As Bill Gates'police chief, Jeff Chen spent his days driving the mean streets—well, the kindly country lanes—of wealthy Medina in his big Chevy Tahoe, protecting the rich and coddling the famous.
Kevin P. Casey
Kevin P. Casey
Chen's crowning achievement as police chief was the installation of round-the-clock surveillance cameras in the tony town of Medina.
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That could explain the four machine guns.
Nobody in the nine-person Medina Police Department was trained to use them. But Chief Chen thought they were right for his tiny (pop. 3,000) town, necessary for the "defense of the city," as he puts it. "Due to the caliber of the residents in our community," he says, "we are a high-risk target."
In recent years, Chinese President Hu Jintao has dropped by Gates' 48,000-square-foot Lake Washington abode for dinner, and Bono recently spent a night at the billionaire's pad between U2 concerts. George W. Bush came by for a couple of fund-raisers, one at the waterfront home of cell-phone tycoon Craig McCaw in neighboring Hunts Point, which contracts with Medina for police services. Michelle Obama showed up for lunch last year at the Medina mansion of Costco co-founder Jeff Brotman, and Bill Clinton has been a regular on the Medina/Hunts Point Gold Coast, dotted with Forbes 400 members, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Incorporated in 1955 and named for the holy Saudi Arabian "radiant city" of Medina—whose entry is restricted to Muslims only—the Eastside town, despite appearances, doesn't exclusively comprise white multimillionaires. Medina is 12 percent Asian and three percent Latino. The 2010 census also lists one black household. What's more, Ichiro lives there. He and the other moneybags helped push Medina's average household income to $170,000 (compared to $67,000 county-wide).
As a minority, Chief Chen says there has been only the occasional awkward moment for him, such as when a white town official asked him if "his people" celebrated Thanksgiving. In his coal-black uniform and gold badge, Chen has won praise in his seven years as chief of the enclave, despite an inauspicious start. When Chen left the Seattle Police Department after 13 years as patrol officer and detective to become a Medina police captain in 2001, he was being questioned about billing SPD for a $382 hotel room that had been comped to him. The probe was dropped after he departed, and was one of the few smudges on Chen's otherwise spotless career record.
In 2007, Chen scored extra points after Medina leaders approved installation of a town-wide security-camera system. It scans the license plates of incoming vehicles, filtering the numbers through police and motor-vehicle databases to identify owners and discover any outstanding violations. The ACLU complained about privacy invasion, and Chen took some heat for making a side deal with Craig McCaw's Clearwire Corp. to install a wireless broadcast tower disguised as the City Hall flagpole—needed to aid the security-camera system, Chen said. The tower, while built at no cost to the city, was also erected without permits. But Chen brushed off critics, including those who said Clearwire benefited from its customers' use of the tower for high-speed Internet service.
What mattered more to the locals was security, and Chen was getting that job done. Thanks to the Big Brother camera system and a community prone to report "suspicious" newcomers, crime has no rate in Medina. There was one assault last year, along with one drug violation. Among the roughly 1,100 households, there were nine burglaries or attempts, and one car theft. Most important, there were no rapes, robberies, or any kind of violent crime last year. The annual police crime report doesn't even bother to include a line for homicide. It's been even quieter this year: The report for April lists zero for every crime category. Medina was Nirvana—a town where absolutely nothing bad seemed to happen.
Then came the bloodcurdling screams—from Chen's admirers. Their chief, they learned, had lost his job.
Chen says he was forced to resign by City Manager Donna Hanson, who says he submitted his resignation unprompted. What has now become a half-year battle royale over who did what and why began in December, when the 49-year-old Chen tendered his resignation and rescinded it six days later, only to be put on paid leave by Hanson. The two were joined by townsfolk in a war of words that has only grown louder, with Chen and Hanson publicly airing dirty laundry and privately calling each other liars. Things came to a head last week when Chen took a preliminary step toward a lawsuit by filing a $14 million claim against the City of Medina, alleging, among other things, defamation and racial discrimination.
Despite what they've recently learned about the chief—that he allegedly lied to a city official, misused city funds, and secretly wrote memos under some of his officers' names to quash tickets and purchase equipment—Chen's backers have rallied to his side.
"They're calling us the angry housewives. Even if we are, [City Hall had] better take us seriously," says Chen supporter Laura Weingaertner, a Medina Parks Board member and co-president of the local PTA, who describes the chief as "a great guy" and "a real cop" who "cares about the residents."
Nonetheless, Chen's been replaced by his #2 man, whom he appointed and who now questions the chief's integrity. In return, Chen portrays the new chief, Dan Yourkoski, as a selfish backstabber who ran his pay up to $170,000 one year with overtime.
