EDITOR’S NOTE: Seattle Bike Blog supports the Defund Seattle Police effort being led by a large group of community organizations and leaders, including No New Youth Jail, Decriminalize Seattle, Block the Bunker, Seattle Peoples Party, COVID-19 Mutual Aid, Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network, BAYAN, La Resistencia, PARISOL, CID Coalition, Asians for Black Lives, APICAG. View the demands and sign on here. We support the protestors and respect the risks you are taking to speak your truths and hold government accountable.

Tear gas causes respiratory distress, severe pain and skin irritation. It could also make the effects of covid-19 worse. Pepper spray causes extreme pain and terrifying temporary blindness. Flash-bang grenades explode, and can cause serious burns, abrasions and permanent hearing loss. Seattle’s Community Police Commission recommended against using them four years ago, a reform the Seattle Police Department decided to ignore.

Seattle Police have employed all these weapons against people of Seattle many times in recent days. Their use is indiscriminate, disproportionate and often without warning. The police use of these weapons has escalated tension into chaos and preceded Saturday’s fires and property destruction shown on screen across the city and nation.

Seattle Police seemed somewhat successful at spinning the story of Saturday’s initial use of these weapons, saying that some members of the crowd were throwing things at them. And Mayor Durkan fully supported their actions. Meanwhile, people on the ground have said consistently that the crowd was peaceful when SPD officers fired these weapons.

When Mayor Jenny Durkan spoke Sunday, she reserved her words of sadness for the property that was destroyed. She did not express empathy for the hundreds of people who were hurt by her police force the evening before. The use of these weapons against people has been so normalized that it hardly seemed worth commenting about, as though they were acceptable civilian casualties in a war zone. Go file a complaint, she said to anyone who was a victim of or witnessed police misconduct. And 10,000 complaints were filed just about problems Saturday.

Her speech was hopelessly out of touch and callous. As someone who has reported about Seattle government for the past decade, my immediate takeaway after watching was that her mayorship is over. She had failed her basic duty to prioritize the health and rights of the people of her city, and she had grossly underestimated the power of the people in the streets.

The city needed someone who would stand up for people who are hurting, whether from the immediate pain of police weaponry or the generations-deep pain of violent racism. The city needed her to declare changes, both in the way her police would respond to future protests and in policies and laws governing policing in general. Instead, she offered some platitudes about systemic racism before defending SPD and showing more empathy for panes of glass than people’s lungs, eyes and basic rights to freedom of speech.

She then went further to limit people’s rights to assemble by declaring a bizarre and confusing city-wide curfew, curbing every resident’s rights and giving SPD more excuses to escalate to violence. And she did this because SPD asked her to, she said.

This is exactly the opposite of what our city needed. We needed our mayor to stand up for our rights and create space for freedom of expression. We needed our mayor to create space for real change. Instead, she tried to shut it down.

But she failed to stop it. People kept gathering to protest racist and violent policing, and they had no respect for her curfew. Nor should they. She lost public confidence.

Mayor Durkan’s speech Sunday was the biggest test of her term as mayor, and she failed. It was a chance to do the right thing and learn from the mistakes of the night before, to deescalate tensions and to layout a clear path for change. Instead, she doubled down on Saturday’s mistakes. Because of that failure, Monday happened. (more…)