OFFICER MARIONS DAY OFF: Thats not a slap on the wrist. Its a hand massage.
  • Robert Ullman
  • OFFICER MARION'S DAY OFF: That's not a slap on the wrist. It's a hand massage.
Last week, the Seattle Police Department ruled that Officer John Marion was guilty of misconduct for repeatedly threatening a reporter with showing up at his newsroom to "bother" him while he was working. The penalty was one unpaid day off work. The reporter was me.

The incident occurred last July 30, when I biked past Fifth and Jackson in the International District, where several officers surrounded a man sitting on a planter box. So I did what I typically do when I see something unusual—I stopped, pulled out my notebook and camera, and started taking photos. After the man left the scene, a county police sergeant threatened to arrest me unless I left the block, even though I was standing on a public sidewalk.

When I asked Seattle police officer Marion who was in charge, he became furious. Marion pointed out that I'd been taking notes and photographs, and he exploded into a threatening tirade about visiting my office to harass me.

That seemed not only unnecessary, unprofessional, and directly in line with the kind of police overreaction criticized by a US Department of Justice report in 2011, but perhaps a real—if minor, compared to instances of police assault—attempt to intimidate a reporter over simply doing his job. Curious to see what would happen, I filed complaints against the county cop and the SPD officer.

On January 9, the SPD ruled that Officer Marion was guilty of "unprofessionalism." (They don't use the word "guilty." Their wording is: "The misconduct alleged did occur.")

"The officer took a normal contact with a member of the public and turned it into a confrontation and escalated it to a point where he was acting in a completely unprofessional and inappropriate manner," explains Pierce Murphy, who runs the SPD's discipline division.

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