Saturday, November 21, 2009

ONGOING COVERAGE: POLICE CHIEF SEARCH

City Council makes it official

Vote confirms Kirkpatrick as new police chief

Anne Kirkpatrick is shown at a public forum in City Hall earlier this month. (Christopher Anderson / The Spokesman-Review

Mike Prager
Staff writer
August 1, 2006

Spokane City Council members Monday night voted unanimously to confirm Anne E. Kirkpatrick of Federal Way as the city's next police chief.

Kirkpatrick, 46, was chosen last month by Mayor Dennis Hession after a nationwide search that brought 43 applicants.

Hession broke with the city's history of all-male police chiefs, and reached outside of the city's own department, in hiring Kirkpatrick, who is the police chief in suburban Federal Way, between Seattle and Tacoma.

With a reputation for being both tough and charming, Kirkpatrick is scheduled to take over the controversy-ridden Spokane department in September.

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She replaces acting Chief Jim Nicks, who stepped into the chief's office temporarily after the retirement last December of Chief Roger Bragdon, who served out his police career in Spokane. Nicks declined to apply for the permanent post.

Kirkpatrick's salary will increase from $122,000 a year, plus $9,000 a year in deferred compensation, to $134,000 a year without deferred compensation in Spokane. She will be given an unmarked police car to drive, and will be on call 24 hours a day. Hession said she has been offered a contract, but the contract had not been signed as of Monday.

Hession said the council's confirmation vote Monday evening was "a great night for the city" and that he expects Kirkpatrick to become "an outstanding chief of police."

Council members also had kind words for the city's first female chief, who was among four finalists, three of whom were from outside Spokane.

"I do think she is going to do a good job," said Councilman Al French, who earlier said he would have preferred the selection of another finalist, Linda Pierce, assistant police chief in Seattle, because Pierce appeared to be more interested in making Spokane her home.

In an interview last month, French said he was concerned that Kirkpatrick would use Spokane as a steppingstone to another department.

Councilwoman Nancy McLaughlin thanked a group of people who served on the mayor's selection committee. "We came down to four wonderful candidates," she said.

Kirkpatrick's selection comes amid a pair of Spokane police controversies – officers' fatal struggle with Otto Zehm at a North Side convenience store in March and the investigation of a sex scandal in which detectives told a firefighter to delete digital images of his sexual encounter with a 16-year-old girl in a city firehouse in February.

During a July forum where residents posed questions to the four finalists, Kirkpatrick stressed that the biggest challenge would be the department's budget problems.

Later, in answering a similar question, she said the challenge would be getting used to media attention.

An ongoing budget crisis at City Hall continues to hamper police crime fighting. The city cut 26 officer positions in the second half of 2004, although most of the jobs were eliminated through retirements and other departures. Five younger, trained officers were laid off.

Currently, lower- and midlevel officers in the Police Guild bargaining unit have been working without a labor contract since the first of the year.

Kirkpatrick was raised in the South as the third of four children of an entrepreneur and his wife. She went to King College, a small Christian school on the Tennessee/Virginia state line.

Kirkpatrick took her bachelor's in business administration and planned to go into the hotel business, but couldn't get a job. Instead, she was one of 50 new officers hired by the Memphis Police Department. She has a law degree and a master's in counseling.

She moved to the Redmond Police Department in 1987 before becoming a law enforcement instructor at a Seattle-area community college. She soon landed a job as police chief in Ellensburg, and then moved to Federal Way in 2001, where she ran a department with 158 officers. She is single with no children.