Port Orchard Police Chief Geoffrey Marti didn’t comply in a timely manner with a sheriff’s officer’s request for information in an assault investigation. Marti was wrong. Under the law, no one gets that luxury — it’s called obstruction of justice.

A Port Orchard woman filed a complaint with the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office on Sept. 19, 2016, accusing Marti of using a level of force that she categorized as an assault.

On Nov. 9, 2016, he was asked by a sheriff’s investigator for a statement. Marti didn’t respond. In fact, Marti didn’t respond for 11 months. Why? Because, he said, he didn’t feel like he had to. Read my officers’ case report, he said. “It’s a non-event.”

In the end, the prosecuting attorney found there wasn’t enough evidence of an assault to warrant prosecution. But Marti was still wrong to not comply with a request for information from an investigator. If the allegation was a “non-event,” as Marti states, then complying with the investigator’s request should have been no issue. He doesn’t get to pick and choose which requests he will comply with.

Some background: On Sept. 7, 2016, Port Orchard police investigated a report that a mother had struck her child. Ultimately, the woman was not arrested and not charged. But she became upset and yelled during the encounter with police. She said she lost her temper when an officer told her child, “I’m really sorry you have to be stuck with this mommy.” (Officer Jerry Jensen made no mention of that in his report, but did write, when the mom called 911, “I went back to my car while she had a meltdown with CenCom.”)

The mother told the Kitsap News Group that the 911 operator advised her to calm down and get out of her car, and that when she did so, “I was grabbed by my shoulders and shoved up against the car.” That was the level of force she categorized as an assault.

The woman visited Mayor Rob Putaansuu two days later and complained, and he recommended that she report any alleged assault to the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office, which she did on Sept. 19, 2016.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Daniel Twomey wrote Marti on Nov. 9, 2016, advising he had completed a case report and forwarded it to the prosecutor’s office. Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Ione George asked Twomey to obtain a statement from Marti regarding the incident. “I can take the statement from you orally, or I believe completing a supplemental report to your [case report] would suffice,” Twomey wrote Marti.

Almost 10 months later, on Aug. 31, 2017, George said she had recently asked again for the information. Asked why the next day, Marti told this newspaper that the allegation was “a non-event” and that the sheriff’s office should simply read his own officers’ case reports.

Even though the investigation was completed, the sheriff’s office and the prosecutor’s office declined to release documents related to the case; presumably, because the prosecutor had asked for a statement from Marti, officials were able to claim the investigation was ongoing and the documents therefore exempt from public disclosure.

This forced this newspaper to file public records requests with several agencies so we could gather facts regarding what had happened. (In our public records requests, we learned Marti has been the subject of five employee incident reports, one of which resulted in a warning and two of which involved his temper; the latter two spurred our interest in the Sept. 7, 2016, case.)

After our last public records requests, perhaps coincidentally, Marti submitted the information George sought and she issued her decision.

This should never have been allowed to drag on this long. In our opinion, Marti received treatment that generally would not be afforded anyone else.

The public deserves to know that all individuals, even police chiefs, are treated the same under the law.