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Seattle suburb settles police shooting for $7.5 million

The facts are complicated. Andrea Churna (photo, left), 39, daughter of a retired Michigan state police commander, and ex-wife of a Microsoft lawyer, kept a gun in her Redmond, Washington, apartment because she thought she was being stalked.

On the night of September 20, 2020, she called police because she thought someone was in her apartment, and when police arrived, she brandished her gun. They told her to put it down, and she did. They told her to come out of her apartment and lay face down in the hallway, and she did.

But she kept moving and looking around, so two of the half dozen or so cops in the hallway shot her. She was unarmed. She died at the scene from half a dozen rifle bullets from a police AR-15.

At least two cops shot at her, according to KUOW, a Seattle-area radio station (read their story here). One was a rookie; the other had recently been fired by another police agency for poor performance, according to a story in the Seattle Times. 

On Tuesday, April 26, 2022, the Redmond City Council voted to pay Churna’s family $7.5 million. Both cops are still on duty with the Redmond Police Department. The police chief has hired a “company with a history of favoring police officers, to conduct an internal investigation” (Seattle Times, April 27, 2022, p. A6).

The Seattle Times story says the county prosecuting attorney has “declined to file criminal charges pending an inquest, which has yet to be scheduled.” The KUOW story says Andrea’s father, a former homicide detective, “said he’s never seen an investigation of this nature take this long.”

Well, maybe one reason for that is because these cops weren’t wearing body cameras, because the Redmond PD doesn’t require them. (Why not?)

To me, based on the facts reported by news media, this sure looks like yet another case of a twitchy cop with an itchy trigger finger killing an unarmed citizen who committed no crime; a police chief who knowingly hired a bad cop trying to blow it off; and the city government that hired this police chief buying off the victim’s family with a large settlement. There are no consequences for the cop, police chief, or city officials; the system makes innocent taxpayers take the fall for bad policing.

Like I said, the facts are complicated. She had a gun, the cops thought she’d pointed it at them, and she didn’t exactly obey their commands. There are times when police have to use deadly force, but this wasn’t one of them. She didn’t have a gun, and they didn’t see a gun, when they shot her. Taking a life simply because a person is fidgety with police guns pointed at her renders human life cheap. (Until, of course, the settlement has to be paid.)

This isn’t not how I’d want to lose a family member, the money be damned. I want better recruiting, training, and supervision of police. I want bad cops weeded out, and prevented from getting other police employment. I don’t want police agencies or police unions to control investigations into police misconduct.

Making taxpayers pay settlements, while questionable police killings of citizens continue unabated, just doesn’t cut it. There’s no penalty for bad cops, just an onerous financial burden on taxpayers and a lifetime of loss for the victim’s family. Until this changes, citizens’ lives will be cheap.

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