Community policing in Spokane was born of community tragedy.
In 1992, two young girls disappeared from the West Central neighborhood. One girl was found murdered. The other was never found. Out of community outrage and mourning rose Spokane COPS (short for Community-Oriented Policing Services), a private nonprofit that seeks to connect law enforcement more deeply to communities through a network of physical locations and volunteers.
In the three decades since, the relationship between the city of Spokane and Spokane COPS has been assumed — even taken for granted — with just a few small hiccups.
The contract with COPS was regularly renewed for long periods of time and eventually codified to not allow other nonprofits to compete for that funding. It was a sweetheart deal for a long-time partner, and one COPS expected to keep receiving — to the tune of more than $467,000 a year.
But now, the relationship has soured: COPS is under a microscope, struggling to explain to a new administration what the city is getting for its money and facing allegations of poor service. Even worse: RANGE discovered the organization employs a former police officer who was on the Brady List — a list that documents untrustworthy law enforcement officers — for lying to cover up the police murder of Otto Zehm, and works with another volunteer who coordinates the Spokane chapter of Tactical Civics, an anti-government, anti-Muslim extremist group.
As Mayor Lisa Brown and her administration seek to balance the city’s $25 million budget deficit, the annual contract COPS expected the Spokane City Council to pass easily, like always, was punted by the council. Brown’s 2025-26 budget proposal would make COPS compete for their lunch money.
COPS Executive Director Jeff Johnson isn’t going without a fight, though. At last week’s council meeting, Johnson publicly announced that, without city funding, COPS would close its doors forever on December 31, despite also receiving funding from the state and having over $200,000 still in the bank.
The council is considering kicking the nonprofit just enough cash to keep the lights on while the budget deliberations continue. With attention comes scrutiny, though, and the light shining on COPS is revealing details of multiple breaches of trust from the organization that relies on community trust to function as intended.
Trust issues
Most of the COPS shops are in Council District 3, including what District 3 representative Kitty Klitzke called “the most functional one,” in Shadle.
District 2 Council Members Paul Dillon and Lili Navarrete expressed frustration that, despite the public funding, none of their constituents even have access to a COPS shop. While there are nine locations citywide listed on the COPS website, constituents can’t actually get service at any of the locations in District 2, which covers most of Spokane south of downtown. After the COPS shop in East Central was converted to a police precinct by former Mayor Nadine Woodward, that location was closed to the public, and the other shop closed down, Dillon said.
Even in neighborhoods that have a COPS shop, there’s no guarantee it will be open and staffed. RANGE heard many complaints from people who went to a COPS location trying to file a report, only to find it closed during their posted hours. Multiple Spokane City Council members even said they had similar experiences.
When it comes to the limited or inconsistent hours of operation and the unequal spread across the city, Council Member Jonathan Bingle chalks that up to the reliance on volunteers and free labor; you can’t expect a volunteer to treat it like a 9-to-5 job, and in order to get a COPS shop, your neighborhood has to have willing volunteers.
“They’re there out of the generosity of their hearts to serve their community for free,” he said. “And when they’re doing it for free, they’re doing it for leisure.”
Because COPS is a private nonprofit that receives city funding and not an official part of city government, the organization isn’t subject to the same training or standards public employees are.
“The thing I really like about volunteering is that the community comes to us with problems,” one volunteer said at a recent council meeting. “They come in upset. They are crying, they are hurting and they see us first — not an officer, not a social worker, not a healthcare worker. We deal with them first.”
That puts volunteers in an almost first-responder role, without the same level of training as a first responder. Board President Scott Burkart told RANGE that COPS is in the process of a training program revamp, so he doesn’t have specifics, but beyond just where to direct citizens, volunteers do take a training course on how to help people in a heightened emotional state and get in-the-field experience supervised by a staff member.
Volunteers give people an outlet by listening to their problems and opinions, Burkart said. “If [volunteers] don’t feel comfortable, they just say that they can’t help the person and then kind of end the conversation.”
There is nowhere near the same scrutiny on COPS volunteers as there is on police officers, and though COPS volunteers don’t take on the same level of responsibility and risk, they are still given a great deal of trust and responsibility by the city. Unlike SPD, volunteers don’t wear body cameras and their work isn’t automatically subject to public records law. Police reports are public records that can be requested by anyone. There’s no such oversight for COPS, and no clear mechanism for either preventing further harm to victims who are in a vulnerable state or for adjudicating complaints after the fact.
And while the COPS mission states, “We are here to make Spokane a safe environment for all members of this community,” people like Virla Spencer, the executive director of The Way to Justice, say not all communities feel safe utilizing COPS.
In comments to The Inlander, Spencer said, “I have never been able to walk inside of a COPS shop to be able to receive any services, let alone have I ever heard of any Black or brown folks ever having any good luck with any of those places.”
But, Burkhart said, “In the history of me being involved in this, I don’t know that there’s ever been any sort of issue between a volunteer and someone who’s coming to use the services.”
When the COPS volunteers came to talk to council earlier this month, Wilkerson noticed they were overwhelmingly white and elderly, though she put it more diplomatically: “the demographic was dominant culture and of a certain age. They were pretty senior.”
Wilkerson said that, between how COPS talked about itself and how she heard her BIPOC constituents talking about COPS, she wanted to experience the atmosphere of a COPS shop for herself. She went to the East Central location and found it empty.
The Brady List employee
COPS says community safety is at the core of its work, but one of its four paid staff members has been formally listed as untrustworthy and was found to have lied in court to cover up the murder of a citizen by a Spokane Police officer.
Sandra McIntyre is the paid staff manager of COPS programs and a former Spokane Police officer. During her time as a police officer, McIntyre (who goes by “Sandi”) admitted to lying in order to cover up the murder of Otto Zehm — a developmentally disabled Spokane man.
She was on the Spokane County Brady List — a legally mandated list of local police officers whose credibility has been questioned — as recently as 2016. The list exists to alert defense attorneys of potentially untrustworthy police officers, and in some cases prosecutors avoid calling Brady-list officers to testify because of those trust issues.
When first asked, Burkart said that though he knew McIntyre was “involved with the Zehm situation,” he wasn’t privy to any specific information about her presence on the Brady list.
But later in the interview, Burkart said that someone within the organization had expressed concern with McIntyre’s history in the past. He wasn’t worried about it.
“Whether she could testify in court for the police department, it wasn’t something that prohibits her from having this job,” Burkart said. “It didn’t prohibit her from being a commissioned police officer.”
Burkart is right; though McIntyre admitted to lying in court, she finished her tenure out as an officer with Spokane Police and ultimately retired from the department in 2019.
The Tactical Civics volunteer
Volunteers aren’t subject to a rigorous vetting process, either. The only requirements to volunteer are to be 18 years old, fill out an application, do a 12-hour volunteer training and agree to a background check.
The application asks basic questions like: “Would you have any problem with or providing service to any person because of race, religion, culture or sexual orientation?” and “Are you a member of any organization that advocates the overthrow of the US Government?” If a volunteer answers yes, they are directed to explain.
But those questions did not weed out volunteer Kerri Kruiswyck, the Spokane County coordinator for the organization Tactical Civics — an anti-government extremist group that bans Muslims from joining and wants to establish their own grand juries as the highest law in the land to punish people who have violated the Constitution. The group has previously promoted beliefs that 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic were government conspiracies. Tactical Civics made local news in Columbia County, where they were invited to speak by a county commissioner, raising concerns from locals worried that their invitation endorsed political violence.
Burkart said that he didn’t think Kruiswyck was an active volunteer anymore, though she lists it on her LinkedIn, because she was primarily a mounted volunteer in a COPS program that was discontinued in 2023.
If someone lies on those questions or joins an extremist group after they apply for COPS, there isn’t a safety mechanism for that. But that’s just like regular employment, Burkart argued. “Once you get the job, you’ve got the job.”
But if someone would have brought her membership in Tactical Civics to the board’s attention, Burkart said, “obviously it would be taken very seriously.”
COPS executive director Jeff Johnson did not respond to multiple calls for comment, but Burkart said that was because Johnson was indisposed, and Johnson would hopefully be able to talk later.
Ok, back up. What does COPS actually do?
COPS’ stated goals are to support Spokane’s actual cops — members of the Spokane Police Department — so they have more time to spend solving crimes. This can mean facilitating communication between SPD and the public, and keeping neighborhoods safe from within, by virtue of being staffed by volunteers living in the neighborhood. Saving SPD time theoretically saves taxpayers money. By sending COPS volunteers to fingerprint car break-ins or handle bicycle registrations, for example, the city doesn’t have to pay labor costs associated with asking SPD officers to do it.
The organization’s lifeblood are its community volunteers working out of eight neighborhood offices — colloquially called “COPS shops” — across District 1 and District 3 of Spokane, but there are four paid staff members listed on their website and they’re governed by a board that includes two representatives from the city, currently Council Member Michael Cathcart and Deputy City Administrator Maggie Yates.
COPS says they provide 12 distinct programs to the neighborhoods they serve, including neighborhood watch, bike registrations and fingerprinting cars after break-ins. They used to provide victim advocates to help victims of crimes navigate the complex and sometimes scary legal system, but that program was discontinued in 2023 after the loss of external grant funding.
At Spokane City Council last Monday, volunteers said if COPS didn’t exist, the city would either have to staff this work with employees, or leave the community stranded without them
An assortment of volunteers, staff and board members, wearing logo-emblazoned COPS vests showed up in mass to testify at last week’s council meeting and extol the virtues of their organization.
One volunteer spoke about helping connect a woman with a translator after she struggled to make a crime report to SPD because of the language barrier. Another highlighted COPS’ partnership with the Department of Corrections: probation officers can meet people on probation in their own neighborhoods at the COPS shops, instead of making them travel prohibitive distances. And, another said, those shops represent a safe location to do Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace transactions or custody handoffs. Sometimes, they even help neighbors avoid falling for mail scams.
Bingle told RANGE that COPS is a way for “citizens to feel heard, if nothing else,” after they’ve been victims of property crimes that might not rise to the level of getting SPD attention.
“The police do not have all the time in the world to go and help with property crimes, with taking reports, with fingerprinting,” Bingle said. “I think COPS is a great way for us to give better service to our population without having to pay a police officer to do it.”
According to Kelly Cruz, COPS’ board treasurer (who once ran for mayor), having volunteers do this work represents a cool $4.9 million in savings for the city. He provided no numbers to back this up, but said, “We’ve been very frugal about the money we get from the city.”
What do they spend the money on?
COPS is asking for $468,000 from the city with an annual 4% increase over a new five-year contract. Along with a $55,000 grant from the state Department of Corrections, this would cover the cost of the two full-time staff members — executive director Johnson and McIntyre — two part-time staff members and the COPS locations. In his proposal to the city, Johnson also estimated they would receive $5,000 in donations for the year, though the numbers he provided from 2023 showed the nonprofit reported $0 in donations, estate gifts and grants last year.
The proposed budget didn’t break up line items in enough detail to give us all the answers, but we do know the organization plans to spend over half their total budget — $302,700 — on personnel costs.
In 2022, the date of their last publicly available federal tax filing, COPS spent $120,000 on their executive director’s salary — about 25% of the $449,000 they received from the city of Spokane that year. There had been gradual increases to executive director pay in recent years, up from $103,000 reported in the organization’s 2019 filings.
Spokane administration spokesperson Erin Hut said the new budget numbers provided by COPS for this year didn’t make it clear how much they intended to spend solely on Johnson’s salary or how much they’d spent on it last year.
For an organization with so many programs and mostly volunteer labor, you might expect a budget to include high estimates for programming costs and volunteer training. But COPS 2025 budget proposed spending only $5,000 on programs and $3,000 on training — together accounting for less than 2% of their total budget. It is possible that program and training costs are mostly tied up in staff salaries, but that level of granularity doesn’t show up in their tax filings or in the proposed budgets.
In the grand scheme of things, COPS does not have a huge budget for an organization serving a city of 220,000 people, with the community seeming to step up with in-kind gifts that could otherwise be very expensive. The organization’s building costs are especially low — accounting for less than $50,000 in 2022 — despite having 8 or 9 locations (COPS cites different numbers in different documents). According to Cruz they only have to pay rent for five of their shops, and they get good deals on those.
For the amount of money that goes to COPS every year, the city could be paying for about seven full-time police officers. The executive director alone gets paid enough to cover the base salary of nearly two full-time police officers.
Members of the mayor’s administration and the progressive majority on council have criticized a lack of clarity on what the city’s getting for its money, though conservative council members Bingle and Cathcart think not renewing the COPS contract over financial transparency concerns creates a double standard.
“The question of how much someone makes to run an organization has never come up before yesterday that I can remember in my five years, despite contracts galore with all kinds of nonprofits like Revive, Catholic Charities, Volunteers of America, Art Commission, Chase Youth Commission,” Cathcart wrote in a text to RANGE. “It’s never been asked. Same with how much is in their bank account. No one has ever cared until it was COPS.”
He also added that he asked Brown’s administration to do a detailed audit of Spokane’s homeless shelter financials but they only audited the bed count. Cathcart said he would be “more than happy to support a city-funded independent financial and performance audit,” of COPS, if that was applied consistently.
Council members Dillon and Klitzke think that’s an inaccurate comparison. Revive was chosen to provide services to the hub of the city’s homeless shelter services, and only after competing openly for that contract, Klitzke said. COPS doesn’t currently compete with anyone.
“If we treated [COPS] like we treated Revive, we’d be expecting an exact service for an exact amount of hours,” she argued.
Are they effective?
Brown, her new police chief Kevin Hall, city council members and the media have all been asking the same question — is COPS effective? — but the answer isn’t clear to them. Most of the officials RANGE talked to could not provide definitive answers to basic questions like the number of paid staff, the executive director’s salary, the number of volunteers and the impacts of its programs.
Hut said the city has been asking Johnson to provide data since September, saying the administration was also looking for answers to the same questions RANGE is now asking:
- How many bikes did COPS volunteers register for their anti-theft program?
- How many times did they collect fingerprints?
- How many neighborhood watch patrols did they organize?
- What were the total number of volunteers and hours?
Basic, mission-related statistics like these are usually kept on hand by organizations to show potential — or current — funders.
COPS’s annual report for 2023 is heavy on good vibes — pictures of happy community members and platitudes like, “It’s a comfortable feeling to know your neighborhood is being patrolled by COPS volunteers” — but no data on the work the organization actually does.
There are issues with reporting: it’s hard to prove some of the key functions for COPS — you can’t exactly give a report of how many crimes you’ve prevented, because those crimes don’t exist. And, tracking outcomes is hard because most calls get referred to other departments like Code Enforcement or the Police Department, where they’re handed off. COPS has no way of knowing what happened with the calls after they were passed on.
Burkart said he doesn’t understand where the communication breakdown is happening, especially because Yates gets the same reports from Johnson the board does.
“Ask the mayor and the city what data they’re looking for. They keep talking about metrics but they aren’t offering any specific metrics that they’re looking for,” Burkart said. “My understanding is that they got the annual report and they got numbers when they asked for them.”
If they asked Johnson for specific numbers and didn’t receive them, then “that is a problem,” Burkart said.
On November 1, about two months after Hut said the administration began asking for data, COPS director Johnson sent an email providing some raw numbers to city officials. From January to September 2024, COPS says they registered 307 bikes, collected 470 fingerprints, filed or diverted 461 code violations and had 77 active volunteers who had over 13,000 in cumulative volunteer hours. Johnson didn’t include any evidence, like a report log or bike registry to support those numbers.
It was something, but not enough for the mayor’s office. “Their response was not fully responsive to our requests,” Hut said.
Weeks later, at the November 21 city council meeting, Johnson would claim from the city hall podium that he’d never spoken about metrics with Brown or Hall. This is technically true, but leaves out the fact that Johnson had been emailing with Deputy City Administrator Maggie Yates and Chief Financial Officer Matt Boston, members of Brown’s cabinet.
“I don’t know how they could possibly bring up metrics because they wouldn’t know what we measure and I don’t know what they would like us to measure,” Johnson said. “I know there’s a lot of talk about metrics, but metrics aren’t truly what the COPS shops are about and if you haven’t been in them, it’s hard to know what they’re about.”
For transparency advocates inside of government and out, that’s part of the problem.
The majority of city contracts to private organizations (especially amounts above $10,000) go through a request for proposal (RFP) process to ensure the best company or organization gets the work. In 2008, the city waived that for the community policing money, awarding a “sole-source contract” — meaning the organization doesn’t have to compete with anyone.
Sole-source doesn’t necessarily mean there are no strings attached. Because progressives and conservatives alike often demand a level of scrutiny to ensure public funds are being well spent, city contracts sometimes have rigorous reporting requirements included.
The current COPS contract doesn’t.
The organization doesn’t currently have to tell the city how they spent public money or how many people their programs served.
Some contracts even function on a reimbursement basis, with the organization spending the money and only getting paid back once they document the cost. For COPS, the money just shows up in their bank account four times a year, no questions asked. Because they haven’t needed to submit a proposal for their work since 2008, they haven’t had to make the case for themselves with metrics or financial plans in nearly two decades.
Council President Betsy Wilkerson says she has also been frustrated by the lack of information. Realizing in retrospect that she passed a contract with COPS in 2020 “on autopilot,” she is now doing some digging on her own.
She couldn’t find Johnson’s 2024 salary, nonprofit filings from the 2023 tax year, their board make-up for 2024 or board minutes for any meetings.
“Erin, this is some crazy shit,” Wilkerson told RANGE. “The more you dig into it, it doesn’t make sense.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct Klitzke’s quote about the most functional COPS shop. It’s actually COPS Northwest in Shadle.
