Timing of club sting, its tactics questioned

With the Seattle City Council set to vote Monday on a nightclub-licensing ordinance, questions are being raised about the timing and aggressiveness of a recent undercover police investigation into more than a dozen Seattle nightspots.

Police say the sting, over two weekends in August, demonstrated that undercover minors were allowed into and served liquor at 14 of 15 nightclubs. Police also say bar employees allowed a gun into two clubs, though officials are now backpedaling in one of those cases.

The sting resulted in the arrest and overnight jailing of some 15 bartenders and bouncers on misdemeanor liquor violations — in most cases, serving underage or inebriated patrons.

Among the questions being raised by legal experts, nightclub owners and some city leaders of Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, City Attorney Tom Carr and Mayor Greg Nickels:

• Did top city officials overstate the problems they found at nightclubs?

• Why did the sting's planners decide it was necessary to arrest and jail bar employees charged with misdemeanors instead of the usual practice of giving defendants a chance to report to the jail or court?

• Were the sting's planners hoping a publicity stunt would tip a close council vote in favor of a nightclub license?

City Councilmember Sally Clark says the sting's timing — and its splashy announcement at a news conference a week ago today — isn't helping her efforts to get a licensing ordinance passed.

"If the devisers of the sting thought the results would push people to support a license even more, I don't think the results came out the way they needed to," Clark said.

Clark and City Council President Nick Licata plan to send a letter to Kerlikowske, Carr and Nickels asking for more information, but they are upset by a report that police spent 900 hours and $52,000 on the operation. Clark and Licata say there are other ways to spend scarce police resources to make city streets safer.

Clark also noted that while serving underage or inebriated patrons is wrong, preventing that is mainly the state Liquor Control Board's job. The council's proposed nightclub ordinance, among other things, would hold clubs accountable for violence.

Defense attorney David Osgood, who represents some of the bar employees charged, says he's outraged by the police tactics. "It's a frame job," Osgood said. "This is patently politically motivated. I don't think a lot of these charges are going to stick."

At last week's news conference, Kerlikowske said he hoped the publicity would have a chilling effect on offending clubs.

Carr and police say the sting was not motivated by politics but by a concern for public safety. Bartenders and bouncers have a duty to follow the law in exchange for the privilege of serving liquor, Carr said, and the sting exposed a corrupt system in which minors were easily served liquor.

If the sting's results are representative, that happens six times more frequently in Seattle bars than in bars elsewhere across the state.

"That's what's scary," Carr said. "As a parent, you count on the expectation that if your kids are going out, they're not going to be able to get in with a bunch of adults and be served alcohol."

But to bartender Brian Armstrong, accused of one instance of serving alcohol to a minor, the arrests were overkill.

Armstrong, 34, said he was treated like a dangerous criminal — handcuffed, put in a police car, fingerprinted, stripped of his belongings and thrown in jail for the night.

"It was probably the most demoralizing, scary, insane process I've ever been through in my entire life," he said.

Changes urged

For nearly a year, Mayor Nickels has urged the council to require that nightclubs obtain a special license that would give the city power to shut down clubs that repeatedly fail to prevent violence.

The sting was hatched in late July by Carr and police after the state Liquor Board rejected Nickels' request to summarily suspend the liquor license of Tabella Restaurant & Lounge, a club in Belltown. Nickels pointed to a July 2 shooting in which an 18-year-old woman was injured, as well as to several other incidents, as evidence that Tabella was a threat to public safety.

At last week's news conference, Carr, Kerlikowkse and Capt. Dan Oliver, who ran the sting, said it showed that the actions of renegade nightclub owners contribute to violence outside their doors.

"When we have businesses selling to minors, selling in excess and even allowing guns in, it's no surprise that violence breaks out on our streets," Carr said at the news conference, with a blow-up photo of a gun as a backdrop.

A similar gun was allowed into two clubs, Tabella and Tommy's Nightclub & Grill in the University District, Kerlikowske said at the news conference. He said that in the case of Tabella, a bouncer let a would-be patron in after patting him down, knowing he had a gun.

More troubling, Kerlikowkse announced, an officer posing as a patron in Tommy's was able to give $100 to a bouncer "so that a companion could come in later carrying a concealed firearm."

Carr said, "It's a crime to bring a gun in, and therefore, it's a crime to allow someone to do that and take a bribe to do that."

But a police report of the incident states that the bouncer said he'd allow the patron in with a gun if he showed a permit.

In an interview this past Thursday, Carr clarified that the gun never made it into Tommy's that night and denied having said it did.

In any case, Carr said Thursday, "it's still a crime to accept a bribe to allow a gun into a public place."

State law makes it a crime for an individual, except for a police officer on duty, to bring a firearm into a bar.

Carr has said he plans to seek a year in jail for the bouncer in question.

Charges prepared

After the sting was over, Carr's office prepared gross-misdemeanor charges against 28 individuals.

Normally when such charges are filed, Seattle Municipal Court sends a summons to the individual with a court date on which to respond to the charges.

Carr says it was the Police Department's idea to instead arrest the defendants in a sweep of their workplaces. Judge Michael Hurtado signed the request for arrest warrants on Sept. 6, two days before they were executed by police.

Among the 28 charged, most who avoided jail weren't working the night the arrests were made.

Notices that warrants had been issued for their arrest were mailed on a Friday; the arrests were made the next day.

Legal experts question whether Carr's pursuit and the judge's granting of arrest warrants were proper under court procedures.

"... A summons should have been issued unless a judge found that the persons involved would not be responsive to a summons or it was necessary to prevent bodily harm to someone," says John Junker, a law professor at the University of Washington.

David Chapman, director of the Associated Counsel for the Accused, says it's rare in Seattle Municipal Court for a prosecutor to seek a warrant and for the court not to send a summons with a court date.

A spokesman for Judge Hurtado said he was on vacation and unavailable for comment. Numerous attempts to reach police Capt. Oliver were not successful.

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com

Information in this article, originally published Sept. 16, 2007, was corrected Nov. 7, 2007. The original version of the story incorrectly stated that Seattle police said a June 4 fight in a parking lot near Tabella Restaurant & Lounge was unrelated to the nightclub.