Is it time for the City of Seattle to partner with more private tech companies?

When the Seattle Police Department hired prolific records’ requester Tim Clemans to overhaul its inefficient disclosure system, it was a clear and unconventional step towards building progressive partnerships.

Six months later, that partnership is dead.

Clemans, a self-taught programmer who was hired by the SPD in April after highlighting the departments’ issues with transparency by filing hundreds of disclosure requests, resigned Thursday after mounting tensions with the department. According to The Seattle Times, the 25-year-old texted his resignation to a supervisor, citing personality conflicts and a failure by the department to embrace technology. Within hours of his resignation, he’d filed more than 200 public-disclosure requests for information from the department, asking for audio and video images taken from patrol-car cameras and 911 center recordings, which he plans to put on a website.

Clemans was given an award by the Washington Coalition for Open Government for his work developing software that can automatically redact sensitive images from police-captured videos, so that they can be more quickly shared with the public.

As a former employee for the City of Bellevue, KIRO Radio’s Ron Upshaw said he could appreciate the frustration of waiting for the government to catch up with the real world.

“It’s impossible to move quickly; it’s impossible,” he said. “Government, in a way, is set up to not move quickly.”

Ron and his co-host Don O’Neill pointed to multiple examples of tech on a state and federal level that do not keep pace with the rest of the country. Maybe this most recent local setback could serve as a lesson.

Ron: Is this a critique? Should the City of Seattle just go, “Listen, we live in one of the tech capitols of the world, let’s just streamline this and get it done super quickly?”

Don: Yeah, you would think so, right?

Ron: “You should be able to load a video clip into an editor and define a person: This person is 10 years old, I’m going to click him with my mouse and have a piece of software that can black that out.

Don: And find a city that’s doing it right that’s a comparable size, with a comparable police force and go, “OK, if that’s how they are doing it in Phoenix, for instance … if Phoenix is doing it, then let’s do it the way that they do it.

Ron: I don’t think that Timothy is going to stop requesting documents.