Comments

1
You fucked up, Seattle! Not as bad as NYC but still...
2
Ed Murray is a fuck-up for Seattle's history books.
3
I finally started watching The Wire recently. Seeing how fucked up the politics of police are, as well as the wheeling and dealing to pay one another favors and screwing over good cops who don't "play the game," this makes sense to me.

Pugel wasn't a sycophant. Murray and his ilk are a bunch of petty dickholes.
4
How anyone didn't expect the fuck-ups that would follow a Murray election after SPOG endorsed him is beyond me.
5
Sad to say 1-4 are correct
6
btw, is it me, or is Murray really thin skinned in his press conferences?
7
I'm a 45-year resident of this city, and everything I've ever heard about Jim Pugel, it's always, always been about what a class act he is, how he's the future of good, reformed policing in Seattle.

His forced retirement (his other choice being demotion to captain) is not good news for our city, nor for our new mayor. Yet another stumble….
8
This is crazy making! I'm not one for attending protest but this makes me want to organize one outside Murray's office. Just so much WTF!
9
"Shoot as much gas as you want in there now," came the response from Capt. Jim Pugel, who commanded the force in the streets during the WTO. "If we are being overcome at Sixth and Pike, I want you to drench them."

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.c…
10
Yikes! This is really sad news...I suppose it means that things have to get worse before they get better.
11
Wait, murray and bailey announced pugel's retirement in a blog post, while he was out of town? Fuck me, that is low.
12
This guy should run for office.
13
Pugel handled the transition as well as anyone could ask. Its a shame someone had to take the sword on this.

Dom, as usual, is wrong on the reason for his ouster. He's a great guy, a good admin, but he's tried and true Seattle PD. He's a result of the system Dom decries. He's too of the cops to effectively lead reform efforts.

Murray's instinct to bring in new leadership is sound and solid. The racism and bullying in the SPD comes from on high and from deep within their culture. Someone needs to take over the department and make unpopular decisions.

Unpopular leaders rarely get compliments from toady, grudge-bearing reporters. As we're fed a story-line about the evil SPOG controlling a mayor our reporter didn't endorse, please remember our reporter's unending track-record of misinterpreting politics, cops, unions, and pretty much everything else he reports on.
14
@13 in his interim leadership position he admonished, punished, and even fired some of the bad cops. The new Chief took only a few days to reverse some of those punishment under the leadership and orders of Murray.

THEY are part of the problem. Good cops can't effect change if they aren't in a position to do so. When Pugel had the opportunity to show true leadership, he did. He might be part of the system, but he was the part of the system that recognized change had to be made. Not so much with his successor.

So, again, fuck Murray and his cronie dickholes. I won't be surprised if a corruption scandal breaks during Murray's term in office.
15
@14

If a corruption scandal breaks, it won't be because Jenny Durkan's in charge of the investigation.
16
@13- "someone needs to take over...and make unpopular decisions"
So put the guy who reversed the unpopular decisions in charge?
"Too of the cops to effectively lead reform efforts"
Yet the only efforts at all were directed by...Pugel.
The SPD is a rogue police force, and SPOG has bought and paid for their own mayor.
17
@13 it sure sounds like you have no idea what's been going on.
18
@17- I'm pretty sure @13 knows exactly what was going on, and as a SPOG apparatchik he didn't like it one bit. Now that the SPOG status quo is once again being protected/ignored he is very happy.
19
@13: Murray's instinct to bring in new leadership is sound and solid.

Bullshit. The SPD got has steadily devolved under a series of new police chiefs brought in from the outside. With Pugel, we had a talented, reform-minded insider who understood the culture, knew the players, had momentum behind him, and demonstrated that he had the balls to hold cops accountable when they fuck up.

And what does Murray do? He throws him under the bus. Un-fucking-believable.

@4: How anyone didn't expect the fuck-ups that would follow a Murray election after SPOG endorsed him is beyond me.

After so many years in politics, I had assumed that Murray knew how to lead. He doesn't. He's as lost in the mayor's office as McGinn was when he started his term.
20
@19
To be fair, even many of the McGinn supporters figured that while Murray wasn't the preferred choice, we couldn't really go wrong with him.
21
Are the Feds/court/monitor still watching over this "reform" process? They seem to have dropped out.
22
Is it just me or is everything Bailey says, or releases to the press just cringe inducing. It's so obviously NOT genuine and dripping with guile that I find it hard take seriously.
23
If you believe for a minute that everything is status quo at the Seattle Police Department, you depend way too much on the Stranger for your news.

The new police chief did not unpunish anyone. He put the responsibility for the SPD's reprehensible record firmly where it belongs: with the Department Leadership.

Imagine you're a line officer hired into a department with a culture of bigotry. You're not a bigot, but you sure notice that bigots don't get punished at your work place. The bosses either don't notice or don't care.

The SPD is run in para-military fashion. The leaders encouraged, allowed, or overlooked bigotry and other abuses for decades. Line officers -- the officers Dom is so hungry to punish -- share as much responsibility for their bad behavior as Lynndie England shares with her commanders.

I wouldn't have either over for dinner, but I don't place all the blame on their feet, either.

By changing punishment into training, the new chief meant to communicate "We need to reteach our officers. This is our (SPD leadership's) responsibility."

He bugled his first public crisis. He's not the toady to SPOG Dom wants to paint him as.

I tried looking up apparatchik on Bing!, but all the definitions include phrases like "unquestioningly loyal." I've commented on this forum for years, and this forum displays a record of everything I've ever posted. A quick scan of my public record will dispel any myth of unquestioning loyalty. Maybe this word means something else I don't understand?
24
This statement reads mostly like a narrative resume, but that last paragraph is gold. Somebody should paint that on the front of SPD headquarters.
25
@1, What I will grant NYC over Seattle vis-a-vis Police Accountability is that the political leadership within the city realized that reform was neccesary and pursued it, e.g., the Mollen Commission, even though I suspect in recent years that reform has unravelled. In Seattle, the political leadership with regards to Police conduct pretty much buried their heads in the sand for decades, only to pop up every now and then and say "We're such a progressive city" and it took the feds to come in and attempt to do something about the SPD problems.

I don't believe Murray is lost and incompetent so much as he is trying to preserve the status quo in his actions while bamboozling leftys not paying attention with his Progressive talking points.
26
Six shooter, you are correct in that police are run in a para-military fashion, but you are pretty much wrong on everything else. Bailey is way more part of that old school mentality and SPOG darkness than Pugel ever was. Why do you think Bailey, who is largely ineffective, was brought in - besides needing a gig when the Sonics left, like the rest of Murray's overpaid and under qualified staff. Dom is not wrong, and this won't be the last of unsettling SPD news to come out of the Murray administration.
27
@13 Hey I guess we'll have to see what sort of outsider Murray chooses. So far what this looks like is: a mayor beholden to a police union that endorsed him, which like pretty much every police union everywhere is a malignant force for increasing authoritarianism and decreasing police accountability.
28
@26:

I hope you're wrong and I am right. I don't know how anyone can argue that SPD rots from within and above.
29
@six shooter: The rot is coming straight from the SPOG.

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