I just found another nasty article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about cops molesting women in the Seattle area after pulling them over for supposed DUI. A summary follows:
Kay Quall was 14 when she learned never to trust a cop.
She was on a date when the car ran out of gas. King County sheriff's Deputy Denny Gulla offered Quall and her boyfriend a ride home. Gulla dropped the young man off first. Then, Quall says, he got in the back seat of his patrol car with her, slid his hand under her shirt and thrust his tongue into her mouth.
The file on his 23-year career is fat with other complaints of abuse -- assaulting a prisoner, making a pass at a high school senior, videotaping a gang beating he could have prevented and, most recently, pulling over his lover's husband and threatening to shoot him in the "mother-f---ing face."
King County Sheriff Sue Rahr admits that the department should have fired Gulla a long time ago. She says every disciplinary step has been diluted or thwarted entirely by the powerful union that represents deputies and sergeants.
...Mike Kelly and his friend Ferrell Johnston were on a slow drive through Buckley in January 2004 when off-duty King County sheriff's Sgt. Denny Gulla, who was having an affair with Kelly's wife, turned on the flashing lights and pulled them over.
...Two weeks later, Kelly told King County detectives: "Every night I come home, I go through the house with my gun."
...Asked to explain why the case against Gulla was dropped, Benton said he could not comment because he has been prosecuting a murder trial and has not had time to review the file.
...On May 19, 2004, Rahr, then chief of operations, recommended to Sheriff Dave Reichert, now a member of Congress, that Gulla be suspended for five days without pay and that he be returned to the rank of deputy.
...Like many people on the reservation, he acknowledges having hard feelings toward Gulla not only because of the deputy's alleged penchant for young girls, but because he has arrested members of the Starr family.
..."There was one incident where me and (the girl) were going to go out and we were leaving from her house and he pulled right up and said, 'Hey, how you girls doing tonight?'
...Daniels, through tribal spokesman Rollin Fatland, recently refused to comment, saying that his memory of the matter is vague and that the tribe enjoys a good relationship with the King County Sheriff's Office.
...The P-I, in the course of reporting this story, invoked the state's public records laws in requesting that the Sheriff's Office turn over all its personnel and Internal Investigations Unit files on Gulla to the newspaper.
...When Gulla encouraged members of a White Center gang to beat a prospective member as part of an initiation rite so that his partner could videotape it as a training tool for other officers, the Police Guild's power saved him from being disciplined.
The 1992 videotape shows Gulla, then a detective of the gang unit and working directly for then Lieutenant Rahr, spending several minutes assuring seven skeptical gang members that if they beat up a youth as an initiation rite, they would not get in trouble.
..."It is my firm belief, based upon past performance, that if Officer Gulla continues to work off duty at Skopabsh village, additional complaints and performance problems will be generated," said a letter from sheriff's Chief Greg Boyle to a police union legal adviser representing Gulla in disciplinary proceedings.
...Two on-duty sheriff's officers, Corey Darlington and Alan Garrison, quickly took the man into custody and put him in the back of their patrol car. Then Gulla pulled up to the scene in his personal car, walked up to the back door of the patrol car and opened it.
"He reached in with both hands, grabbed him by the shirt collar and started shaking him, not violently, just shaking him," Darlington, a recruit officer, told to an internal affairs investigator.
..."I wanted to watch to make sure that it didn't get completely out of hand," as Gulla screamed at the prisoner, calling him an "asshole" and "a little s--t," Darlington said.... When Gulla didn't get the answers he wanted, he got "a little more angry" and gave the prisoner "a short, quick rap on the chest with his left hand," Darlington said.
...In the course of questioning him, "he made a quick movement -- I didn't and still don't know what his intentions was/were -- I reached out with my open right hand" and "pushed him back."
The King County Prosecutor's Office, in deciding there was insufficient evidence to charge Gulla criminally, called Darlington's version of the incident "most plausible, given the fact that he candidly says that Officer Gulla was verbally abusing" the prisoner.
...And Gulla got support from the executive director of the Muckleshoot Housing Authority, Connie Moreno, who wrote in a letter that Skopabsh Village was "comprised of a group of extremely low-income people with severe alcohol and drug abuse problems.
...Internal-affairs records about the incidents given to the P-I by the Sheriff's Office are heavily redacted and do not reflect Quall's allegations that Gulla molested her or Berens' allegation that she fled from Gulla's advances.
This was originally posted at: Washington DUI News.
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