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Mayor Durkan failed

EDITOR’S NOTE: Seattle Bike Blog supports the Defund Seattle Police effort being led by a large group of community organizations and leaders, including No New Youth Jail, Decriminalize Seattle, Block the Bunker, Seattle Peoples Party, COVID-19 Mutual Aid, Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network, BAYAN, La Resistencia, PARISOL, CID Coalition, Asians for Black Lives, APICAG. View the demands and sign on here. We support the protestors and respect the risks you are taking to speak your truths and hold government accountable.

Tear gas causes respiratory distress, severe pain and skin irritation. It could also make the effects of covid-19 worse. Pepper spray causes extreme pain and terrifying temporary blindness. Flash-bang grenades explode, and can cause serious burns, abrasions and permanent hearing loss. Seattle’s Community Police Commission recommended against using them four years ago, a reform the Seattle Police Department decided to ignore.

Seattle Police have employed all these weapons against people of Seattle many times in recent days. Their use is indiscriminate, disproportionate and often without warning. The police use of these weapons has escalated tension into chaos and preceded Saturday’s fires and property destruction shown on screen across the city and nation.


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Seattle Police seemed somewhat successful at spinning the story of Saturday’s initial use of these weapons, saying that some members of the crowd were throwing things at them. And Mayor Durkan fully supported their actions. Meanwhile, people on the ground have said consistently that the crowd was peaceful when SPD officers fired these weapons.

When Mayor Jenny Durkan spoke Sunday, she reserved her words of sadness for the property that was destroyed. She did not express empathy for the hundreds of people who were hurt by her police force the evening before. The use of these weapons against people has been so normalized that it hardly seemed worth commenting about, as though they were acceptable civilian casualties in a war zone. Go file a complaint, she said to anyone who was a victim of or witnessed police misconduct. And 10,000 complaints were filed just about problems Saturday.

Her speech was hopelessly out of touch and callous. As someone who has reported about Seattle government for the past decade, my immediate takeaway after watching was that her mayorship is over. She had failed her basic duty to prioritize the health and rights of the people of her city, and she had grossly underestimated the power of the people in the streets.

The city needed someone who would stand up for people who are hurting, whether from the immediate pain of police weaponry or the generations-deep pain of violent racism. The city needed her to declare changes, both in the way her police would respond to future protests and in policies and laws governing policing in general. Instead, she offered some platitudes about systemic racism before defending SPD and showing more empathy for panes of glass than people’s lungs, eyes and basic rights to freedom of speech.

She then went further to limit people’s rights to assemble by declaring a bizarre and confusing city-wide curfew, curbing every resident’s rights and giving SPD more excuses to escalate to violence. And she did this because SPD asked her to, she said.

This is exactly the opposite of what our city needed. We needed our mayor to stand up for our rights and create space for freedom of expression. We needed our mayor to create space for real change. Instead, she tried to shut it down.

But she failed to stop it. People kept gathering to protest racist and violent policing, and they had no respect for her curfew. Nor should they. She lost public confidence.

Mayor Durkan’s speech Sunday was the biggest test of her term as mayor, and she failed. It was a chance to do the right thing and learn from the mistakes of the night before, to deescalate tensions and to layout a clear path for change. Instead, she doubled down on Saturday’s mistakes. Because of that failure, Monday happened.

After Monday, any possible confusion about whether the police have been the aggressors was cleared up. There was no provocation that led to the use of explosive and chemical weapons against people gathered outside the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. Multiple video angles, including video taken from above the barricade and on the ground captured the whole thing. Seattle Police attacked people en masse. There’s no denying what happened. Hearing Omari Salisbury, whose protest streams have been powerful and important, trying so hard to get the police to deescalate right before they began their attack clearly encapsulates what is wrong with SPD’s protest response:

So the mayor had another chance Tuesday to try to salvage things and do the right thing. And she failed again. She said she had “concerns” about the Monday police response, but that’s the farthest she would go.

“The use of force must be rare, it must be necessary and it must be proportional,” she said without even noting that the police use of force Monday obviously broke all those rules. She didn’t condemn it, she didn’t direct them to stop, and she didn’t take away their explosives and gas canisters. So of course police used them again Tuesday night, once again blanketing Capitol Hill with explosives and tear gas.

Mayor Durkan does not appear to have control over SPD, which raises serious questions about whether she should be mayor of Seattle anymore. For a small and clear example, she noted in her Tuesday speech that she knows people are concerned about officers covering their badge numbers with tape, so one of the few seemingly concrete changes she offered was that she would direct officers to stop doing that.

“But that won’t happen overnight,” she said. The badge number issue is a simple test: Can Mayor Durkan make any change at all regarding police? Removing pieces of tape (or at least moving them so they don’t cover the number) is the easiest imaginable police reform, and there is no reason it can’t happen overnight. Hell, there’s no reason it can’t happen in five seconds. If she can’t get that done, then how can she get anything done?

I don’t know how Mayor Durkan can save her job at this point, whether at the ballot in 2021 or sooner. She has followed the same police-defending stance that too many other mayors of liberal cities have followed this week, including New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. And de Blasio was just booed off stage, the people of his city turning their backs to him while he tried to speak. He’s not company she wants to keep right now.

After Wednesday afternoon’s powerful and pointed Defund Seattle Police protest, the Mayor did change her posture a bit. She spoke with some leaders involved in the protest, including her former mayoral opponent Nikkita Oliver, and came outside City Hall to address the protesters personally. It didn’t go great for her, but at least she was there to show everyone she heard the demands and to take her well-earned boos. And shortly after, she cancelled the curfew, and City Attorney Pete Holmes dropped the city’s effort to withdraw from SPD’s Federal consent decree. Those are a couple easy but meaningful wins for the protest efforts.

And direction finally seemed to reach the police front line that they are to deescalate tensions rather than attack crowds. Wednesday’s protest on Capitol Hill went late into the night without major incident. But not gassing her own people is really the lowest possible bar to set for a mayor.

Mayor Durkan did not voice support for the more substantial changes protesters are demanding, including reducing the SPD budget by 50 percent, using those funds to invest in community and dropping charges against protesters who have been arrested. Her stance on these demands and other long-sought reforms (PDF) by so many hard-working community leaders will be perhaps her final hope to make it through this.

Thankfully, we have several strong leaders on City Council who are standing up for the people they represent. Unless Mayor Durkan asserts some level of power over our police department, the Council may need to take extraordinary action to assert the will of the people. We did not vote to have SPD run our city. Seattle is not a police state even if the police are treating it like one. The crisis this week is existential for our city’s democracy. And it’s far from over.

CM Tammy Morales posted a strong and passionate speech calling for an end to the curfews and calling on her fellow councilmembers to join her in seeking “a drastic reduction in the department’s budget.”

Mayor Durkan’s response to a media question about cutting SPD’s budget was that it was difficult to do because so much of it is salaries. Well, conveniently enough, many officers are making strong cases that they should be fired this week, starting with the officer seen here kneeling on multiple people’s heads and necks in the exact same way Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. I’m sure the thousands of complaints will highlight more officers who would better serve our city by joining the millions of unemployed people across the nation.

CM Teresa Mosqueda has been a consistent voice of leadership, saying basically all the things that Mayor Durkan has failed to say. She has been calling out police efforts to silence people and the media in real time. And she has had the guts to contradict police gaslighting:

CM Kshama Sawant has been a strong voice of support as always. She has proposed a ban on police use of chemical weapons and other dangerous tactics:

CM Lisa Herbold and Council President Lorena González organized a Council hearing to discuss the protests and solutions.

If covering badge numbers was a small test of the Mayor’s ability to control the police, the protests are themselves large tests of whether the police are able to resist violence against the people they have sworn to protect. And the department failed spectacularly. If officers are behaving this way in front of so many people and so many cameras, how are they treating people, especially Black people, when nobody is looking? The fact that all know the answer to that question is exactly why drastic, institutional change is needed.

Mayor Durkan was absolutely right about one thing she said Tuesday: “The denial of truth is the lifeblood and the oxygen that injustice needs to continue.” The people are out in our streets speaking their truths. Seattle must stop denying them.

(Shout out to the folks with bikes who got organized and used their bikes in a support role during the protests, forming barriers and controlling traffic to keep the marchers safe.)


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Comments

16 responses to “Mayor Durkan failed”

  1. Thank you for speaking out

  2. Jenny Durkan is one of the most mealy-mouthed politicians I’ve ever seen. Absolute disgrace

  3. Matt

    Thank you fornyour well thought out opinions. But, can I ask that we reduce the dehumanization and over generalization that all of the SPD officers are bad. Their are certainly good and great people in the SPD and we need them to join us and speak up. If we speaking as if they are all bad people, then how can progress be made.

    Defunding is certainly not the answer, we have scared people away from the police force. How can we rebuild our police if no body is willing to step into their shoes? Especially, when we want more oversight over enerything they do.

    More funding may be necessary to get better people into those positions, and to have better training. Combine that with better communication oversight over spending. Control the areas that need to be controlled, don’t over generalize and to punish but keep scum in the system. We need to entice better people to join the SPD and provide better means for them to speak up on issues they see.

    Overgenerallizing has become a nasty habit on both sides. Protesters certainly have not liked being overgenerallizing themselves as instigators and rioters, when there has been a few among them.

    Let’s get back to the root cause and find those that are truly the scrum. Let’s fix the system to allow those that are good and want to be good to have a voice and a means to speak up. Let’s stop pretending that their is ever such a thing as a completey perfect system. And let’s move forward and work together to make the right changes.

    1. Brock Howell

      How much do we have to pay police officers so they don’t harm residents?

      Entry level officers make $84,000 per year, and within five years they make $110,000. After that, their salary increases by 2-16% depending on number of years served.

      https://www.seattle.gov/police/police-jobs/salary-and-benefits

      This is not a case of “a few bad apples” that can be solved with higher pay and more training. This is a systemic problem. This is a problem of allowing officers to use weapons that shouldn’t be used. This is about using tactics that aim to physically dominate rather than deescalate.

      A lack of accountability creates a culture of bravado among the force. And officers defend their own officers before protecting citizens — to an extent that they will willingly turn a blind eye to horrendous conduct or worse join in the bad conduct.

      Thirty percent of SPD’s budget is in overhead, and a third of its staff are non-officers. Some major cities have police departments with overhead of less than 10%. Perhaps that’s a place to start the budget conversation.

      1. Matt

        Thank you for providing some more insight. I absolutely agree that it is a systematic problem, and that is what the focus needs to be on.

        I am optimistic that there are many good people in the SPD, but may be suppressed or uncomfortable speaking up about issue due to policies, unions, departmental habbits of defending thier own. There needs to be change that improve accountability and removes barriers for those that are good people in the SPD to be able to speak up. There needs to be a culture change from within to foster good people, to reward and encourage positive actions.

        My fear is that this defunding tactic is being thrown around to loose. And yes there probably is some fat that can be trimmed from their budget. But I don’t see that has helping the current issues, its more of a punishment tactic and it’s losing focus the real issues.

        I suspect that police morale is very low right now, and suspect there are not many people that are wanting to join the SPD. So, how do make change with what we have, foster good intentions? How do we get good SPD people on our side? How do we spark a ‘me too’ type of movement from within the SPD and get people to speak up? How do we create a long term solution and encourage better accountability and community outreach?

        I’m sure these questions are being discussed, but it just seems the bigger topics and broader fight is drifting.

      2. Joe

        Why are starting police salaries roughly 150% that of starting teachers?
        https://www.seattleschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_543/File/District/Departments/Human%20Resources/SalarySchedules/Certificated%20Non-Supervisory_2019_20.pdf
        Why are cities using taxpayer funds to pay for the misconduct of their officers?
        https://www.citylab.com/equity/2020/06/police-brutality-lawsuits-cities-settlements-credit-ratings/612301/
        If the good apples are too afraid of losing the backup of their misbehaving squadmates in a dangerous situation, maybe that misbehavior should hit the department where it hurts: in the pension.
        Draw fines and settlement money from the offending officer’s retirement, then the general retirement fund for the department. They better be sure their action are justified, or they’ll suffering later. Every single employee of the SPD will feel the impact economically, and I doubt they will continue to let the bad apples spoil the bunch.

    2. Ballard Biker

      What if American Airlines made a statement saying “Most of our pilots are good pilots, sure there’s a few that have a tendency to fly into mountains, but the vast majority are good and we can’t diminish that”? People would be outraged and demand that American Airlines fire the bad pilots and stop patronizing them until they do.

      Sure there’s plenty of good cops, but until they take initiative to clean out the garbage, the good are complicit with the bad.

      1. JR

        THIS!

      2. Nathan Todd

        That is Chris Rock’s joke

  4. Rick

    hey can we a bike community out somehow critical mass style this weekend to show support?

    1. Brock Howell

      PEACE PELOTON
      Saturday, June 6, noon at Alki Beach Park. Led by In Gaj Now

      From Website: InGajNow.com

      When: Saturday, June 6 @ 12:00PM
      Where: Alki Beach Park Bath House (Corner of Alki Ave. SW and 60th Ave. SW)

      Join us as we peacefully ride in protest of the injustices endured by black, brown, disenfranchised, and underrepresented populations in our city. This rain or shine casual ‘no drop’ ride will move at a pace of >10mph with 200 feet of elevation gain, for approximately 20 miles, taking us through the neighborhoods of: West Seattle (Alki), SODO, Georgetown, Columbia City, Rainier Beach, Downtown, LQA, Fremont, Capitol Hill, and the Central District, culminating at the Northwest African American Museum.

      Bring your bike, helmet, family, friends, and motivation as we advance positive change for all people!

      *We remain in a global pandemic and all cyclists must observe and comply with CDC and Washington State guidelines around the exercise of good public health and social distancing practices.

      1. Rick

        Yes!! Thank you! I’ll spread the word.

      2. JAT

        Thunderstorms. Best of intentions, but this will be interesting.

  5. Conrad

    Thanks Tom. Well said. Next time, Seattle, vote for the progressive candidate. The police are going to have to do better. I understand that morale is low but come on. After everything that has happened you still can’t uncover your name badge? You still have to act like a thug in the face of unarmed protestors? What does a police cruiser and all that fancy cop equipment cost? A gun is a poor substitute for a dick, spine, or brain. The latter two are what you need for quality police work. Defund the police.

  6. Jessica Winter-Stoltzman

    thanks Tom. Agreed. Durkan had several chances and she’s shown she doesn’t have any control over the police. By refusing to obey simple directives like uncovering their badges, they are explicitly saying they don’t believe they have to listen to any outside authority. If that is what they think, then we should stop paying their salaries. The badge issue is just an indicator of how they feel about any kind of accountability and outside authority.

  7. Eli

    I miss the nostalgic, simple days when Seattle could suck just because we got a 2.2/5 in the People for Bikes annual city ratings.

    https://cityratings.peopleforbikes.org/city/seattle/

    Great editorial, BTW. I think you were the first person I saw to openly write on this topic so directly.

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