TACOMA, WA – Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank says he “won’t be silenced” despite coming under the microscope of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission following a series of provocative social media posts made by the sheriff after the Aug. 27 mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minnesota.
The suspect who shot and killed two children and injured 18 others during the first week of school was identified as a man claiming to be transgender.
Days later, Swank posted on X: “Do you think it’s time to ban trans people from owning guns?
“Everybody’s afraid to say what the truth is,” Swank told The Center Square on Tuesday. “The truth is that transgender people have mental health conditions; they need help. It’s a mental illness.”
Swank said he knew posing the question of taking gun rights away from trans people would generate a backlash, but said he welcomes the debate.
“The people on the left want gun control, right? They want guns to be removed. But people on the left also want you and me and everybody else to admit and embrace that trans people are normal people, and they don’t have a mental health condition,” he explained. “So, my question was because they want to take guns away from mentally ill people, I say that trans people are mentally ill. But the left says don’t take guns from them. It shows the hypocrisy of their arguments. I posed it as a question just to see what they would say.”
Swank said some of the responses labeled him “transphobic” but didn’t address the gun control question he posed. Other commenters agreed. One wrote, “If there is a verified link between the drugs used for their transition and the adverse action on their mental fitness, then a temporary or permanent ban would be appropriate.”
Days later, Swank received notice from WSCJTC that complaints had been filed against him for his social media comments, and he could face decertification as a law enforcement officer.
“There’s an RCW the training commission follows, and it’s to decertify police officers. And it’s for all the good things, like you commit a crime, you’ve been convicted of a felony crime, you violate the Constitution on purpose. You planted dope or evidence on somebody, you know, you did all this stuff,” he said. “But then there’s a little subsection and one of the subsections says in social media or any other type of communication, if you said something that’s disparaging to the following groups – and it’s like 20 different groups – if you said something negative about gender, about this, about that, it said they get to determine if it’s hate speech or not.”
Swank went on to call possible decertification “laughable.”
“It’s really funny because I don’t care if they do,” he said. “People think that if they decertify me and I’m no longer a cop, according to them, that then I won’t be sheriff anymore.
“But see, here’s the deal: The sheriff of the county – which is me – I’m the only one that can commission people. I commission all the deputies that are for [the] Pierce County Sheriff’s Office. I, and only I, have the authority to do that by statute,” Swank continued. “So, they could decertify me, and then I’ll just say I’m still going to commission myself. So, it doesn’t matter.”
The sheriff said if the commission does decertify him, he is prepared to go to court.
“I know it’s going to cost my family money,” Swank said. “I’ll do whatever is necessary to show that I’m a sheriff. I’m an elected politician. I’m elected by the people. I have a right to say what I want to say. What other elected official is bound by something that says that you can’t speak this way or we’re going to sanction you or whatever? That doesn’t happen at all, but it’s happening to me.”
The Center Square emailed WSCJTC for comment on the complaints against Swank.
“There is no investigation at this point – there were three cases that have been brought to our attention that WSCJTC is looking into,” WSCJTC Communications Manager David Quinlan said in an email.
Quinlan provided more information: “Sheriff Swank is the subject of three Certification cases – two initiated by complaint and one initiated by a notice of an initial disciplinary decision from his former employer, Seattle PD. They are all in intake or intake review (i.e., not yet assigned to an investigator). All certified officers, including certified Sheriffs, can be investigated for decertification. See RCW 43.101.105. If misconduct within the certification statute is proven by a preponderance of the evidence, penalties can include revocation of certification, suspension of certification, probation and/or retraining.”
Swank says no matter what the commission determines, he’s not going anywhere.
“I won’t even acknowledge it,” he said. “I’ll just tell them I don’t really care what you say. I’m still the sheriff.”