Harger: Auburn fired a cop in two weeks, while an Arlington cop is charged with 10 counts. WA’s police chiefs have stopped circling the wagons
Jun 3, 2026, 8:15 AM | Updated: 2:52 pm
The Auburn Police Department fired one of its officers on May 28. He had been arrested two weeks earlier on a felony charge of immoral communication with a minor. Two weeks. Arrest to termination. He hasn’t even been officially charged yet.
Two weeks.
Earlier this month, Arlington Police Chief Jonathan Ventura got in front of a KIRO 7 camera and called out one of his own. Forty-one-year-old Dustin Bartlett. Eight-year veteran. Once officer of the year. Bartlett’s girlfriend had walked into the Island County Sheriff’s Office and handed deputies two hard drives full of child pornography. Ventura didn’t dodge. He said it was devastating to his department.
Friday, Bartlett was arrested again, charged with violating a protection order at his Camano Island home where his girlfriend was staying. He now faces 10 counts of possessing images of child sex abuse, plus the protection order violation.
Something’s different.
Remember Jeffrey Nelson? That’s what the old Washington looked like
Auburn cop. Killed three people over eight and a half years. The last was Jesse Sarey, a 26-year-old homeless man in a mental health crisis, in 2019. Shot in the abdomen at point-blank range. Shot in the head seconds later, after he was already on the ground.
King County prosecutors charged Nelson with second-degree murder and first-degree assault in 2020.
Nelson kept his job. He kept it through the charges. He kept collecting his Auburn salary, nearly $100,000 a year, while charged with murdering a man on duty. A jury convicted him in June 2024. The first Washington police officer ever convicted of murder for an on-duty killing.
Auburn didn’t fire him until January 2025. After sentencing. Four and a half years, charged with murder, on the city payroll.
Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus said at the time her hands were tied.
Compare that to the Auburn officer arrested last month. Not convicted. Not formally charged yet. Gone in two weeks.
That is the shift.
It is nice to see the City of Auburn taking these sorts of crimes seriously. I’ve covered some other situations in Auburn where the mayor’s response to serious accusations against people in her orbit was less than urgent. So it’s good to see the city moving quickly on this one.
One note on the Nelson conviction. It only happened because Washington voters passed Initiative 940 in 2018, removing the “malice” standard that had made it almost impossible to convict an officer of murder for an on-duty killing. Nelson was the first officer prosecuted under the new standard. That is a separate story from the one I’m writing today.
Chief Mark Caillier and Chief Jonathan Ventura didn’t circle the wagons
Caillier didn’t say “we will let the process play out” and keep the officer on the payroll. He called the allegations deeply troubling. He worked with Pierce County investigators to coordinate the arrest at the station. Two weeks later, the officer was gone.
A note on naming. This newsroom does not name a suspect until they have been officially charged. Bartlett has been charged. The Auburn officer has not.
Arlington Police Chief Jonathan Ventura didn’t hide behind “no comment.” He went on television. He named what was alleged. He named how much it hurt.
Pay attention to who these officers were inside their departments. Bartlett was Arlington’s officer of the year. The Auburn officer was the hero of a local feel-good story in March about rescuing an abandoned puppy named Zeus. Officer adopts the dog he rescued. That kind of story.
These were not anonymous patrol cops. These were the men the departments put forward as the face of the badge. That used to be the kind of officer a department protected the longest. Caillier and Ventura moved fastest on them.
That is what good police leadership looks like.
RELATED STORIES
Good cops want bad cops out. Caillier, Ventura, and Washington’s chiefs are saying it out loud
The good cops, who are the vast majority of them, want the bad cops out. A bad cop makes every other officer’s job harder. He makes prosecutors less willing to take cases. He makes neighbors less willing to call for help.
What’s changing is that the chiefs are saying it out loud. The departments are acting in weeks instead of years. The wagons are not circling.
The Nelson era took 4.5 years to end. The Auburn officer arrested in May is already off the force. Bartlett is facing 10 felony counts, with the Arlington department on the side of accountability from day one.
The chiefs are doing their part.
Good cops have been waiting a long time to see this. So have the rest of us.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
