Mayor Jenny Durkan promised to disperse the Capitol Hill Organized Protest and reinstall police inside East Precinct “in the near future” at a press conference Monday.
Seattle Police Department (SPD) Chief Carmen Best blamed the Seattle City Council’s “hasty legislation” banning chemical weapons for SPD’s failure to reach shooting victims early Saturday morning. That claim was wrong on multiple levels.
For one, the police showed up 20 to 30 minutes after the shooting by which time volunteer medics were already transporting the first victim (a 19-year old Black man who bled out and died) to Harborview Medical Center. Tear gassing protesters doesn’t magically solve the timing issue or heal the victim’s wounds. Although I’m sure it would be further traumatizing.
Moreover, Chief Best blamed the wrong ban; the City Council’s chemical weapons ban doesn’t go into place until next month. A United States District Judge ordered an injunction restricting use of chemical weapons and rubber bullets in crowd control situations, citing their indiscriminate use on whole crowds and neighborhoods. The injunction isn’t as extensive as the city council’s ban, but apparently police got the message nonetheless.
While Mayor Durkan said she isn’t yet planning to physically remove protesters, she did leave that as a real possibility if CHOP campers don’t leave voluntarily. She isn’t technically enforcing the 8pm to 8am curfew that had been rumored, but it does seem like that might be on the horizon.
Decriminalize Seattle–a grassroots coalition of groups that came together around the demand of defunding police by at least 50% to fund community-led responses–issued a rebuttal to the Mayor’s plan disputing the idea that police would prevented the violence we saw over the weekend.
“We know that in every neighborhood of our city, violence is a constant,” Decriminalize Seattle wrote. “We know that police do not stop violence. We know that violence happens even when the police are present. Less than a year ago, a Black woman was killed on the same block as last night’s shooting, with the East Precinct fully staffed with officers only 200 feet away. The presence of police did not stop that death.”
I livetweeted the press conference, if you’d like a play-by-play. Erica C. Barnett also had tweeted extensively and asked an excellent question about how tear gas would have helped police reach the victim. Neither the Mayor nor Chief Best gave a satisfactory answer, but it didn’t stop the chief from continuing to blame the city council’s “hasty” legislation, which again hasn’t gone into effect yet.
