Bullied sergeant exposes overtime fraud in King County Sheriff's Office
A rival sergeant, who lives in Idaho, was logging implausible hours while not taking any calls and doling out extra overtime to other "supercommuters" on the squad.
They called him “Sergeant Hog.”
Sometimes, it was “Sergeant Biden.” Members of the King County Bicycle Emphasis Enforcement Squad, abbreviated as “BEES,” teased Sgt. David Hoag about his age, joking that he wore a diaper. They broke the lock off his locker and filled it with trash, put up mocking signs around the office, and wrapped his car in plastic wrap.
The squad had always had a juvenile prank culture—and Hoag apparently gave as well as he got—but something had changed. This was more mean-spirited. Hoag blamed the unit’s other sergeant, Dusty Davis. He believed Davis was trying to harass him into retirement.
Hoag told internal investigators that Davis once bragged about torturing women prisoners when he was in the army. Drawing an analogy, Davis allegedly said that “if you apply constant pressure, people will either break or leave.” Davis admitted to being “exterior security” at a detention camp but denied the rest.
Eventually, Hoag did leave, but he got his revenge on the way out. Before he retired, Hoag filed a complaint against Davis, containing 25 separate allegations of misconduct.
In addition to the bullying and mistreatment, Hoag accused Davis of sleeping on the job, abusing overtime, and showing favoritism to a clique of “supercommuters” within the squad, who, like Davis, lived in Idaho and traveled all the way across the state to work in King County.
Commanders and internal investigators at the sheriff’s office seemed to focus more on questions of professionalism, like whether Davis called a deputy named Ramos “Gaymos” or if he ever used the phrase “soggy biscuit.” The allegation that Davis and the other supercommuters were logging massive amounts of overtime and not working was apparently treated less seriously.
The internal affairs detective reviewed a sample of days Davis worked and found multiple days when he worked over 16 consecutive hours without taking a single call. On some days, he was seen in civilian clothes at the BEES office, when he was assigned to supervise a beat an hour’s drive away.
Davis would sign up to augment shifts that had adequate staffing, and did so as a deputy, not a sergeant. He had an underling, usually Deputy John Cotchaleovitch, approve his overtime requests.
Hoag claimed that Davis bypassed normal channels to assign more overtime to his friends, who lived out of state, including Deputy Cotchaleovitch, Deputy Cesar Molina-Sisimit, Deputy Christopher Travers, and Deputy Josiah Satterfield. All of them denied receiving special treatment.
Cotchaleovitch called the investigation a “witch hunt.”
However, Major Todd Morrell, chief of the Metro Transit Police, reviewed the squad’s overtime and found the supercommuters’ overtime use was a “country mile” beyond their peers. After the investigation began, Morrell suspended emphasis overtime in Metro, but he claimed the move was unrelated.
In the end, KCSO commanders sustained only seven out of the 25 allegations, all of which were classified as “general” or non-serious misconduct. Most of these involved Davis’ inappropriate behavior toward Hoag. Only one of the overtime allegations was sustained, and it was treated as a performance issue.
Major Marcus Williams wrote that there was “credible evidence” to support the rest of the allegations, but the “ambiguity of the General Orders Manual or the specific direction given by [Metro Transit Police] command would make it difficult to sustain the violation.”
Davis was suspended for only four days and transferred out of the Metro Transit Police. Undersheriff Jesse Anderson called Davis’ conduct “appalling” but added that he “has an opportunity to learn from this experience by changing his ways and show[ing] that he can put this behind him.”
Hey, thanks for reading! Before you go, stop and read this.
If you haven’t noticed, local journalism is dying, and other news outlets are mostly doing police stenography. We’re the only police watchdog in town. That means if we didn’t exist, there would be no one to rake up all this muck on local cops.
Help keep us in business by signing up for our Ko-Fi. Tiers start at just $5 a month. Join today.
Will city and county leaders ever be able to get contracts and codes of conduct that start to put and end to these abuses? How will that happen? What pressure can citizens put on them?