By Mark Larson, Kathy Van Olst and Jim Pugel

On Jan. 23, former Auburn Police Officer Jeffrey Nelson was sentenced to almost 17 years in prison for the 2019 assault and murder of Jesse Sarey. Nelson ignored his training and began a needless physical encounter that ended with his shooting Sarey, first in the gut and then a second time in the head as Sarey sat on the ground, mortally wounded.

To many readers, this case may by now feel like old news. But what is new is that in sentencing Nelson, King County Superior Court Judge Nicole Gaines Phelps sharply called out the culture of Nelson’s employer, the Auburn Police Department, which for years allowed Nelson’s violence to go unchecked.

Pretrial evidence in Nelson’s case, taken from Auburn’s own police records, documented Nelson’s history of excessive force as an officer. The jury did not hear this evidence for legal reasons. But Judge Phelps was well aware of it, and in sentencing Nelson she was free to consider what she knew to be his predilection for violence when his authority was questioned and his willingness to cover up his unlawful actions by filing false police reports.

As a part of this pretrial evidence, a police expert reviewed and wrote a report detailing Nelson’s history of using force in the years leading up to Sarey’s murder. The expert — one of our authors, Jim Pugel — highlighted 17 episodes in which Nelson had clearly used excessive force by deploying his police dog, using his Taser and rendering people unconscious with a neck restraint, in addition to fatally shooting two people before he murdered Sarey. The report showed an unmistakable pattern that should have been obvious to Nelson’s superiors.

One of the excessive force events Pugel identified involved a young man who testified during a pretrial hearing about his encounter with Nelson. Judge Phelps repeatedly highlighted this incident in sentencing Nelson. On a summer day in 2014, the young man and Nelson traded insults on an Auburn street. The man had committed no crime, but Nelson nonetheless said to his patrol partner, Cristian Adams, “You want to (expletive) him up? I want to (expletive) him up.” Nelson did not know he was being recorded. Moments later, Nelson shocked the young man with a Taser and choked him unconscious as Adams assisted. Perhaps most telling, Nelson was then recorded boasting to fellow officers, “I’ll take the biggest and the baddest and make an example of them.”

Astonishingly, Nelson’s supervisor approved this use of force, merely cautioning Nelson to watch his language. Even more remarkably, Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus promoted that supervisor, Mark Caillier, to serve as the Auburn police chief while Nelson’s homicide trial was still pending.

Nelson’s use of force history also includes Auburn police video showing him celebrating and high-fiving other officers after his police dog bit a teenager who had already been taken into custody, and was left howling in pain. Another video captured Nelson steering his patrol car to collide with a moving motorcyclist because the rider had “flipped off” Nelson. Another report documented Nelson unleashing his dog on a person who fled after merely jaywalking.

Complaints from within the department appear to have surfaced before Sarey was killed. Several employees complained about a “good old boy network” at the department and a failure of leadership to administer discipline. Discontent within the ranks ultimately led to the commissioning of the McGrath Report that substantiated many of these issues. Yet no action was taken to address the issues. The department even featured Nelson’s photograph prominently on its recruiting posters after Sarey’s killing.

People who study police science and policy often repeat the axiom that “culture eats policy for lunch” — even the best policies cannot fix a culture that overlooks, and even rewards, excessive force.

So many signs pointed to a broken culture in the Auburn Police Department and yet it does not appear that any meaningful corrective action was taken. After Nelson was charged, the Police Department refused to review the Sarey shooting, even though it was within its purview as his employer.

Instead, Auburn taxpayers kept paying Nelson’s full salary and benefits for years while he was on house arrest awaiting trial. Other police departments have taken disciplinary action against officers when they are under a criminal charge. But no one at Auburn was willing to do so. It likely would have exposed some difficult truths.

During closing arguments in Nelson’s trial, and even later as the verdicts were being read, Chief Caillier — the highest-ranking police official in the city — and other officers prominently arrayed themselves behind Nelson, wearing their police uniforms and badges in a show of solidarity. Faced with guilty verdicts, the department and the city issued a statement claiming to “respect the verdict.”

However, rather than “respecting the verdict” of 12 jurors who reviewed the crime video and heard the evidence at trial, multiple Auburn police officers, including current Auburn police Assistant Chief Sam Betz and Patrol Commander Adams, complained to the court at Nelson’s sentencing that the prosecution had portrayed Nelson unfairly. All attested to his good character and endorsed him as an example of good policing. Notably, not a single one of them expressed the slightest remorse or regret over Sarey’s death. They hardly mentioned that someone lost their life. To them, it was about Nelson being “bullied” by the prosecution.

Although the city pledged a review of the Sarey homicide after the verdicts, it is not clear that review has begun. But even if the department does investigate, that work will presumably be done by the same people who vouched for Nelson at sentencing.

Auburn needs to look not only at Nelson’s use of force against Sarey, but also at a departmental culture that tolerated and, at times celebrated, the police practices of an officer who has now been convicted of murdering an Auburn citizen. The Auburn Police Department needs to take a hard look at its policies and practices in the wake of this murder. But having good policies in place will not be enough if the culture of the department, and the support its leaders receive from the city, remains unchanged. The city needs to reclaim the “core values” the department proclaims on its website: “courage, honor, integrity and professionalism.”

Now is the time for Auburn and its police department to rise above any bunker mentality and to consider the biases and culture that predisposed Auburn police leadership to fail to critically assess the uses of force by its police, and in particular, Nelson. The city of Auburn owes it to Jesse Sarey. It owes it to his family. It owes it to all the other community members who found themselves on the wrong side of Nelson, a man with a badge who used violence against Auburn citizens who challenged his authority. It owes it to the entire community as well.

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All views expressed in this op-ed, which first appeared in The Seattle Times, are the opinions of the authors. Mark Larson was chief criminal deputy prosecutor with the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office for 28 years and worked on the Nelson case in its pretrial stages. Kathy Van Olst was senior deputy prosecuting attorney for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office for 23 years and worked on the Nelson case in its pretrial stages. Jim Pugel was Seattle Police chief from 2013-14 and chief deputy of the King County Sheriff’s Office from 2014-18 before his retirement after 37 years in law enforcement.