At the heart of the race for the office that litigates local crimes in our county are three evolving debates: the dwindling capacity to go after domestic violence cases, how local police violence cases are investigated and what experience is required to run the Spokane County Prosecutor’s Office.
The office prosecutes misdemeanor, criminal and civil cases, advises county departments in legal matters and manages family law in the county. The person elected to lead the prosecutors will oversee a staff of nearly 150 people, including about 70 attorneys.
The incumbent angling for the seat in the November 3 general election are current Spokane County Prosecutor Preston McCollam, who has worked for the office since 2015 and was appointed to lead it following his mentor’s retirement. His challenger, Danny Tarkenton, is a military veteran and a former deputy prosecutor in the prosecutor’s office.
This election will be the first time voters will weigh in on the office since McCollam took over last year.
The Spokane County Commission appointed McCollam, a Republican, as prosecutor in July 2025 when his longtime predecessor Larry Haskell retired. McCollam was one of three candidates the Spokane County Republican Party recommended for the position. He earned his law degree, a Juris Doctorate (JD), from Gonzaga University in 2013.
Tarkenton is running as an independent, though she has campaigned with prominent candidates running on the Democratic ticket. She passed the state bar exam in February of 2025 and also has a JD from Gonzaga, which she earned in 2024. She’s currently studying for a Master’s in forensic psychology at Arizona State University.
In August 2025, McCollam fired Tarkenton, a green attorney who’d spent only five months prosecuting cases as a deputy attorney. This followed multiple requests from Tarkenton to transfer departments within the county. She had accused her supervisor, Jason Moscowitz, of creating a working environment in which she felt unsafe. In a settlement, the county paid her $20,000 in damages and recorded her firing as a “resignation,” according to documents that a Spokane lawyer unearthed through a public records request and that Tarkenton provided to RANGE.
The experience to do the job
The prosecuting attorney is the chief criminal litigator in the county and serves as a legal advisor to county departments. McCollam has litigated cases with the office for a decade and has positioned himself as the more experienced candidate, saying during debates that working at the top rungs of the prosecutor’s office has prepared him for the role.
“You’re not selecting a recruitment and retention coordinator,” McCollam said during a debate hosted by KSPS, the local PBS affiliate, which was moderated by reporters from RANGE and The Spokesman-Review. “What you’re selecting and the people are choosing is an individual that’s capable of actually accomplishing the duties of the job.” He cited state law, saying “at a minimum, your prosecuting attorney should be able to enforce the law.”
Tarkenton sees the role differently, saying extensive trial experience is not necessary to do the job.
“It is a leadership role,” she said. “While I understand the need to do trials … you need to have leadership qualities and experience, which I do have an extensive amount, not only during my time in military service but in my role as a training NCO. It’s about having leadership judgment to be able to lead that office.”
She added, “It’s also about having the passion to be loyal to the Constitution as well as your people.”
Prosecuting domestic violence
Spokane County has one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the state. A report from InvestigateWest showed that McCollam’s office has declined to investigate record numbers of domestic violence cases in the past year. The article described a number of incidents in which people had reported domestic abuse but the prosecutor declined to press charges because the victim had not wanted to, there was a lack of evidence or they feared a case might be thrown out because an underfunded public defense office lacks the capacity to assign an attorney to the abuser.
McCollam told InvestigateWest his staff must sometimes decline less provable cases as they work to allocate resources to cases they consider more likely to be successful in court.
“As a prosecutor, you have to do hard things every single day,” McCollam said, elaborating on this dynamic in a recent candidate forum hosted by The Spokesman-Review. “Sometimes [a prosecutor] can't prove that case and if they can't prove it, they have to sit down with that family and discuss why and have to talk about the impact of that decision.”
McCollam has advocated for higher taxes to fund law enforcement that could be used to bolster resources for such cases. For example, the prosecutor testified last week in favor of a new 0.1% sales tax adopted by the Spokane County Commission to help pay for policing and court resources.
Tarkenton told RANGE that domestic violence cases can be particularly hard to nail down because victims may recant accusations or stop cooperating after their initial contact with law enforcement. They become afraid of retribution from their alleged attackers, lose solid memories of an attack or struggle to access resources that would remove them from a dangerous situation.
She proposed a policy reform for domestic violence prosecution in a paper she did in a recent criminal psychology class in her Master’s program. The policy, she told RANGE, would require officers to gather and preserve as much concrete information — “911 recordings, medical records, photographs and officer observations,” according to Tarkenton’s paper — as soon as possible at the scene of the crime response. It would also require officers to connect the victim immediately with an advocate and resources to get out of their dangerous situation.
“The priorities of what's being triaged needs to change,” Tarkenton told RANGE in an interview this summer.
Police in the state of Washington are required to gather evidence largely around guns and inform alleged victims of ways they can get help, but Tarkenton’s proposal seems to go further than this by saying the police must gather specific evidence and directly connect them with help.
RANGE wanted to ask the prosecutor’s office whether Washington or Spokane County police already do this, but McCollam did not return multiple requests for comment for this story.
Independence in prosecuting police
Another important responsibility of the prosecuting attorney includes reviewing police killings of civilians to decide whether to rule the killing as “justified” or consider criminal charges against the officers involved. The county prosecutor’s office has found every police killing in the county justified during the 11 years that McCollam has worked there.
The vast majority of police killings during that time occurred under the authority of McCollam’s predecessor Larry Haskell, but two have fallen to McCollam in the year he has been prosecutor: the killings of Joshua Musselman, 29, and Ryan Tiestort, 43. Musselman was killed December 29, 2024 by four Spokane police officers; Tiestort on June 15, 2025 by a Spokane County Sheriff deputy and three Washington State Patrol officers. He cleared all eight officers in both cases in early September, though Musselman’s case was reopened October 14 after RANGE published a story about the officers’ callous texts between each other in the hours after the shooting where they admitted they had not established probable cause.
In The Spokesman’s candidate forum on October 4, McCollam said he would differentiate himself from Haskell by publishing his decision reports on police killings on the prosecutor’s website and at his office.
“I made it available at the front desk, published it openly, shared it with anybody who wants it so you can see the work that was done and make your own decision,” he said.
But the reports are not on the website or at the front desk; RANGE went to his office on October 8, but the desk clerk said the report was not available. In a short phone call with RANGE later that day about the Musselman killing, McCollam said these were the first such decisions he has had to issue and emailed RANGE both reports.
Critics believe he will continue the practice of exonerating officers who kill people.
“Preston showed who he was with this case,” said Anwar Peace, a police accountability activist and Musselman’s neighbor, referring to McCollam’s ruling on the shooting. (Read RANGE’s in-depth coverage of the Musselman case here and here.)
In recent years, police accountability activists — including Peace and Debbie Novak, whose son David was killed by a Spokane police officer in 2019 — have proposed a bill in the state Legislature that would create an extra level of accountability for police who kill people. They would like the state to adopt an Office of Independent Prosecutor to review findings from state investigators and decide whether a police killing should be prosecuted.
In some configurations of the proposed law, the leader of that office would be appointed by the governor. In other proposals, they would be appointed by the state attorney general. The idea is that, because county prosecutors work closely with local law enforcement to do their work, there’s an inherent or at least perceived conflict of interest when they are tasked to decide whether a police officer should be prosecuted. The state-level office would remove that perception. It would not take away county prosecutors’ authority to bring their own charges.
But it’s a controversial proposal that McCollam and Haskell have vocally opposed. They say that, because local prosecutors are elected by county voters, the office would undermine the democratic processes and circumvent the will of voters.
“I strongly believe that centralizing power in unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies should set off alarm bells for everyone in every party no matter how you vote when the president is up for election,” McCollam wrote in a Facebook post responding to criticisms about his work from a Spokane police accountability activist.
Tarkenton feels exactly the opposite way. She supports the creation of an independent prosecutor and goes further: “Until we can get that implemented, the best that we could do is refer criminal cases to the [state] attorney general's office,” she said during The Spokesman’s candidate forum.
Cash flow & a fake-news guv endorsement
As of October 28, Tarkenton has raised a total of $50,356.15. Some of her largest donations come from Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington; Bajun Mavalwalla, the former Democratic congressional candidate; and the health care workers union SEIU Healthcare.
Her campaign consults with Bracken Consulting, LLC, run by Geoffry Bracken, who works with progressive political action committees and candidates for office in Washington state.
McCollam has raised more than double Tarkenton’s haul: $136,803.05. Some of his largest donations come from the Associated Builders and Contractors Union, a nonunion trade association that represents the construction industry; the Spokane Police Guild, the powerful cops union; the developer Sheldon Jackson.
McCollam is a Republican who has the endorsements of some politicians, including Baumgartener, who have supported President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts, and his campaign contributions reflect that same priority.
Notably, he also received a $260.25 donation from Jack Zappone, a federal immigration officer who helped Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violently arrest an immigrant in his Spokane yard last year.
In an email chain obtained by RANGE in which county officials wanted ICE to release an immigrant to county custody to prosecute him for a crime, ICE attorney James Yi expressed skepticism that the county would release the man back to the federal agency after. In a reply, McCollam lamented that Washington’s sanctuary law may not allow the county to release the man.
“It is frustrating that the current legislation does not appear to provide a relief mechanism for a situation when the federal government is willing to assist the state in making sure individuals are held accountable for their local criminal activity,” McCollam wrote.
His campaign manager is All In Strategies, a consultancy owned by local political operative John Estey. Estey has worked closely with the advocacy group Let’s Go Washington, which is pushing three conservative ballot initiatives on the November ballot that seeks to overturn a wealth tax Washington passed last year and to erode privacy rights for children seeking healthcare without the permission of their parents and for girls in school sports.
Though Tarkenton is running as an independent, her campaign posted on its Instagram last month an endorsement it had received from someone who called themself Bob Ferguson, the name of Washington’s Democratic governor.
On Facebook, Rep. Michael Baumgartner tagged McCollam’s campaign in a post dragging Tarkenton for being boosted by a governor who was “soft on crime, weak on homelessness and foolish on drug use.” (Ferguson campaigned for governor partly on infusing Washington police agencies with extra $100 million in public funding and, after he took office, signed a law that allows local governments to raise sales taxes for police revenue.)
Only, it wasn’t Ferguson who’d endorsed her; it was an imposter.
Tarkenton confirmed with Ferguson’s office that he’d not endorsed her, retracted the endorsement and called for an Attorney General’s investigation into the fake endorsement, she told RANGE.
She said she had suspicions about the identity of the sender but wouldn’t divulge that information.
“That’s for the investigation to find out,” she said.
The Spokane Community Against Racism endorsed her for real.
Editor’s note: Erin Sellers contributed to this report.
