Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Investigate West.
Shortly after Kalispel Tribal Police Detective Phineas Haglin arrested a woman at the Northern Quest Resort and Casino outside Spokane, Washington, he found a hotel security guard and asked if video surveillance captured the encounter.
The guard said no, mistakenly.
Haglin, believing there was no video, then gave a false account in his sworn statement, investigators found. The woman never shoved him hard enough that he staggered back two steps when he approached her at a bar at the casino’s concert venue, as he had claimed.
Video surveillance showed what really happened. Haglin, who was wearing a mix of police uniform and street clothes, tried to cut the woman off from drinking alcohol. She and a friend walked away. When he approached again, she cursed at him. But she never shoved him backward. Instead, Haglin grabbed her by the arms. When she tried to get away, he grabbed her by the hair, pulling out her hair extensions.
Haglin radioed for help before she got away, and four Kalispel Tribal Police Department officers rushed over believing they were responding to an assault on an officer.
Those officers formally complained about Haglin’s conduct. An internal investigation found that Haglin’s attempt to arrest the woman was unlawful because she had not shoved him, and that his actions led to “another officer sustaining injuries that she should not have had to endure,” a department supervisor wrote.
During the investigation, Haglin admitted he would have “written the report differently” had he known there was video.
When Haglin surrendered his department-issued cellphone, investigators also found evidence he’d been soliciting sex workers and receiving naked photos from their website ads. Haglin was fired on Sept. 27, 2021, about a week after the arrest.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been fired from a Washington police department.
Before ending up at Kalispel, Haglin worked at 10 other police departments in Washington over more than 30 years, including four tribal police departments. At least two of those 11 departments — Sauk-Suiattle Tribal Police and Asotin County Sheriff’s Office — fired him, according to public records obtained by InvestigateWest.
Neither Haglin nor the Kalispel Tribal police department responded to separate requests for an interview.
Tribal police departments make up a small fraction of Washington’s law enforcement workforce, but they are a disproportionately common landing place for officers like Haglin who’ve been fired elsewhere, according to an analysis by InvestigateWest and the Invisible Institute of nearly three decades of officer employment records in Washington. Though tribal police account for only 2.5% of the state’s law enforcement workforce, about 11% of fired officers who stayed in law enforcement went directly to work for a tribal police department — more than four times tribal police departments’ share of the workforce.
Many of these officers were fired or resigned in lieu of termination after being accused of misconduct, a review of employment history and state disciplinary records shows.
Critics say that agencies employing “wandering officers,” a term which refers to officers fired by one agency who go on to get hired at another, are exposing themselves to increased liability, and their citizens to increased risks to their safety. Research shows that fired officers who move to other departments are more likely to commit misconduct and to be fired again. Though the majority of wandering officers end up at non-tribal agencies, critics say InvestigateWest’s findings pose concerns for tribal communities, which data shows are subjected to disproportionate police violence and misconduct.
“Hiring a wandering officer always poses a risk,” said Benjamin Grunwald, a professor of law at Duke University and author of prominent research on wandering police officers. “It’s especially true when it comes to the tribal departments … which presumably are serving communities with fewer economic resources, less political power, and more opportunities for law enforcement abuse to cause harm to the community.”
The trend highlights the unique position of tribal police departments, which may lack resources to recruit officers and struggle with critical staffing shortages. It also points to ongoing failures by the state of Washington’s Criminal Justice Training Commission, the state agency responsible for granting, denying or revoking law enforcement certifications. Despite an expanded enforcement mandate to decertify bad cops, the agency has been stymied by poor disciplinary documentation from police agencies and a yearslong investigation backlog — enabling officers accused of disqualifying misconduct to retain their certification for years and get a new job before any investigation shows up on their record. Though the commission was partly intended to prevent wandering officers, the state law on policing certification that expanded the agency lacks any mandates for increased scrutiny of fired officers who move between departments unless there’s been a completed investigation finding serious misconduct.
“It’s one of the worst trends in eroding police-community relations, and I’m alarmed to see that this is still happening with tribal police agencies,” said state Rep. Roger Goodman, D-Kirkland, chair of the powerful House Community Safety Committee.
Officers wander while investigations take years
In 2017, then-Tacoma police Officer Jesse Jahner responded to a 911 call about a child in mental distress. Social workers watching the 9-year-old boy had grown concerned when the child grabbed kitchen knives and broke dishes and windows while his grandmother ran an errand. She’d returned and calmed the boy before Jahner and his partner, Damion Birge, arrived.
It wasn’t the first time the officers had been called to transport the boy, who had cognitive disabilities and severe mental illnesses, to the hospital. But this time, the officers told the grandmother they wouldn’t reply to further calls unless she beat the child with a folded belt, according to accounts from the grandmother and a social worker.
Birge told the child’s grandmother she should “beat the demons out” of the child, according to court records, and the officers instructed her to strike the child “for every window” he broke.
For more than five minutes, the grandmother beat her grandson with the belt at least 20 times while Jahner held the child facedown with his buttocks exposed, witnesses to the beating said, according to court documents.
The grandmother later told police she “had promised [the child] she would never hit him, but she felt pressured to do so by the officers,” court documents say.
The next day, medical staff at the Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in Tacoma called police after noticing marks on the child’s back, sides and arms. Jahner was fired over the incident in October 2018, charged with felony assault on a child and official misconduct.
Tacoma Police Department reported “disqualifying misconduct” on his notice of separation sent to the Criminal Justice Training Commission.
But it’d be nearly six years, and after another termination on his record, before Jahner lost his Washington law enforcement certification.
A judge dropped charges against Jahner and his partner in 2019 after the officers petitioned Pierce County Superior Court for dismissal, arguing they’d acted within the law. The state appealed.
As the state’s appeal moved through the courts, Jahner didn’t want to stop being a cop.
“He’s hoping to get back on the force because he’s a good officer,” his lawyer said.
So Jahner got a job working for the Cowlitz Indian Tribal Public Safety Department, where he worked for around two years until he was fired again in February 2021, records show.
Shortly before his firing from the Cowlitz tribal police, an appeals court reinstated charges against Jahner. In 2023, a jury found him guilty of official misconduct and acquitted him of third-degree assault on a child, after his attorney argued in court that Jahner acted properly and was merely advising the grandmother of her right to use physical punishment under Washington law.
Jahner’s 2023 conviction would have disqualified him from keeping his law enforcement certification — but even though the original complaint was received in 2018, the commission’s official investigation didn’t begin until months after Jahner was convicted in 2023. In March 2024, as the probe was still going on, Jahner voluntarily surrendered his certification, ending the investigation. Jahner did not respond to a request for comment.
Grunwald, the expert on wandering officers, says that his research shows these officers are more likely to be terminated again compared to officers who have never been fired, and that they face more civilian complaints. He says that it’s a potential red flag if officers have moved around to several departments in short succession, even if they haven’t been clearly fired from each post.
InvestigateWest’s review of employment data found that the Nooksack Indian Tribe Police Department, Chehalis Tribal Law Enforcement and the Tulalip Tribal Police Department have all hired five or more fired officers, and a total of 22 tribes hired multiple wandering officers, though not all are necessarily employed at any agency at the same time.
The police department that hired the most wandering officers was the nontribal Mabton Police Department, at nine officers, where Haglin — who was fired from Kalispel after the casino arrest — served as the chief of the police between 2016 and 2018. The agency currently has a police chief and two full-time officers on staff.
Jahner is one of 83 officers reviewed by InvestigateWest with multiple firings on their record, but he’s one of only nine of those officers who lost their certification to work as a cop in Washington. The rest are actively employed as officers or could be hired as one at any time if they did not have a break in service of two years or more, when certifications require renewal.
Like many officers under investigation by the Criminal Justice Training Commission, Haglin surrendered his law enforcement certification in 2023 amid a review, halting any further investigation or a public hearing. His lawyer, James David, said in a November 2023 email to the commission that it was because Haglin had retired, not because he believed his certification should be revoked.
It had been more than two years since he’d been fired, but Haglin’s surrender still halted the commission’s investigation, meaning the agency did not hold any hearings or make findings on Haglin’s misconduct.
“It really raises a lot of concerns around background checks and if our state decertification processes are being effective,” said Anita Yandle, counsel for the New York University Policing Project, a nonprofit organization based out of the NYU School of Law that works to promote public safety.
Recruiting officers
Limited resources and prolonged staffing shortages have incentivized some agencies to rely on officers who have been trained — and fired — elsewhere.
As sovereign entities, tribal governments have broad latitude to set training and certification standards for the officers they hire. Tribes can hire officers who aren’t certified by Washington state and don’t meet the Criminal Justice Training Commission’s requirements.
Still, 25 of the 29 federally recognized tribes sharing geography with Washington and that maintain their own tribal police departments have opted into Washington’s certification process through an interagency agreement with the state commission. Tribes with their own police may choose to pursue state certification to improve cohesion with state and county law enforcement, especially in areas where gaming is present, since unless a tribal police officer obtains a state peace officer designation, their jurisdiction is strictly limited over non-Native Americans and uncertified officers can’t work alongside general authority agencies.
The interagency agreements with the state commission create a pathway for tribes to work more closely with other agencies while respecting tribal sovereignty. Tribes with an interagency agreement with the state commission were responsible for roughly four times the cost of basic training compared to non-tribal departments in Washington, due to being classified as “non-mandated” departments, according to a 2022 progress report on implementation of the policing certification law. That changed in 2024, after lawmakers passed a bill adjusting the payment structure for tribes holding an agreement with the state commission that brought them in line with state and county law enforcement agencies.
But the report, completed by members of the Criminal Justice Training Commission, found tribes frequently opt to send their officers to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico, then apply for the equivalency certificate, which costs less because tribes only have to pay for the officer’s travel. And as the report notes, “it may not align or prepare officers necessarily with Washington state policing,” particularly with regard to standards on de-escalation, use of force and duty to intervene when witnessing another officer using excessive force.
Tribes across Washington have hired multiple wandering officers as they still report chronic staffing shortages, including at the Tulalip Tribal Police Department, Chehalis Tribal Public Safety Department, Colville Tribal Police Department, Lummi Nation Police Department and Kalispel Tribal Police Department.
Several tribes that remain under state criminal jurisdiction under a federal law, called Public Law 280, do not currently maintain their own police departments, and others have chosen not to enter agreements with the state commission. Data on the officers employed by departments that do not have an interagency agreement, including the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, were not part of InvestigateWest and Invisible Institute’s analysis.
Because many non-tribal departments can offer higher pay, more benefits and pensions that tribal governments don’t have access to, tribal departments may be faced with a choice between accepting officers with less-desirable employment histories or being understaffed.
“Currently, state and federal law enforcement can provide retirement and other types of compensation benefits that tribes can’t provide to law enforcement … even though tribes have been trying to keep up, we’ve had a great deal of problems in keeping the commissioned officers,” U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, testified at a 2023 hearing before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.
Proposed federal legislation, called the Parity for Tribal Law Enforcement Act, aims to open up access to federal pension benefits for tribal departments. It has broad bipartisan support among Washington’s congressional representatives and tribal governments, but has languished in Congress due to budgetary concerns. A 2023 state law, approved as House Bill 1481, allows tribes to enter interagency agreements to access to the state’s police and firefighter pension program. So far only the Puyallup Tribe of Indians has finalized such an agreement. Instead of pensions, a number of tribes offer retirement plans or profit-sharing agreements for officers.
“We’ve had difficulty recruiting, training and retaining quality officers,” then-Tulalip Tribal Police Chief Chris Sutter testified at a public hearing on the bill in 2023.
Missing records
Despite some improvements, the Criminal Justice Training Commission’s documentation on officer firings and misconduct remains patchy, and a case backlog means cops who should be decertified — and ineligible to be hired — fall through the cracks.
The agency can prioritize cases where separated officers facing a potential investigation are seeking employment elsewhere — but an InvestigateWest review shows that doesn’t always happen before the officer obtains new employment.
Tribal police departments disproportionately hired those officers without having a complete picture of their employment history.
Robert Lee Anderson III began working at the Lummi Nation Police Department in October 2024. It was nearly three months since he had been fired from Western Washington University Police Department for striking a handcuffed man in the face after he and a fellow officer found the man breaking into one of their private vehicles in January of that year. The Western Washington University Police Department reported misconduct and pending criminal charges on Anderson’s notice of separation, and Anderson pleaded guilty to fourth-degree assault, a gross misdemeanor, for the incident. And amid a case backlog that delayed the investigation, Anderson’s certification remained active, and still is today, records show. Then a “discrepancy” in his background check with the Lummi Tribal Police allowed him to get hired. Just two months after he started, Anderson was fired again, once the severity of his conviction was discovered, according to Anderson’s notice of separation document.
Under the 2021 decertification law passed as SB 5051, all departments with officers certified by the state, including certified tribal officers, have legal responsibilities to conduct background checks on candidates before hiring, including thoroughly examining an officer’s past employment history and complaints made against them.
Prior to his employment in Washington, Anderson worked as a police officer in Williams, Arizona, for 12 years. Why he left is unclear, as Arizona law allows officers to purge their disciplinary records after three years. Anderson is currently under investigation by the Criminal Justice Training Commission, and the agency has discretion in his case, since automatic disqualification for excessive force has a high bar — an officer must be terminated from their agency and found to have committed excessive force that was both illegal and resulted in serious injury or death to face automatic disqualification. Anderson was fired and the incident was litigated as an assault, but since it did not cause “serious injury” as defined by Washington law, it is not automatically disqualifying.
Meanwhile, the agency has been operating under a worsening case backlog since SB 5051 broadened the type of misconduct for which an officer would automatically lose, or be eligible to lose, their certification, and also created a process for the commission to begin accepting civilian complaints.
That, along with staffing shortages, contributed to a current case backlog of more than 1,500 cases. Some cases have gone uninvestigated for years, including between 30 and 50 serious cases at a given time, according to lawmakers. The vast majority of cases will be closed either due to lack of evidence or jurisdiction, while others will end in a settlement allowing the accused officer to remain certified. Still others will end with an officer voluntarily surrendering their certification — but that still leaves hundreds of complaints that will need to be thoroughly investigated, especially if the officer contests the commission’s findings.
“It’s a huge slog that they have to go through,” said Goodman, the Kirkland legislator. The agency self-reports its decertification actions, and has decertified about 47 officers a year for the last four years, and addresses about 400 complaints but receives more than 900 per year.
SB 5051 didn’t mandate timelines or staffing requirements for conducting investigations. Its only mandatory deadlines are to give officers 60 days to request a hearing after receiving a statement of charges, and then 90 additional days for the hearing to take place. But there’s no legal clock running on how long the commission can sit on a case without investigating. Without a statutory deadline, serious cases can languish indefinitely, while the accused officer remains certified and employed.
The commission provided InvestigateWest with data only for officer separations dating back to 1997. But that dataset may not account for every officer who was fired between now and then. When studying Washington employment data, Grunwald found the number of documents accounting for officer separations in Washington during the 1990s and early 2000s were improbably low, meaning that it is possible there are more officers who have been fired or committed misconduct than the available data captures.
Research shows that wandering officers tend to end up working at smaller departments with fewer resources, often policing communities of color — and 82% of all U.S. tribal police departments have fewer than 25 officers, including the vast majority of tribal police departments in Washington.
State Rep. Chris Stearns, D-Auburn, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and sponsor of the state bill on pension access for tribes, says that in his experience working closely with tribes, there’s a strong desire to hire qualified candidates that will best protect the needs, culture, and interests of tribal citizens, elders, and children.
Native Americans face the highest risk of deadly police violence of any race, and 2026 research from the University of Washington shows Native Americans on and near reservations face a disproportionate risk of being killed by police, with the report stating that a “coordinated public health response to police violence is urgently needed in Indian Country.”
“They should have an interest in hiring the best people,” Stearns said. “You don’t want your elders to get roughed up by someone, that goes against our values.”
Critics like Yandle, the NYU lawyer, say agencies that make a habit of hiring wandering officers are exposing their agencies and their citizens to outsized risk, particularly in tribal communities that are historically overpoliced by law enforcement.
“Placing officers who are known to have committed misconduct or have other similar red flags in their history in communities where we already know that police officers are statistically more likely to violate someone’s rights really places a community at risk,” she said.
