Comments

1

I’ve been wondering what would happen if a crime occurred I side CHOP and somebody called the police. I’live far away and haven’t been following SUPER closely so maybe this has already happened, but I’m glad to hear that police were allowed in when they were specifically called to respond to an incident, and I’m glad to hear that they did respond. Good on the medic!

2

This seems like such an obvious solution to what police defunding should look like.

If the police stop inserting themselves uninvited into the lives of morally innocent people going about their daily business harming no one and instead focused on crimes where an actual victim has been harmed and called for their help.

We could cut both the police and prosecutor's office by 90% and remove 75 of those currently in prison, or 90% is we stopped incarcerating the mentally it as well.

Which is why it will never happen. Seattle may be liberal, but our police and prosecutors office are run by the equivalent of Jerry Falwell.

3

The police are choosing not to enter. They can and have the ability to use overwhelming force if need be. It would be massively ugly and not a good situation for anyone be they protester or police. Plus it would play into the right wing media narrative.

It seems that more or less the majority of the those in the zone recognize it and are able to handle situations as they arise. They need to make sure they are respectful of those that live and have businesses in the area. If they lose that the whole thing comes apart.

4

Why did they call the cops? I thought it was a cop-free zone. Aren't the police terrible villains who might've brought harm to everyone?

5

Luddite5, I understand your concern, but like most things, it is a little more complicated than that.
The following are the results of everyday cops making routine traffic stops and Terry stops, that turned into significant arrests.

Randy Kraft - 16 murders (arrested for DUI)
William Lester Suff - 12 murders (stopped for an illegal U-turn)
Ted Bundy - Need I say more? (stopped for erratic driving)
David Berkowitz - "Son of Sam" (a parking ticket)
Joel Rifken - murder (stopped for a missing license plate)
Timothy McVeigh - Oklahoma bomber (stopped for a missing license plate)
Wayne Williams - Murdered 30 children and teenagers in the Atlanta area (stopped on a bridge)
Bruce Davis - Multiple murders (Stopped for car prowling)
Larry Eyler - 20 murders (Contacted for stopping on a highway)
James E. Swann - 4 murders/10 attempted murders (Running a red light)

The list goes on and on. Last night in Pierce Co., a LE officer stopped a speeder and found a gun-shot victim in the backseat. (The driver was lost and didn't know where to take him.) Not convinced? In the late 1970's, my sister was abducted at knife-point from a Redondo Beach, California bar where she worked, and was sexually assaulted in a Lomita oil field. A short time later, the suspect was stopped by police for a traffic violation. My sister ran to the cops and the suspect was arrested.

You want accountability? SPD mandates that every Terry stop or traffic stop is documented. Every stop is recorded by body-worn video and if feasible, in-car video. No system is perfect. But as any good police detective will tell you, uniform patrol officers uncover more crime by accident, than any detective does on purpose. Be careful for what you ask for. You just may get it.

6

All I know is that I live in a neighborhood where cops don't even bother to patrol, and we had to file a police report online when our car got broken into. So don't tell me cops earn their salary. Cops are useless chemical weapon-launching dimwits, of no use even in so-called "white" or "rich" neighborhoods.

Defund police and use the money to treat junkies and homelessness. The money would be better spent, than on tanks, tasers, and chem weapons to use only to defend the property of multinational corporations who have no stake in Seattle. Get rid of 'em.

7

Get rid of all police until they can explain their utility to actual taxpayers, not corporations, nor Trump voters outside the city. Get lost.

8

apr144... You should try to avoid stereotyping people. It is a big world out there. There is a great quote attributed to Mark Twain. I don't think he really said it, but, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure and it just ain't so."

10

5: I understand decades of pro-police media combined with your own "stranger-danger" fears has convinced you the police are a public good, but all the data contradicts the extremely selective anecdotes above you base your limited world view on.

For the past 4 weeks the American people have had a front row seat to the police rioting against peaceful protestors. What you call "everyday cops" is a fiction not just all the data, but our recent more accurate view of policing contradicts.

Here is the real violent and unaccountable face of policing in America for the remaining 20% of Americans who were asleep for the past 4 weeks so don't realize what happened to George Floyd is not a one off, but a typical day of policing in America for the average cop:

Brutal Force
The full picture of police violence in America shows the cops are out of control
https://thebaffler.com/latest/brutal-force-al-gharbi

The entire article is worth reading since it really captures the violent criminality of our police along with the judges and prosecutors hired to hide or excuse their despicable behavior. Just aa few tidbits:

Since 2015, cops fatally shot at least 352 people who were unarmed (that is, not even possessing a toy, blunt object, or other instrument). In total, 5,408 civilians were killed by police gunfire over the last five years; one out of every fifteen was unarmed. And it is important to note that these data only count police shootings. Hundreds more civilians are killed by cops every year with tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets, chokeholds, positional asphyxia, blunt force trauma, or getting struck by police cruisers and other causes; a large share of these civilians are also unarmed. Many have not committed a crime.

There are also widespread reported rapes, sexual assault, and sexual harassment incidents involving on-duty cops every year. (Of course, many more cases likely go unreported.) According to an investigation from the Buffalo News, from 2005 to 2015, “a law enforcement official was caught in a case of sexual abuse or misconduct at least every five days.” The officers are usually armed in these cases. The victims are typically isolated, and often physically restrained. Sometimes there is an imminent threat of force or arrest. Nonetheless, cops often have the audacity to claim that these sex acts, against civilians under police custody, are consensual. An investigation by the Associated Press found that many cops use police tools and databases to stalk and harass exes or people they are sexually interested in (and for other personal purposes).

There is no “war on cops.” Instead, the levels of violence police deploy against civilians seems grossly disproportionate to the level of danger they actually face from the public.

The OMDP figures for 2016 are roughly equivalent to the other major non-governmental database tracking police fatalities nationwide, the National Law Enforcement Officer Memorial Fund. They also count eighty-six police homicides in 2016 (i.e., fatalities resulting from officers being beaten, stabbed, strangled, shot, or struck by a vehicle). The estimates from both of these databanks are higher than FBI statistics, which reported sixty-six felonious deaths of law enforcement agents in 2016. Nonetheless, let’s take the highest estimate: eighty-six line-of-duty law enforcement homicides.

Not all abuses by police are physical in nature. Consider the billions of dollars in cash, cars, real estate and other assets that police seize from civilians every year on the grounds of “civil forfeiture.” In 2014, for instance, cops ended up taking more property from Americans than burglars did. In many cases, people who have their property or assets seized are never charged with any crime—however, it often proves nearly impossible for them to get their money or items back. The abuse of civil forfeiture has become so extreme and widespread that the Supreme Court recently had to step in to help curb abuses, and there is a bipartisan Congressional effort to cut down on the practice.

Blue Lies Matter

According to an investigation by USA Today, at least 85,000 cops have been investigated for misconduct over the last decade—including 22,924 investigations into excessive force; 3,145 allegations of rape, molestation of a child, or other sexual misconduct; 2,307 purported instances of domestic violence; and 2,645 cases of police obstructing an investigation, committing perjury, falsifying reports, and/or tampering with witnesses or evidence. These numbers, daunting as they seem, may just be the tip of the iceberg.

The first line of defense protecting bad cops is the “blue wall of silence.” Police rarely report errors, misconduct, or crimes committed by their peers.

When investigations do occur, police often close ranks to protect one another. Consider, for instance, the police officers who nearly killed that seventy-five-year-old man by shoving him to the pavement. The officers involved were suspended without pay while the incident was investigated (and they were subsequently charged with assault). Rather than applauding because their peers were being held to account for excessive use of force against someone who posed no plausible threat, the entire emergency-response police unit resigned from their assignments in protest of their colleagues being suspended. As a result of this tendency of cops to stick together—even when their fellow-officers are “in the wrong”—investigations into police misconduct generally come away empty-handed.

11

Okay, time to swoop with a massive force to clean up CHOP.

Jenny?
Jay?
Donald?

12

5

I didn't state the obvious above, but almost all of this police criminality listed here started as a police traffic stop.
If, as the meticulously researched article above proves, that the police commit rape, murder and robbery vs solve crimes during traffic stops by a order of 10 to 1, then your anecdotes of police stopping the serial killer who aren't like the Golden State Killer a cop themselves is extremely misleading.
You are arguing essentially that if we allow the police to continue raping, murdering, and assaulting the public there's an outside chance they will catch someone as criminal as they are.

Meanwhile, solving actual murder cases is below 50%, solving rape is below 20% with the police failing to process up to 200,000 rape kits around the country. Property crime? The police disinterest in such crimes is legendary.

As for your talk of accountability:
SPD must document Terry Stops: And what is the punishment if they don't? That's right, nothing. Police requirements never punish violators, so are meaningless.

Video: The cameras are pointed at the public, not them and they turn them off (without any legal liability) all the time. Video has only increased the criminality of the SPD and KCSO.

You also fail of mention Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, who along with his team of county prosecutors has spent the last 30 years covering up fo, excusing and not charging police criminality on a regular basis. Police accountability is King County is a joke.

14

Were the perps CHOP residents?

15

@14: No such thing as CHOP residents. There are Capitol Hill residents who pay rent and mortgages, the rest is just a crowd and the homeless.

17

ACAB until they're needed. Gotcha.

19

@5 - Traffic stops are half the problem here. The cops spend a ton of time finding excuses to stop people and investigate them. They love to stop crappy-looking cars for equipment violations so they can do a little investigating of who the driver is and maybe, if they're lucky, come up with a reason for a search and find the drugs. And they may not even need an equipment violation for a pretext. I personally know of one case where someone was stopped because their car was black, but the registration with the state listed it as yellow. So now painting your car makes you a criminal.

A broken taillight is not a reason to start asking someone questions about where they are going, ask to see a license, etc. Stop the car, say "Sir, you may not know your taillight is out" and go on your way. No need to run them for warrants etc.

Terry stops (requiring circumstances that would lead a reasonable officer to believe that "criminal activity is afoot" are completely different from pretextual traffic stops. There's plenty wrong with a lot of Terry stops, but the Terry standard at least requires something to indicate that some kind of crime (which are the police's business to investigate) is going on, unlike a broken taillight, cracked windshield etc., which say nothing about any crime but are often used as an excuse to stop someone.

@18 - are you sure this is the same Robert James? The guy I saw in the video of the CHOP incident would have been maybe 16 in 2014.

23

@21:

Meanwhile, a bag of human remains was found on a beach in West Seattle yesterday - I suppose you'll blame CHOP for that as well?

25

Arguing about medical transport while the victims bleed out. Then blocking cops from investigating a HOMICIDE? Wow. CHOP will he remembered as an embarrassment to BLM and the sad pandering to the horde that killed Durkan’s career. Seattle looks dumb and confused- of course this happened.

28

This season of MTV Real World is the most realistic ever!

29

@23: How does referring to an unrelated news event remove CHOP from blame?

31

Now that the inevitable has happened--gunfire and dead people--what are you going to do Chief Best and Mayor Durkin? This perfomative passion play has gotten all too real. Does someone living in an apartment above all this have to catch a bullet? Does a block have to burn because fire fighters can't get in? When has it "gotten out of control"? The leadership vacuum is filling up with bad ideas and energy, are you going to step up to your responsibilities?

32

19: You're right that car stops are only half the problem, which is why police should stay in a station until and unless someone calls them. My comment on car stops was in response to #5.

Police don't just use any excuse to look for drugs, all to often them plant them and are not punished by the police department or charged by the prosecutor's office. One of many, many stories.

https://blackculturenews.com/2020/03/police-officer-gets-busted-attempting-to-plant-drugs-on-a-man-during-an-arrest

Terry stops are based on bad case law and a clear violation of the 4th Amendment. The judiciary has allowed prosecutors to eviscerate the 4th amendment through things like canines and check point. A Terry Stop is the equivalent of the old Soviet Union stopping you to check your papers.

34

@23, nobody is blaming them for something in West Seattle. However, after protesting against a police presence, getting support to defund the police, and having them removed from an area, the protesters have some responsibility for public safety with the borders of CHOP.

If CHOP becomes so dangerous that those city leaders and protesters leave it to the cops to clean up the mess they made, it will be among the most irresponsible and cowardly things I've seen happen and I'd say the movement to defund the police would have taken a huge hit to its credibility.

35

Anyone with any sense and awareness---that is, many in Seattle except for its mayor, the City Council, The Stranger staff, and the terminally ideologically blind---could see this violence coming. Our mayor seems to believe in a fantasy world where she is a newly woke free spirit showing meanies the true meaning of love and compassion. Her---and the council's---understanding of CHOP is so naive as to beggar belief. Mayor Durkan seems hell-bent on winning the approval of Sawant, her supporters, other members of the council, and the protesters. It's as if she believes they and The Stranger represent the real culture of Seattle, which in fact is far more various. In the process she's proven how pathetic---how truly pathetic and insecure and hollow---a person she is. And no one should let Sawant and company slip away from culpability either. The council---and in particular, Sawant---helped pressure Durkan to allow this. Notice how there have been almost no council-member calls for Durkan's removal since she's allowed CHAZ/CHOP to stay? Well, now a critical moment really has arrived: does Durkan let this continue or not? And can our "leaders" let go of their media-fed fantasy about a new summer of love and actually grow up? A horrific tragedy this morning---and hopefully the last one. Okay, Mayor: the ball's in your court. Show some courage at last by at least privately acknowledging your insecurity about approval from the left. No more tragedies at CHOP. Do your job, Mayor.

37

I doubt the zone is going to make it much longer. Denying emergency services and disrespecting residents will be what brings it down. The leadership vacuum is too much to overcome. BLM proper would do well disavow the area, call for its end and move on to other protests and marches.

It’s devolved into a social scene rather than a zone that could foster change. It’s people hanging out for the sake of hanging out. The zone hasn’t really offered anything to address the issues raised by the initial protest. An effective protest needs to clearly communicate its position. Instead they’ve occupied a neighborhood that isn’t theirs impacting the residents. Just as SPD did before.

I’m still for pedestrian zones in the area for all to freely use, converting the precinct into a community center and marches and rallies to address police oppression. The occupation is doing more harm than good and it would be wise for defined organizations to cut ties before it takes their cred down with it. This won’t last the summer. It may not last June.

38

Mayor Durkan, Sawant and the Stranger have blood on their hands. Of course a lawless zone they endorsed descended into bloodshed. BLM should condemn this naive experiment, defund the police just lost momentum.

41

This shooting is exactly what the right has been waiting for, as a club to beat their message of Law & Order into the populace. It'll be front and center in Trump's Tulsa speech tonight.

42

trumpf's mini-Nuremberg will spread the CV-IXX to his Faithful, their extended families their doctors and caregivers supermarketeers and all for what?

to re-elect thee most Corrupt pos potus the USA's ever had

Who wants to Die for trumpfy?

44

@2 -- what's cool about the internet is it allows you to find lots of information. Such as a report telling us what Washington's prison population has done to cause them to wind up there.

https://www.doc.wa.gov/docs/publications/reports/100-QA001.pdf

As of March of this year, the breakdown by type of crime looked like this:

Most serious current offense
Murder 1 and 2 13.5%
Manslaughter 2.5%
Sex crimes 21.5%
Robbery 8.2%
Assault 28.3%
Property crimes 16.1%
Drug crimes 6.5%
Other 3.8%

That means that 74% the current prison population in WA is people who committed a violent crime to get there. In other words, when you say 75% of the people in prison are there for offenses that harm no one, you're completely wrong.

45

44: Your interpretation is problematic on a few levels

You presume those convicted committed the crime they were convicted of. The vast majority of those charged take a plea deal (about 98%) on all kinds of crimes they did not commit. They do it because the alternative is a prosecutor stacking charges against them in a trial where the judge defers to the prosecutor and the juries overwhelmingly support the State before the trial even begins. Mandatory minimums have eviscerated the the 6th amendment to the Constitution. As any defense attorney will tell you, innocence is OK as a final fall back position if that's all you have on your side, but it's nothing to bet your life on at trial and most don't. Prosecutor sentencing has no limit or oversight and if they want to send someone to jail for 10 years for fighting them on a fishing without a license charge when they don't even own a fishing pole they can it and often work with the judge to frame the trial in a way that essentially delivers a directed verdict to the jury.
Things like murder and sex crime are scary labels, but there's all kinds of crimes that fit into all these category that are not the violent crimes normal people would think of. I could be driving my friend to a 7-11 to buy cigarettes and if on his own be pulls out a gun and shoots the attendant I am now facing a first degree murder charge. I could pick up a women who's car broke down on the side of the road, and if she turns out to be a sex worker I can be charged as a pimp.
Almost every violent crime has a loopole like this that allows police and prosecutors to pretend they are arresting the dangerous when they are primarily arresting the clueless, harmless and mentally ill and charging them in a way that goes well beyond the spirit of the law in a way that gives them the appearance of doing their job.

Meanwhile, there are thousands of untested rape kits the police and prosecutors couldn't care less about.

47

@45 got it. So we need to test more rape kits, so rapists can be held accountable, but when they're held accountable, that's bad.

Heighten the contradictions indeed!

48

47: No, you have it wrong, again.

We need to force the police to test the rape kits they continue to ignore and is some cases destroy, then require them follow up on and arrest the rapist tied to the rape kit even when it more often than not turns out to be tied to a police officer.

Because you are easily confused, let me tell you what we don't need. We don't need prosecutors coercing people to take plea deals for crimes they never committed because they can't afford and attorney and can't afford the stacked charges they are routinely threatened with. The police and prosecutors don't need to bend and reimagine existing laws to be used in ways they were never intended to run up incarcerate and create the illusion they are pursuing violent crime when all the have done is incorporated non-violent crime into the violent crime statute.

As the data confirms, even if you don't like it, the clearance rate for police for murder is less than 50% and for rape less than 20%. Perhaps the police should select what cases they work not entirely on most asset forfeiture money. Perhaps the police should pursue the violent crimes the public cares about that the police seem entirely uninterested in solving.
At a minimum, perhaps the police should stop being the primary perpetrators of those violent crimes they are paid to stop, which brings us back to the prosecutor's office failure to pursue criminal charges against criminals within the police department.

Since we have been trying to reform that system for decades and failed, defunding is the next best solution.

49

46: It is you who is delusional. Your argument is not with me, but with the data:

https://thebaffler.com/latest/brutal-force-al-gharbi

"Police are 4 times more likely to commit domestic violence than the general population and routinely get away with it.

Since 2015, cops fatally shot at least 352 people who were unarmed (that is, not even possessing a toy, blunt object, or other instrument). In total, 5,408 civilians were killed by police gunfire over the last five years; one out of every fifteen was unarmed. And it is important to note that these data only count police shootings.
Many if not most police departments grossly undercount the number of civilians they murder on a yearly basis
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/opinion/police-involved-deaths-new-york-city.html

There are also widespread reported rapes, sexual assault, and sexual harassment incidents involving on-duty cops every year. (Of course, many more cases likely go unreported.) According to an investigation from the Buffalo News, from 2005 to 2015, “a law enforcement official was caught in a case of sexual abuse or misconduct at least every five days.” The officers are usually armed in these cases. The victims are typically isolated, and often physically restrained. Sometimes there is an imminent threat of force or arrest. Nonetheless, cops often have the audacity to claim that these sex acts, against civilians under police custody, are consensual.

Not all abuses by police are physical in nature. Consider the billions of dollars in cash, cars, real estate and other assets that police seize from civilians every year on the grounds of “civil forfeiture.” In 2014, for instance, cops ended up taking more property from Americans than burglars did. In many cases, people who have their property or assets seized are never charged with any crime—however, it often proves nearly impossible for them to get their money or items back. The abuse of civil forfeiture has become so extreme and widespread that the Supreme Court recently had to step in to help curb abuses, and there is a bipartisan Congressional effort to cut down on the practice."

Blue Lies Matter

According to an investigation by USA Today, at least 85,000 cops have been investigated for misconduct over the last decade—including 22,924 investigations into excessive force; 3,145 allegations of rape, molestation of a child, or other sexual misconduct; 2,307 purported instances of domestic violence; and 2,645 cases of police obstructing an investigation, committing perjury, falsifying reports, and/or tampering with witnesses or evidence. These numbers, daunting as they seem, may just be the tip of the iceberg.

When investigations do occur, police often close ranks to protect one another. Consider, for instance, the police officers who nearly killed that seventy-five-year-old man by shoving him to the pavement. The officers involved were suspended without pay while the incident was investigated (and they were subsequently charged with assault). Rather than applauding because their peers were being held to account for excessive use of force against someone who posed no plausible threat, the entire emergency-response police unit resigned from their assignments in protest of their colleagues being suspended. As a result of this tendency of cops to stick together—even when their fellow-officers are “in the wrong”—investigations into police misconduct generally come away empty-handed."

Given the overwhelming evidence that the police create more harm than good in the communities they work in, perhaps you should be as upset at police violence and corruption as you are at the data that shows who and what police truly are.

51

51: Your not denying me, you're denying the data on violent over-policing.

We've heard your bromides, but do you have any facts that contradict the documented pattern of rape, murder and assault perpetrated by the police I noted above?

When police are 400% more likely (170,000 police officers) to beat their wives and children than the general public, I'm not sure "oh calm down" is a credible response, and that's not even mentioning the pattern of murder the unarmed assaulting peaceful protestors. The fact that prosecutors refuse to hold you accountable for your crimes doesn't make it ethical. When you are charged or not, raping children in custody is still wrong.

53

Johnny88, have you noticed that people are fed up with gratuitous police violence against innocent civilians?

56

@29/34:

Because, as we all know there have been absolutely no crimes of any kind committed within the City limits aside from CHAZ/CHOP since SPD abandone - er, temporarily closed the East Precinct building, amiright?

57

@42:

Given the hilariously poor turnout in Tulsa, MAGAts appear to be learning what the rest of us have known all along...

58

Johnny88 @55

https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759

Whether or not they were good when they signed up, cops get trained to behave badly:

"Whether you were my sergeant, legally harassing an old woman, me, legally harassing our residents, my fellow trainees bullying the rest of us, or 'the bad apples' illegally harassing 'shitbags', we were all in it together. I knew cops that pulled women over to flirt with them. I knew cops who would pepper spray sleeping bags so that homeless people would have to throw them away. I knew cops that intentionally provoked anger in suspects so they could claim they were assaulted. I was particularly good at winding people up verbally until they lashed out so I could fight them. Nobody spoke out. Nobody stood up. Nobody betrayed the code."


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