Stamper looks back

The Seattle Weekly's Nina Shapiro catches up with former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper in a compelling profile. Stamper's law enforcement career ended after the WTO riots in 1999 -- an ironic denouement, as Shapiro notes:

"That was a defining moment," he says, when he realized the scale of the fiasco before him. The whole mess—complete with charges that the city had become a "police state" and emblematic images of officers decked out in Darth Vader armor—was also a strange and impossible-to-predict defining moment for the career of a man who, up until that point, had been known as a radical visionary who wanted to take policing into new, touchy-feely territory.

"That's my legacy," Stamper says with resignation. ... "Thirty-four years in the business—with my passions around domestic violence, community policing, citizen oversight, true partnerships—and for me, it's WTO. It's kind of funny. But I do see the irony."