Man sues Seattle Police Dept, calls officer ‘rotten apple’
May 5, 2015, 10:31 AM | Updated: 2:55 pm
A Seattle man arrested for carrying a golf club has spoken out about his lawsuit against the Seattle Police Department, calling the officer who stopped him "out of control," and a "rotten apple." (Seattle police video)
(Seattle police video)
A Seattle man arrested for carrying a golf club has spoken out about his lawsuit against the Seattle Police Department, calling the officer who stopped him “out of control,” and a “rotten apple.”
“Most policemen are good people, but you got rotten apples in all professions, and she is a rotten apple,” William Wingate said at a May 4 news conference covered by KING 5.
“She is out of control,” Wingate said, referring to Seattle police officer Cynthia Whitlatch.
Wingate, a black man, alleges that his arrest was racially motivated. The Seattle Police Department has not commented on the lawsuit, KING 5 reported.
Whitlatch ordered the man to drop the golf club, saying he had swung it at her patrol car in a threatening manner and struck a stop sign. A video of the encounter last summer shows that after driving around a block, the officer pulled her cruiser up to a corner where Wingate was standing, and yelled at him to drop the golf club.
She told him he had swung it at her, and that audio and video recordings from her cruiser would back up her allegations.
Wingate, 70, appeared surprised, seemed to have trouble hearing the officer, and then insisted he had done no such thing. He said he had used the golf club as a cane for 20 years.
Wingate was eventually convicted of unlawfully using a weapon under a plea deal in which the charge would be dismissed if he had no other offenses for two years.
No recordings surfaced to bolster Whitlach’s version of events, and after a state lawmaker questioned the arrest, the city attorney’s office took another look. Prosecutors dismissed the conviction, and the police department apologized for the arrest and returned his golf club. The department said the officer had “received counseling” from her supervisor — which Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole initially deemed an appropriate resolution.
But then the chief became aware of troubling Facebook posts made by Whitlatch about a month after the arrest — at a time when protests in Ferguson, Missouri, had gripped the nation’s attention. The weekly newspaper The Stranger reported that Whitlatch said she was tired of “black peoples paranoia” and wrote of “chronic black racism that far exceeds any white racism in this country.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
