The Redmond Police Department (RPD) is one of 10 agencies that make up a recently launched regional team that was formed to investigate officer-involved shootings and other major incidents in King County.

Jim Bove, spokesperson for the RPD, said the way the new team — King County Investigative Response Team (KCIRT) — works is if a King County agency has a serious event, they can request investigators from KCIRT — who will investigate and likely won’t know the people involved.

“KCIRT was designed to assure transparent and unbiased investigations after serious incidents, specifically officer-involved shootings,” Bove said.

He said this doesn’t change anything for Redmond because the few times the city has had an officer-involved shooting, RPD always asked another agency to investigate. For example, in the last serious incident in Redmond a few  years ago, the department had the King County Sheriff’s Office investigate.

In addition to officer-involved shootings, other incidents in which KCIRT can be utilized include intentional and accidental use of any other dangerous or deadly weapon, assaults on law enforcement officers or other law enforcement employees, fatal or serious injuries to a subject in police custody and vehicular collisions involving police gunfire directed at a suspect or a suspect vehicle.

KCIRT was activated on June 1 after about two years of development.

According to the KCIRT model policy — which was created by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC) and approved in November 2011 — the purpose of the team is to provide law enforcement with “guidance on how to structure criminal investigations into officer involved critical incidents that are transparent and fair, and instill the public’s confidence.”

The draft continues, stating that, “maintaining the public’s confidence in the investigation processes of officer-involved critical incidents is important for the long-term relationships of an agency and its community. The goal of this model policy is to assist in that effort.”

KCIRT is available to any law enforcement agency in King County that requests the services of the team and in addition to RPD, the remaining agencies of KCIRT are Washington State Patrol, King County Sheriff’s Office the Bellevue, Kirkland, Issaquah, Bothell, Mercer, Snoqualmie and Black Diamond police departments.

Maj. Mike Johnson of the Bellevue police — the agency that took the lead in forming KCIRT — will be in charge of the new unit.

He said the formation of this task force came as more research in the last few years pointed to this model of multi-jurisdictional collaboration as a best practice. South King County has had such a model in place for officer-involved shooting incidents for a few years and Snohomish County has had a program for 20 years.

Johnson said this part of King County is just now forming its multi-jurisdictional team now because doing so is always a bit complicated and takes time to put together.

“The benefit (of having multiple agencies working on an investigation) is directly related to our ability to combine the most talented investigators and the best equipment/techniques from the many capable detectives throughout the county,” Johnson said.