There was a notable moment at that rowdy city council meeting yesterday, and it came as protesters were heckling the council and Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O'Toole about cops' treatment of the anti-police-brutality protesters who've taken to the streets over the last two months.

"Can you address why 23 of 25 arrestees are black or brown people at mostly white protests?" a protester said from the front row of the crowd. "Can you please address that?" O'Toole said she didn't know if that was true, but would look into it.

Then Council Member Kshama Sawant told the group: "The response from the police department and from the council ... I think it has to be in proportion to the sense of urgency the community is feeling and especially the African American community, and the question of why the arrestees are majority black while the protests aren't and also the community is not majority black. So, why are the arrestees majority black? Why are they young black people? I think that is an urgent question."

But the majority of the arrestees weren't black, according to the Seattle Police Department. The department writes on its Blotter that of the 25 people arrested at protests between November 24 and December 28, most of them—14—were white. Of the rest, seven were black, one was Asian or Pacific Islander, and three were of unknown race or ethnicity.

If there's a way to rescue the point Sawant and protesters were trying to make, it might be this: According to the SPD's numbers, 28 percent of arrestees were black, while black people make up about 8 percent of the city's population, according to census data. (Which is not to say that we know exactly what the demographic breakdown of the protesters was.) And, to further complicate things, a less racist breakdown of arrest percentages doesn't change the SPD's history of racial profiling, which continues to stoke suspicion of the department and others like it across the country.