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After an alleged assault inside the Northwest ICE Processing center, the private company running the facility conducts an internal investigation.

But that process can often be faulty, as we reported yesterday.

Experts say the Tacoma Police Department should also be conducting its own separate investigation.

Yet that hasn't always happened in the past.

Multimedia Journalist Jaelynn Grisso has more on those findings.

Javon Gordon had been detained for months when he returned to his cell in late 2024 and found his belongings scattered on the floor, according to a lawsuit filing.

He protested to his supervisor and, while talking to the supervisor, two other guards allegedly threw and pinned him to the ground.

They chain his hands in his feet, both behind his back.

So he's defenseless.

And then one of the guards delivers a, kind of a, knee strike to his ribcage.

Gordon, along with two others, filed a lawsuit against Geo Group, the private company that runs the facility.

The lawsuit describes an internal hearing during which he learned there was a video recording, but was not allowed to see it.

It's beginning to appear with the new trainees who are coming into the facility that the video of Javon's beatin is being used in training.

One staff member, who had been in the facility a little bit longer, told Javon he was so alarmed by what he saw in the video that he told Javon to get a lawyer.

And that is what puts Javon on the path to participating in this lawsuit.

Records from TPD show that Gordon also called and reported the assault to police, who responded saying it was not TPD jurisdiction and that they let GEO staff know that they can handle the complaint in house.

However, both experts and TPD agree that the police do have jurisdiction.

TPD declined an on-camera interview for this story.

Researchers at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights released a report last year revealing that Gordon's case is far from the exception.

Of the nearly 160 cases spanning a decade, only two of the cases ever went to prosecution.

In those two cases, guards were the ones assaulted, despite the majority of calls to 911 being from detainees.

Now, that's not to say that people weren't facility employees can't be victims, but we know that the overwhelming majority of the reports of violence were being made by detained folks.

And we saw a systematic pattern of dismissing those claims.

Additionally, detainees cannot call 911.

People within the facility cannot call 911.

Not that they're not allowed to, that they literally can't.

There is not the technological capacity from within the facility to call 911.

So in order for a detained person to call 911, they have to ask a guard to call for them.

The report highlighted several key findings from the analysis of public records, including that TPD failed to follow up with detained victims more frequently than staff, and that TPD frequently didn't pursue an investigation because GEO was conducting an internal investigation.

TPD declined to comment on the report, saying, quote, there is additional context surrounding the cases referenced, which spanned more than a decade of responses and quote.

Godoy says that TPD has clear jurisdiction over crimes in the center, despite records showing TPD officers claiming they didn't have jurisdiction in some cases in the past.

An informational directive published by TPD last fall reinforced this, explicitly saying the department provides law enforcement services at the center for both detainees and staff.

The UW report listed example after example of cases the police dismissed like Gordon's, which will now go into discovery, meaning he may soon gain access to the video at the heart of his case.

I'm Paris Jackson.

Thanks for watching.

To see this week's stories on troubling incidents and how they're investigated at the Northwest ICE Processing Center, visit CascadePBS.org/TheNewsfeed.