Less than a week after the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) swore in controversial former Tacoma officer Christopher Burbank as a patrol deputy, Burbank has resigned from the position.
TCSO announced Burbank’s resignation on Wednesday, April 3.
“Today, I met with Deputy Burbank and discussed the impacts of his employment with our agency. At the end of this discussion, Deputy Burbank resigned his position with TCSO, and his resignation was accepted,” Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders stated in a news release Wednesday, adding that the decision “was based on community response and death threats made to Deputy Burbank’s family.”
Burbank was one of three officers acquitted in December for the 2020 in-custody death of Manny Ellis.
In a Reddit post Tuesday, users heavily criticized Sanders and the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office for Burbank’s hiring, according to reporting done by The Olympian.
The decision was also criticized by Shelly Washington, an impacted family member with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, who called the move “a ‘slap in the face’ to families like hers and Ellis,” the Olympian reported.
“When I made the decision to hire Deputy Burbank, I failed to consider the greater community impact and instead made the decision based on business needs to remedy TCSO’s staffing crisis. Furthermore, I entirely misjudged the community perception on the investigation and jury process that Deputy Burbank completed. I recognized the harm this has caused to marginalized communities, and I was wrong,” Sanders stated in the Wednesday news release.
When TCSO announced Burbank’s hiring on Monday, April 1, the sheriff’s office noted Burbank’s 14 years of patrol experience and the “immediate relief” his addition to the roster would provide the patrol division.
In the April 3 news release, Sanders said the “immense pressure to fill TCSO’s vacancies has increased” and added that the department has lost dozens of staff to higher paying agencies and have struggled to recruit qualified applicants.”
As of April 1, TCSO had seven additional “promising lateral applicants in the (background) process for the first time in years” and 27 total candidates in the background process, with the department was “expecting to be fully staffed with zero vacancies in patrol with a waitlist to join our team,” according to the post.
“The benefit of remaining transparent in our operations and who we hire is the ability for immediate public feedback, both good and bad,” Sanders wrote in the April 3 release. “As such, we will continue to operate in this manner moving forward. I am not above reproach, and remaining forthcoming about decisions I make allows for course correction and community input.”
Sanders stated the experience has “created opportunity to review our own current crisis response procedures and has altered my own perception of the criminal justice system as a whole.”
He ended the news release with an apology to his constituents for the hiring decision.
“Trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets. For those who have lost confidence in me or what we’re trying to accomplish at TCSO, I apologize for letting you down. I recognize there are spaces I may no longer be welcome in, and this is a challenging reality for me to accept.”
He added that he plans to schedule a public forum “where community members can express their concerns directly to me” and said “I will continue to learn and improve.”
