A Seattle Office of Police Accountability (OPA) report released last week belatedly confirmed what Spekulation and some other activists said happened in the summer of 2020: SPD officers had participated in a disinformation campaign and transmitted false radio reports of right wing Proud Boys with guns threatening protesters. The hoax was an attempt to intimidate, disperse, and scare off Black Lives Matter protesters in the Capital Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) outside of the abandoned East Precinct.
OPA Director Andrew Myerberg concluded that this false information escalated tensions at the CHOP at terrible time and violated department policy and the officer code of conduct. The hoax culminated on June 8th, the day after a man drove his car into a crowd of protesters and shot a man who tried to confront him. Protesters were already on edge, and the SPD officers seemed poised to try to exploit that, basically as a form of psychological warfare. However, protestors did not leave and the tension continued. On Juneteenth, a fatal shooting happened in the CHOP followed by another later in the month, which Mayor Jenny Durkan used as pretext to clear the protesters and encampments and have SPD retake East Precinct.
Allegedly, the Durkan administration and SPD senior leadership were unaware of the Proud Boys ruse or chose not to act on it, with Police Chief Carmen Best even promoting to Assistant Chief the police captain who would later take blame for the ruse in the OPA report. Daniel Beekman of The Seattle Times covered the story Wednesday and credited activist Spekulation and Converge Media’s Omari Salisbury for uncovering the hoax, which neither the department nor the Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office had acknowledged for 18 months.
“Matt Watson, a Seattle artist and activist known as ‘Spek,’ immediately raised the possibility on social media that there had been a hoax. No one out on the streets had actually seen the Proud Boys group that the officers were talking about on the radio, and the officers were using irregular call signs,” Beekman wrote. “But there was no investigation until late 2020, when Converge Media journalist Omari Salisbury asked OPA for body camera video from the officers who had supposedly tailed the Proud Boys group. When OPA couldn’t locate any relevant video, the office launched an investigation.”
