New civil rights lawsuit accuses Seattle officers of racism after deadly traffic stop

SEATTLE — Seattle police shot and killed a man after a traffic stop on Dec. 31, 2018. Now attorneys have now filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Seattle and two officers, saying police never should’ve made the stop.

The lawsuit also alleges racism played a role in the traffic stop that ultimately led to the death of 36-year-old Iosia Faletogo.

“It’s quite clear the stop wasn’t done for a proper purpose,” said Nate Bingham, attorney for the Faletogo family.

Dashcam and body camera video Seattle Police released in the days after the incident starts after Faletogo is pulled over.

Seattle Police say they pulled over Faletogo because the plates came back to a driver with a suspended license.

The lawsuit says the car belongs to Faletogo’s family member — an older woman.

But as to why police ran the plate in the first place, the lawsuit alleges, “The officers’ attention was captured — either explicitly or implicitly — by the fact that Iosia was a Pacific Islander man riding in a car with a black woman in a predominantly white neighborhood in North Seattle.”

The suit claims police ran the plates to look for “reasons to justify a stop.”

Attorneys also claim officers violated Faletogo’s Fourth Amendment rights by stopping and detaining him “without probable cause or reasonable suspicion.”

Additionally, the lawsuit alleges officers violated Faletogo’s Fourteenth Amendment rights by “treating him differently than a similarly situated white suspect.”

“They pulled him over, they looked to each other and said, well that’s not the registered driver. And they knew right then and there, that there was no valid stop against Iosia,” Bingham said.

“I think that’s really important backstory because after that, they were looking for reasons to drag the stop on. They were looking for reasons to look for something else and investigate something that had nothing to do with the traffic stop — and that’s illegal,” Bingham said.

The lawsuit also make several accusations of negligence. One such accusation says the Seattle Police Department ended up deleting some video and audio of the moments leading up to the traffic stop.

“Inexplicably, SPD allowed the in-car video and audio footage immediately preceding the stop to be destroyed,” the lawsuit says.

“When that stuff goes missing, it’s a problem,” Bingham said.

Court documents say there was a technical error that meant normally saved video was not automatically saved to one hard drive, but there is a secondary hard drive that serves as a backup in case of malfunctions.

However, the suit says “SPD failed to save the missing footage before it automatically deleted” — something that violates SPD protocol and the federal Consent Decree the department is still operating under, according to the lawsuit.

During the traffic stop, Faletogo got out of his car and took off, running across N. Aurora. Officers immediately chased him.

“Stop reaching for your waistband: you’re going to get shot!” you hear an officer yell in body camera video.

One officer tackles him and there is a struggle. Video slowed down and circled in red by Seattle Police shows what appears to be a gun in Faletogo’s hand.

Moments before the shooting, Faletogo’s hands appear clear. The slowed-down video shows Faletogo’s hand moving.

“He’s reaching for it!” an officer shouts.

“I’m not reach ... " Faletogo responded.

Those were his final words — that’s when an officer fired, killing him.

“They brought him to the ground. There’s six of them, one of him. There is not reason to shoot him in the head,” Bingham said.

Police say they found about 250 pills containing fentanyl on Faletogo after he died.

Bingham said, however, that the arresting officers had no reason to believe he was in possession of drugs during the arrest and that police can’t retroactively justify what he says was an illegal stop.

“One of the most important principles in American policing is that the ends cannot justify the means,” Bingham said. “If we excused these officers for making an illegal stop because they ended up being right, then it would encourage them to illegally stop everyone they think ‘looks like a criminal.’ And if the police were given free license to act on their biases and stop everyone they think ‘looks like a criminal,’ communities of color would be even more disparately impacted by the criminal justice system than they already are,” Bingham wrote in an email.

There has not yet been a trial date set by the court.

Cox Media Group