Dori Monson: Bellevue Police Department is ‘filthy’
Dec 6, 2013, 4:02 PM | Updated: Dec 9, 2013, 8:22 am
Taken from Friday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.
Remember the Bellevue cops who were so drunk and rowdy they got kicked out of the Seahawks game?
And then one of those cops, Officer Andrew Hanke, by his own admission drove home to North Bend so drunk he says he blacked out on the drive home.
In my view, that’s attempted murder. In the view of the Bellevue Police, it’s “a slight demotion may be warranted.” It got all swept under the rug.
OK, well Brandi Kruse found out that on Nov. 20 of this year, that very same cop was weaving so badly on I-90, driving home from a sports bar, that he got pulled over.
But lucky him, he got pulled over by his fellow Bellevue cop. And according to the police report, Officer Doug Brennan said ‘Hanke what are you doing?’ He says he smelled the odor of alcohol inside the vehicle and that Hanke had a glazed look on his face and his eyes were bloodshot, watery, and droopy.
According to the report, “I asked Andy where he was coming from and he said he was coming from the Sideline Sports Bar. I asked him how much he had drank and he stared at me then looked forward in the car.”
“I told him that he was drunk. I pointedly asked him ‘What the (expletive) are you doing driving?’ I told him that he was hammered.”
Instead of investigating Hanke for DUI, Brennan called his wife to pick him up.
I’m trying to figure out how filthy is the Bellevue Police Department.
First of all, Hanke shouldn’t have stayed on the job. If your judgment is so abysmal that you get so drunk that you get kicked out of a Seahawks game and then black out while driving home to North Bend … if you’re risking the lives of citizens you’re not fit to be a cop. You shouldn’t have the power of deadly force over everybody you encounter.
And then that a fellow Bellevue cop would think that instead of doing a blood alcohol test and getting evidence, so you could actually prosecute this cop for DUI, they call his wife and were going to sweep it under the rug? This is what the NCAA calls a lack of institutional control, when this goes to the top of the Bellevue PD.
It’s a filthy department made even more so by the fact they wouldn’t talk to Brandi Kruse when she was breaking this story. They will not talk with us as they would not when the whole Seahawks incident went down.
Bellevue Police has a lack of accountability, it has a lack of transparency. Police departments need to be more accountable and more transparent than any public agency. I find the conduct of the Bellevue Police Department to be deplorable. I think it’s a filthy department.
I’m going to make a distinction here because I believe most Bellevue cops are really good, dedicated officers. But there is an institutional problem with the Bellevue Police Department. And there’s an integrity problem.
This goes up to the chief. Where’s the control that the chief has over her officers? They won’t talk to us about this. They say they won’t while the investigation is pending.
Well, their hope is we’ll all forget about it by the time the investigation is done. This lack of transparency has to end by the Bellevue Police Department. And I’m curious how you, as a citizen, feel about this?
Taken from Friday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.
Related:
Bellevue cop accused of letting fellow officer off hook for DUI
JK