SEATTLE — Criminal charges will not be filed against Seattle leaders who deleted text messages off their work phones as Black Lives Matter protests were taking place in 2020, according to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (KCPAO).
In 2022, the prosecuting attorney’s office requested an investigation of possible destruction of public records after a whistleblower complaint and the discovery of texts missing from the phones of former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best and current Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins.
Black Lives Matter protests took place in Seattle in June 2020, sparking the creation of the Capitol Hill Occupied, or Organized, Protest (CHOP). Seattle city officials and police were heavily criticized for instances of police brutality against protestors and for a lack of response to the area during emergencies in summer of 2020.
King County Prosecuting Attorney Lisa Manion concluded there is “no legal basis to file criminal charges in this case,” according to a Sept. 12 memorandum to the King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO), the agency tasked with the investigation.
For charges to be filed, prosecutors would have had to establish willful and unlawful conduct. According to the KCPAO, there is no evidence that the city leaders intended to permanently delete information. The prosecutor’s office could not prove state laws were broken, including “Injury to Public Record,” which is a Class C felony and could not prove “Injury and misappropriation of record.”
According to the memorandum, texts from an eight-month period between October 2019 and June 2020 on former Mayor Jenny Durkan’s phone were missing. Durkan’s phone settings changed from “Keep Messages: Forever” to “Keep Messages: 30 days” sometime in July 2020, which deleted all of her texts during the eight-month period.
The memorandum states it is unclear who changed the phone’s setting and why, or who later changed the phone’s setting back to keeping messages forever. A City IT employee later performed two factory resets on the phone, destroying all of the previously downloaded texts.
For Chief Best, who retired in early September 2020, investigators found “several thousand” texts were manually deleted off her phone. When she testified in civil litigation, Best said she “routinely” deleted texts as she believed the City of Seattle stored all text records in a cloud, similar to her email archives, the memorandum stated.
Fire Chief Scoggins was locked out of his phone in October 2020 due to a passcode issue. When City IT staff were unable to help, he went to a local Apple store and had a phone reset performed, according to the memorandum. Scoggins was “unaware that would delete all of the phone’s data.”
Several other high-ranking employees had missing text messages around the time period of 2020, some of which were lost due to passcode issues and subsequent resets or misassumptions about the city’s process for archiving phone records.
“There was no single factor that led to the destruction of text messages belonging to the high-level city officials during this four-month period; rather it was a perfect storm of training delinquencies, outdated and conflicting policies and producers, and insufficient safeguards to prevent the loss of records that primarily contributed to the destruction of these text messages,” KCSO wrote in an executive summary of the investigation.