Six years ago, Greg Neubert was a white Central District cop with a reputation as--depending on who you talked with--either a thug in uniform or a valuable check against the drug dealers ruining the 'hood.

Then he got famous.

On May 31, 2001, Neubert and his white partner pulled over a 37-year-old black convicted felon, Aaron Roberts, in a parking lot at 23rd and Union. Roberts, with a warrant out for having left a day release program and with coke and alcohol in his blood, panicked when Neubert reached inside his idling vehicle, presumably to turn off the ignition. Roberts accelerated, catching Neubert's arm in the window, and from the passenger side Neubert's partner shot the unarmed Roberts dead.

Witnesses challenged the two white cops' account of what was at the time the latest in a string of fatal shootings of unarmed black men by white Seattle cops. Three days of protests in the Central District followed Roberts' death. Naturally, as has happened without exception for every single one of the over 100 cop-related civilian fatalities since the current King County inquest system was adopted, an inquest found the shooting to be justified. Few in the Central District agreed.

Two years later, Neubert was back in the news again. In August 2003 Officer Neubert filed a civil lawsuit against Roberts' mother, claiming that by letting her son use her car that fateful night, she was responsible for the sprained back Neubert allegedly suffered in the incident. It wasn't enough that her troubled son was murdered. Since workers' comp would have covered any medical costs, and the lawsuit was on the face of it spurious (Neubert would have had to prove that Roberts' mom explicitly gave Aaron permission to flee police with a cop's arm inside the vehicle), it was thrown out--but not before dragging Roberts' family through the mud and grief all over again.

A month before Neubert filed his lawsuit, Aaron Roberts' teenage son, Aaron Jr., haunted by his dad's death, shot and killed himself.

Two years later, in September 2005, Neubert, now transferred from the East to the West Precinct, was in the news yet again. He was one of two officers who opened fire and wounded a motorcyclist, 21-year-old Francisco Figueroa-Cook, who allegedly shot into the air and toward a crowd outside a Belltown club. A bystander was also wounded in the incident.

Now it's 2007, and guess who's in the news again? From the 4-4-07 P-I:

Leaders of some local community groups and the NAACP are calling on Seattle police to widen the inquiry into the conduct of two Seattle officers accused of falsifying information on a police report after a drug arrest in January. James Bible, president of the Seattle chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the investigation into the conduct of Officers Greg Neubert and Mike Tietjen calls into question all other arrests they have made...

Prosecutors dismissed the case against the man, then took the unusual step of writing to defense attorneys representing others arrested by the two officers, informing them that the officers were under investigation. In all, attorneys representing defendants in about 30 cases were contacted. All involved drug arrests, two of them being prosecuted at the federal level.

The man arrested in the incident was in a wheelchair. No further details of the man's allegations regarding the arrest have been made public.

Here's the kicker: Neubert and Tietjen were West Precinct Officers of the Year in 2006, in large part for their record of busting street-level buyers and sellers of drugs.

It's problematic enough that SPD is wasting endless tax dollars on an unwinnable War on Drugs--one that, by emphasizing street sales, targets almost exclusively minorities and the poor. Neubert is, judging from his 2006 award, regarded as a cop's cop. And what does that say about a department that honors a man who roughed up a guy in a wheelchair (over, allegedly, $30 worth of crack), shot one person, triggered the shooting and killing of another, and then launched a petty, vindictive, otherwise pointless lawsuit against his victim's family? It bespeaks, among other things, a serious level of contempt for the underclasses Officer Neubert is supposed to be serving and protecting, the same folks routinely victimized by drugs, by the black market the War on Drugs engenders, and by the War itself. A War in which Neubert is a decorated soldier. And it bespeaks a badly misguided set of priorities on behalf of the police force doing the decorating.

If this guy is a hero, there's something seriously wrong with the Seattle Police Department.