Meet Karim Miller
...he keeps an eye out for the cops.

BY RICK ARTHUR

No, he's not some low-life thug casing a bank job while looking over his shoulder for a black-and-white, but rather the chief videographer for the Seattle Police Department, whose role it is to keep his camera-eye focused on improving the thin blue line.

Miller, WSU class of ’82 with a B.A. in communication and a hailfellow, well-met type who eats, sleeps and lives all things Cougar, films instructional videos and crime scenes for the SPD. How a selfdescribed hick from Yakima came to Pullman and later to such a job in the big city across the Cascades—and how he benefited from his education in the College of Liberal Arts—is an engaging tale, especially as he tells it in a Jimmy Stewart manner so pronounced you’d swear he had his hands in his pockets and was sticking an awshucks toe into the ground.

“I used to be on the other side of the law,” Miller sheepishly reveals in an interview in his cubbyhole of an office next to his makeshift studio in the decrepit old Public Safety Building in downtown Seattle. “There wasn’t much to do in Yakima,” he says, and his teenage misadventures brought him into not infrequent contact with that city’s police officers.

Then, the product of a single mother of six kids, a registered nurse who stressed the need for an education, he came to the Palouse.

“It was the chance of a lifetime,” he relates, when he realized he did not have to work in the orchards or in retail. “There was another option for my life.”

“This is available to ME?” he remembers thinking of his first exposure to WSU. Indeed it was, and the university gained a lifelong supporter.

In fact, it may be hard to find a Cougar more passionate than Miller, whose office walls, desk and shelves in the SPD’s former 911 communications center form a kaleidoscopic collage of WSU banners, pennants, ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, cups, trophies and other assorted gewgaws and gimcracks. The visitor’s eye doesn’t quite know where to go first when assaulted by the dizzying display, but get him to talking about it all and he’ll declaim about the photo of him and his buds, celebratory cigars in hand on the 50-yard-line of Husky Stadium savoring the 41-35 win over the hated University of Washington in 1997 that sent the Cougs to the Rose Bowl, and the one of him and his son, Spencer, posed in front of the massive “Go Cougars” sign on the combine just over the hill before Highway 195 snakes into campus.

Miller revisits that famous sign at least every other year, when he and six pals rent an RV and make the pilgrimage for the Apple Cup. “Anything goes” on the strictly stag party weekend, he says, although they’re circumspect about having a designated driver.

And although the sign wasn’t there yet, the farm combine and rolling wheat fields were among the first things he saw on his first trip to Pullman, when he was still just putting in his time at Yakima Valley Community College.

“I never thought I’d wind up at WSU,” Miller says. “I was just a Yakima country boy come to town,” visiting his girlfriend, who had a full scholarship to the university in its educational program for unwed mothers.

As it turned out, he says, he “loved the school more than the relationship”—and a good thing, too, since he’d go on to meet and marry Kim Kouba, the sister of a classmate and now his bride of 16 years and mother to sons Spencer, 9, and Guerron, 4.

It wasn’t long before Miller—whose first name, by the way, is pronounced “carom,” not “Kareem” —transferred his junior college credits to the university’s College of Liberal Arts and quickly was consumed by the joy of learning and collegiate camaraderie.

“It’s Utopia,” recalls Miller, a tall, lanky, boyish guy of 43 with closecropped hair a shade or two darker than those Palouse wheat fields. “Seventeen thousand, 18,000 students in the middle of nowhere. You become friends for life.” “Pinch me when I wake up,” he remembers thinking. “I’m no longer in Yakima.”

Miller, a photography buff since he’d been given a camera as a fifthgrader by one of his sisters—his siblings are Kwajileen, Quanne, Shawnee, Cherokee and Chyma, who also obviously bear his parents’ naming eccentricities—soon was exposed to, and reveled in, the reputation of the Communication department.

“I learned about a guy named Edward R. Murrow,” he says, exclaiming, once he came to really know of the pioneering CBS Radio correspondent’s WSU legacy, “he went HERE?”

So the young photographer worked on the school yearbook, worked at KWSU TV, interned at KING5 TV in Seattle, broadened his mind and perfected his craft—“It was all a blast,” he says—before graduating.

He free-lanced at KING for a while, but after seeing a veteran reporter let go one year before retirement, decided that “broadcast was too cutthroat.”

Then came a professional interlude it pains him to disclose.

“I hate to admit it,” he says, “but I eventually worked for the University of Washington.”

Miller found himself producing training videos for a UW program called Televised Instruction in Engineering, but he deemed it other than challenging, and went on to a similar job with the Pay N Pac hardware chain, putting together instructional training videos for company and store managers.

“It was suit-and-tie, tons of money, a corporate environment,” he says. Needing more freedom, he responded to a newspaper ad for Seattle City Light seeking an accomplished videographer.

“I didn’t hear back for a year,” he says, but he ended up being interviewed by “guys in uniforms.”

“I didn’t think this was for City Light,” he deadpans, and, lo and behold, he suddenly became a civilian “strategic adviser” launching the video unit of the SPD.

“My job is to support the role of police officers,” he says, and he’s been at it now for 17 years.

“Day in and day out you realize what happens to them,” Miller says, the former youthful miscreant having long achieved a mature appreciation for the men and women who protect and serve. “The alcoholism, divorce, suicide rates, not being supported … They have to face that every day.”

Currently he’s working on a training video about the hot-button AMBER alert system for missing kids, and is spearheading the project to put video cameras in SPD patrol cars. He also produces the department’s monthly public-access TV show, Beyond the Badge (find out more about it at http://www.cityofseattle.net/ch28/programs.htm).

In addition to his studio work, however, Miller relishes being in the field. He was deeply involved in both of Seattle’s recent black-eye brushes with international infamy, the WTO riots of 1999 and the Mardis Gras riots of 2001.

He remembers well when the World Trade Organization and its attendant anarchists came to town.

“You could feel it in the air,” he says of the pervasive atmosphere before the civil disobedience efforts of thousands of peaceful protesters were hijacked and eclipsed by a violent few. “You could see the frustration on the officers’ faces. There was nothing we could do. All we could do was document.”

Miller was in the streets when he got word from an SPD captain that “as soon as the turtles leave, we’re going to light the sky”—meaning that once the colorfully costumed peaceful demonstrators were herded out of the way the pepper spray and tear gas were going to fly against the anarchists—and he’s proud of his video handiwork and, indeed, of the police tactics.

“We sent out 80 to 100 copies” of videos to other agencies in cities worldwide that were due to host other similar meetings, he says, and that wanted to learn from a situation, as onerous as it was, in which “not one guy got hurt and no one was killed.”

As for Mardis Gras 14-1/2 months later, in which young toughs fueled by drink and pent-up racial enmity assaulted dozens of victims in Seattle’s Pioneer Square, he says, “I just knew things were going to turn to crap. You could sense it, feel it.”

Miller was out of town at the time, and says he felt compromised by having to deploy his unit, by phone, to film the mayhem while police, in an ill-advised and much criticized strategy, stood by.

“I had to send my guys out,” he says, “but I knew they’d never be the same” by being exposed to the wanton brutality. “I thought of my WSU philosophy course, ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man.’”

The payoff, if there was one, was that the video his colleagues shot helped convict a Seattle gang-banger in the killing of an innocent young man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a good Samaritan who was savagely beaten when he intervened in an attack on a young woman.

Miller himself has testified in court some 15 to 20 times over the years, detailing crime-scene videos that have helped to convict others, although he’s quick to rate the training videos he produces as just as valuable. In his words, they can show “the power of a cop who says, ‘That’s what saved my life,’” and they’re no small notch on his own holster.

So would he want to wear the blue uniform himself?

He’s thought about it more than once, he concedes. He’s been told he’d be a shoe-in to rise rapidly through the ranks.

His response, though, when he’s been urged to “Come on, Miller, take the test,” with eventual sergeant, lieutenant and captain badges dangled before him?

“Put it in writing,” he says, noting that “I love video. I have the best of both worlds—law enforcement and video.”

To be sure, Karim Miller is a man who loves what he does—and loves what brought him to it, the College of Liberal Arts at Washington State University.

“It doesn’t fill the mind, it opens it,” he says of a liberal arts education.“ It really is the chance of a lifetime. It changed my life. It’s with me now forever.“

It takes nothing to be a Husky,” he sniffs with disdain. “You have to be special to be a Cougar.”

And although Miller’s wife isn’t quite as nuts about the crimson-and gray as he is—“I admit it, I’m not,” she says —there’s the likelihood, as you might expect, that his passion may extend into the next generation of his family.

“I’ll pay for any college you want to go to,” he says he tells his sons, “as long as it’s WSU. I’ll be there every weekend, too.”

But whether or not his family comes to have class of 2014 and class of 2019 graduates, Miller will be back before then, of course, for every Apple Cup game and other big events. There’s also a tantalizing possibility, he muses, since he can retire from the SPD as soon as eight years from now:

Wouldn’t it be something if this ardent Cougar who so epitomizes the core values of the university were to return as an instructor in his chosen field, coaching, inspiring, mentoring and sending out into the world more solid citizens and rabid fans like himself?

“If ever I had a chance to go back,” he says, “I’d do it in a minute.”