By T. A. Frank
Monday, April 25,
2022
This February, Bruce Harrell, newly
installed as mayor of Seattle, made it official: His city is in decline. “The
truth is the status quo is unacceptable,” Harrell said in his first state of
the city address. “It seems like every day I hear stories of longtime small businesses
closing their doors for good or leaving our city.”
But it’s not just small businesses.
Much of Seattle’s core looks like a
pockmarked ghost town. Storefronts on both sides of Third Avenue, a major
thoroughfare, are boarded up. Blocks from the Four Seasons hotel and the
Fairmont Hotel, tents crowd the sidewalks, and drug users sit under awnings
holding pieces of foil over lighter flames. Traffic enforcement is minimal to
nonexistent. In mid-March, Amazon announced that it was abandoning a 312,000-square-foot
office space in downtown, citing concerns over crime.
That such woes should afflict one of the
richest cities in the country—Seattle has a median household income of over
$100,000—cannot be blamed on economic decline. The year 2020 saw a 68% spike
in homicides, the highest number in 26 years, and the year 2021 saw a 40% surge
in 911 calls for shots fired and a 100% surge in drive-by shootings. Petty
crime plagues every neighborhood of the city, and downtown businesses have paid
hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund their own security.
What happened to Seattle? The answer, of
course, depends on your politics.
In the news section of the Seattle
Times, for instance, a reader is unlikely to see any consideration of a
link between policing and public safety. “No single cause for 2021’s surge in
gunfire in Seattle,” declared a typical recent headline over an article that points only to possibilities such as the
pandemic or an unlucky cycle of “retaliatory violence.” But the majority view
in Seattle appears to have shifted away from sympathy to ideas like “defund the
police” and toward a recognition that hostility to law enforcement has been a
major factor in the deterioration of the city.
What follows is a cop’s-eye view of
Seattle’s undoing.
***
On Monday, May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis,
George Floyd died after police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd face-down on
the pavement with a knee to Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. Video footage
of the incident circulated around the world in the days that followed. One of
those to watch it was T.J. San Miguel, a canine handler who had moved from the
Big Island of Hawaii to join the Seattle police in 2008. “I thought it was
disgusting,” she says of Chauvin’s actions. “You don’t do that to somebody. That’s
just basic fucking stuff that we knew and learned and had trained on for years
and years. It became pretty apparent that there’s a big difference in training
and tactics and procedures in the West Coast versus East Coast and other
places.”
The knee to the neck also surprised J.D.
Smith, a Marine veteran of the first Gulf War and a Seattle police officer
since 1998. Smith had spent years pursuing drug dealers, killers, and pimps and
had subdued a lot of people. “That’s not even a proper technique,” says Smith.
“We put a knee in between the shoulder blades, and it never chokes anybody
out.”
Matthew Kruse, a young patrol officer who
had joined the force in 2018, was struck that a handcuffed man would fail to
get immediate medical care. “Especially in Seattle, we really emphasize once
they’re in handcuffs and they’re under control you turn to the medical
attention,” he says. “It’s kind of ingrained, but it’s also just doing the
right thing. Do you need something? Do you want to get checked out by medical?
If I have water on me, ‘Do you want some water?’”
But any potential differences between the
police in Seattle and those in other places mattered little to the mood of the
city in the late spring of 2020. Protests spread from Minneapolis across the
country, and the first large-scale demonstrations took shape on Friday night,
May 29, in Seattle’s Chinatown district. Kruse was among the cops standing
guard. “For the first three hours, I was just having a conversation with
people.” After 10 o’clock, though, he says the mood shifted. “People were
throwing stuff,” Kruse says. “They were starting to shine flashlights in our
face.”
On Saturday, the crowds grew destructive.
Groups of protesters shattered windows up and down the retail corridors of
downtown and emptied many of the stores of their merchandise. Some torched
police cruisers parked outside of Nordstrom’s flagship store at Pine Street and
6th Avenue. Protesters also pulled firearms, including M4 rifles, out of the
abandoned vehicles. Mike Magan, a robbery detective who had been on the force
for over three decades, was home that evening, watching the mayhem on the news.
“I was beside myself,” he says. He recognized the abandoned van of a co-worker,
whom he phoned. The colleague, a forensics video specialist, answered in a
whisper and said that he and other colleagues were taking shelter in the
Nordstrom’s and videotaping what they could of the violence outside.
The following morning, Magan got called
into the office to start investigations of 30 to 40 people who’d been arrested
for crimes such as trespass, burglary and property destruction. Five or six
hours in, he began to suspect they’d given the police false names. But there
was no point looking into it further. “We found out they’d all been released
from custody prior to even being questioned,” he says.
The bedlam in Seattle caused police
leaders to institute a so-called “blue/gold” schedule, meaning that officers
had to work 12-hour shifts up to seven days a week. Christopher Young, a
detective in the investigative support unit (previously named the criminal
intelligence unit), who has been on the force since 1994 and never experienced
such a schedule, calls June 2020 “the most stressful month of my life.” Young
found himself working 16-hour days for weeks straight. “Even our homicide
detectives were sitting at their desks working their cases in battle dress
uniforms with their helmets ready to run outside to protect their own office
building,” he says.
Of the hundreds of businesses that
reported being damaged or looted over that weekend, Nordstrom was the most
prominent. There had been an attempt by someone to set it aflame. On June 1,
Mike Magan and a colleague from the Seattle bomb unit entered the site to look
for possible video footage. The first floor, he says, was destroyed. “All the
jewelry cases had been smashed,” he says. “All the cosmetics were gone. All the
makeup was gone. Shoes were gone—bags. Everything.” As for tracking down the
looters, that wasn’t on the agenda. “We were told: you will not investigate any
of those things,” Magan says. “The city attorney wouldn’t file charges on
them.”
That night, Magan, who had been out of
uniform for decades, had to don riot gear to guard the East Precinct on Capitol
Hill. Demonstrations began peacefully but changed after dark. “We were getting
pelted with bricks, rocks, frozen water bottles,” says Magan. “There were shots
fired. Here I am, 33 or 34 years on the department, and I’m like, ‘Why am I on
the front line here?’”
The long shifts exhausted everyone,
including the younger officers. Matthew Kruse was working from 7 PM to 7 AM,
mostly on his feet, and if he was out on patrol he had to have riot gear with
him in the car in case he was needed for crowd control. Once a week or every
two weeks, he’d get a day off and spend it all sleeping. “Some nights I slept
at the police station,” he says. “And I remember at least a couple of times I
just slept in my car, because I was like, if I try to drive home I’m going to
kill myself or someone else.”
J.D. Smith, stationed at the West Precinct
near the turmoil, was spared a direct confrontation with the violence that May
and June. His job at the time was to process online crime reports, which were
now rolling in faster than ever. But he could see the toll being taken on his coworkers
when they returned to the station from the protest sites day after day. “The
looks on their faces—it just reminded me of the Gulf War,” he says.
When the protests grew violent, police
officers began to use various non-lethal weapons to control the crowd,
including pepper spray and tear gas. This led to complaints, lawsuits, and
stinging condemnation in the local press. On June 5, Seattle’s mayor, Jenny
Durkan, declared that officers “do not need to be using tear gas at protests as
a crowd management tool” and banned the use of it for 30 days. Many officers
felt they were being asked to maintain order in violent crowds while
surrendering all of their crowd-control tools. “People were throwing bottles
and rocks, and we had to split this thing up. God forbid after multiple,
multiple, multiple warnings that we’re gonna throw gas, guys, you better
disperse, we throw gas,” says J.D. Smith. “So then what? Oh, Seattle PD, look
how heavy-handed they are.”
***
Prior to the summer of 2020, the
department had been receiving encouraging communications from the mayor’s
office, and, in the spring, city officials had filed a motion asking the federal government to lift a consent decree that had been imposed on the Seattle police in 2012 over concerns
about use of force and biased policing. In 2016, Barack Obama had even invited
the department’s then-chief, Kathleen O’Toole, to the State of the Union, and a
federal judge had ruled in 2018 that the city was in “full and effective
compliance” with the decree.
But Mayor Jenny Durkan announced on June 3
that the city would no longer seek to lift the consent decree, and she offered
no encouragement to a police force that was being stretched to the brink.
Seattle City Council member Teresa Mosqueda vowed to lead an “inquest” into the
budget of the Seattle police and said she wanted to cut funding by half, a view
echoed by fellow council members Tammy Morales and Kshama Sawant. City Council
president Lorena Gonzáles blamed the police response to the protests for
turning “our densest neighborhoods” into a “complete war zone”.
“In May of 2020, our political leadership
considered us a necessary evil,” says Young, the detective. “In June of 2020,
they started to think that we were an unnecessary evil. Every cultural
institution in the city turned on the police.”
That included educational institutions. In
early June, Young, as a parent of children in Seattle Public Schools, was one
of thousands of recipients of an email from school superintendent Denise Juneau
announcing that cooperation with the police would be suspended in light of “the
perpetuation of systemic racism, the murders of Black people by police officers
across our country, [and] the violence displayed by some law enforcement
officers here in Seattle.”
That perspective was palpable on the
streets, too. T.J. San Miguel would hear jeers out of open windows on Capitol
Hill. “You have people in an apartment several stories high just yelling and
screaming at you as you’re out there walking down the block,” she says. In one
case, a crime victim had called for police help, only to start showering the
responding officers with anti-cop abuse when they arrived. “It was very
shocking,” she says. “And it’s just like, ‘Okay, bye, have a nice night.’”
“We were hated,” says J.D. Smith. “We were
literally hated overnight.”
On Sunday, June 8, Matthew Kruse and
coworkers from the North Precinct got an order to go down and help back up
their colleagues in the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. A large protest was
expected that day, and the plan, he says, was to let crowds march past the
precinct unimpeded, unless there was criminal activity, and Kruse and his
colleagues were stationed a couple of blocks away, watching the area on camera.
No one was trying to break into the precinct, says Kruse, but people started to
pitch tents near it. At that point, according to Kruse, a police captain went
over to talk to the protesters. “He started talking to protesters and telling
them, hey, you guys have got to move along, and they got in a verbal
altercation,” says Kruse. “Then they [senior officers] came back to us and said
we’re just going to let them stay there and do their thing.” The East Precinct,
already boarded up, was now abandoned.
News of the surrender of the East Precinct
hit cops hard. “I just felt sick,” says Young. “It was humiliating.” Kruse
found the about-face on holding the fort versus leaving it insulting. “At first
they had said: no, we’re not going to let them take the precinct,” says Kruse.
“The next day it’s being cleared out.” J.D. Smith was incredulous. “I’m still
embarrassed,” Smith says. “We gave away a precinct.”
***
What followed for the next few weeks was
an impromptu test site for improvised maintenance of public order in what came
to be called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. The New York Times
described it as “an experiment in life without the police—part street festival,
part commune.” Donald Trump weighed in from the Oval Office to condemn it.
“Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle,” he tweeted. Seattle’s mayor,
Jenny Durkan, responded, “It’s not terrorism. It’s patriotism.” Asked by CNN’s
Chris Cuomo how long the CHAZ would last, Durkan quipped, “I don’t know. We
could have the summer of love.”
That is not what the Seattle police saw.
“All these businesses are failing and they’re asking for help,” recalls J.D.
Smith of the stores and cafés in the CHAZ. “There is nothing, and I mean zero,
we can do because the mayor is saying summer of love.” Christopher Young says
that officers received an email instructing them not to enter the six-block
zone of the CHAZ, although he made his way into the off-limits area after some
unsuccessful arson attempts against the precinct building. “I was sent with a
fancy camera to take pictures of the crime scene of where they tried to burn it
down,” says Young. “You had to go by a checkpoint with guards, and God knows
what they’d do with me if they found out I was a cop. I had to basically go
undercover to sneak in and look at my own precinct.”
CHAZ lasted until Wednesday, July 1, when
officers reclaimed the precinct. During those 23 days, a 17-year-old was shot
in the arm on June 21; a 30-year-old male was shot and wounded on June 23; and
two black teenagers, 14 and 16, were shot and wounded on June 29 as they drove
into the zone. The older of the two, Antonio Mays Jr., died of his wounds.
Witnesses have stated that members of CHAZ security were the ones who opened
fire on them, but police have never tracked down the responsible parties.The
damage to the area was so great that small businesses in the area filed a class-action lawsuit against the City of Seattle for its neglect.
Despite it all, the city continued to be
racked by protest and strife throughout July, with further vandalism and
looting on Capitol Hill by a subset of the protesters, few of whom ever faced
charges. City officials continued to direct their ire toward the police
department instead, and on August 10 the Seattle City Council voted to cut the
pay of senior police staff, including Chief Carmen Best, who enjoyed widespread
respect from officers on the force, including all of those interviewed for this
article. “It was demoralizing,” says Christopher Young. “She was a great chief
and a very progressive leader who happens to be black. But she still got run
out of town on a rail because she wouldn’t agree that her department needed to
be abolished.”
Carmen Best immediately announced her
resignation. At that time, T.J. San Miguel, who calls Best “excellent, just
excellent,” was already looking for an exit. “I realized I could do everything
completely right, and if the optics aren’t good, then they’re going to hang me
out to dry,” she says. “Once I came to that realization, it was like a bad
breakup where you just shut somebody off.” San Miguel left the force when Best
did.
A change in public safety began to be
noticeable across the city, not just in protest zones. Seattle’s city attorney,
Pete Holmes, and King County’s prosecuting attorney, Dan Satterberg, had always
taken a lenient approach to so-called quality-of-life crimes, but after June
2020 they began to ease up across the board toward a range of other offenses.
Matthew Kruse said that storeowners would call the police about shoplifters,
not realizing that prosecutions of that offense had effectively ceased. On one
occasion Kruse and his partner watched a man walk into a store, shoplift about
$20 in goods, and walk out. “He was like, ‘What are you guys going to do—arrest
me?’” says Kruse. “And we knew we weren’t going to arrest him, because with any
misdemeanor stuff, we had to go through the prosecutor, and stuff like that
wasn’t going to get prosecuted. You could I.D. the suspect and could get a full
confession, and they were going be like, ‘We’re not gonna take it.’”
With an incentive structure that made
officers feel they had little to gain and much to lose from taking the
initiative on crime prevention, cops began a dramatic—and some would say
resentful—pullback in enforcement. Patrol officers no longer drove or walked
about looking for suspicious behavior like someone climbing a fence, but stayed
put and responded after the fact. Mike Magan said that one of his colleagues
got investigated and punished for responding to a call of shots fired without
logging into his computer first. “It was like we were biting our own necks, and
you began to see that a lot of these officers would go park their cars at
certain locations and not go out and patrol,” he says. “You could track the
cars and you could see that these officers were parking in parking garages.”
Kruse wanted to keep patrolling, even if
it was in a more low-key way, but one day his supervisor advised him to avoid
it. “I was told straight to my face: don’t leave the precinct unless you’re
going to a call,” Kruse recalls. “He says: I’m looking out for you, still fresh
in your career. I don’t want you to get in trouble for doing the right thing.”
Kruse quit in October of 2020, later taking a police job in Lynnwood, a suburb
about 16 miles north of Seattle. The following month, the city council voted to
cut the budget of the department by 20%.
For Mike Magan, the pullback in
enforcement spread even to his fellow detectives, causing him to hit breaking
point. “One of the robbery squads just decided they weren’t going to work
anymore,” he says. “They wouldn’t leave the office, they wouldn’t help you on
search warrants, they wouldn’t come out and conduct interviews with you. They
wouldn’t come out and track video. It was heartbreaking.” Magan couldn’t stand
it and decided to retire early.
An exodus of officers led to a manpower
shortage that prompted J.D. Smith to quit as well. As someone whose
interactions with the public were mostly online at this point in his career,
Smith was relatively cushioned from classic hazards of the job. The severe
shortage of officers, however, made him certain that he’d be put back into
uniform and on street patrol, which he believed spelled trouble for someone out
of practice. “It’s tough even when you’re out there every day,” he says. “But
you take somebody who has been off the streets for 10 years—they’re rusty.”
Returning to the work of chasing down violent criminals in a time of hostile
public scrutiny seemed untenable. Smith picked April Fool’s Day of 2021 as his
date of retirement.
The departing officers left a severely
diminished department. Even before the unrest of 2020, the number of officers
in the Seattle Police Department was low by the standard of other cities. With
about 1,400 police officers in 2019, or 18.5 officers for every 10,000
residents, policing in Seattle could never be as comprehensive as in New York
City, where the ratio is 43.6 officers for every 10,000 residents, or
Washington, D.C. where it is 54 per 10,000. But with 186 departures in 2020,
nearly three times the annual average, and another 150 or so in 2021, Seattle
started 2022 with well under 1,000 deployable officers department-wide.
“I loved going to work every day, and I
had a fantastic career,” says Mike Magan. “It’s a beautiful city, but I watched
it go from really good to really bad.”
“The mayor and the city council were
telling us, basically, that we’re the bad guy,” says J.D. Smith. “The truth is
99% plus of us are amazing people that are only there for the reason that I was
there: I don’t like people in fear, and I don’t like people in pain.”
“I’m actually a left-wing guy on just
about every issue,” says Christopher Young. “I want the United States to be a
Scandinavian-style welfare state. So I’m very sympathetic to people’s
concerns.” Forming a complementary department of 100 people comprising
community service officers, social workers and others who could do the sort of
enforcement that doesn’t require a gun would have been a worthy experiment,
Young feels. “But they didn’t do that,” he says. “They just demonized the
police and chased good people out of town.”
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