Passion defined Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich’s tenure in Spokane County, for good and for ill
During his more than 16 years running the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, Ozzie Knezovich remained aware that county commissioners put their political capital on the line naming him sheriff.
“You know, I was not the frontrunner,” Knezovich said earlier this month by phone from his home in Rock Springs, Wyoming. “As a matter of fact, the party had chosen somebody else.”
Spokane County Commissioners Todd Mielke, Mark Richards and Phil Harris emerged from that closed-door session in April 2006 and named a then-43-year-old sergeant their pick as the county’s top law enforcement official.
“It added an extra dimension of pressure, if you will,” said Knezovich, who on Dec. 31 ended his last term as sheriff. “It was always important that I lived up to that trust that they had put in me.”
He has consistently received overwhelming support at the polls and had earned national recognition for the agency. But critics say his sometimes bombastic leadership has led to lawsuits and unnecessary tension with other leaders in the community.
Mielke is a longtime political ally who took a job with the sheriff’s office in 2019 as its chief administrative officer.
“I don’t know that Ozzie was necessarily my top choice at the time,” Mielke said. “If he was, it was a horse race, neck-and-neck.”
The commissioners were forced to name a new sheriff after then-Sheriff Mark Sterk resigned before the end of his term. Sterk had urged commissioners to choose Spokane Valley Police Chief Cal Walker to replace him.
Mielke said Knezovich’s subsequent career vindicated the 2006 vote he made after the commission interviewed the three candidates up for the job.
“I believe that he continued to improve the agency during his tenure as sheriff,” Mielke continued. “He was passionate about the work he did.”
The positives of that passion were on display in the jury room of the Spokane County Courthouse last month, when members of Knezovich’s staff and community members bestowed honors on the sheriff and listed accomplishments. Among them were combining fire, 911 and law enforcement calls in the county to improve emergency responses, creating a task force of law enforcement agencies to combat gang violence in the community, re-energizing the county’s Sheriff Community Oriented Policing Effort to improve neighborhood responses to crime and serving as a founding member of the Spokane County Human Rights Task Force.
Knezovich also led the charge to modernize the county’s emergency communications systems and restart Crime Check, the nonemergency crime reporting line that had been cut due to budget shortfalls.
“As much as people want to accuse Sheriff Knezovich of being self-serving, what I have learned, serving next to him all these years, is anything but,” Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels, Knezovich’s successor, said at Knezovich’s retirement gathering that included county elected officials, members of the sheriff’s office and deputies. “He has done what he has felt was the best for you, for us, for all the citizens of Spokane County.”
Knezovich said his decisions during his time in office were guided by a simple principle.
“Do the right thing for the right reason, sort of politics be damned, if you will,” Knezovich said. “It served me well. I can’t complain about any of that.”
Talking politics
The approach led to the sheriff often using, especially in recent years, a public megaphone to call out people with whom he disagreed on politics and law enforcement issues, sometimes with consequences both legal and in relationships with others in the community.
Knezovich was a vocal critic of former Republican state Rep. Matt Shea, who was ousted from the House GOP caucus in 2019 after an investigation found he engaged in domestic terrorism, even as others in the Republican Party stood by the Spokane Valley lawmaker. In later years, he turned his attention to members of the Democratic Party, including local and state elected officials, whom he accused of pushing policies that promoted lawlessness.
“I watched the extremism grow on both sides,” Knezovich said. “I came into office during the Bush era, and I had to worry about the left extreme. With Obama, I had to worry about the right extreme. When Trump came into office, I had to worry about both.”
Knezovich said he noticed relationships he’d had with Democrats souring after the 2016 presidential election, and he began calling out what he called “progressive” politicians, whom he differentiated from Democrats.
“To this day, I have no problem calling them out,” Knezovich said.
In 2022, Knezovich condemned several lawmakers, including a Spokane County Commission candidate, in a video released on the Sheriff’s Office Facebook page and filmed at the county Public Safety Building while Knezovich was in uniform. The Washington Public Disclosure Commission late last year fined Knezovich $300 for violating state electioneering laws, a fine Knezovich has vowed to appeal.
What about the jail?
One of the lawmakers criticized by name in that video was Spokane City Council President Breean Beggs. He has been targeted by Knezovich frequently after serving as a private practice attorney, a lawyer for the Center for Justice that advocated for criminal defendants in the community and later joining the liberal-leaning wing of the Spokane City Council.
“He has a particular style that I think he thought was going to work,” Beggs said of Knezovich, before referencing the recent jury verdict in a defamation lawsuit brought by a former deputy against the sheriff that will cost the county $20 million. The county plans to appeal the decision.
“We both believed strongly that people were generally good, that if they got the right programs to meet their needs they could be productive members of the community,” Beggs continued.
The difference was where those people should receive that help, Beggs said. Knezovich thought they should remain in custody, while Beggs advocated for release.
Knezovich said building a new jail, for which he said he’s advocated along with additional community justice efforts, was the one thing he wished he’d been able to do during his tenure.
“I wish I would have been able to accomplish getting the jail done,” Knezovich said. The Spokane County Commission took over operations of the jail in 2013 after several years of public debate about a new facility.
Knezovich said the move was intended to distance himself from the ongoing discussion about the future of the facility.
Mielke said commissioners wanted to devote more of their attention to the jail staff, who had expressed concern about being overshadowed by the interests of deputies on the streets.
“We did separate it, and it came under the control, oversight and guidance of the commissioners,” Mielke said. “There continued to be a desire to do something.”
Knezovich continued in his recent interview to suggest forces including Beggs had prevented the construction of a new facility years ago, potentially costing lives and taxpayer dollars. Beggs said he continues to be puzzled by the accusation.
“He somehow holds me responsible they didn’t build one,” Beggs said. “I had no formal political power or influence over that at all.”
Knezovich still feels passionately about what a future jail proposal should look like. He spoke against the approach pushed by current Commissioners Al French and Josh Kerns to ask voters to approve a 0.2% sales tax to raise the funds for a new jail. Knezovich said such an approach would allow local jurisdictions to opt out and that such funds should go toward paying more people, including deputies, attorneys and jail staff, not building a facility that the community is likely to outgrow quickly.
“In order for the system to run, you’ve got to have programming,” Knezovich said. The former sheriff said he’s left Nowels documentation going back a decade on how the jail system should be overhauled.
Despite their disagreement on the jail issue, French received Knezovich’s thanks at his retirement party for being “one of the great elected officials” the sheriff worked with.
“We’re sad to see him go,” French said. “He doesn’t focus that hard on party politics. That’s one of the reasons he’s got some of the highest approval ratings.”
But some have accused the sheriff of being too defensive about the job and his deputies.
Progressives, Camp Hope and culture
A culture audit of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, announced in partnership with the local chapter of the NAACP and Eastern Washington University in 2019, only attracted a 16% participation rate from deputies.
That led to a falling -out between Knezovich and Kurtis Robinson, then-president of the NAACP, that has persisted to this day.
“Quite frankly, I don’t trust him,” Knezovich said of Robinson. “We bent over backward trying to make that work. We wanted to meet with them, redo the questions and put the survey back out.”
Robinson noted that the sheriff had publicly called out himself and other criminal justice advocates in the community after the public split.
“The sheriff is so used to being in charge,” Robinson said. “When he ran into somebody that just listened – that didn’t react or respond in the same way when that person felt it wasn’t appropriate, when he couldn’t pull those levers to his satisfaction – there was no great surprise that he reverted back to the status quo.”
Knezovich said he took exception to Robinson’s public charge that the sheriff was displaying “blue fragility,” the idea that law enforcement cannot take public criticism without becoming defensive.
“This was a couple of weeks after him giving his word he’s going to work with me,” Knezovich said. “Then I read this garbage.”
“I thought I had a really strong relationship with Kurtis,” he continued. “I just really don’t have a use for him anymore.”
Beggs said he’s also seen this side of the former sheriff, particularly in the few final months of his office, when Knezovich vowed to step in and clear a homeless encampment on Washington State Department of Transportation property in East Spokane.
“He did an independent thing, threatening lawsuits and scaring people; it just delayed things,” Beggs said.
Knezovich said his stance was about community safety and concerns over drugs and criminal activity originating in the camp. He also said size estimates coming from providers in the camp and the state were inaccurate, and touted progress at the nearby shelter on Trent Avenue to provide additional services.
“We basically doubled the capacity,” Knezovich said of the city’s Trent Avenue shelter. “That helped absorb some of the issues.”
Mielke said Knezovich will be remembered for his passion to serve the community. How some chose to interpret that passion, including when it appeared as criticism of others, is up to them, Mielke said.
“Obviously, he’s a very passionate guy,” Mielke said. “On any given moment, if you don’t agree with his passion, he will let you know. How are you going to deal with that?”
Knezovich plans to spend time in retirement with family in Wyoming, where he started his law enforcement career decades ago. That includes four grandchildren. Long rumored to be considering other political offices in Spokane County, the former sheriff said such a scenario is unlikely.
“I don’t see that happening in Spokane,” he said. “We moved here to get closer to family. Going back would be counterintuitive.”
Knezovich said he’s satisfied with his time as head of the office.
“Part of the reason I didn’t run for office again, was I didn’t have anything left to accomplish,” he said. “I had pretty much done everything I had set out to do, within my span of control.”