, before advising Tompkins to “invest in Visine” to hide the red in her eyes from crying, and to just tell people to “fuck off.”

When Tompkins allegedly told Maxey and SPD Human Resources Dir. Mike Fields what Rahr had said, the letter says that Maxey told her not to file a formal complaint — not that it would matter, anyway: Maxey also allegedly told Tompkins that Fields had sent the issue to the department’s HR Investigations Unit, where “investigations go to die.”

A few months before Tompkins resigned, in September 2024, Maxey told her that she would be reporting to him. The letter says that Tompkins expressed concern that the rest of SPD would start claiming that the two of them were in a relationship.

“Well,” Maxey allegedly said with a laugh, “Chief Diaz already groomed you so this should be easy for me.”

Over the course of her tenure at SPD, the letter says, Tompkins eventually had to take two weeks off work, due to the stress the rumors were causing. The summer before she left, in July 2024, Tompkins even met with SPD’s executive director of wellness, Dr. Emily Hu, to discuss the sexual harassment she was facing, the letter says.

On Nov. 6, 2024, Tompkins resigned.

The letter concludes with several legal citations, including the fact that, according to the Washington State Supreme Court, a single discriminatory comment was grounds for establishing a hostile work environment claim.

“Here, the hostile work environment was ‘pervasive’ by SPD’s own admission,” the letter reads. “It occurred countless times. The harassment continued for more than a year and half. Moreover, it was much harder for Tompkins to do her job when a significant proportion of the SPD workforce believed she had received her position because of her physical appearance and sexual favoritism rather than on her qualifications and experience.”

“SPD was on notice about the harassment even before Tompkins’s official start date,” the letter continues, which means that SPD was legally obligated, per a 1995 9th Circuit Court ruling, to do something about it.

Washington law states that an employee who has resigned does not have to prove that leaving was due to a hostile work environment with unbearable working conditions. Therefore, all Tompkins has to do, the letter says, is to show that the alleged sexual harassment played a substantial role in her decision to leave.

Though she has left the department, Tompkins “still feels violated, degraded, and dehumanized,” and the trauma she experienced at SPD “has caused her to withdraw from social interactions.”

“Tompkins,” the letter reads, “is not the same person she was when she began employment with the City 18 months ago.”

Tompkins settlement talks with the City of Seattle are slated for June 25. She received a letter from the state’s Employment Security Department in December granting her full benefits.

“We decided you had good reason for quitting your job,” the state’s decision letter reads.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this story said that the demand letter was hand delivered to Mayor Harrell. It was hand delivered to City Hall, addressed to the Mayor.