The Strange Death of the Seattle Police Department
Despite mainstream Dems rejecting the most extreme demands of the Floyd protesters, progressive cities continue to be driven by radicals who believe in a utopia with no police whatsoever
This memoir is written by a retired Seattle Police detective who witnessed firsthand how many of the criminal justice reforms being enacted are designed to make law enforcement dysfunctional and consequently worthy of abolition, not reform it.
In the throes of the 2020 George Floyd “uprising,” City of Seattle elected officials seriously considered passing legislation to defund their police department by 50% and shortly thereafter abolish the agency in favor of a new Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention. This is the story of how once responsible public officials went temporarily insane during a moral panic.
In 1994, when I signed up to be a police officer for the City of Seattle, I knew many of its citizens regarded my profession with disdain. My go-to cocktail joke is that Seattle is similar to San Francisco–just not as conservative. I had thick skin and would have been a firefighter if I wanted everyone to love me. So I accepted being treated as a necessary evil in order to earn a living doing a job I love. Law enforcement is a front-row seat to the best show on earth. I’m a cop because I don’t know how to not be one, and I’ll be goddamned if I let some cosplay revolutionary anarchist baristas deter me!
I adore Seattle and was honored to serve its citizens. Unlike many cops, I lived in the city and I sent my kids to Seattle Public Schools. I am an atheist who wants America to become a Scandinavian-style welfare state, so I used to be politically aligned on the left with my fellow Seattleites. However, my skepticism about civilization being able to function without police makes me a fascist by 2023 standards.
Below, I describe the 5 stages of the decline and fall of policing in Seattle.
STAGE 1: THE BUNKER
Artist rendering of the proposed new Seattle Police North Precinct. City of Seattle file photo.
The Seattle Police Department (SPD) North Precinct Police Station was built in 1984 and was designed for a staff 154. The precinct currently houses 250 employees, nearly 100 more than planned. City of Seattle file photo.
Seattle reached an inflection point in 2016 when radicals who considered policing an unnecessary evil were able to affect public policy. The event was a small but loud faction of anti-police activists who prevented the construction of a new North Precinct. The campaign was brilliant in that it adopted Tea Party anti-tax rhetoric to achieve a radical leftist goal of police abolition. Their Block the Bunker campaign argued that the price tag for a new facility was too high and the run-down building designed for half the number of employees and augmented by trailers was more than adequate. The new precinct design was contemptuously referred to as a “bunker” because it was built to withstand attacks from guns, bombs, and rioters (more on this later). Fretting over a $160 million price tag sounds reasonable until you realize that Seattle was swimming in tech money. From 2000 to 2015 Seattle was on a massive spending spree for a new courts and police HQ building, a new West Precinct, and a new Southwest Precinct. And no, the cops were not the only recipients of this largesse. All 33 fire stations had been replaced or refurbished. A perfectly good Central Library was torn down and a Rem Koolhaas masterpiece was built in its place. Ironically, the north Seattle area citizens who actually wanted a new precinct instead received a fancy new garbage dump for $108 million. And, most hypocritically, the mayor and city council who lacked the backbone to support their police force did so from a new City Hall. The North Precinct was canceled out of pure spite, not fiscal responsibility.
Despite the sting of betrayal at our city leaders changing their minds about a new precinct at the last moment, Seattle was still a fun place to be a cop. In 2018 some Seattle Police officers way younger and cooler than me produced a lip sync challenge video as part of a friendly competition with other cops around the country that went viral online. People liked the police!
When the pandemic started in March 2020, it was a non-partisan issue with the potential to create national unity. In April 2020 an internet meme started spreading where uniformed civil servants–mostly police officers–would post pictures of themselves in uniform as a morale booster to the public while they were enduring lockdowns.
A photo of himself the author posted to Facebook in April 2020.
Traditionally, the anarchists would start a riot every May Day in Seattle. However, in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown, May 1st was a nonevent: a few people adorned their cars with Marxist slogans and drove around downtown. Hilariously, at the time it was deemed too dangerous for a group of people to march outdoors. I naively thought this meant we would get through the COVID crisis without too much drama.
STAGE 2: THE WESTERN BARRICADE
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed during an arrest by the Minneapolis Police Department. It was sickening to watch and there was universal denunciation by the police throughout the country.
On Saturday, May 30, 2020, a large protest in Seattle devolved into a riot after the demonstrators attacked the police, set fires, and looted stores. Five squad cars were torched and police rifles were stolen. The looters picked the city so clean of things to steal that the mob went to the suburbs the next day to continue stealing.
The counterculture scene in Seattle, and therefore the residence of many of the protesters, is located in the Capitol Hill neighborhood which is patrolled by East Precinct officers. The captain of this precinct performed ritualistic acts of atonement for a crime he didn't commit in a city a thousand miles away by kneeling before Black Lives Matter activists.
Despite the commander trying to de-escalate the situation, the East Precinct became the focus of the entire protest. A few days earlier a precinct in Minneapolis was burned down so we were concerned the same thing would happen to the East Precinct. Seattle East Precinct was a former car dealership built with wood timbers in 1926 and was definitely NOT a bunker. It had a zero-lot line facade full of plate glass windows facing a public sidewalk. It was completely indefensible and abutted over 100 apartments whose residents’ lives would be endangered if the demonstrators set the precinct on fire. This situation enhanced my understanding of why the activists demanded that the new North Precinct not be built. It was too difficult to attack. Protesters graffitied the newly constructed precincts I mentioned previously but there was never any serious concern that they’d be burned down because they were designed to be resilient. The anarchists wanted police facilities that can only be protected by a massive line of riot police in order to create the next viral video that discredits law enforcement. Kids, the lesson here is that if anarchists are against something it’s automatically a good idea until proven otherwise.
The Seattle Police East Precinct has large plate glass windows next to the public sidewalk.
The solution to protecting the precinct was to establish four checkpoints that restricted access to the four blocks leading to the intersection of 12th and Pine Street where the building resides. Almost all of the violence by the protesters and retaliation by the police occurred at 11th and Pine, which the protesters called The Western Barricade in a reference to the tactic in the doomed Paris Commune revolt in 1871. This is a theme I would notice with modern radical leftist militants: they took inspiration from historical events that failed spectacularly because these revolutions never had an opportunity to devolve into an authoritarian nightmare worse than the government it replaced. I don’t blame them. If I was a Marxist insurgent I wouldn’t want to be associated with the Reign of Terror, the Killing Fields, or the Great Purge either!
A huge crowd massed at the Western Barricade. Photo taken by the author.
I’m a Persian Gulf War Army veteran, so I know that combat is 99% boredom and 1% terror. The Seattle riots were similar. Most of the time the protesters hung out in a music festival environment. In fact, it did not take long for a band to set up and provide a free concert about a block from the action.
A photo by the author showing a band performing a free concert on 11th Avenue. The Western Barricade is around the corner.
Everyone present at the protest was doing their part by holding territory and putting pressure on the police. But only the true believers would go directly up to the riot line and taunt the police. The zeal with which the radicals would try to provoke the cops into overreacting was astonishing. The demonstrators would chant “We’re not tired, no one likes you” all night long at the exhausted officers. They also had two very specific insults: the first was “Everyone hates you. You should take your gun out put it in your chin and pull the trigger.” Since police officers have a high suicide rate this was especially vicious. The other one was asking cops if they beat their wives and they would quote some ridiculously high percentage (40%) of police officers being domestic abusers. This one puzzled me because if there is a hint of a police officer engaging in this behavior they’re not going to have a job for long. I looked this statistic up online and found it originated from a small survey done in 1985 before many of the officers being harassed were born. Eventually, after they learned that no amount of insults will get the police to assault them on camera, the protesters would start throwing rocks and firecrackers at them to provoke a response with tear gas.
A selfie taken by the author at the Western Barricade during the day when things were relatively tame. The white building in the upper left corner is the East Precinct. Note the hands raised up similar to how Evangelical Christians demonstrate piety at a revival. I know, it means hands up don’t shoot, but still the similarities are striking!
My most vivid memory of the protest was a beautiful college girl showing up at the Western Barricade at 10 o’clock at night. Her tall boyfriend handed her a Black Lives Matter placard, presumably which she had carefully stenciled that evening in her dorm room. Her face lit up with a smile as she thrust the sign above her head. He snapped a photo and they immediately departed. This took about 15 seconds. Virtue points: earned.
Since I was walking around in plain clothes during the protest I could hear the activists discussing tactics. They were inspired by the 2019 Hong Kong protests which featured the use of umbrellas. The stated purpose of the umbrellas was to hide their identity and repel pepper spray. The umbrellas were also a weapon to torment police standing in a riot line by poking at them. This was infamously demonstrated in the Pink Umbrella Incident, where an officer on the riot line at the East Precinct grabbed an umbrella that was pushed in his face and all hell broke loose. This incident was used as a talking point by activists to state that while nobody in the Seattle Police Department had anything to do with the horrible murder of George Floyd, their entire legitimacy was lost by this one act of wanton parasol destruction. The umbrella tactic was another example of American radical leftists being inspired by doomed movements. They seemed oblivious to the fact that the Chinese government mercilessly crushed the Umbrella Protest.
The other thing that the protesters chatted about incessantly was whether or not the Seattle cops would use an LRAD on them. LRAD stands for Long Range Acoustical Device. It’s a high-tech sound cannon that causes pain throughout the body. Apparently, it had been used in the recent Berkely riots and the protesters were terrified that it would be used in Seattle. They, like everyone, thought that since Berkeley is the epicenter of progressivism, surely Seattle would have one too. They were wrong, SPD did not have an LRAD initially but obtained one later in the summer of 2020 to use it as a public address system only after complaints were made that officers’ orders to stop rioting could not be heard. The sound cannon feature was disabled. The protesters constantly gave false reports of an LRAD showing up which started a panic in the crowds. An armored vehicle with its hatch opened vaguely resembles an LRAD. This begs the question: if the sound cannon is so effective and does not cause permanent injury, then why is it banned in Seattle? The answer is obvious: because it works without using force that can be used as propaganda against the police. I’ve never heard an activist propose banning riot police carrying batons because they want the police to hit people with them as it makes the cops look bad, however justified. Kids, the lesson here is that if anarchists are against something it’s automatically a good idea until proven otherwise.
During the first week of June 2020, the Western Barricade fell into a predictable routine. It would be a party atmosphere during the day and at night it would become violent. Initially, the activists’ demands were:
Take down the barricades so they could march in front of the precinct.
Free the political prisoners.
Stop using tear gas under any circumstances because it is a “war crime.”
The tear gas is a war crime narrative was especially infuriating to me, a veteran who had been tear-gassed many times in training. The Geneva Convention prohibits the use of tear gas during combat operations to avoid the adversary thinking it was a lethal gas and retaliating, but militaries are allowed to use tear gas to quell civil disturbances; which this was. In any event, police officers are not soldiers, and we are not in a war, so it’s a nonsense statement. Tear gas was the only tool that could be used to control crowds of thousands of people who were confronting 100 officers trying to protect a building.
Antifa militants lighting dumpsters on fire during a riot. Photo by the author.
STAGE 3: AUTONOMOUS ZONE
The situation at the East Precinct was tactically and politically untenable. After a week the angry crowds did not go away. The officers were exhausted, and every day more of the cops would be out of commission from injury. The City Council, most of whom had been elected on a promise to hire more cops, had been intimidated into submission and were sometimes participating in the protest against their own police department. The council was threatening to impeach the mayor if she did not ban the use of tear gas. The police command staff did not feel they could protect the precinct without chemical irritants and believed that allowing the protesters to march up to such a fragile building would risk the building being destroyed and more officers and protesters hurt. Cops aren’t dumb. They knew we would have to abandon the building before the command staff did. We got this email from the Chief of Patrol Operations.
The next day, June 8, Assistant Chief Mahaffey ordered the precinct abandoned after 11 days of sustained protests. My assumption was that some of the activists would simply burn it down (there would be arson attempts discussed later). I was shocked that instead, they expanded the police barricades, and left-wing militia armed with rifles took over the entire neighborhood. The word among the protesters was that abandoning the precinct was a ruse to trick them into breaking into the building so they could be arrested. Activists stayed out of the building during the three-week autonomous zone, presumably because they thought the City might give them the building as a community center. All police officers, including those undercover like me, were ordered to stay out of CHAZ. They emailed us a map with the newly created micro-state in red.
It’s important to remember that there were two separate decisions by police command staff: #1. To abandon the East Precinct (which I agreed with) and #2. To abandon the neighborhood surrounding the precinct building (which I disagreed with but with the City government unwilling to let the police confront the militants, it was probably inevitable). To be clear, all city departments besides the police were allowed in that zone. The city helped them paint a huge Black Lives Matter mural on the street in front of the precinct.
The attacks on police did not end when the officers’ shifts ended. The school district sent me a letter profusely apologizing for ever having anything to do with the Seattle Police Department. They confessed that they hired a couple of cops to work in their larger high schools and while these individual officers had been wonderful partners in keeping kids safe, they were deeply sorry for contributing to the murder of young black men by collaborating with such an evil organization as the Seattle Police Department. Sigh.
The letter further stated that during the protests, activists saw police vehicles staging in an unused school parking lot (all schools were closed due to COVID) so the school district assured me that they would demand that police never set foot on their property again. Double sigh.
During 2020 there was a gesture where people posted black squares on Instagram to signify fealty to Black Lives Matter. My wife doesn't mix politics with social media so she did not post the proscribed black square. Some of her Seattle friends confronted her for this supposed moral failing. Two friends were aware she was in a relationship with a police officer and severed communication with her as a result.
At the same time, anything police related in American culture was under attack. The TV show Cops was canceled after 31 years.
Despite all of this hate, my fellow officers and I did the best we could. If you google my name, you will see I was the Seattle graffiti detective, but that was only for five years after I was burned out from working seven years in the sexual assault and child abuse unit. At the time of the riots, I was in the Criminal Intelligence Section whose mission was to investigate organized crime, politically motivated crimes such as threats to public officials, and any weird stuff that required undercover detectives and was not related to drugs or vice.
When the riots began my unit was one of a handful of Seattle Police officers who were in civilian clothing. Grizzled homicide detectives who hadn’t put on a uniform in decades had to wear their gear while they sat at their desks. When their building would come under attack from “peaceful protesters” they would have to stand on a riot line.
Another unprecedented thing was the department being placed on indefinite emergency 12-hour shifts which ended up lasting about two months.
As a plainclothes detective, I was not allowed to participate in the protests because that would be considered infiltration. My job was to pretend to be a random passerby and call in uniformed riot police when I observed crimes such as vandalism, so they could swoop in and make the arrest. Doing this job as a middle-aged white guy without the rioters making me out as a cop was challenging. I was successful by adopting a “curious idiot” persona. For example, sometimes I would wear a marijuana shirt and ride one of my kid’s Razor scooters.
The author in undercover mode.
STAGE 4: THE DEMANDS
After the success of kicking the cops out of Capitol Hill, the protest coalesced around three demands to the city:
Defund SPD by 50%
Invest in Black neighborhoods
Free the political prisoners
The second two requests would be granted without much debate but cutting the department budget by half was controversial because it would result in crime increasing. Chief Carmen Best fought this move as best she could, stating that you can’t make public policy out of something someone decided to write on a poster. She explained that 80% of their budget is dedicated to salaries, so there would have to be massive layoffs for a department that only had about a thousand cops to patrol a city of 750,000. When Best pointed out that she had hired many racial minorities recently and they would be the first to be laid off, Councilmember Lisa Herbold suggested laying off white men first.
Initially, they started calling the microstate CHAZ for Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. While it was supposed to be a leaderless utopia, a rapper named Raz Simone took charge by handing out guns like candy and administering a disciplinary beatdown to a graffiti vandal. After it was learned that Mr. Simone was a pimp he was ostracized by the other activists. They rebranded from CHAZ to CHOP for the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.
On June 12, 2020, a man later identified as Isaiah Thomas Willoughby by arson detectives was caught on video attempting to burn down the East Precinct. The only problem was that the detectives were not allowed to process the crime scene because they weren’t allowed access to CHOP. That’s where I came in. I was assigned to go into CHOP undercover and take pictures of the fire damage. I had to leave my gun and badge behind because if the CHOP guards searched me, they could have decided to execute me on the spot. I had an open cell phone call with a headset to a team of officers in a van who could drive in and rescue me if needed, but it all went without a hitch and the suspect ended up being convicted. Desmond David-Pitts was arrested for trying to burn down the East Precinct on August 24, 2020, when it was back to being used by the police. These two incidents show that the fears of the precinct being burned down were legitimate and so was the decision to keep the angry mob away, however messy it was to attempt to do so.
While seven of the nine city council members said that they wanted to defund SPD by 50%, they never could figure out a way to do it without the city being thrown into complete chaos. However, they did de facto defunding by convincing hundreds of officers to quit and go work where they were appreciated. The medium-sized city of Spokane poached four of our best and brightest at once. This exodus was repeated dozens of times over.
Since I couldn’t go into CHOP, except that one time, my job was to drive around it in my car and keep an eye on things. This is the expanded Western Barricade. Photo by author.
Eventually, two black male teenagers were shot and killed in CHOP, one by CHOP security. This created the political willpower to retake the area on July 1, 2020. The protests continued resulting in the Seattle Police arresting a total of 324 rioters in 2020.
STAGE 5: THE AFTERMATH
In 2022 I retired from Seattle PD and sailed off into the sunset. Despite needing 1,400 officers, Seattle says that it has only 954, and my inside contacts suggest that there may be closer to 850 deployable officers in the 17th largest city in the country. Violent crime has been rising steadily since 2020.
Murders are the best bellwether of crime in a city because they are not as open to interpretation as less serious crimes. Here are the recent amount of murders per year in Seattle:
2017: 26
2018: 31
2019: 28
2020: 53
2021: 40
2022: 52
Note the huge jump from 2019 to 2020 of 61%. And no, it had nothing to do with the pandemic or the economy. Crime went down in 2009 during the Great Recession. Violent crime in 2020 stayed the same in every other country on the planet, all of which experienced the same pandemic. Sadly, in the first five months of 2023 we are up to 29 murders. If we continue at this rate 2023 will have 69 deaths, the most in the entire history of the City of Seattle. These excess deaths are all entirely preventable if our public officials could resist the urge to give in to mob rule.
The empirical evidence does not suggest that abolishing the police will work but the activists are not giving up. One of the popular anti-police Twitter accounts in Seattle is @DivestSPD. They admitted to me that they are not interested in police reform. They really want zero police but good luck getting them to explain how things will work when this happens.
It’s perfectly fine if people want to believe this, but when the next controversial police killing happens–and it will happen in a high-crime nation of a third of a billion people–will the politicians be intimidated into following the abolish the police agenda?
The solution to getting Seattle and other cities out of this mess is simple: Evidence-Based Policing. If a policy lowers crime it is good. If a policy increases crime it is bad. There will be tension between lowering crime and negative externalities such as police use of force. However, the use of force can be reduced with the same rubric. For example, does issuing officers Tasers reduce deadly force? I don’t know, but that’s the type of work that a good-faith police reformer would pursue. It’s cynical (and incorrect) to say that policing is hopelessly broken, nothing can be done to improve it, and it needs to be done away with. Training and technology save the lives of officers and criminal suspects, but it costs money.
The activists don’t want there to be a discussion of empirical evidence because the facts are not on their side.
Seattle PD lowered all types of uses of force by 44% between 2018 and 2019.
New York PD went from discharging firearms 994 times in 1972 to 35 times in 2018.
Los Angeles PD in 1990 had 115 officer-involved shootings. In 2019 that number 26.
Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Change takes a long time, but it does happen–unless you defund it.