Daniel Auderer, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) officer who was caught last year mocking the death of 23-year-old Indian student Jaahnavi Kandula, has been fired for ‘unprofessionalism’. The decision and the internal report into Auderer were released to the public on July 19. Jaahnavi, a native of Andhra Pradesh studying at the Northeastern University of Seattle, had been killed by a speeding police car driven by officer Kevin Dave, while responding to a drug overdose call in January 2023.
The disciplinary action report, submitted on July 10 by SPD interim police chief Sue Rahr, said, “I believe the impact of your actions is so devastating that your intent to keep them private is not sufficiently mitigating. The hurt your words have inflicted on Ms Kandula’s family and community cannot be erased. Your individual actions have brought lasting shame on the Seattle Police Department, disgrace on our entire profession, and makes the job of every police officer more difficult.”
The report also says that Auderer “displayed a cruel mockery of the sanctity” of Jaahnavi’s life and that “there is no coming back from such a betrayal.” However, Rahr has disagreed with an external authority’s findings that Auderer was also in violation of the SPD’s Bias Free Policing Policy.
Few can forget the viral body-camera footage released on September 11, 2023, of Auderer laughingly telling a superior officer that Jaahnavi had “limited value” over a phone call. Auderer, at the time, was the vice president of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG) — a police union. He had been briefing the SPOG’s president Mike Solan regarding the accident that killed Jaahnavi.
Auderer had arrived at the scene as one of the first responders. Without realising that his body-cam was still recording, Auderer told Solan while driving away from the accident site, “she is dead,” before erupting into laughter seconds later. On the same phone call, he refers to Jaahnavi as “a regular person” and adds, “Yeah, just write a cheque. Eleven thousand dollars.” Auderer then continues on the same call, getting Jaahnavi’s age wrong. “She was 26 anyway, she had limited value,” he tells Solan.
In the July 10 report, Rahr observes: “It has been quite striking to me the number of people I talk with in the greater Seattle community who feel that your dehumanising laughter was more disgraceful and disturbing than the death of Ms Kandula.”
The SPD interim chief also adds, “Your gleeful laughter and callous comments about the ‘limited value’ of Ms Kandula’s life displayed a cruel mockery of the sanctity of her life. There is no coming back from such a betrayal of that sacred trust. Not only did your comments irrecoverably break the public’s trust in you as an individual officer, but they also did extreme damage to the public’s trust in the entire Seattle Police Department. Your actions make it harder for every member of SPD to do their job with community support.”
How Auderer was caught
Jaahnavi had been killed in January 2023, but Auderer’s actions only came to light in September of that year when during a routine check, an SPD employee watched the footage and escalated the matter to the department’s chief. The footage was then referred to the Office of Public Accountability (OPA) and released to the public, as they are legally bound to do.
At the time, Divest SPD, a Seattle-based police watchdog, alleged that Auderer had a history of racial violence while on duty. They highlighted how he had already been the subject of eighteen investigations by the OPA since 2014, including for having illegally stopped, harassed and violently arrested two Mexican immigrants in 2010. Also, in 2010, Auderer along with 14 other SPD officers were accused of causing permanent brain damage to a mentally ill man they brutally assaulted. In 2017, the injured man’s guardian settled a federal civil rights claim for 1.75 million USD.
Divest SPD had further alleged at the time that Kevin Dave had no reason to be speeding and that he’d been only three minutes away from his destination when he hit Jaahnavi.
The July 10 report acknowledges Auderer’s past offences. According to the report, this is the third sustained allegation of unprofessionalism against him.
In 2017, he was put on a four-day suspension for violating the SPD’s discretion policy. Auderer, who was neither on duty nor within his jurisdiction posed as a pizza delivery person to participate in an arrest without any official authorisation.
Auderer received a written reprimand in 2018 and was ordered to re-train in the SPD’s professionalism policy for ridiculing a person who had told him that she had a medical condition that affected her ability to follow his instructions. Again, in 2022 Auderer received another reprimand as he had inserted “inappropriate and irrelevant editorial comments” regarding his personal views on the city’s “failures” in a police report.
The SPD too, has a bad track record
In January this year, the OPA released a press statement regarding its investigation into Auderer. “The OPA found that the officer violated SPD’s professionalism and bias-based policing policies by laughing about Kandula’s death, describing her as having ‘limited value’, and making other disparaging remarks.”
However, as previously mentioned, the SPD’s interim chief is in disagreement with these finds and says in her July 10 report, “Regarding your alleged violation of the Bias Free Policing Policy, I disagree with the conclusions of OPA sustaining that allegation and will take the necessary steps to overturn their finding.”
Further, as TNM’s reports pointed out last year, the SPD itself had come under OPA investigation in 2023. It had been discovered in July that year that a mock tombstone for a 19-year-old Black man killed by officers of the department had been placed in the station breakroom. The mocking tombstone, which also bore the raised fist symbol of BLM, was kept alongside a campaign flag for Donald Trump, who is once again in the running for the US Presidency.
Read: Seattle cop who mocked Indian student's death has history of racist behaviour