Jaahnavi Kandula, 23, a graduate student from India, was killed in a crosswalk by a speeding Seattle police vehicle on January 23, 2023. See details of the incident here.
One of the police officers dispatched to the accident scene, Daniel Auderer, mocked Kandula as a person whose life had “limited value” and jokingly suggested the city “just write a check” for $11,000 to her family.
It was a private conversation between Auderer and Mike Solan, the controversial head of Seattle’s police union. But it was picked up by the dashcam in Auderer’s squad car, and when the video went public it caused an uproar.
Auderer and Solan argued Auderer’s remarks were taken out of context, but the racist overtones were inescapable; Auderer is white, while Kandula was a person of color.
It took eight months for Auderer to be taken off street duty. That happeed in September 2024, days after the video was released. Then in May 2024 the police chief was replaced, for reasons unrelated to the incident, and deciding what to do with Auderer fell to a new chief.
She considered suspending Auderer for 30 days, but in the end decided to fire him, calling his comments “cruel” and citing “immeasurable damage” to public trust in police (see story here).
Cops do their jobs on camera now, which means they have to be performers. They can’t engage in locker room talk on duty anymore, as Auderer did, or their words may come back to haunt them. From now on they can only joke about dead pedestrians in locker rooms and police union halls.