SPOKANE, WA – Just over two months after the largest protest in Spokane since the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, the City Prosecutor’s Office has dismissed all misdemeanor charges for failure to disperse against the June 11 and June 14 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters.

The Spokane County Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that it has also dropped all of those charges it filed.

Public Relations Assistant Julie Humphreys cited confusion among officers and deputies and said the county expected that the city would refile. The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office had assisted the Spokane Police Department and charged several of the ICE protesters with city ordinances outside its jurisdiction.

City Prosecutor Justin Bingham told The Center Square that he has hundreds of hours of body camera footage to review first. He’s worried that judges will dismiss the cases if the city rushes them through court and fails to gather sufficient evidence to secure convictions against the dozens of protesters.

“We’re facing a lot of the same issues we did with the George Floyd cases,” Bingham said. “We had the same level of information and police reports, and those were very difficult. Ultimately, we had one of those cases that we were able to take to jury trial, and it was the same thing with [June 11 and 14].”

According to state law, a person is guilty of failure to disperse if they congregate with three or more people and their actions create a risk of injury or property damage. Those individuals must also refuse or fail to disperse when ordered by a police officer or sheriff’s deputy enforcing the misdemeanor law.

“There’s no conspiracy,” Bingham told The Center Square. “We are understaffed and under-resourced, and my office has 13 attorneys total … we have the same staffing that we’ve had since [about] 2010.”

Bingham said his office is struggling to keep pace while operating largely under the same capacity as when the city had about 25,000 fewer residents. Spokane has two years to refile before the statute of limitations runs out, but he said it will come down to resources and couldn’t speculate on the timeline.

The reports from June 11 and June 14 were difficult to articulate because officers and deputies were citing people, then handing the cases off to another person to write up. Bingham said readily available evidence just wasn’t enough for his team to proceed when it came time for the arraignments in court.

The City Prosecutor’s Office may purchase some “technical tools” to help review all the evidence, and believes it can make many of these cases into “viable prosecutions.” However, Bingham said the issue is that those tools are expensive and the city is already grappling with a multimillion-dollar deficit.

“There is nobody from the mayor’s office or from SPD that has told me that we should not proceed on these cases,” Bingham told The Center Square. “There’s no difference between the approach of Mayor Brown’s administration than Mayor Woodward’s administration — both have been very supportive.”

When asked whether she would bolster the prosecutor’s funding so Bingham could refile the charges in time, Mayor Lisa Brown told The Center Square that her administration is working to “sustain” funding.

“I value the integrity of the justice system, which is why I have not and will not provide any direction in the prosecution of these cases. I respect the work of our prosecutors and law enforcement, who are focused on addressing the most pressing public safety concerns like domestic violence, DUIs, and other crimes,” Brown told The Center Square. “At the same time, my administration is working hard to sustain funding for all of our criminal justice agencies as we face significant budget pressures.”

Humphreys said the county is still pursuing felony charges for unlawful imprisonment and assault on an officer against Justice Forral, director of operations for Spokane Community Against Racism, whom Brown appointed to the Human Rights Commission. She said the prosecutor is also still investigating Erin Lang, who initially faced felony charges for unlawful imprisonment, and may refile those against her.

The Trump administration also charged nine people with federal crimes a month after the protests. Most are accused of conspiracy to impede or injure an officer, but two also face assault charges. However, Brown rang a different tone in a statement that she released after those arrests, stating her “outrage.”

“Just learned that several community leaders were detained this morning by federal agents apparently for their roles in the June 11 demonstration at the ICE facility,” Brown wrote on July 15. “This politically motivated action is a perversion of our justice system. The Trump Administration’s weaponization of ICE and the DOJ is trampling on the U.S. Constitution and creating widespread fear across our community.”