On this week's Blabbermouth, I got a chance to ask Seattle City Council Member Lorena González about two vastly different narratives that have become connected to the police shooting of Che Taylor in Wedgwood on February 21.

According to the Seattle Police Department, Taylor was seen at around 3:30 pm that day carrying a gun in a holster. Forty-five minutes later, officers called for backup in order to arrest Taylor, who they knew was legally prohibited from possessing a firearm because of his felony record. The SPD says Taylor didn't follow officer commands during the attempted arrest and "reached for his handgun, leading officers to fire."

Taylor's family, as Ansel Herz has reported, believes Taylor was "unarmed" and that one officer came to the scene with an intent to kill. The president of the local NAACP, Gerald Hankerson, has described the police shooting as "coldblooded murder" and has suggested that Seattle police may have planted the gun and drugs that the SPD says were found in the car Taylor ducked into. At a March 3 neighborhood council meeting in Wedgwood, Taylor's sister stated that she believes a cover-up is being carried out. At the same meeting, Taylor's mother said "I don't feel justice will be done."

On Blabbermouth, González tells me: "Those two different narratives couldn't be more diametrically opposed to each other if we tried."

She's watched the SPD video of the shooting, is following the investigation closely in her role as chair of a city council committee that's devoted to police oversight, and is awaiting new information the SPD has said it will release before the end of this month.

But for now, González she said she believes the starkly different narratives ultimately reflect a lack of community trust in the police department. On Blabbermouth she and I spoke about the very real roots of that mistrust and the barriers to acceptance of each of the current shooting narratives.

In order to accept the police narrative, one has to have a baseline level of trust in the Seattle Police Department.

In order to accept the narrative from Taylor's family and the NAACP, one has to believe that the SPD lied about Taylor's possession of a handgun and could have planted a handgun, a holster, and illegal drugs inside the car where Taylor was killed.

González is a longtime civil rights advocate and SPD watchdog, so after we talked about the roots of community mistrust of the Seattle police I asked her whether she considers the second narrative—the narrative of a planted gun and drugs—to be a real possibility. Her response:

I don't want to believe that that's possible. I'm not gonna sugar-coat it, Eli. I think that if we are at the point in our police department where we are all actively believing that they are planting evidence, that they are planting guns, that they are planting drugs—then we've got a lot more work to do.

And it really sort of means that the Department of Justice got it wrong, that the federal monitor has gotten it wrong, that the judge has gotten it wrong, that CPC [the Community Police Commission] has gotten it wrong, and that after the call by advocates, including myself, for DOJ to come in an do an overhaul and take over our police department—to believe that level of corruption would mean that all of the work that so many advocates have put in for years and years and years into getting to this point was completely a waste of time.

And I don't believe that that's true... I just don't want to believe that we're at a place now where we can say, 'Everything that we've done, and everything that we have asked the DOJ to do has been completely ineffective and has actually resulted in more corruption rather than less.'"

The full interview with González is here.

This post has been updated since its original publication.