News Releases

As we approach the anniversary of WTO and a new series of rallies, the City of Seattle needs to show that it has learned the right lessons from last year's demonstrations.

In September the Seattle City Council passed the first ordinance resulting from police failures during the WTO demonstrations. As recommended in the ACLU's report on WTO, the law requires all Seattle Police Department officers to wear legible identification on the outermost layer of their uniforms and to orally identify themselves when asked by citizens.

Washington voters in 1998 passed Initiative 692 to allow patients with certain terminal or debilitating diseases to possess and use marijuana for medicinal purposes. After months of negotiations with the ACLU, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) in 2000 issued written instructions for enforcing the Washington Medical Marijuana Act.

While concern over police accountability in Seattle has come to the fore in the past year, it is hardly a new issue. In the last dozen years, no less than six City-sponsored reports, and three ACLU-WA reports, have criticized the police internal investigations system for not responding to the needs of the community it serves.

Although the Seattle City Council has adopted reforms to strengthen citizen oversight of police misconduct investigations, a move is already underway to weaken them by eliminating one component – the citizen audit panel.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington today issued a report calling for the creation of an independent office for police accountability.

Throughout the decade and well before, citizens have called for real accountability for the Seattle Police Department (SPD). City reports have been issued, committees have been formed, and recommendations made. But the City has still not seriously addressed the problems caused by a system that allows the police department to investigate itself.

Responding to advocacy by the ACLU-WA and local parents, Burlington-Edison School District has directed a teacher not to teach creationism in his science class. At its September meeting, the school board backed a decision by Superintendent Rick Jones that a science teacher could no longer teach creationism in the guise of "intelligent design theory" in biology lessons.

A federal court in Seattle has held that people have the same right to protest in cyberspace as they do on sidewalks. U.S. District Court Judge William Dwyer ruled that people cannot be barred from putting offensive material on the Internet unless a court has found it defamatory after trial.

The state supreme court in April ruled by a 5-3 vote that the Pierce County Sheriff's Department chaplaincy program does not violate the separation of church and state. The ACLU-WA had filed a lawsuit in 1991 challenging the program for violating constitutional prohibitions on government sponsorship of religious activities.