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SEATTLE -- A Seattle police officer has been caught on tape talking about "making up" evidence while two wrongly arrested men sit in jail. It's the latest shocker uncovered by a KOMO 4 Problem Solver investigation into the Seattle Police Department's vanishing dashcam videos.
Josh Lawson and Christopher Franklin filed a claim against the city Monday for excessive force and wrongful arrest.
The two were arrested at gunpoint on November 16, 2010 and said the incident changed their lives forever.
"I thought I was gonna die," Lawson said about that night.
Franklin said it was "the most terrifying thing I've ever experienced."
Both men said they suffered facial bruises and swelling after one was kicked and the other man-handled into the pavement while being arrested. But then listen to what an officer says on an audio recording after he takes the two to holding cells: "Well, you're going to jail for robbery that's all."
You then hear Franklin ask, "for robbery?" And the officer responds, "Yeah, I'm gonna make stuff up."
Franklin believed him.
"He showed me that he has the power to do whatever he wanted that night," he said. "He has a badge, and all we can do is nothing."
We watched the partial video of their arrest together with Lawson and Franklin. Neither man has a criminal record and they were not charged with anything after the arrest. They both work full-time and go to school. But the night of their arrest they were in the neighborhood near Seattle Center, several blocks away from where an assault was reported.
In a 911 call, a witness described those assailants: "It was two tall, skinny African Americans."
Lawson is six feet tall, and Franklin is just five feet nine inches tall.
The person who called 911 to report the attack told a dispatcher the assailants "were both wearing jeans."
But in police booking photos Lawson is wearing white sweat pants.
"It wasn't really until I was able to communicate with you and your knowledge of what's out there and what the videos mean and your investigation that it was like 'oh, wait, there's not just one video that we don't get - there's more.'"
We discovered at least three other dash cam videos exist of the Lawson/Franklin arrest. But none show Officer Richardson during the critical time period, when he had Lawson and Franklin at gunpoint and later kicked Lawson.
We asked Whitcomb if the department was going to hold officers accountable when dashboard cameras aren't turned on.
"We do, we actually do, look at our OPA reports," Whitcomb said. But when we reminded him it didn't happen in this case, he said, "well maybe not in that case, but there's other cases."
Attorney Padula's take on the lack of dash cam video? "I think it's reprehensible, to me there's no excuse for that."
We've learned that the arrest video could have been salvaged from the hard drive in Officer Richardson's dash cam system, but wasn't - 13 February 2012