Public Safety & Human Services Committee Special Meeting 6/3/20

I believe you're on Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

The June 3rd, 2020 special meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It is 12.02 PM.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Gonzalez.

Here.

Council Member Lewis.

Present.

Council Member Morales.

Here.

Council Member Sawant.

Here.

And we are also joined by Council Member Peterson.

Here.

Council Member Juarez.

Here.

And that is all, thank you.

Thank you so much.

We will now approve our agenda for a committee meeting.

If there is no objection, today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

Before we move into public comment, I have a short opening remark about the purpose of today's meeting.

Council Member Herbold, I just wanted to note that I am here as well.

This is Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you for joining us, Council Member Mosqueda.

This nation has a long and proud history of protest for change and an even longer history of racial injustice and institutionalized racialized violence.

especially towards black men and women.

The protests we're experiencing in Seattle and seeing around the country are the results of those histories sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

It's important that we put today's meeting in that context that black men and women have disproportionately suffered and died at the hands of law enforcement in Seattle and across the country and that protesters are pleading not just for justice for George Floyd, but for an end to police violence against Black men and women here in Seattle and across our country.

I was with many of you at Not This Time's event at Westlake on Saturday, protesting the murder of George Floyd and generations of harm done to black communities and black people at the hands of law enforcement.

The stirring words of rage and sorrow of the many voices lifted Saturday were a lament to the failures of a nation built by black and brown people to deliver justice in law enforcement, failures to deliver justice in law enforcement, failures to deliver economic equality, and failures to deliver educational equity.

I've heard many say over the last few days that embracing protest does not have to constrain our right from expressing rage, sorrow, and heartbreak.

It must not.

On Saturday, I learned from the mayor's office at 5 57 p.m.

about the 5 p.m.

curfew.

I'm sorry, I learned at 4.57 p.m.

about the 5 p.m.

curfew.

And I talked to as many protesters as I could to tell them about that late-breaking curfew.

That evening when I got home, I contacted Council President Gonzalez, and we decided then and there that we needed to publicly issue a request to the mayor's office, Carmen Chief Best, and Chief Harold Scoggins to brief the city council and provide updates regarding the number of injuries and arrests, and as well as the health and safety impacts of the police response to the demonstrations.

We asked for a detailed after action and incident report, including details specific to rifles stolen, police vehicles destroyed, damage to property, and to the interstate as a result of the demonstration.

But we first and foremost emphasize the importance of a review of whether or not the policies for policing of demonstrations in the SPD Policy and Procedures Manual following the implementation of recommendations of the Community Police Commission in 2015 were actually followed.

Today's agenda will begin with public comment.

I want to acknowledge that there is a large amount of interest in public comment today.

So far, 93 of you have signed up.

We will follow public comment with a community panel of individuals with firsthand witness accounts of police response at the demonstrations protesting the murder of George Floyd and generations of harm done to black communities and black people at the hands of law enforcement.

After our community panel, we will hear from the executive, including Senior Deputy Mayor Fong and Chiefs Carmen Best of SPD and Harold Scoggins of the Seattle Fire Department, as well as Department of Neighborhoods Director Andres Mentea.

We will then hear from the three civilian-led police accountability agencies about their role investigating complaints, recommending discipline, and recommending policy changes to the complaints and disciplinary system.

we will close the meeting with additional public comment.

We are creating a listening space here today.

Our goal is to center the voices and experiences of black men and women who are most impacted by police violence and whose voices are often least heard.

Please join us in starting from the premise that everyone has a perspective that should be understood.

Everyone knows what they saw and joins with us today with what they know and understand and with their own life experiences.

This is not a fact-finding exercise, it's an opportunity to listen.

We will create a plan to respond and we will do so together, even if that path is not made clear today.

I pledge to you to center my policy efforts in police accountability and investment in communities that have suffered from disinvestment.

At this time, we will transition in to part one of the remote public comment for items on today's agenda or under the committee's purview.

Please note that there are two parts to today's public comment to allow us ample time to hear from the public and our panel and city departments on events surrounding the recent protests.

All registered speakers will be split into two public comment opportunities.

The time dedicated for each public comment is as follows.

Part one will be up to 20 minutes and then I will make a request to extend the public comment for an additional 10 minutes.

That will allow us to hear from at least the first 15 speakers.

Part two of the public comment will be extended for a time determined by this committee and the number of speakers registered and present to speak.

Speakers who are moved into this public comment period will not need to re-register and will be called in the order registered.

This committee anticipates part two of the public comment period to start around 3 p.m.

Please note the 3 p.m.

time is estimated and I as chair will work towards meeting it and request your patience as we work through these agenda items.

If your speaker number is 16 or above, and you do not wish to either monitor the meeting until the second public comment session, nor do you want to leave and come back to the meeting at three o'clock when the second public comment session is estimated to begin, because you can leave the meeting and come back, please be aware that we will be tracking the number of people who signed up for public comment and do not avail themselves of the opportunity to testify in the second public comment session.

And based on the number of people who do not come back to take advantage of the second comment period, we will consider holding another public hearing to hear from all people who wish to address the council about their experiences in these demonstrations and or their opinions about the city's response to the demonstrations.

Please understand that we have structured public comment this way today because we want to center the experiences of individuals who have lived experiences of Black men and women with firsthand witness accounts of the city and SPD's response to these demonstrations.

That's who comprises our community panel, our first item on the agenda after public comment.

I hope everyone waiting to give public comment understands and agrees how important it is for us to center those voices in our discussion today.

Finally, before we open for public comment, I ask everyone please be patient as we learn to operate this new system in real time.

I will moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

Each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I will call on each speaker by name and in the order in which they registered on the council's website.

If you have not yet registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up before the end of the public hearing by going to the council's website.

This link is also listed on today's agenda.

Once I call a speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate mic and an automatic prompt of you have been unmuted will be the speaker's cue that it's their turn to speak.

Please begin by speaking by stating your name and the topic you are addressing.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of the allotted time.

Again, you will hear a chime.

Once the speaker hears the chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comments.

If speakers do not end their public comments at the end of the allotted time provided, the speaker's mic will be muted after 10 seconds to allow us to call on the next speaker.

Once you have completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line.

And if you plan to continue following the meeting, you can do so via the Seattle channel or listening options listed on the agenda.

So the public hearing is now open and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

I'd like to hear first from Kara Alden.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Kara Alden and I'm speaking on police response to protesters this weekend.

I'm a small business owner.

I'm a community volunteer.

I've lived in and around Seattle for the last 15 years, but most importantly, I'm a public middle school teacher here in Seattle, and I'm speaking on behalf of my students.

My students are 13, 14 years old, and they're passionate, they're well-spoken, they're thoughtful, and they care about public issues.

One of the only places where they can have their voice heard is through public protest.

My students can't vote yet, My students are sometimes barred from certain places from speaking because they're considered too young.

And public protest is one of the only places where they are heard.

They are currently too scared to attend protests because of the actions of police.

My students are fearful for their safety during peaceful protests, not because of other protesters, not because of the community that surrounds them, but because of the actions of police.

My students should not be scared of going to a protest for fear of being pepper sprayed in the face.

My students should not be too scared to attend a protest at the age of 13 and 14 because they might get hit with a flash bang canister that's thrown indiscriminately into a crowd.

This is the only place that my students can have their voice heard right now.

And it's shameful to me that we're using pepper spray on crowds, that my students, my 13 and 14 year olds cannot safely attend and cannot safely talk about the issues they care about.

One of my students helped organize the climate walkouts in the fall.

She would love to attend these protests.

She wants to, but she can't because she's too scared of what the police might do to her.

It's shameful that we're using pepper spray during a respiratory pandemic.

It's shameful that we are putting our citizens in these situations and in this, in fear and in danger.

My students shouldn't be scared.

My students shouldn't be too scared to attend a place that is their constitutional right to assemble.

Thank you Carol.

The next speaker is Amy Storm.

Hi my name is Amy Storm.

I'm a constituent from West Seattle and I am addressing the defunding of the Seattle Police Department.

I hope that you are as horrified as I am at the violent and dangerous tactics the Seattle Police Department has used against peaceful protesters over the last week.

But unlike me, you have the power to create actual, actionable change.

I'm calling on the Seattle City Council to ban the use of tear gas, defund the police, and break ties with SPD, and fight the power of the police union wherever possible.

Every dollar spent on a riot shield is stolen from the mouth of a low-income child in this city.

Every penny spent on tear gas is stolen from the budget of a school.

If the council and Mayor Durkan actually cared about vulnerable people, we wouldn't give millions of dollars of taxpayer money to jackbooted thugs who attack and kill those they claim to have sworn to protect and serve.

If you cared about crime, you would fund social programs to lift up the people that need it, not throw money at a white supremacist organization so they can buy another Humvee.

But most vitally, right now, you wouldn't allow the use of tear gas on your constituents in the middle of a respiratory pandemic.

How dare Mayor Durkan allow chemical weapons to be used on the unarmed populace?

How dare Mayor Durkan allow something banned for use in war to be used on civilians?

Protesters don't cause riots, cops do.

Stand up, speak out, and do something useful.

I yield my time to the next speaker.

Good day to everyone but Mayor Durkan and the SPD.

Thank you, Amy.

The next speaker is Ian Stewart.

Hi, this is Ian.

I'm addressing the demands of activist organizations that have been brought forth in the last few days.

First of all, activists are not asking only for accountability.

At minimum, we are asking for a drastic defunding of the Seattle Police Department.

Thank you, Amy, for just talking about to amplify the demands of I'm going to amplify the demands of the COVID mutual aid group today and calling upon the city council to, one, propose and vote for a 50% cut from the $363 million already budgeted for SPD, two, prioritize community-led health and safety strategies, three, the city attorney must not prosecute protesters, including those arrested for violating curfew and those living in encampments.

Furthermore, all officers who taped over their badge identification or engaged in brutality or excessive use of force in the last three days must be immediately fired.

Um, second on this committee, I just want to specifically address the council members for Baltimore Gonzalez, who voted to approve the latest Seattle police officers guild contract.

I'm glad you've since been calling for a renegotiation, but you should know that the people of Seattle will not give you a second chance to address police brutality.

And, uh, thank you to council members to want for your loan votes against that contract.

Finally, I call upon all of you to join protesters today in calling for the immediate resignation of Mayor Jenny Durkan.

Her response to protests has been swift and brutal violence by the police with little to no provocation.

On the first day of Pride Month, she tear gassed protesters in a historically queer and black neighborhood.

Her officers have been caught on film instigating violence against protesters and members of the press.

In her term, she's consistently fought to remove the police department from federal oversight and acted only at the whim of the Seattle Police Officers Guild.

It's clear that as long as she is at the helm, she will actively resist anything but superficial measures to end police violence.

This is about the safety of our community as the most vulnerable among us are getting killed and beaten by police officers.

These are the stakes.

We don't need more pretty words.

We need action now.

Most of you have not been doing your job.

And if you aren't working to meet the demands of the protesters, the people of Seattle will remove you from office.

If you're not on board, you don't really believe that Black Lives Matter.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ian.

The next speaker is Patrick Burke.

i think you are all weekend i felt peaceful and legal protest being terrorized by police officers while they laughed smiled and made gestures to antagonize people people they took direct aim at the faces of people and shot me directly in the spine while we practiced our first amendment right Taking the word of the police is exactly why we're at this point in the first place, allowing chief best and mayor Durkin to have very manicured press conferences under the guise of COVID and not allowing for follow-up questions shows their leadership doesn't want transparency.

If peaceful protesters are outnumbering the so-called agitators more than 300 to one, and the police can't handle that with the $357 million budget and all of the training they receive, then we clearly need a different organization to be in charge of our public safety if they're just going to take it out on the innocent people of Seattle instead of protecting them.

State patrol being heard, don't kill them, hit them hard.

Before there's even an order given does not sound like de-escalation, nor does it coincide with public safety.

That sounds like premeditation.

If officers need a two-piece inch of tape to make them feel better, maybe we should spend more on getting them therapy and less on special operations and tear gas.

I hope all members of the council will realize their power and recognize Mayor Durkin has displayed moral turpitude for the last, pretty much her whole time.

And we'll explore the Section 10 of the Seattle Charter.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold, for your listening and your leadership on this matter.

Thank you, Patrick.

Next speaker is Robert Krushenk.

Uh, thank you council.

Thank you.

Council member Herbold and others.

My name is Robert Krupschank and I'm a homeowner in Greenwood and district six.

I'm addressing the unacceptable police response to the not this time rally at Westlake park.

I attended on Saturday, May 30th and other responses, protests in recent days.

Even before that rally began around 2 45 PM, I heard SPD exploding incendiaries.

My path into Westlake park on fourth Avenue was blocked by a line of police officers using bicycles.

Washington state patrols already in full riot gear.

I've been to many rallies at Westlake and have never seen this kind of response even before the rally started.

As the speaker said, the names of Seattle victims of police violence, names Mayor Durkin has not said publicly at her press conferences this week, I heard numerous police explosions.

I saw a stream of people trying to get pepper spray out of their eyes.

Most were women.

Most were black.

Since then, we've witnessed an escalation in police attacks on peaceful protest.

Police use the slightest provocation by even one individual to attack the entire crowd.

This is not democracy.

This is not justice.

Many of you know that I used to work in the mayor's office 10 years ago.

All of these issues came up then regarding demonstration management and more independent reviews were done.

Reforms were implemented and the CPC led further reforms.

As we've seen this week, nothing has changed.

We've spent a decade on just this most recent phase of police reform.

It doesn't work.

We need to listen to those community members who are urging us to defund the police and find a totally new way to provide safe and healthy communities and Jenny Durkin needs to resign.

Solidarity to everyone at today's protest.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you, Robert.

The next speaker is Steven Ramos.

Hi, I'm Steven Ramos.

I'm speaking regarding the violence displayed by SPD this weekend.

I'm a U District resident, and after increased police activity in my neighborhood, I spent last night taping plastic wrap and garbage bags to my windows and vents so that I could hide in my shower out of fear that my neighborhood would be gassed by police.

I'm going to briefly list instances that I witnessed online that I saw as violence against our city and people.

Saturday, police had unsecured assault rifles in their vehicle, proving that they arrived to deliver violence and not deescalate.

Monday, an officer grabbed a pink umbrella from a protester and proceeded to pepper spray them when they resisted.

Tuesday use of tear gas against protesters due to a water bottle being thrown after six hours of peaceful protesting a water bottle.

Health officials have stated many times that COVID is a respiratory disease.

Yeah.

SPD is authorizing use of weapons that can cause long-term respiratory damage.

Why does our city have funding for weapons when there are so many people who live here who are facing poverty, joblessness, lack of access to resources and ability inability to pay their rent and basic utilities.

I agree with the previous speakers that we need to defund the SPD.

These funds should go to people who have been suffering and scared for decades and need help now.

All of these instances are on film.

They are being seen by people across the world on the internet.

It reflects not on us, but on you.

These are plainclothes civilians with umbrellas, plastic balls, and rocks who are trying to protect themselves and deescalate one another amidst being met with armed law enforcement equipped with chemical weapons blunt objects and guns.

You are leaders and need to do better and deescalate the tensions in our city and create spaces where people can express themselves and be able to hold accountability for themselves and one another.

Thank you for letting me speak today.

Have a nice day.

The next speaker is Karen D. Hi, this is Karen D.

The city entered its consent decree due to blatant evidence of SPD's overwhelmingly excessive use of force.

These past few days have shown all of us that nothing has changed.

The accountability system measures put in place have clearly not changed SPD's behavior.

The city cannot fail its people by exiting the only meaningful oversight SPD has had just because the mayor wants a win for her re-election campaign.

We send the city's request to end the consent decree, and in fact, ask the judge to look into SPD's demonstration management practices and policies.

Also, it is your job to aggressively negotiate the police union contracts.

Please do not let us down again.

The mayor failed to protect the reforms that the people demanded and fought for, the reforms that were enacted into law in her negotiations with the police union.

How the most recent contracts were overwhelmingly approved by city councils beyond me.

Cops investigating cops, only six months to complete an investigation of a complaint against an officer.

Zero meaningful oversight of cops who abuse their power working shifts for private security companies.

These are all things that you've already addressed in law.

So SED does not need to obey the law because it wasn't negotiated, but protesters following the law and exercising their First Amendment constitutional rights get gassed and arrested.

Finally, please censure this mayor.

Anything short of a formal rejection of this mayor's brutal tactics, lies, gaslighting of her own constituents is taxed at approval.

Tell us you don't condone her retaliation and bullying of people who voice truth.

You want to know what the problem is?

Start at the top with Jenny Durkan.

I also want to echo all the other public commenters today.

Drop all charges against protesters.

Defund SPD.

Stop using tear gas and flashbangs against your own people.

Black lives matter.

Thank you.

Thank you, Karen.

The next speaker is Lori Akhtar.

Hello.

My name is Lori Akhtar.

I'm addressing policy accountability and police accountability.

I'm a master's of social work intern and a program manager living in Capitol Hill.

Over the last several months, we've seen our political systems do many quote unquote impossible things in order to manage the coronavirus pandemic.

For instance, we've waived HIPAA requirements for some telehealth.

We've been able to pass a lot of measures for financial aid stimulus and increased services very, very quickly.

Now, police violence and brutality is not new and it's not a pandemic, but it is obviously an epidemic.

And I feel confident that we are fully capable of making similar rapid, massive changes for this that we were able to make for COVID.

Why are police equipped with tear gas and flashbangs, for instance?

we could change that tomorrow to day and let's be clear water bottle being thrown in cal anderson park that's an average nightly experience i had a friend just a few months ago who had a glass bottle thrown at her but i don't think the criminal justice system would have approved of her responding by tear-gassing four city blocks i don't think anyone would have considered that a reasonable reaction so why is it a reasonable policy for the people paid to protect and serve And I bring up COVID because if we made those rapid changes for pandemic mitigation, doing things like creating stronger force policies, reducing the militarization of our police and defunding our police is something we need to do for COVID and pandemic protection as well.

Protesters are not going to stop until there is reason to believe that meaningful change will happen.

The longer these protests go on, that is, the longer that there's no evidence that SPD will be made safer for the citizens it's meant to protect, the more at risk everyone is to get COVID, and that risk increases nightly.

There are two health crises at play, coronavirus and the systemic murders of black people and criminalization of blackness, which also part of why black folks are more at risk for the coronavirus themselves.

In order to reduce one health crisis, we must reduce the other, and very quickly.

Thank you.

Lori the next speaker is Sydney Porter.

Hello my name is Sydney Porter.

I am a White student at the University of Washington who is tired of seeing my Black and Brown peers having to fight against centuries-old systems of oppression including the system of policing.

The ongoing protesting is exposing the violence and brutality that the Black community disproportionately faces at the hands of the Seattle Police.

An investigation of the Seattle Police Department led by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in 2011 found that one in five arrests utilized excessive force and that in cases with unnecessary or excessive use of force, over 50% of these involved minorities.

The same investigation concluded that the Seattle Police Department officers escalate situations and use unnecessary or excessive force for minor offenses.

The protesters are demanding institutional change to our police system so that this brutality against Black and Brown bodies cannot continue.

I will be speaking on the demands being made by the protesters.

These include the defunding of the SPD and increased media and long-term investment in Black communities.

The Seattle Police Department's priorities claim to be to reduce crime and disorder to serve with honor and professionalism and to strive for excellence in service to foster better trust, and to use data-driven policies and practices.

Yet, as we have seen in recent protests, the department does not hold themselves to their own set of improvement guidelines.

As the Department of Justice's investigation and the violence of the Seattle protests reveal, the SPD officers resort too quickly to the use of weapons and have a track record of racially biased policing practices.

Attempts to reform in the last decade of this report have since this report released have failed and the Black community pays the cost.

Instead of continuing to pour money into the hands of the FPD we need to be investing in community programs.

A 50 percent cut to the FPD could be used to fund these community-led programs in education.

Invest in people not police.

Thank you Sydney.

The next speaker is Atina Gunawan.

Hi, uh, my name is Tina Gunawan and I am a member, uh, I'm a Seattle public school substitute.

And I, um, wanted to address my comment and increase, uh, I wanted to let the city council know that I demand an increase of police accountability, crack down on racial bias and diminish excessive use of force during the protest.

I see.

And, um, I read a lot of.

in a lot of places that police are turning off their body cameras.

I demanded that the use of force should be unacceptable.

Officer badges, numbers, and names should be visible.

And in light of the current events of the Minneapolis Public Schools ending the relations with the Minneapolis Police Department, I demand that also Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle PD reevaluate their relationship and try to terminate and move towards terminating their relationship with the Seattle Police Department.

I cannot as a member of being of the educator community I cannot look my students in the eye and say I can protect you.

I wake up every day and going to work worried about my Black fellow Black students teachers and co-workers.

So with that, I demand also that the Seattle Police Department being defunded and the relationship that it does with the oldest member of the Seattle community, especially with the public schools being terminated.

Thank you.

Thank you, Atina.

The next speaker is Daniel Azulay.

My name is Daniel Duai, and I live in the East Precinct of Capitol Hill.

The other night, two nights ago, there was a protest, and once the flash bangs and tear gas went off, it seeped into my apartment, and my three-month-old son, Nadav, who was sleeping, was awoken from his sleep coughing, crying, spitting up mucus, mucus bubbling out of his nose.

He was bright red, and we were forced to leave through our homes.

We ran to our car, we didn't have time to even put him in the car seat because it was so bad.

My wife had to pour breast milk on his eyes and we had to go and leave our home and we're not there.

And we don't know when we can go back because of the problems of tear gas seeping into all the materials and specifically affecting the respiratory health of infants.

So I really wanted people to understand that when police use tear gas and police use flash grenades, There's damage to protesters, which is wrong, Black Lives Matter, but there's also damage to people who aren't participating in the protest and live in those neighborhoods.

Why would they use tear gas, which is a war crime, actually, why would they use that in a residential neighborhood?

It seeped in, it emptied our building, and now I had to figure out if I can even go there because I'm worried about my child's lungs.

So I demand that the Seattle police immediately stop using tear gas and flash grenades to handle protest and do so in a more mature manner.

And I demand accountability because I want to speak for my son, Nadav, who isn't old enough to speak yet.

And I hope that although there's a lot of different stories and ideas, I hope that this story stays with you because it's a three-month-old who cannot speak for himself and is very vulnerable and is being affected by this.

Thank you.

Thank you, Daniel.

We've reached the 20-minute mark.

Committee members, if there is no objection, the public comment period will be extended an additional 10 minutes.

Seeing no objection, the public comment period is extended an additional 10 minutes.

And then as a reminder, we will resume to public comment after our panel presentations.

The next speaker is Carol Butterfield.

Carol, we are having a hard time hearing you.

Carol, we can't hear you.

I'm sorry.

So much better.

Thank you.

Sorry.

Okay.

Can you hear me better now?

Yes.

Thank you, Carol.

We restarted your call.

I live in District 7, and I'm speaking about the protests this weekend.

My initial location was at Westlake Center, where I could not see the plaza area, but the crowd was masked and calm, and despite everything, everyone was uniformly present and courteous.

We marched down 5th.

The crowd was peaceful, unified, focused on a 60-year-old white woman and a nurse I never felt in the slightest bit threatened by this crowd.

Participants handed out masks, energy bars, water, first aid items.

Not a hostile crowd.

Our group continued south, eventually stopped, and said that we needed support building around 4. There, to my alarm, a woman dressed white at night gear and hired police officers in front of the building and behind barriers.

Just to the point when I started to feel afraid, the crowd would from basically calm to noticeably tense.

A few minutes later, there was a sudden massing of additional police officers, also in riot gear, and flashing vehicle lights.

The additional officers swarmed the building in front of the building.

Crowds became noticeably more anxious than hostile, especially people of color.

People booed and displayed the middle finger.

I decided to record the crowd just then because my instinct was that I wanted to show how peaceful the crowd was in the moment before the tear gas was deployed.

I've never felt like that in my life.

My overall impression is that the conduct of SPD greatly ratcheted up what was basically a calm crowd and was peacefully exercising its rights.

The conduct included right near sudden and dramatic massing of officers at a site that was experiencing no unrest.

and flashing vehicle light.

And certainly the choice to deploy tear gas into a crowd that was not rioting confirms this impression.

From what I saw, SPD actually created whatever riot occurred at Fifth and James by initiating hostile and harmful actions into the crowd.

I'd also just like to state that I would have really loved to have seen police de-theft, Mayor Durkin, and any of the Seattle City Council actually genuinely make a sustained appearance that might have helped.

Last thing is, We have a president who is intent on militarizing our law enforcement personnel.

We should not be following that example.

Thank you for your service and your interest.

Thank you.

Thank you, Carol.

The next speaker is Christopher Glazer.

Hello, my name is Christopher Glazer.

I live in District 4 and I'm addressing the SED's response to the protest.

I attended Saturday's protest and have been watching the others.

As part of the peaceful protest, I witnessed countless acts of police aggression and escalation.

I witnessed it firsthand when they gassed and maced protesters that were kneeling and sitting down.

My girlfriend experienced it when she tried to return home from a peaceful protest on Sunday and was assaulted by an officer blocks away.

There's no doubt in my mind that the violence that has taken place over the last few days is largely due to SPD's use of excessive force.

I would ask who the force is meant to protect and serve, but the answer to that has been made clear.

I know there has been measured success in complying with the consent decree, but the issues with SPD run deeper than that.

The force is a culture issue, and that runs deep.

eyewitness officers intending to start a conflict.

While SPD has been able to check some boxes the last few years, the damage the force has done to the trust of the community takes decades, generations to undo.

Wholesale change is needed to earn it back.

The actions last night resembled that of an authoritarian police state just looking for an excuse to stomp out a protest.

I know a few bad actors came in through water bottles, but there's the difference between police and us.

Protestors sell police and remove bad actors, the force does not.

I find the actions last night to be disproportionate and cruel.

The protesters have been there for six hours peacefully.

A few water bottles does not undo that, and it certainly does not require a response consisting of weapons banned by the Geneva Convention.

SPD also does not seem to realize the damage that the gas does to those who happen to live in the area.

The excessive force has displaced many in the community.

I find it hard to believe that taping over badges is the only way they could have honored a fallen member.

Either that was a lie, or they were so disconnected from the community that they could not realize how bad of a decision that was.

Either one of those conclusions represents an absolute failure.

I am echoing prior comments.

The council must bring drastic change to the budget of SPD.

They must be held accountable and protesters must not be prosecuted.

I will not forget if changes do not come election time.

Black Lives Matter.

Thanks.

Thank you, Christopher.

The next speaker is Francesca Favorini Corsoba.

Hi, my name is Francesca Favarini-Torba from Highland Park in West Seattle.

And I'm speaking today to ask you to make defunding the police an immediate priority.

When I was preparing to go to the protests on Monday evening, I told my friend, it felt like I was preparing for war.

It wasn't the other demonstrators I was fearful of, or even the possibility of white supremacist instigators.

It was the police.

I had earplugs to protect my ears from flashbangs.

I had goggles to protect my eyes from tear gas and mace.

I felt like I was preparing for war, and yet tear gas is a weapon that has been banned in warfare by the Geneva Convention.

Why does our city, our police, and other cities and police like ours think it is acceptable to use against the very citizens they are sworn to protect?

I was at the protest on Monday for three and a half hours.

There was not a hint of threat or violence from the peaceful protesters.

My wife and friends and I left at 8 p.m.

It wasn't long after that that we heard reports of the protest being thrown into chaos by the police.

It felt like the police had just gotten bored.

They were tired of people peacefully exercising their rights to free speech and wanted to go home.

So they instigated violence against the community.

There's video showing this.

Thank God there is video.

Black folks are not safe from the police.

Indigenous people are not safe from the police.

We are not safe from the police.

We must immediately defund the police.

Instead of funding racist, antagonistic, and woefully under-trained officers to handle everything from truancy to mental health issues, to homelessness, to domestic violence, we need to pour our money into social services that can actually address these issues rather than putting more people at risk of losing their lives.

We must invest in housing, employment, and healthcare in ways that directly target the problems of public safety.

Instead of criminalizing homelessness, we need publicly financed supportive housing.

Instead of gang units, we need community-based anti-violence programs, trauma services, and jobs for young people.

Instead of school police, we need more counselors, after-school programs, and restorative justice programs.

Thank you.

Black Lives Matter.

Thank you, Francesca.

The next speaker is Pauly G. Hi, my name is Pauly G. Giulianotti.

I am a member of Next Steps Washington, which was founded by Annalisa and Fred Thomas, parents of the late Leonard Thomas.

echoes of a bomb exploding in our city streets are the find that i failed administration and police accountability system this is mayor jenny dirk and administration actively seeking to dismantle police accountability and transparency in seattle i just got off a zoom call with uh...

the cpc the community police commission and others where many members of the community were calling on mayor durkin and chief that to resign Within the last few days, Durkin's police department has maced a child, had officers placing knees on the necks of protesters, lost possession of multiple firearms, had officers close fists punching protesters during arrests, exploded incendiary devices at easily identifiable news media, and deliberately escalated violence with the community at large.

is beyond comprehension.

One could find these circumstances acceptable, and yet just weeks earlier, on May 7th, city officials sought to end police accountability measures in Seattle.

City Attorney Pete Holmes, Chief of Police Carmen Best and Mayor Durkin, in full cooperation with the Trump Justice Department, recently filed a motion to prematurely end the federal oversight of the SPD.

Yes, we must defend the SPD.

We must immediately cease using these black balls, stop the SPD from using black balls.

We want community reps at the negotiating table during the labor negotiations for the SPOG contract.

And we must have the city withdraw the motion to terminate the sustainment plan of the consent decree.

But the abuses that we have witnessed within the last few days are only a small fraction of the SPD's unhinged and unrepentant behavior.

Only weeks ago, an officer used a silencer to shoot and kill a young father, Sean Furr, holding his infant child.

SPD's horrid history includes the murder of Charlena Lyles.

Thank you, Polly G. Next speaker is Mark Taylor Canfield.

peter can tell them that hi i'm not going to cancel an executive director for democracy watch news we're international news organization specializes in covering pro-democracy movements around the world i've also written an article for the national lawyers guild on report on the city of seattle's investigation of civil rights violations during the w t o protest I was a founding member of the Committee for Local Government Accountability, served as a watchdog group to oversee the city's investigation of civil rights violations during the Seattle protests against the WTO in 1999. So I was covering the protests as a journalist on Capitol Hill on June 1st.

My video of what happened is posted at my YouTube channel.

I saw no signs of a riot.

I posted a compilation of the videos on Monday night at Instagram and YouTube, jokingly calling it the Pink Umbrella Riot.

By the way, that officer who attacked the umbrella should at very least receive some additional training and effective crowd control measures.

These videos have been seen all over the local media.

When police use pepper spray and fire tear gas canisters directly into the crowd, they caused a panic and a crush of bodies, which is very dangerous in itself.

This is how rock concert attendees have been killed in the past by being crushed by or trampled by the crowd.

This is a public safety issue.

Firing these devices directly into large crowds of protesters is not recommended.

I've been covering protests in Seattle since the mass demonstrations against the WTO in 1999. Since those events, I've seen excessive use of tear gas, flashbangs, concussion grenades, pepper spray, and other crowd control devices on protesters.

During the Occupy Wall Street protests, Mayor Mike McGinn had to apologize for the pepper spraying of 85-year-old resident Darlie Rainey.

Recently, a nine-year-old child was allegedly pepper-sprayed by a Seattle police officer.

I have also been pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, and fired at with pepper balls while covering local demonstrations as a reporter.

Yesterday, I talked to a power news reporter who was struck by a tear-gas canister over the weekend.

During protests on Saturday and during May Day events, I've suffered from the effects of flashbang grenades, which landed within inches of me.

Crowd control devices like these are quote non-lethal, but they can be very dangerous and lethal at times.

Minneapolis reporter Linda Tirado was struck in the eye by a projectile weapon used by police.

She was permanently lost in that eye.

In fact, crowd control devices

Thank you, Mark.

Our last speaker for this first public comment session is Zachary Gardner.

Hello, my name is Zachary Gardner.

I'm a resident of Belltown and I've been a resident of Seattle for 12 years now.

I was very involved in the Occupy Seattle protest back in 2011, and I've been very, very involved and have been at every single protest every single day.

just insane to me that they think that this is a measured response.

The difference in response between the Occupy protests to these protests is just over overboard.

They're doing everything without any prior warning.

Myself and my wife witnessed this as we walked downtown to even try and get to the protest.

We were not allowed to, there were bike tops in the way.

So it is very, very clear that even though before the consent decree and the Occupy protest, They handled it a little bit better.

I wouldn't necessarily say they handled it well, but they weren't just indiscriminately pepper spraying, tear gassing.

Everybody's made a comment about COVID.

Enough is enough.

They aren't doing anything.

We act as if they were landing on the moon again.

Remove the black tape.

That's it.

It's easy as that.

Remove the tear gas.

Remove the pepper spray.

Observe them.

Do Chicagoism.

They're now just observing a protest.

It will not escalate until Seattle PD escalates it.

I am sick of it.

Black lives matter.

I yield my time.

Thank you so much for joining us.

That is the end of our public comment period for the first session.

This has been 30 minutes dedicated to public comment.

As a reminder we will have additional public comment at the end.

We hope that everybody who has signed up for public comment can stay and listen to the members of our community panel.

Feel free to continue listening or leave and rejoin the meeting.

So again, we'll now move into item one on the agenda.

Will the clerk please read the item into the record?

Agenda item number one, community panel briefing and discussion for 60 minutes.

Thank you.

This community panel is represented by members of our community with firsthand witness accounts of the public response to the demonstrations of the last few days.

Joining us is Dominique Davis of Community Passageways, a felony diversion and prevention program leading the way in re-imaging and recreating an alternative to today's criminal justice system.

Also joining us is Omari Salisbury with Converge Media, a leading producer of culturally relevant audio and media content.

We also have Willard Jimerson with United Better Thinking, working with youth and young adults who are unserved by traditional service providers.

And Nesty Durango is a filmmaker, community organizer, and member of the Seattle Film Task Force.

Let's see, we also have a woman named, I'm sorry, Ivana.

I don't have the information.

Her name is Ivana.

Anna Buell.

I'm sorry, Anna Buell.

And I'm sorry, I do not have introductory text for you, and I trust that you will introduce yourself.

All four panelists have participated in the Seattle demonstrations against the murder of George Floyd in the past week.

I'm so grateful that they've agreed to share their experiences with us today.

And my request of council members is to please hold your questions for panelists until the end.

of all of the panel presentations, and we'll take your questions.

Some of the presenters have other commitments and may not be able to participate for the entire duration of the panel.

So the order of the presentation is Willard Javison, Omari Salisbury, Nesty Jirongo, Dominique Davis, and Ivana Anabule.

Let's please start with Willard.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me on this platform.

I wouldn't say that it's a pleasure to have to be on such a platform around such horrific and horrendous realities of why we have to have this particular space at this particular time.

So yeah, I am Willard Jemerson.

I am the Executive Director for United Better Thinking, but I'm also the Project Program Manager, Community Facilitator for Zero Youth Development, King County Public Health, and also one of the youngest in King County to be tried as an adult in 1994 underneath the super predatory philosophy.

At the age of 13, I was tried as an adult, six weeks after turning 13 and sentenced to 286 months, which turned out to be 23 years, eight months and four days, not at that time.

I served 20 and a half years from 1994 to 2014. So I've been home for six years and pretty much been hitting the ground running and staying afloat and staying abreast and keeping my hand on the pulse of what's going on in the city locally as well as nationally and globally.

So, and also, you know, yes, we had a peaceful demonstration this past week around some of the horrific engagements coming out of the George Floyd circumstance.

solidarity as well as in, you know, raising up the issues that are going on in regards to this open indictment that is on black and brown bodies.

Every day I feel like I walk around as a possible obituary.

Just from daily interactions, anything can pretty much happen.

It can turn into a drastic situation for me, walking into a Starbucks or just driving down the street or just having a casual encounter that can go in a different direction, it could prove to be a death sentence.

And so what we wanna talk about a little bit is police accountability.

And around police accountability or system overhaul or change around an effort, some of the things we wanna highlight and raise here is just to create an equitable public safety measure for all.

Our current system at this particular moment, it screens of inequities and existing gaps that reeks of the possibility, and in most cases, death.

You know, we had Sean Furr.

We also had, you know, Charlena Louse, Shea Taylor, and others that we can speak into the existence of the realities of that, walking around black and brown.

in this society, in this country.

And right here, even in progressive Seattle, we're all, everybody say we're so progressive, we're so ahead of the curve, but we're just as conservative as any southern state.

You know, you go to Mississippi, you go to Alabama, some of the things that we do will be considered horrendous in comparison, like they don't send majority of their young f to try them as adults or what we need to do is we ne community based strategies myself, Don Davis is doing ways.

Uh, you know, just interest in the communit And just to kind of respond to some of the questions, you know, about the protests are the peaceful demonstration, I'd rather say.

You know, there was flashbangs, there was pepper spray.

I was down there in a peaceful manner.

The folks that I came down there with They were very peaceful.

They didn't engage in any kind of violence, but we still ended up with pepper spray in our mouths, in our nostrils, in our eyes, burning our skins, you heard the flash bangs.

And so crazy that I have a 19 year old cousin and I'm walking up the street to go to my vehicle as we was parked away from the Westlake was quite some time as far as walking distance.

probably about 15 minutes walking distance away from my vehicle.

And then I run into my little cousin.

And when I say my little cousin, my father's younger brother's daughter, and she's irate.

And I'm like, what's going on Flo?

And she's like, I just got hit by a flash bomb by the police.

And I literally was just getting out of my car and I was just sitting here just kind of like observing or standing there observing what's going on.

and she got hit in her forehead and also got hit with one in her leg.

First she started just talking about she got like kind of beat up by the police and like, what happened?

And then she told me what happened and she was, she's never been through this.

She's never experienced it.

She just wanted to be in solidarity with, you know, the messaging, with the peaceful protests.

And she ended up becoming victimized.

And then her mom was calling me, looking around, cause she seen that I was down there and was concerned for her baby.

And we're there trying to spit out this pepper spray that has got on our nostrils.

And then I have some young folks that were with me as well that were in space.

And these young men, they want to be involved.

But at the same time, their melanin is highly melanated just as well as mine.

And we know that can turn into a drastic turn.

As soon as the curfew came through, it was about five o'clock when the curfew came and it was like five o'clock Seattle downtown and no, there was no pre-warning.

And it was like, it felt like it was a setup.

It really did.

It felt like it was a setup.

It was like, It was it was equivalent to say if anybody's walking right now, you're subject to go to jail.

You know, it was just it was just to set up.

And now that's pretty much was 100% of everybody was walking at that time.

So everybody was pretty much set up to go to jail.

And it's the same.

The system right now is very is playing a very antagonist role is not really connected with the with with those who have elected folks to be in those positions to serve us.

Um, and they're being paid by our tax dollars.

They're paying by being paid by our hard sweat, um, equity and, and, um, our, our, I give you Sarah diligence to the work and they're not showing up.

You're not showing up in space.

And if you're not doing the work, then you have to be removed.

You have to get out to space and open up opportunities for those who are willing to do the work.

And at this particular moment, our backs against the wall and we are asking for something drastically, um, to be, to be done differently.

And I close my statements.

I believe you're muted.

Thank you, Willard.

Really appreciate your perspective.

I don't know what demands are on your time, but we're going to be having questions from council members at the end.

If you could stick around, that's great.

Next speaker, Omari Salisbury.

Good morning.

Can everybody hear me?

Can you hear me?

Okay, fantastic.

The voice is sore.

We've been out there late at night following these protests that are happening here in Seattle.

I think the best way that I can be of assistance here to the city council and to the people that have joined in the call is to maybe give a chronological breakdown as to what I've seen happen here.

I wanted to first of all start with Friday.

Friday, I joined the protest on 5th and Marion.

When I arrived at 5th and Marion, I saw an Amazon Go store had been broken out, and a few other things were damaged.

The Seattle Police Department pushed the protesters further south on Fifth Avenue, past the municipal facilities there, City Hall, past the jail, down to Washington Street.

And near Washington Street, in between Washington and Jackson, is when you would say that the protests fizzled.

Now, after that, though, A lot of the police presence left, and for 45 minutes, I witnessed a group of whatever you want to call them, anarchists or vandals or whatever.

destroyed the International District.

Police will abide, they absolutely did not stop.

Washington Kicking Bank of America, Washington Federal Credit Union, Seattle Vision Clinic, numerous other small businesses owned by people there in the International District.

This same group walked back past the police, which were now at the Bank of America.

Again, nobody stopped this group, nobody said anything.

I followed that group and went up to the King County Courthouse.

I believe the sheriff's office is there.

Kicked in the windows there.

Nobody stopped them.

Proceeded up, I think, again, the 5th or 6th.

Walked down there, broke out the windows.

IBM building, Brooks Brothers, the U.S.

Bank.

And by the time I left this, guys, they had gone from 5th and Jackson to 7th and Pine, unchallenged anything.

They said barricades.

I mean, it was just, there's a tape that I put out there.

They just came to destroy it.

It wasn't looting.

It wasn't tagging.

It was just a wrecking crew.

there was no police prese back.

Police friends, the them in a car or they'd s keep going.

I'm only bri I want to be able to brin to what's going on with t So friday, I literally s I can understand why the and people downtown have Because they trusted him to be like, hey, our businesses will be OK.

And it got tore up.

And just real quick, of any of our members of the Asian-American community that are on there, the tape was out there.

No black people came to your neighborhood and tore it up.

The tape shows who did that.

You know what I'm saying?

Saturday now was crazy all around what two things that stood out was the peaceful protest started peacefully and ended peacefully, which you know what I'm saying, was one story which is kind of crazy though because you know there's car on fire over here and everything.

Those guys stayed.

Because the point of it was, don't be distracted.

And that protest there stayed peaceful.

Of course, seeing cars on fire, we left them over there.

I wanted to see what was going on.

And there was some disorder.

Now, I didn't witness when the police gave up the intersection.

I didn't see it for myself.

I do know when I arrived, they had blocked off parts of Pine there on 6th Avenue on a few different ways.

And somehow they gave up their position.

I can't speak to that.

Well, when I went over there, there was no police presence and, you know, it was a bit of chaos ensuing.

The thing, though, that did strike me was that, and it was crazy because you got it on video, is that on the intersection of 6th and Pine on the crosswalk, the police had now set a barricade with the bicycles.

Less than 30 feet from that sidewalk is the North Street E-Bar.

E-Bar was the first door that was penetrated there by the rioters.

or the Vandals, whatever you want to call them.

That was the first door.

It was less than 30 feet.

And so you'll see on camera, I'm like, hey, guys, this is getting looted right here.

They're going into the Nordstroms, and I'm going back and forth.

Are you guys going to do anything?

What's going on?

And then from there, there was no move.

Then across the street, Starbucks, boom, kicked in.

Then across the street again from there, whatchamacallit, the bigger door by Nordstroms kicked in and everything else.

I'm not an expert on police tactics, on stuff like that.

I do have an opinion about their tactics because of their taxes that were impacted by myself.

But two days in a row, we saw the bad guys run free.

Two days in a row.

You know what I'm saying?

There was tear gas deployed and everything on Saturday, but two days in a row.

Now let's go to Sunday.

Sunday, peaceful protests.

You know what I'm saying?

It's all around the city.

Nobody really trusts each other after Saturday.

Police are kind of like, we don't trust the protesters.

Protesters are like, man, we don't trust the police.

Peaceful protest, 100%.

We get up there to Bourne and Seneca, and actually Madison and Bourne.

Protest stops right there.

They're like, you guys can't go back downtown.

Of course, protesters are like, yeah, we want to go back downtown.

Somehow, there's a negotiation that occurs, and the Seattle police, we got it on tape, Seattle police told the protesters, you guys are more than welcome to Westlake.

Got it on tape, gave them an escort down to Westlake.

Everybody's rallying down there, doing whatever chance they do.

By the way, I'm not a protester.

I'm not for or against their cause, any of these organizations.

I'm telling you, I see it there.

So we get down to Westlake, people are coming there, they're doing their thing.

In about an hour and a half, somebody might be able to correct me on the time, the police are like, you guys got to get out of Westlake.

Here's the problem, guys.

They declared a state of emergency down there.

There was no buses.

There was no link light rail.

No Ubers were coming.

Where were these people supposed to go?

I mean, you know, a good thing might have been just been like, hey, just sit here and watch, like, we'll watch you, you watch us.

But instead, the police wanted to sweep these people.

These are people that have been peaceful the whole day, seven hours of footage.

These are probably the most peaceful, no, whatever, seven hours.

And the police invited them downtown.

And what happened is, and I got the officer on tape, who was like, well, you guys shouldn't have snuck down here.

And he's, I'm on tape, I'm like, hey, guys, how do you want them to leave?

You know, not even talking as a journalist, but as a concerned member of our society here in Seattle.

I'm like, they don't have a bus.

There's no link like rail.

They said, can you call King County Metro?

Not my problem.

It was like somebody else should have thought of that before they gave the order.

I said, well, don't sweep them.

Don't sweep them out.

Just let them sit in the park, you know, they'll chat all night, you know, tire themselves out.

They were determined.

They sweep the protesters, peaceful protesters, out of Seattle on Sunday night.

And man, I'm talking about a quick step.

They put the batons out there and they pushed us.

They pushed us out, left on Pine, up the Pine Hill, and then up the Boren Hill.

And people who know Seattle know that Boren Hill, man, is a steep hill.

And then chased people throughout Broadway.

It was Sunday.

Monday, you guys saw the tape.

You know what I'm saying?

Now, I mean, and this is the thing is that I brought up and I say that the police did make an improvement in tactic is that they never, these guys never tell anybody what their comfort level is with the barricade.

If different protest leaders have different strategies, BLM might be okay.

It's our protocol to be at five feet.

Someone else might be three feet.

But the general public who just shows up, people assume a barricade is where you go.

Seattle's a home of great music.

Look how many concerts people automatically go to the front of the concert at the barricade.

It's in natural intuition.

So the barricade was always an issue because the police get nervous.

And the thing is, what I was saying is that if they're nervous at the barricade, just make a deeper barricade.

It's easier for the police to step back and make their own comfort zone than it is to tell a protest of 1,000 people to step back.

You know, the police can make a 10-foot barricade if they want it, right?

That wasn't the case on Monday.

And you guys saw the tape for yourself.

You know what I'm saying?

And I mean, beyond that, the way, man, I'll get to the gas and stuff in a second.

I'm just trying to talk fast.

I'm going to leave a Monday where it's at because we put the tape out there.

And you saw that.

And last night, man, last night, it was, man, I had gone home.

I sent my gas mask home.

Somebody donated a gas mask.

I sent everything home because I was like, this is going to end peacefully.

Going home.

I got over there to Broadway.

Somebody threw a water bottle at my friend.

the footage is out there.

And the question is like, are these responses proportional?

And especially when I bring up Friday, when people just ran through the city, and Saturday, when all these people vandalized and destroyed our city within sight.

You know what I'm saying?

Is what we're experiencing here proportional?

And also, I would have to say here, It's like the state police, people who've been following my feed for three, four days.

I've been saying, man, the state police is real aggressive.

We learned about the state police on Saturday.

We learned about them on Saturday.

And I keep saying it.

It's like, man, these guys are very aggressive.

And now you see there's a thing there in the Seattle Times about the state police.

And I will say this, and I want to say this.

And with the police, there's been some great instances of humanity with the Seattle Police.

You know, I'm almost 300 pounds.

I'm not glad police stopped giving me water so I could keep up.

There's some excellent communicators within the SPD.

Oddly enough, at the East Precinct, but a lot of times, you know, I mean, they're, they're not out there sometimes, but you know, there's been instances where, where the man, the guys who are on the job, they'll come and communicate in the best way.

And their communication in turn diffuses the situation.

There's not a consistent level of deescalation here.

And I don't think there's a consistent level of comparing what events are.

Because how could Saturday be a riot and Monday be a riot?

You know what I'm saying?

I mean, there's just two different things.

So I don't have a timer up here.

I don't know where I'm at with my time.

And I just wanted to move quickly.

I can't hear you, man.

I'm all right.

I appreciate that, Amari.

I think given that we do have three other speakers, and I want to leave some time for council members to ask questions, if we could move on, that would be great.

I really appreciate your first-hand account and all the reporting that you're doing out there.

Next speaker is Nesty Durango.

Hi.

Thanks for having me on this committee.

I wanted to speak to the fact that this is not an isolated incident.

I've been to many protests over the number of years, and I've seen regularly that SPD comes to Black organizing, Black protests with a certain amount of aggression, riot police pepper spray consistently, regardless of what kind of action it is, regardless of how peaceful it is, that's what we're met with each time.

So on Saturday, I was in no way surprised.

That's the SPV that I know.

It is also concerning that we are getting a few different things from Carmen Best, from Governor Inslee.

And from our mayor, our mayor who was actually like was working on the investigation in 2011 and 2012 that stated that our SPD has a serious, serious issue with excessive force, specifically towards black and brown folks within the city, like for her to at the same time be very keenly aware of what the SPD does, while also, you know, creating a situation in which we are beholden to them, it's deeply concerning.

The fact that Governor Inslee released the National Guard on Saturday, but stated that specifically they would not be armed, when in fact, I saw it with my own eyes, I have footage, they were very much armed.

guns.

They had a tank in the middle of our city.

Those are just facts.

Then we have Carmen Best, who has been posting in neighborhood groups and stating these lies about the SPD, saying that, number one, the incident that's happening in Minnesota is so different than what we have here.

It's talking about how the city, like SPD itself, has proved itself that they had that it de-escalates, that the SPD has a track record of not using excessive force, which is false.

Like, all of these things that we're saying, like, it concerns me deeply that our leadership is actually, is lying to its people and making people feel uncomfortable.

In reality, we are in a serious, like, this is a police state, and we have We have so many issues going on in this city.

I have friends that are social workers that are working with homeless people, you know, during COVID, front lines, and are still struggling to pay their rent.

Well, we have this SPD that's, their yearly salary starts at over 100,000.

It doesn't make sense because what has Seattle PD done to show that it's protecting its people?

In reality, I live in Rainier Beach.

I see hundreds of cops.

a month that we are being over please specifically because of our the color of her skin it's not shocking it is really sad that i'm watching a lot of young folks who have never been able to come to protest before are excited about speaking their minds and talking and using their rights these are the rights that we talk about as americans you know the land of the free and yet simply by just showing up to Speak their mind like they are being attacked.

They're being tear gas like we are we all are and these There's something so concerning that we are so comfortable with these With these curfews, you know, I was in the middle of that protest I got that I got the curfew notification at maybe 512 and when I was in the middle of the city surrounded by riot police.

No buses, no ride share services, no light rails, no way to get out of the city.

And the entire city has that curfew.

So cops can follow you anywhere within the city, not just downtown.

You can follow me all the way to my home and arrest me.

And that's so alarming.

How is that not fascist?

How is it not?

a chance now to actively change the way that the city deals with its police.

But at first, it cannot be complicit in the violence of the police.

The SPD needs to be defunded.

That's my argument, fundamentally.

So thank you.

Thank you, Netsi.

Next speaker is Dominic Davis.

Dominic.

Hello.

Thank you.

I appreciate you giving us this time.

I'll be very short because I know we're short on time.

So there was only a couple of things.

Everybody's pretty much covered everything that you guys get a good picture of what was going on for these last few days.

You have a timeline and everything.

One of the things that I had got a call on Friday about from some of my people that were on the ground, hey, man, we just seen these vans pull up.

with a bunch of white people dressed in black.

You know what I mean?

I'm like, well, he said, yeah, a bunch of anarchists or something, man.

I don't know what they're going to do.

But they just pulled up in about four vans.

And they all just getting out of these vans like they must have came from somewhere else or something, you know?

And I was like, oh, well, let me know what happens, you know?

Then I started getting videos, people hitting me up and calling me like, hey, man, they're tearing stuff up, right?

So I mean, that was weird to me to get a call of some vans pulling up with people dressed in black on Friday night, right?

And so that just told me there was an organized effort.

period.

So that's one point I want to make.

Another point I wanted to make was the fact that when the, and I think everybody's seen that footage of the young white kid that got his hands on the AR-15.

and was holding the AR-15, getting ready to pose for a picture in the middle of everything.

I think that was Saturday.

And he was getting ready to pose for the picture in the middle of all the stuff going on in the middle of the ride.

And a white undercover officer, or plainclothes officer, runs up on him with his gun pulled out.

And he was armed, too, with another gun, an AR-15 around his shoulder, I think he had.

And he had his gun pulled out, ran up on the kid, and grabbed the gun out the kid's hand, right?

Told the kid, get out of here.

Right?

And dropped the clip off the gun and all that and took care of the situation and defused the situation with this kid standing there getting ready to pose with this gun.

And the first thing that ran through my head was what if that kid was black?

What would have happened if that kid had an AR-15, he was a black kid standing there getting ready to pose for a picture with an AR-15?

What would have happened?

Would it have been the same situation?

Would that police officer would have ran up on that kid with a gun and grabbed it from him and told him, get out of here?

Scram, beat it?

Would that would have happened?

You know?

So I had to put that out there and let you guys know this is what we're dealing with on our daily existence of being black people living in this United States of America and living in this city.

So I just imagine if that was one of the kids that I work with, if that's one of the young men that I work with and they're in the middle of all this craziness and they grab their hands and get their hands on a gun, what's going to happen to them when an officer sees them?

I don't like seeing young girls, 15 to 16 years old, being pepper sprayed in the face.

I don't like seeing young men and young women, teenagers, being pushed and shoved around by law enforcement.

And now, don't get me wrong, these ain't just kids of color.

These are kids of every color, from every hue and every ethnicity.

I just don't like seeing people being treated unfairly, period.

But at the end of the day, it breaks my heart to see kids that are out using their voice, being activists and standing up and speaking for the rights of all people.

and the people that they see that are being treated bad, and then they get punished, pushed, beaten, and pepper sprayed because they feel like they have a right to stand up for the rights of other people.

We should be applauding them.

We should be lifting them up.

We should be giving them awards for being brave enough to go out and stand up for people that they are seeing being treated wrong.

They should not be shoved, pushed, pepper sprayed, and stomped on.

It shouldn't happen.

So that's all I got to say.

But at the end of the day, I also got to put this out there and say, I know a lot of really good police officers that should be taking the lead on all of this.

We should demilitarize our police force.

They shouldn't look like they're getting ready to go on war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

They shouldn't walk out.

They should walk out there in their regular uniforms and be shaking hands and talking to people and being consoling to people and talk and have an issue, like having conversations about the trauma that's being put on our communities, not of all colors from what we're seeing and witnessing.

So, I mean, but we got officers that are willing to do that, and we got officers that do do that.

They should be leading this whole charge, and we shouldn't have people out there militarized with tanks and weapons and all that.

So, that's all I got to say.

I can't hear you.

I can't hear you.

Thank you.

Our last panelist is Ivana Annabelle, and I also want to recognize that we've been joined by Council Member Dan Strauss.

Oh, can I talk now?

Please do, Ivana.

Thank you.

Okay.

Yeah, I'm Ivana Annabellelli.

I represent Queer the Land.

Yeah, I was out there and I just wanted to say that with the consent decree, it's very shocking that, you know, after work, I'm driving and I just see folks by Rancho Bravo walking up to the barricade and then The next thing I know, the police are pepper spraying and gassing folks without any sort of warning, yet they're not supposed to be using excessive force.

These are peaceful folks.

These are folks with their hands up.

And this is what Jenny Durkan allows.

Jenny Durkan, it was shocking for her to say that, you know, that these folks are perpetuating violence and blamed it on white men.

But it just reminds me of how you know, white women blame their husbands, and she's also complicit in what these police officers are doing.

Police are gassing youth, children, elders, beating people to the ground.

In my experience, this has been really excessive.

I've been to many protests and led many things, and just to see that you all are gassing children, they should be ashamed of themselves.

In a city where you all have canceled a lot of community programs that help children in need.

The city of Seattle has, you know, the budget for the police department, over $300,000, yet you can't even fund some of the people who work for the city to have proper housing.

They're still living paycheck to paycheck.

Again, Jenny Durkan should be ashamed of herself.

The people who work for the city of Seattle can't even afford to live in the city of Seattle.

It's been...

really intense just to see the way that you are treating youth.

It was really intense to watch a child, a 15-year-old child, pick up an AR gun, AR-15 gun, and all I thought about was Tamir Rice.

Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed for a toy gun that he had, and he didn't even get a chance.

So it's just a privilege, and it shows that you all are able to show self-restraint, but not self-restraint for Black youth.

The city is, we're unable to get all the wealth that you all have because what, we're black, we're undocumented, non-English speakers, incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, houseless.

It's a shame that Jenny Durkan is doing sweeps in the middle of a pandemic and making the folks who are houseless walk to meet their shelter needs.

That is a fact.

It is a shame.

You have all this wealth It's just shocking.

I really think that we should defund the police, spread that money to other things.

It's shocking that other cities are able to house folks in hotels.

There are so many apartment buildings that are open, yet here we are just sweeping and making them walk to their place and not, you know, replacing their items.

It's just been really shocking, but I'm also not surprised because this is a police state.

It's very shocking that you also had a protest with the police department and the not this time folks were given a permit and you have the police not sitting there and focusing on them while people are getting slashed, people are getting hit with batons, people are getting hit with bicycles, yet what are you doing over there?

So I just don't understand how folks are able to get permits and all these things and all these privileges, yet we are sitting here getting beat with batons, getting followed.

Like Dominique said, like Omari said, there was no transportation.

People were fearing for their lives.

We had to provide mutual aid to get people out.

City workers had to use their city badges, that's what I heard, just to make sure folks were able to get out safely.

That's a shame.

You're putting everyone at risk.

All you care, all these folks, all Jenny Durkan seems to care about is herself and who's underneath her.

She doesn't even care about the people she employs, the childcare folks that she employs.

She laid them all off.

So defund the police, Black Lives Matter, and that's all I got to say.

Thank you, Ivana.

Again, I appreciate your taking your time, all of you with us.

I invite my colleagues on the council to put their names into the chat function to let me know whether or not you have questions for our panelists.

And in the alternate, you could, for those of you, but I think most of you have my phone number, you can certainly text me directly and I will get you into the queue.

I think I don't see anybody in the chat section just yet.

So I think I'm gonna just start us off with a question if that's okay.

I'd be really interested to know from each of you, given the fact that the mayor has issued a curfew that is going to go every night between tonight and Friday night, ending on Saturday morning, and given that in issuing this curfew, there's been an expressed desire to balance the rights of demonstrators expressing their First Amendment rights.

with the needs of the city to maintain peace and safety.

Would really love your perspective from being down on the ground and sometimes into these curfews, Amari in particular, I watched a lot of your live feed last night.

Would really like to get your perspective on the role that continuing curfews have on the city meeting what its stated goals are?

I mean, to be honest with you, the curfew, it means nothing in a sense that it's like, I mean, so one, you got a lot of conflicting things because you have the mayor who yesterday was like, okay, you guys can protest, you be peaceful, basically like, listen, man, just don't tear anything up and it'll be fine.

And then you got the police who were like, man, you got, because of this curfew, you need to go home.

Like if there was, if there was no curfew, you know, that was imposed, the protestors, I don't know if they were, might feel like, you know, they're going to sit there and protest, but the, the, I'm trying to say is that the law enforcement, a lot of times it seems like we'll use the curfew to do, I guess, what the curfew is supposed to do, clear the streets.

You know what I'm saying?

Um, there's nobody who's staying, as somebody who's just being out there and seeing everything, there's nobody who's really staying at home.

And really all it does is hurt a lot of businesses because there's a lot of restaurants closed.

I saw the jerk shack was closed down there in, uh, in, uh, Beltown, a place I like to frequent.

And so, As far as the protest is going, I don't really see the curfew as being effective, but I do see it as a tool that if they need to, it gives the law enforcement an opportunity to engage if they so need to, and they can say it's because of the curfew.

Thank you, Amari.

Anybody else have any reflections on that question?

Other council members?

All right.

Sorry.

Council Member Mosqueda, yes please.

And then Council Member Sawant.

Thank you so very much for your public testimony today and for the time that you've taken to share these stories.

I too have been watching a lot of the live feeds and I know many people have put their lives at risk.

I just want to take a minute to say you know, how angry we all must be to risk our lives, not just because of COVID, but because of the police response to turn out in the street.

And I think it should go explicitly said that the actions that you all have been reporting on and shared your stories on today demand a response.

You have put your lives at risk.

People have put their lives at risk on a daily basis during a deadly pandemic to call attention to massive institutional violence against community members.

So I mostly wanted to say thank you and put your stories in the context of the ongoing public health pandemic that is killing disproportionate numbers of black and brown community members.

Your testimony is very important and I want to just say thank you for sharing it and to underscore that what I think Council Member Herbold said at the beginning, no one should be gaslighting the stories that you have told.

No one should be discrediting or dismissing those stories that have been told by folks on the front line.

And we have heard that from the mayor's office and we continue to want to elevate those stories and those experiences.

So I appreciate that this panel went first today and that you all have really shined a light on the truth of what you're experiencing on the front line.

What I've heard from you is a water bottle is not a weapon.

A water bottle is not a weapon and should not have resulted in tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber bullets last night.

And what I also heard from earlier in the public testimony was this is also not a unique situation.

And I wondered if the second person who testified could speak a little bit more about the disproportionate types of force that you see happen when Black Lives Matter protests have occurred in the past.

and some of the situations you've also experienced when it comes to sort of the difference maybe in the women's march versus other Black Lives Matter marches that you've participated in.

Are there other stories that you'd like to share about the disproportionate use of force that you've seen in the past?

I think I'm number two.

Were you speaking to me now?

I was the second speaker.

What I would say is, is this, is that, um, so I've been covering, I'd say like, let's talk about like Mayday, right?

One thing that I've seen as being consistent covered Mayday 2016, the police gave up almost five miles from Westlake all the way down to Soda.

You know what I'm saying?

And that's how they pushed the people out there.

all the way to Soto and everything else.

There was a few people who wanted to be, you know, break things.

They got arrests.

Some people wanted to go to jail or whatever.

But the police had a well-crafted strategy in, you know, to protect property and the protesters, and literally gave up plenty of real estate downtown, you know.

And that's what I saw like four years ago.

I mean, they also pulled out the flash banks.

They did some other stuff then there as well.

There's some other marches where that I've seen, the escalation level is much lower.

I mean, we just have to be real and sincere, is that when you get people that are protesting against things around social justice and equity, and I'm not a big social justice guy, I'm just a reporter, then, you know, people, the police take a different posture.

People will see my reporting when we talk about posture, You know, so it was one posture.

If they just have their shortsleeve shirts on, of course, it's a different posture with masks.

And those postures interact with each other.

You know what I'm saying?

They impact each other.

But I would say is that, like, man, I've never seen this amount of force pulled out of town during WTO.

I've never seen...

I'll just say this, and I'll hop off here.

Last night, So, bottle thrown, they clear the street, rubber bullets.

By the way, I got shot with a rubber bullet last night.

But let me tell you, I got it on tape, the protesters three times reconstituted their line and just said, hands up, don't shoot.

One of them was a nurse who just got off from Swedish custodians.

Hands up, don't shoot.

Three additional times from when the water bottle was thrown.

So let's just put that over there.

Three additional times, hands up, don't shoot.

They gassed him.

from additional times.

I mean, that's what I'm saying.

I couldn't speak on the first incident.

I didn't see it.

The three times I saw people there, a ragtag crew, it was like La Miserable.

They're like, you know, barricade.

You know what I'm saying?

Three times, excessive gas.

And then you heard from that in public testimony.

So, I mean, that's what I can really talk to, ma'am, is the disproportionality of the use of force.

Thank you.

Council Member Swann, please.

Thank you councilmember Herbold and I really appreciate all the panelists who spoke from their heart and spoke facts and truth about the situation.

I also am incredibly grateful to the people who testified in public comment and I hope that those of you who weren't able to testify during the start of the meeting will come back at the end of the meeting because Absolutely.

I want to hear from you.

I'm pretty sure other council members want to hear from you.

And I also wanted to let all the activists out there know that members from Socialist Alternative, my political organization, are going to be out there in the protest right now.

They're out there right now.

And I wanted to thank Brother Willard, who unfortunately had to leave, but who just testified on this panel.

I just wanted to acknowledge that he was with me at the press conference this morning when we had spokespeople from the community, including the NAACP, who have said that we cannot allow the mayor and the city's establishment to lift the consent decree.

And I have some more points about it, but I'll save it for the next panel.

But I just wanted to just acknowledge some of the points that have been made by community members.

One is that we need to maintain the consent degree, although we don't believe that that is going to be enough.

We will need I want to acknowledge the demand that has come from the community to defund the police budget and to cut the police budget in half.

I wanted to let everyone know, just like I did in the press conference this morning, that I absolutely support that demand, and I will be bringing that amendment forward during the budget discussions, and I invite other council members to join me in that.

I think it is extremely crucial that we ban the city and the city's police from obtaining or using any kind of chemical weapons, including tear gas, and ban rubber bullets.

And I will be looking into whatever legislative means that are possible to ban the use of chemical weapons and rubber bullets, and I will keep the movement informed.

And again, I'm happy to work with any council member who wants to who shares that goal with me, and I'm sure it is shared by the community.

And I wanted to thank everyone for their courage, and last but not least, thank you, Omari, for the independent media work that you and others have done, which has provided incredible video evidence of how the police are the ones often that are instigating, and not just instigating, but orchestrating the violence, and they seem to become prepared to instigate violence.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Sawant.

Would any other council members like to address the panel?

Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

Sorry, I used the chat, but that's not always as effective as we plan.

I want to echo everyone's thanks to you all for joining us and to apologize for the way that this city has reacted to people merely trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.

I was on the CPC call earlier this morning and heard more from our community members who are obviously grieving and traumatized and outraged.

One of the things that we talked about on that call or that we've heard actually several times over the last few days is the discussion about how we have a robust accountability system.

We have a robust force review system in place for dealing with complaints.

And we know we've had at least 12,000 of them that have been made in the last few days.

But I think it misses the point, the bigger point, which is that there shouldn't be a need to review anything.

People exercising their First Amendment rights shouldn't be put at risk for doing that.

They shouldn't be at risk of an excessive use of force by publicly funded public servants.

And so I just want to be really clear that we need to have the right framing and lens as we're having this discussion.

I also do want to ask Dom, if you're still on, Coach Dom, and others.

We've actually heard several times about this issue of vans of people showing up.

I had a constituent message me that she's a clergy member.

She went to bear witness to what was happening, and she saw a van load of people show up dressed in black bulletproof vests.

And so I'm just wondering if you have any more information about Where the vans came from?

Where did you see them?

How many people were there?

Because this is something that we've heard several times, and I think it's going to be an important part of, as we try to unfold what happened, try to have a little more details about what that was about.

Yeah, thank you, Councilmember.

I personally wasn't an eyewitness to this event, but when I got the call, the information I got was they were up around the Broadway area, and I think it was three or four vans had pulled up all at the same time, and they were all getting out.

They were all dressed in black.

They had their masks on and everything, and Some of my homeboys that was there seeing this had hit me up and was like, bro, these cats are tripping.

They look like they're about to go down here and tear stuff up or whatever.

And so they had said that they were all white dudes.

There was a bunch of white guys in all black.

And they were, you know, that's all I got.

Basically, the one thing that one of my guys said to me was he thought they came up from Portland, is what one of the guys said to me.

Now, I don't know for sure about that.

I'm getting all this secondhand.

I didn't witness this.

I didn't see it.

So I'm not, you know, don't take me to court on that.

You know what I mean?

But I did, that's the information I got.

And then if you notice, when you start seeing all the stuff that was happening, and a lot of things, there was a lot of guys in black doing a lot of stuff.

So I don't know.

Thank you.

I don't know if I could just chime in real quick.

What I did see, and I mean, we just haven't had time to review this footage, I mean, this stuff's been nonstop all year, is that what I did see on Saturday, because I'm always at the front, the people at the front are usually pretty consistent, and so we're just looking at more of the footage and trying to track it.

trying to get an aerial of them as well because we've seen people come over there and try to get up in front of the barricade and say something this and that and then you know just disappear kind of like rattling up the crowd so I don't know about you know out of the vans and things like that but I have seen people you know where where there's just really weird they just come up there and then get up there in the front try to rile everybody and fall back could just be a regular citizen could be organized but that's probably some

Just like to make a quick note for all panelists when you're speaking, please try and turn your sound on your device off so we do not hear the pings come through.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any other questions from council members before we move on to the panel with the police chief and the Deputy Mayor and Fire Chief, Council Member Mosqueda?

Thank you again to everybody.

One of the things that we had heard on Saturday from a few folks who had reached out to other officers that they know, and this relates to Dominique, to your example as well, was that we had heard from a few folks that they were very upset that they were being asked to go downtown in riot gear, especially given the tense nature of the protests across the country.

They were very concerned that that was the orders that they had been given.

We know that there is also an oath of office that is taken for duty to disobey unlawful orders, and we take that very seriously when it comes to international situations.

I'm wondering, Dominique, could you comment a little bit more on any stories or examples that you've heard from folks who were concerned about either being deployed in the way that they were or the type of situations that they were asked to be put in or the orders that they were given from some of the folks that you may have talked with as well?

Honestly, I can't really speak to that.

What I can do is speak to the conversations I've had with other law enforcement in other cities outside of Washington, where you talk about the psyche, that getting geared up and dressed up into a military grade warlike outfits and it's stepping out, it takes you into a different psychological, where you step in thinking I'm going into war, right?

But now you're doing this where you're facing your community.

And so, and then the community sees you dressed like that.

Now the psychological effect of seeing the officers, you know, and so there's a whole psychological situation going on.

So I would love to have a conversation with SPD.

That would be awesome.

If community could sit down with SPD and hear some of those officers, how they feel about getting dressed into these, um, warlike, um, tactical outfits and ste where most of them feel t people that are protesting wrong.

It was a tragedy.

there us against them and them message and it hits Now you have the reserves.

Now you have all these weapons on you.

Now you're dressed in all this gear.

And now people, it divides us even more.

I don't get the psychological effect.

If I was just hypothetically saying, if I was in charge of putting our officers out into the middle of this, I would be putting them out into the middle of this to show compassion and empathy and build relationship.

That would defuse everything.

And then what would happen is, the community would side with law enforcement when people start rioting.

There's only a small portion of people rioting.

The community would literally stop that because they would be feeling, they would feel a connection with law enforcement, like, hey, these guys get us, we get them, they know why we're out here.

We want righteousness, we want justice, we want equality.

These people over here tearing stuff up, and you can actually see the handful of people that are trying to tear stuff up.

When you cause chaos, mayhem, tear gas, rubber bullets, everybody's running everywhere, you can't distinguish the handfuls of pockets of people that are really out there to do damage.

So anyway, I kind of went in a different direction.

But yeah, I would love to have a conversation.

If that would be set up, I would be more than happy to sit down and have a conversation with how do officers feel when they have to step out with military equipment.

Thank you, Dom.

Council Member Swann, I believe you had another quick item.

Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

I just, on the consent decree, I just, I forgot to add an important thing.

As I was saying earlier, 35 plus organizations, among them NAACP, El Centro de la Raza, Casa Latina, One America, Real Change, Jewish Voices for Peace, have signed a letter together demanding that the mayor withdraw her petition for lifting the consent decree.

And many community leaders, you know, individuals have signed that as well.

And I have authored a sign on letter draft that Ted Verdone from my office has sent all council member offices.

And I'm really looking forward to your responses.

So to see if you will sign on to that letter with me.

The letter basically urges the mayor do not file our petition for consent decree and that the consent decree needs to be maintained.

And I just wanted to share, I'm happy to share that Council Member Mosqueda has already let me know that she is signing on to that letter and I greatly appreciate that.

I look forward to responses from other council offices and also if there are any suggested changes you want to make to that letter, I'm happy to look at those.

Please have your staff reach out to my staff.

Council Member Strauss.

Thank you, Councilmember Herbold and thank you to the panelists here today.

I was late to this meeting because I was watching the CPC meeting and transitioning here into the office.

I was listening through our council listen line the entire time.

Also, Amari, thank you for your reporting.

I have been I feel like I know you very well because I've been listening to your voice for a couple nights now.

I was up with you until about 1.30 in the morning last night.

So thank you for your reporting.

What is clear to me is that the proportionality of response is not consistent with uh...

the aggression from people exercising their first amendment rights what i saw last night and i look forward to the opa and the oig and their investigations into these complaints because i'm glad that we have a process and i want to see this process play through what i personally witnessed was a day of peaceful protest uh...

day of peaceful exercising of the first amendment right was beginning to wrap up and chanting, you go home, we go home, which Amari, I have to say your analysis on de-escalation tactics has been very helpful because I watched as this crowd was de-escalating a situation and for a very small portion of the group on the fringe of of the edge of the group to throw water bottles, to have the response at that time be gas, flashbangs, pepper spray, batons.

The proportionality of that response, I don't need to have an investigation to understand that that is out of balance.

We don't need to be using military-grade weapons on the people of our fair city.

There's not a place for military-grade weapons on our streets, much like in my work trying to reduce gun violence.

We know that when you add more guns to a situation, there's a higher likelihood of gun violence.

It's the same here.

We need to reduce the amount of military-grade weapons that are on our streets to reduce the amount of gun violence.

harm that is being done to people.

This gas seeps into people's homes.

We don't have a place for military-grade weapons on our streets.

And so my oversight, having watched the live streams of countless people watching the SDOT cameras throughout the city, clearly hasn't been enough.

And so, Amari, what is your recommendation And Dominique, and anyone else on the call, what is your recommendation that needs to be done today to deescalate tonight?

We don't have more time to reduce the likelihood of military-grade weapons being used on our streets.

What does our city need to do today?

What do I need to do today?

What you need to do today is if officers feel uncomfortable, this is barricaded six feet, one, they need to, One, there was no distance before Saturday, and you saw that.

Two, on Monday, there was no distance.

Yesterday, after a lot of discussion by the public, and maybe by the police, too, they put themselves six feet behind the barricade.

You know, for them, the barricade's the front line.

I mean, for them, I think that if they want, they can move back even further behind the barricade, because it's easier to move 50 officers back than it is 500 or 1,000 people.

I think the Seattle Police, the State Patrol, and the National Guard.

to set up a barricade that gives them maximum amount of low anxiety.

You know what I'm saying?

And that's why, to be honest with you, that protest went, it was, I mean, it was rocking for a long time, very peaceful, because of the distance.

And we showed on the stream that that six foot, if that was there on Monday, even an umbrella coming over there, it would have been too far from the officer to even grab an umbrella, right?

So that space already set up something.

So I think if they're gonna protest today, Let the SPD set up a barricade that doesn't raise their anxiety, because their anxieties really is kind of what everybody leads to.

It's them being on high anxiety that a water bottle can get this disproportional response.

Maybe more space.

They can see a water bottle coming in, too.

I can't say someone's not going to throw something.

But hey, you got further away from the protester, maybe further time if somebody does do something.

That's one thing right there.

But the biggest thing, the second thing, could be bigger or not, is that you guys as the city council, the city of Seattle Chief Best, you guys need to determine today what kind of city Seattle is. 100%.

You know, Reuters called me last night.

Two in the morning, the Associated Press called me.

You know, there's all kinds of wire.

This is going.

It's up to you guys right now, the city council, the mayor and the chief of police to make a determination.

of what kind of city Seattle's going to be.

And is this the kind of city that this thing goes on here on and on?

Because some cities are just known for that.

Man, that's a tough city.

That's a tough county.

Don't go over there.

And if that's what it's going to be, let Seattle own it and stay in this route.

If this is not what Seattle is and who Seattle is, then you guys need to make a determination and come together as a city council, as a mayor, as a police chief, and say, this isn't who we are.

There needs to be a step up.

And the other thing, I know I'm long-winded, I'll stop here, is to be honest with you, on the street level, there's a vacuum of visible leadership.

It's not, we're not seeing it.

The crisis creates an opportunity.

There's an opportunity for leaders, elected leaders like yourselves and other people, to step up and shine bright because, I mean, people aren't seeing the leadership there.

But as for today, Let the SPD set a barricade that makes them comfortable.

It brings down their anxiety level.

Thank you so much, Omari.

This is a really helpful segue for us to move to hear from the mayor's office and hear from both our police and fire chief.

I want to recognize Omari that I heard you last night calling for leadership from my home in West Seattle.

And I considered coming down to join you.

Didn't know how much time I had to do so.

It was pretty clear that things were wrapping up by the time I got on.

But I wish I had.

And if there's another opportunity for me to come down and help, I will do so.

I really honor everybody's courage today for joining us, and I deeply appreciate the work that each of you are doing in your communities to fight justice.

I apologize for the harm to your heart, your body, and your soul from the experiences of living as a black person in America.

I pledge that this committee will center your experiences as we determine a path forward towards police accountability.

Thank you so much.

I would like to say something really quickly.

Absolutely.

Go ahead, Nesty.

Specifically in terms of what can be done to make these protests more safe would be more, we actually need oversight and accountability in terms of how these officers that are shown to be using excessive force on peaceful protesters We need an actual understanding that those people will be fired, that there will be consequences for their actions, and not vague suggestions of that.

We need actual accountability as far as that goes.

The fact that there is no punishment, and it's allowing the officers to do whatever they want, there need to be consequences.

Thank you, Neste.

We do have our accountability partners on after the mayor's office and the fire and police chief to talk about the accountability process and how they make recommendations for discipline and a little bit of a status report.

on the complaints that they've received now and maybe some changes for how they do their investigations in a way that involves community more.

So thank you again.

Will the clerk please read from item number two into the record?

Just to clarify, I meant community accountability.

There is no accountability when it's organizations that work with each other.

Appreciate that.

appreciate the clarity.

Thank you.

An independent community led investigation and many consequences.

We need disciplining or firing of the officers involved.

And I'm sorry, I that's what I was meaning to explain when because I've heard the calls for a community driven investigation process.

And so Director Andrew Meyerberg is going to talk about some ideas that he has, that he and I have talked about to center community in that investigation process a little differently than we've done before.

But I really do hope we can move on.

I am concerned that we are not going to have the mayor's office for the full hour that we have scheduled.

So Alex, can you please read item two into the record?

Agenda item number two, executive department's response and presentation of timeline of events, briefing and discussion, 60 minutes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So today we're joined by Deputy Mayor Mike Fong, Chief Carmen Bass, Chief Harold Scoggins, and Department of Neighborhoods Director Andres Matia.

Thank you all for joining us.

Our serious concerns about the city's response to the demonstrations protesting the murder of George Floyd and the death and injury of black people at the hands of law enforcement in our city and in our nation for generations does not obscure the recognition of the work of first responders in these challenging times.

Council members, just to remember again, our panel will not be able to opine on complaints of actions of individual officers.

I'm not suggesting that you don't speak about the actions of individual officers that you're aware of.

I'm only managing expectations of whether or not our panel will be able to respond to those questions about those individual complaints.

Again, my request of council members is to please hold your questions for panelists until the end of all the panel presentations, and then we will take your questions.

First, we'll hear from Senior Deputy Mayor Fong.

Good afternoon, Chairwoman Hermold and Council Members.

Before I begin with some brief remarks, I also want to thank your panel this afternoon.

Just some very informative perspectives and voices that need to be heard as part of this conversation and discussion.

I'll also mentioned as you have Council Member Herbold, I too listened to quite some time to Omari's broadcast last night and found it also enlightening as far as our continued dialogue around this issue.

So thank you for that.

And again, also thank you for inviting the executive to your committee this afternoon to discuss the events that have unfolded over the last several days But I do want to start by just echoing the mayor's repeated remarks and those from members of the council and community that the many voices that are demanding real institutional and systemic change around racism, inequities, and injustice must be heard.

And residents across Seattle continue to gather to express their frustration and anger about the unjust killing of George Floyd, and it is their right to gather, and we thank them for speaking out.

And as a city, it is our duty and responsibility to protect those peacefully protesting as they exercise their freedoms.

So I want to just anchor our conversation this afternoon in a couple of key priorities that I know the council and the executive share.

And that is that we are committed together to dismantling the systemic inequities and injustices that have persisted for so long in our society and continue today.

And yes, that absolutely includes government constructs and institutions.

And we are deeply committed together to the First Amendment right to free speech and assembly.

And we will protect the safety of everyone.

demonstrators, and our broader community.

And we are committed to transparency and accountability.

And on this point, I know you'll be hearing from the OPA, OIG, and CPC later this afternoon, but I deeply believe that the many years of hard work by so many, including the mayor and many of you on the dais to craft such a strong and fair system of accountability for officer conduct will be tested, but I truly believe that the system we have built will endure.

And I would also emphasize that the mayor herself has been instrumental in helping to ensure the strong civilian oversight component of our county system, but also the integrity and the independence of the O.

P. A. And O. I. G. In their investigative and oversight roles.

The hallmark of our system has always been a willingness and an openness to continuous improvement.

And this administration is committed to that principle.

As you've heard even from the mayor in the last few days, We have discussed further examination of issues such as badges and badge numbers, but as well as body cams and other issues that have come up.

I know that many members of this council and many members of the community and the previous administrations have worked so hard to establish protocols and procedures for.

But given the issues that have arisen, there's definitely an openness and eagerness on our part that we invite the council and community into that conversation once again.

As you know, Mayor Durkin was one of the original signers of the consent decree nearly 10 years ago.

And while progress has been made, and we are deeply proud of that progress, as she said yesterday, there is much more that needs to be done and more voices need to be heard from the community as we center around that endeavor.

So I'll just close briefly that today we're here to talk through some of the actions that are related to the city's response since last Friday.

But I wanna reinforce that much of this information is still preliminary and our operations are still ongoing with the many dedicated city employees and public servants down in the Emergency Operations Center as we speak.

And as with any major incident, we will ultimately develop a full after action report where we can evaluate, assess lessons learned and pursue continuous improvement.

And we welcome this dialogue with the council.

And today is the beginning of that conversation going forward.

With that, I will turn our presentation and discussion over to Chief Best, as well as a few other cabinet members for our presentation this afternoon.

Thank you.

Thank you, Senior Deputy Mayor Phong.

I think I'm unmuted there.

I'm sorry, Chair Herbold.

I cannot listen to this.

This is just a charade.

Did the Deputy Mayor just say that we have a strong and fair system of accountability?

Is he aware that 29 police killings have happened since 2011?

I want to read the names of those people because we need to know their names, say their names.

Eric Blaine Evans, Mike Quan Yee Chen.

Henry Frankie Lee Sr., James David Anderson, Jackson Kevatinuan, Joel Douglas Reuter, Martin Anwar Duckworth, Luna G. Kaluzny, I'm sorry for my mispronunciations, Andrew Joseph Law, Cody Willis Spafford, Oscar Eduardo Perez-Giron, Austin James Derby, Larry Andrew Flynn, Steven Porter Johnston, Sean Toshiro-Smith, Sean Ma, Raymond Azevedo, Che Andre Taylor, Michael L. Taylor, Demarius Butts, Charlene Alliles, Kyle Gray, Jason Seavers, Ayosia Falatogo, Danny Rodriguez, Ryan Smith, Elliot Yerby, Sean Lee Feuer, And the 29th person is an unidentified African-American homeless man in mental distress who was shot five times in Queen Anne.

I am really sorry.

I am incapable of listening to this charade where the police chief, the deputy mayors, the mayor staff are going to act like They are exist.

It's really may Deputy Mayor Fong's presentation to me sounded like he exists on a different planet than all of us.

And it is extremely problematic.

And I would really urge Chief Best you are about to speak.

I would urge you to speak as if you are on the same planet as the rest of us and that you feel the same responsibility on your shoulders that I feel and to give serious answers as to what is going to happen.

And I would reiterate that at the end of the day, and this is to members of the movement that I'm a part of, I do not expect the political establishment, Mayor Durkin or establishment council members or the police chief or any other bureaucrats to address this crisis.

We are going to need most immediately an independent community-led investigation to hold the police officers accountable who are right now out there repressing our protesters, and we need that investigation to lead to disciplining and or firing.

Thank you, Council Member Sawant.

Chief Best, you have the floor.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Sawant.

I appreciate your passionate words of respect to the people who were killed at the hands of officers and your commitment to making sure that there's a community-led investigation.

I also want to start by thanking Council President Gonzalez, Chairwoman Herbold, and other council members for allowing me to be here today to chat with you about some of the issues that have been presented.

I've been listening to some of the public concerns and comments, and I understand, as you all do, that there are very significant concerns from both demonstrators, participants, about the police responses and about how we are using our tactical responses in these particular situations.

Particularly from Omari and Dominique, thank you for your insightful comments.

I welcome the idea of having a conversation, particularly about some of the stresses and psyche that go into officers repeatedly having to be on the front lines of these demonstrations, as well as the people who are involved many of whom, most of whom, are trying to exercise their free speech and have their message co-opted by others who are not there to do goodwill.

I would like to take a moment to thank all of you for your statements of support, all of you council members, for your statements of support and appreciation for the essential first responders who have worked countless hours and risked time, at times their safety, during their last several days.

I also want to say that I have, what I've been saying actually for many, many days is what happened in Minneapolis was wrong.

It was tragic and it was murder, the murder of George Floyd.

And it hit us all in a real deep and unique way because it was so tragic to watch a man die in front of everybody after several minutes when he could have been saved and nobody did anything to intervene.

I agree that the entire justice system Really, all of our systems are grounded in a racist past that is often not only anti-color, but specifically anti-Black, and it perpetuates disparity today.

And yes, I feel the frustration of the people out there marching.

And I know that there's been a lot of talk from a lot of electeds and others, but everyone's comfortable talking, but who's comfortable taking action?

What we need to do now is we need to listen before we respond.

In so many instances, none of it translating to action.

I'm tired of waiting.

Our communities are tired of waiting.

From my first breath out of the womb, I was an African-American female from my very first breath.

So that is who I am first and foremost, but I'm also the police chief and I have sincere responsibilities to make sure that I'm protecting the public safety, everybody's safety.

And while I hear a lot of different ideas about how that might be done, I'm welcome and I'm open to hearing what you might have that's going to affect real change.

Again, we're tired of waiting.

And I am pushing for the Seattle Police Department to work forward, to move forward.

And we've been doing that for many years.

And we'll continue to do that work as part of our continuous improvement and innovation.

And we'll continue to listen.

We'll continue to listen.

I believe that we all agree that there is much work that needs to be done to remove racism and disparity from the systems.

And I hope that we can all also agree that assaults and looting and destruction are not how we're going to get that work done.

You can't tear down your own house that you've been in when you think you're going to make change.

You have to be organizing, healing, and planning to make change.

And yes, there was a subgroup of people that were doing just that, tearing down our house and tearing down our downtown core.

It was a larger group than we've ever experienced before.

People may have their opinions about what constitutes a small group or a large group, but anywhere from 300 to 500 people at certain times were downtown and on Capitol Hill committing property destruction.

And we cannot tolerate even a small amount of destruction or a few assaults on officers.

No one's job should require them to take bottles of frozen water to the face.

I will briefly give just a high level summary of the events of the past few days.

We've shared a detailed timeline of all the major events since Friday on our public police border.

And as each timeline shows, the days have been busy and they've been dynamic.

But I again will reiterate that I am open to and certainly happy to have discussions and conversations.

And if people have specific evidence-based practices that we can utilize that will maintain the safety of everyone involved, I am absolutely open to hearing about it.

But before I go over the timeline, I do want to hit on a couple of key areas that I know have been of concern to both yourselves and to the community.

First of all, the mourning bands.

You know, they're a longstanding tradition in policing to honor officers who died in the line of duty.

It's never come up as an issue before.

I mean, the fire department utilizes it and others, but I understand now that it's a real concern for the community and we're listening.

So even as we speak, we're working on policies to make sure that we can identify officers by their serial numbers so that people can have that prominently displayed and there's no issue of trying to, the perception of trying to hide the identification.

I have to say though, just for clarification's sake, that we've always worn name tags with our names showing.

It is required.

I was even criticized myself for wearing a morning band.

And I am pretty certain that I know my name is here and I've let a lot of people recognize and know me from the community.

So, you know, that's just a part of, you know, wearing these bands, but we'll make sure that we revisit that.

But as always, we have to be consistent and we have to listen to the community.

Based on the laws and regulations crafted to my understanding, by the ACLU and some members, even this current council, we are not allowed to film the legal expression of First Amendment rights.

If the council has agreement from the ACLU and the courts, and they want us to have our cameras on, even in these demonstrations, we will work to ensure the technology is available to do that.

We will absolutely operate under your guidelines and your expectations.

Finally, I know that there are many concerns about how we decide to deploy blast balls, crowd management, pepper spray.

I heard from some of the panel previously that they have ideas and thoughts about how that might be done.

Again, if we can find evidence-based practices that work, we're very open to that and we're open to the discussion.

But our crowd management policies that we have in place now were developed under the watchful eye of the federal monitor.

They were approved by the Department of Justice and the federal court.

We also had the policy reviewed by the CPC.

They gave us their edits, and while not all of those edits were accepted, many of them were.

They will be reviewed by Andrew Meyerberg, the Director of the Office of Police Accountability, and by the Office of Inspector General, Lisa Judge.

Every single year we review our polities, and this will be an important part of that review.

We'll make sure that it's all reviewed, and I know you're gonna hear from those panelists later to talk about what they're planning to do and how they're going to review everything.

Additionally, I can tell you for this series of events, we asked the Center of Policing Equity is headed by the renowned Dr. Philip Atiba-Goff to help us with an independent review of these events.

Together with the review of Inspector General Judge, I am confident that we will have a model policy for addressing these types of events.

And since I know Inspector General Judge, I don't doubt that she will welcome community input into how that review moves forward.

So now I'm just gonna give you a brief overview of the recent events that occurred, that are still occurring.

We have two going on right now.

To begin, on Friday night, we had an unexpected group show up and assemble in Henhay Park.

They picked an area that was not traditional staging area for demonstrations, and officers on the scene quickly assessed that things were evolving, and we brought in additional resources, many of them people who were at home, and we had to call in to deal with 150, what appeared to be black bloc folks who showed up into that area.

Once we were staffed up and it took a little bit of time, we were able to manage the scene.

It was a clear, it was a clear fighting night that things for these particular sets of incidents It was just gonna be different.

There were clear attempts to split our resources.

New individuals were brought in by vehicles to support those that were already fighting with the Seattle Police Department.

And there's really no other way to say it.

It was pretty much a fight.

I was sitting in this office and I could look out my window and see what was happening on the street.

Officers were being pelted with rocks, bottles, and feces.

And there were attempts to blind the officers with these, green colored laser pointers that they were pointing in their faces.

And those engagements continued for some time into the evening, with some looting and property destruction as well.

In total that night, we made a couple of arrests that were connected to the event.

On Saturday, we were prepared to and did facilitate peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights by thousands, and I mean thousands of community members.

Starting at around noon, right here in front of SPD headquarters, people gathered.

The peaceful demonstration was ended by the actions of groups of individuals with the sole purpose and cause of creating mayhem.

You know, I got to be clear, there were several people, thousands, literally thousands of folks here who really were just exercising their anger, their rage, their right to mourn and to grieve and to lament the current racist systems that are in place.

But there were also people there who were there to really attack the officers.

And while we're hearing a lot of conflicting reports about who started it, what, when, I have every confidence that Director Meyerberg of the Office of Police Accountability will review everything to make sure that we were following our policies and procedures that we have in place.

But officers, again, were being pelted by bottles, many filled with frozen water.

And right before 2 p.m., right in front of the SPD headquarters, At about 2.40 p.m., we had the first officer injured by one of these projectiles, and that required the Seattle Fire Department to respond.

At 3.10 p.m., the first dispersal order was issued at 5th and Pine.

And at 3.55 p.m., a patrol vehicle was on fire.

So these things, these events were quickly happening, and officers were, in the meantime, assaulted multiple times before they responded with force.

As I discussed earlier, that's our belief of the consequence, of the sequence, that is, of events.

And we'll look for Director Meyerberg, as discussed, to talk about everything that he ferrets out, every use of force and every complaint.

All of that will be reviewed.

Overall, we made 55 arrests throughout Saturday and into early Sunday morning.

Downtown Seattle on Sunday morning, I don't know.

It just made my soul hurt.

This city that I love, and I know all of you love, was in tatters.

I saw what I can only describe as agony on the faces of business owners as they swept up shards of glass and took inventory of what was stolen.

It was really tragic to see, but I also saw, and I know many of you saw this as well, hundreds of people here helping, including parents and children and business owners and friends.

I spoke to a couple of folks who came in from like Marysville and other places just to come help out with the cleanup and scrub the graffiti off the buildings.

That was very heartening to see.

So we had another peaceful demonstration on Sunday, but by four o'clock, things had changed.

And we had bottles and rocks once again being hurled at officers.

Over the course of the night, we had rocks, bottles, compost bins hurled at the officers.

we had officers shoved, pepper sprayed, and punched.

Throughout the night, we gave multiple dispersal orders that were ignored.

And Sunday night, we made 21 arrests.

On Monday, we facilitated, again, another very peaceful demonstration with thousands of people for hours across downtown and Capitol Hill.

The crowd converged at the East Precinct, where they had the start of what I believe was really meaningful engagement with the commanders that were on the scene there.

What wasn't shown in the videos that have circled around the social media is there were multiple individuals in that crowd who are working to start a fight.

Again, thousands of people, many of them there just wanting to express and mourn and grieve, fight for change, make their voices heard.

But there were people in that crowd who did not have that intent.

And at one point, you know, as a crowd was pushing forward to search for the fence line, officers didn't give the dispersal order, border warning, and they just took the necessary steps to hold the fence line.

I have done a thorough review of both our policies and the Seattle Municipal Code to make sure that we were in compliance from my perspective, but certainly that will be reviewed once again by Andrew Meyerberg, who's the director of the Office of Police Accountability.

So after that, several groups began causing chaos amongst the many people who had just come there to peacefully have their voices heard.

They were throwing projectiles, including chunks of concrete, and one officer took a chunk of concrete to the eye, and it may have damaged his sight permanently.

We're not sure at this point.

While we were facilitating that march, we had a group of around 200 or so at University Village with a clear intent of vandalizing the property.

They were using tactics to test our deployment, to draw us away up to the ab, and even used a drone to survey all of our movements.

something that we as police are not allowed to do, even in an emergency like this.

Overall, across the day, we made 11 arrests.

Last night, we were still collecting all of the details, but we know, again, we had peaceful protests for hours.

I had the opportunity to meet and talk with some of the people who were involved in that march.

I went downtown to the beginning of the march, right in the West Lake Center, spoke to the officers, spoke to many people who were participating.

Everybody had a message of peace and expressing their First Amendment free speech rights.

We later met with them at the EOC.

I was with the mayor at that time, and we spoke to the crowd, and everything seemed to be fine.

But into the night, it went awry.

Many of the folks that were there initially that spoke to us were not there when some of the violence occurred.

At that night, we made two arrests.

So yes, meaningful change has happened at riots.

This is Pride Month.

Stonewall was a riot led by trans people of color.

People demonstrating and fighting back have been used to ignite change throughout history.

But what happened during many recent events was not fighting back.

It was actually attacking.

Not everybody, not even most people, But some people were attacking, and that is the truth.

And it was igniting property just for the sake and joy of igniting property.

Across the events, we have made over 80 arrests.

Most were for burglary happening during looting, property destruction, and assaulting officers.

Our focus has been and will continue to be focusing on people engaging in criminal behavior.

There is absolutely no reason and no cause and no justification for an officer to pinpoint people who are respectfully protesting, or maybe even sometimes not respectfully, but protesting and demonstrating.

But we can't have people committing acts of violence against the public or against the officer.

So I will admit to you that everything has not gone as we had planned.

But I also think that the first responders have done a pretty good job of making sure that they are available and that they come back night after night.

And I would imagine there's gonna be more tonight and taking rocks and bottles.

They have been working constantly since Friday night.

They took projectiles to the face and to the body, and they were hit with fire extinguishers and concrete.

And I have to reiterate, no one signs up to be assaulted, and we can't allow that.

So we're considered experts in this field.

But again, I welcome others on this call who have stated that they have better ideas and options about what we can do.

We'd be glad to hear it.

But right now we're in the middle of trying to handle demonstrations that are ongoing.

This weekend specifically, Friday and Saturday night, the peaceful demonstrations, the peaceful demonstrators, as they moved on, were left with people who were just intent on riots.

And we have never had that before, and particularly in this style.

But I get why it's happening.

People are just fed up and dang tired of seeing black men killed unarmed by police or anyone else, including community members who actually killed them as well.

So they're tired of it.

So totally understand that, but also recognize that we just can't have our city torn up in the process.

And we've really never had this level of vehement reaction before.

It's almost palpable.

So the priority for me and for this agency is always going to be protecting life and protecting property.

And if criminal behavior begins, we have an obligation to deal with it and address it.

So I actually, as council members to want, read the names of the many who died at the hands of police, and we grieve for them too.

I know you don't believe that, but we actually do.

I don't wanna see anybody killed at the hands of anybody, but we also have to do a job in this city.

And I wanna conclude before we take questions, which I understand it's gonna happen at the end of the panel, with the reminder that social media is social media.

It's not news.

There are no editors.

There are people who have agendas.

Those things that are posted are their narratives and their perspectives.

We have to remind ourselves that half-truths and hate and propaganda have filled social media networks for years, whether it's about the police or about any other demographic group.

An officer who was out there involved in this was the victim of threats from all across the nation, and come to find out, and you can talk to Director Meyerberg, he'll be up next, that officer wasn't involved.

So social media is not news, and it's not always factual, and we have to take what we see there with a grain of salt until more details can be ferreted out.

So we just don't wanna take the whole cloth when we just have a snippet of video.

We're here to adhere to our principles, and that means we want to wait for the truth and get the whole truth and let the details and the facts lead us to our conclusions.

I appreciate all of you, and I thank you for allowing me to have these moments here to speak and to express my heartfelt sentiment and solidarity and standing with people who are against wrong or against hate.

And if you think that there are better ways for us to manage these demonstrations, I absolutely look forward to hearing what you have.

We will always follow the rules and ordinances presented by our city council.

And on that, I'm going to turn it over to Chief Scoggins of the Fire Department.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chief Best.

Good afternoon, members of the Council, Council President Gonzalez, Council Chair Herbold, and thank you for having us this afternoon to just give you a brief overview of, you know, the Fire Department's perspective and what we've done and accomplished over the last several days.

But I think I'd be remiss if I didn't start with my personal feelings.

Many people were talking about what's going on, and this doesn't hit anyone probably harder than me.

I have many of the same lived experiences that many of the conversations that you're hearing around the community and around the nation.

Not hearsay, I mean personally.

All of those things have happened to me or members of my family.

Growing up in Los Angeles, experienced many different things.

My time here, experienced many different things.

And please understand, I've only been here five years.

experience many different things.

So I do understand.

I have a personal concern for change and growth and justice and all of these fronts that you're talking about for education, for health care, for housing, for jobs, for employment.

All those are very real to me.

I have four very real kids and two very real grandkids and their future is important.

to the changes that we make and making them in the right way.

And I do want to thank the mayor and Chief Best for their leadership and their partnership, because, you know, everyone has been working extremely hard.

And it would be good if you acknowledge that our department directors, I mean, they have been here around the clock, working extremely hard, trying to help community, not just the past seven days.

Clearly, the past 90 days has been nonstop.

Your team has been working hard for this community.

It's important that you know that.

As we walked into this protest this weekend, many of the remembrances for the person who passed away, we had simple goals in the Seattle Fire Department.

Our goal was to support the protests while continuing to serve the community.

And we had to do that in a couple of different ways.

We knew the crowds were going to be large, and as with all protests, there's going to be trip and falls and things like that.

But what was happening around the nation made this a bit different.

So we wanted to make sure we had appropriate resources to deal with any medical emergencies or fire emergencies.

And as all of you have seen around the nation, there have been many fires burning.

We did not wanna get caught short.

So we did a few different things.

One, we staffed up additional fire engines.

On Saturday, we staffed up five additional fire engines and strategically located them around the community.

Because what we knew is we were going to have the normal fire calls that come in.

And on Saturday we had probably 200 to 250 with two of the most significant being a structure fire on Capitol Hill and another structure fire in West Seattle.

And they were significant fires that had a large draw on our resources.

So having those extra resources helped.

As the events escalated on Saturday and the fires started growing around the community, our goal was to get in there and put those fires out.

If it was a trash can fire, a vehicle fire, or a structure fire, we did not want that fire transitioning from a structure to a building.

That becomes very important for us.

But we knew it was going to be challenging to get in there, which is why we had a lot of help and a lot of units.

I do want to thank the Seattle Police Department, the Sheriff's Department, for providing us escorts and getting us a way to get in there and put those fires out.

And some of them reignited, and we got back in there and put them out again.

On Saturday, we had a total of 33 calls that were related to in and around the protests.

And eight of those were the vehicle fires that you saw.

And our firefighters did an amazing job in working all around the clock.

As we moved into Sunday, also with Saturday, as things escalated, we did call for additional resources.

We called for our neighbors to come and help us just in case one of these large buildings got going in the downtown core.

We wanted to make sure we had enough help to really attack those fires.

So our King County neighbors sent us additional engines to help.

And we also had a plan that was moving forward with the state mobilization in case larger structures got going and we had a number of them going.

So that was Saturday.

Moving into Sunday, once again, we stood up our resource management center and we staffed additional engines for Sunday.

We had a total of 22 responses in and around the protest area.

And then moving into Monday, the same format continued.

We had 18 responses in and around the protest area.

And I believe Monday was the, the university village.

So we had separation.

We had large geographical separation at that point.

So we strategically relocated our resources around there just in case anything happened around the university village.

We wanted to make sure we had enough resources in a close proximity to put those fires out or medically related responses.

And we did have A medically related response that was really significant and I'm glad we were close to get the person help that really needed help.

And then that was significant.

And last night, our units once again monitored the groups that were moving around and we were ready and we had nine responses between yesterday and into the night last night.

You know our team has been working extremely hard and I do want to thank the members of the Seattle Fire Department because you know they have been going non-stop for a very long time, not just the last seven days.

We have not teleworked, we have not done any of those things.

We have responded to more emergencies that have probably been more frightening than many of our members have responded to.

in their careers because it was an unseen pandemic and they were afraid of what they were taking home to their families.

So we have been going steady for a very long time and I do want to commend them because they have been working extremely hard.

That's all I have and I will pass it to Director Andres-Montilla.

Thank you Chief Scoggins.

Director Montilla.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Hello, my name is Andres Mantilla.

I am the director of the Department of Neighborhoods.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak regarding our ongoing community response and engagement efforts, not only over the past weekend and in the past week, but also largely through the COVID-19 response as we continue to engage with all of our communities and in particular with communities of color who are disproportionately being impacted by this pandemic.

First, I wanted to also share with you both my personal and our department's commitment to centering race and equity in our work.

The murder of George Floyd and the ongoing murders of so many others, as well as the constant weaponization of white supremacy and anti-blackness, have us all of the city staff in a deep sense of hurt, helplessness, anger, and with anger and grief.

As a team, DON is focused on two North Star goals.

The first is to put race and equity at the center of all of our decisions.

And the second is to invest in the power of communities to forge their own solutions.

These goals guide our work day to day.

They guide us through the pandemic and they guided us over the weekend.

I wanna briefly just share and lift up particularly a program called the Community Liaison Program.

Many of you were aware.

Community liaisons are embedded community leaders from a variety of immigrant and refugee committees, communities, communities of color, and communities of seniors, youth, people with disabilities, all who provide a range of support to city departments, including translation, interpretation, and policy support.

I am thankful to these community partners, because when we asked them and called them over the weekend to help us, they came, even as they were responding and dealing with their own grief, their individual grief, and that of their families.

The community liaisons made in-language videos to share information of what was happening on the ground and immediately translated these into seven languages.

All of these videos can be found on YouTube and are actively being shared by the community liaison team.

We also translated curfew information into additional languages and those are available on OIRA's blog.

And we did this largely within the same day.

So thank you to those community members and community volunteers.

Um, this response is, uh, in addition to the ongoing work that we are doing with COVID-19.

And I just want to remind folks that, uh, we are centering communities of color within that, uh, engagement at the direction of mayor Durkin and in support with so many of my colleagues.

Um, it's changed the way we've engaged.

It's changed the way we've engaged with community in this crisis, as well as we've had to move to more digital means, but it's offered an opportunity for our staff to understand how community can be experiencing this digital engagement during the digital divide during this time.

During the week and over the last week, DLN has reached out to over 6,000 organizations to provide information about the curfew and the city's response.

We are continuing personal outreach and answering community questions.

As you heard yesterday, the mayor and the chiefs committed to a meeting with the activists that will be happening later today and we will be also organizing additional meetings with additional community leaders and organizations, along with some of my cabinet colleagues and mayor's office staff.

During this time, there were also several voluntary cleanup efforts.

You heard the chief reference some of them, and also city staff and city lab efforts that I wanna speak to just quickly.

Both are currently underway, or were underway in the Westlake area, the retail core, and then in, the CID in Little Saigon, a team led by FAS in partnership with public utilities, Department of Transportation, parks, the Office of Economic Development, and assisted by the Port of Seattle and the Seattle Building Trades, as well as with DLN, did mobilize a team to clean up glass and address broken windows, as well as address preventative boarding at the request of businesses specifically within Little Saigon and within the Chinatown International District area.

In the retail core, over two dozen sites were addressed and crews began and worked on preventative boarding in Little Saigon and the CID.

And to date, we have addressed over 130 addresses with 30 that are still in progress and with approximately 50 to 60 people per shift.

Again, thank you to those crews and to our community partners and volunteers that showed up on this work.

And thank you to this Council for letting me have a few moments today.

Thank you, Director.

I really appreciate you taking some time to share with us this important work of folks in your department and throughout the community.

I know that I've got some folks in the queue.

It looks like I've got Council Member Lewis in the queue, Council Member Mosqueda.

We'll start there.

I just want to flag that Councilmember Lewis's questions are extremely important as it relates to orders to disperse use of use of force, and I'm.

I would really hope that the responses that we get from Chief Best are not just, oh, we'll look into that, looking backwards, but that you help follow the line of questioning and where it takes us for moving forward.

I think some of Council Member Lewis's questions are really about how we can start doing things differently now, not just assessing what's been done over the last So with that, I'll turn it over to Councilmember Lewis.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

And, you know, I want to start at the top, Chief Best and Deputy Mayor Fong and the rest of the panelists here thanking you for being here.

You know, I want to preface this line of questions that Councilmember Herbold queued up.

By acknowledging I'm not a likely candidate for this line of questioning based on my background in law enforcement, based on the fact that I'm friends with many police officers, my best friend growing up, who I was the best friend at his wedding, is a police officer.

And I believe that policing can be done constitutionally and in collaboration with the community.

But I wanted to align a question here because I think that can only happen if we do follow the rules and follow the rules in real time and acknowledge that the rules that we're so proud of that have been shaped by years of being in our consent decree are rules that should be shaping behavior in real time, not something to set up accountability later.

And that's sort of what Council Member Herbold just touched on.

And Chief Best, I'm glad that you brought up those crowd control rules, because from what I have observed from some of the incidents, and I know there's nothing that upsets police more than Monday morning quarterbacking tactics.

So this is not something I do idly or cavalierly to enter into this line of questioning.

But I think these rules matter most when law enforcement is present to protect First Amendment events and activities.

So I'm going to jump into this line of questioning, and they're mostly going to pertain to Monday night's events.

And I do just want to flag for everybody that's viewing at home, you know, that I'm not singling out Monday night's events purely to suggest that those are the only events that have been concerning or troubling over the last several days.

I'm not doing that.

But I do want to particularly drill in because it's one where we have some of the most photographic examples.

of the use of some of our crowd control rules.

And I want to preface this by presenting a video that was made by Omari Salisbury, who testified earlier to this committee.

And we're going to play this video muted.

Before we start, I also want to preface for people that are viewing at home, because we are on a live stream, that there is It is a fairly graphic video, so I do just want to give a warning to the viewing public.

And I would ask the chair's indulgence that we play this video briefly before I proceed with the line of question.

I wholeheartedly support this.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you.

And I'm going to play this muted, as I said.

So, Joseph, if you go ahead and play the video.

All right, thank you for playing that, Joseph.

And I know that's a difficult thing for everybody here to watch.

But first, as a foundational question, before I get into the rest of them, I just want to ask you, have Chief Best and Deputy Mayor Fong, have you reviewed that video previously?

Council Member Lewis, thank you.

I have seen, not maybe that specific video, But many versions of the video and the incident that occurred on Monday in the clash between the officers and some of the protesters, there's been a number of folks who have issued concerns and complaints in this regard.

So I've heard from a number of different perspectives.

It's already being reviewed by the Office of Police Accountability and Director Meyerberg.

So to make sure that there's various versions about what occurred, We want to get to the facts of every piece of this.

And as you said, it's very disturbing.

No one wants to see pepper spray or tear gas or anything else being deployed.

But at the same time, I think there's probably underlying issues as to why that occurred.

And I want to make sure we know what they are.

And so.

We'll get to that a little bit further on the line here.

But I appreciate that.

But I want to jump into it because these are ongoing demonstrations.

I don't want us to wait all the way until the final formal review.

So I want to touch on a couple elements of what we've seen here.

And I probably wouldn't be doing this if it was just what we've seen here.

But the fact that it's been commiserated and it's been relayed to me by dozens of friends who were present and witnessed this, who would not idly report this unless they were concerned.

And so I just want to get into a little, because it was determined to be a riot by the incident commander.

and that you know i want to get a little bit into the definition that we have a deficit definition of the police manual for a riot uh...

it's it's a it's fourteen point oh nine oh nine a you know after conduct within a group of four more persons creating substantial risk causing injury to any person substantial property The first question that I want to say is, you know, the response called for, if it's determined that that element is present, right, is the crowd is to be ordered to disperse.

And first, I want to make sure that I'm correct on that.

Am I correct?

Yes, as you've read it, you're absolutely right.

And you being a former city attorney, I'm sure you know that as well as anybody.

Yes, that is correct.

Thank you.

And going on to the next question.

So the manual also says that before you order that crowd to disperse, The incident commander that's in charge, they consider less restrictive means of crowd management, correct, than telling the crowd to disperse.

I'm sorry, one more time.

They consider less restrictive means of crowd management than giving the order to disperse.

Yeah, we always try to use the most least invasive force before we issue a dispersal order.

right so i i guess my question is and maybe the maybe this is a premature question for the review but for reviewing the tapes it you know like what happened on saturday night in downtown seattle and i'll be the first to say that was a riot that was out of control there were there was vehicles that were burning there were there were buildings being looted uh...

it seemed that the events that we just saw on tape and from what i've heard from other folks were presently there who were chanting we don't yet actually ironically we don't see no right here please take off your right here I'm having a hard time seeing how that could be labeled a riot.

Okay, Council Member, thank you very much for that.

I absolutely appreciate your perspective with your basis of knowledge about the law.

And one of the things that will be reviewed is if in fact it was a riot, all of those tenants would be looked at again by Office of Police Accountability.

So there's a dispute about if in fact it was a riot.

or what occurred first, I would be looking at body, I'm sure that Director Meyer would be looking at body-worn camera, video collected from the area, policies, procedures, and Seattle Municipal Code, and anything else that might affect the actions or what happened that night.

So I agree that it should all be looked into and not for me to answer at this very moment because I'm not the expert on it that's gonna be looking at the police accountability part of this.

Right, but I guess to build on that too, You know, we played the video muted, but even playing the video with the sound and the videos from multiple different angles that have been submitted from other people, there wasn't, once the determination was made in order to disperse.

And I guess my question is, did the department lack the means to provide an order to disperse?

Well, in some cases, that is the case.

And the SMC, as you know, is pretty clear about when it is feasible to do so.

So if the people on scene, the commander on scene, feels that it's not feasible at that time for a whole host of different conditions, there is a possibility that they will not give an order to disperse.

And again, all of that will be looked at and reviewed.

I know that Council Member Herbold in particular, whom I greatly respect her thoughts and opinions on these matters, wants to look forward, but we have to sort of look back at the incident before we can answer it forward, how we might move in a different or better direction if one is warranted.

writing and i appreciate that but my concern is that this i want to make sure that we take the the opportunity of this hearing today to drill into some of the things that have happened so far and what is an ongoing uh...

round of demonstrations and say and you know i'm i'm leaning on some of these points because i i i think that we've seen over the last couple of days the difference between a riot and a rioter and you know saturday night in downtown seattle as i alluded earlier was a riot we saw it on tv and we saw uh...

we saw what happened but you know if an assembly like the one that was there on monday uh...

which was overwhelmingly uh...

i'll accounts peaceful uh...

but included a couple of folks who were who are being disruptive uh...

who were by some accounts throwing throwing stuff at the police line i don't want us to be in a position where uh...

we don't have any means of deescalating the confrontation with a couple of individuals so that those couple of individuals can intern veto the demonstration of uh...

hundreds of peaceful demonstrators uh...

united people that i have in that demonstration who who were friends of mine who were you know assistant attorneys general and urban planners and transportation advocates that you know they were riots right you know they were there to peacefully demonstrate they were told to disperse and they were hit with tear gas and flashbang grenades so i you know it's just a matter that uh...

the tactics that are being using are starting to present and there's an editorial in the new york times about this today that there's a the fundamental right to free expression assembly that cities have an obligation to be maintaining uh...

if we can allow a few people to round up a peaceful constitutional demonstration to the point where we're deploying weapons to break it up we're failing our obligation as a city to allow people to exercise the fundamental right to free expression and to demonstrate So that was more of a speech, I guess, than a question.

But it leads me to the next question about command and control of the weapons that we have in the field.

And so I want to start with a couple of foundational questions.

So OC spray, commonly known as pepper spray, lesser lethal, authorized for COWD control use, as are blast balls.

And if I'm not mistaken, are blast balls, is that the same thing as a flash bang grenade?

Yes, it can be.

And so in the manual, again, under 14.0909B, these weapons can only be used at the direction of the incident commander unless there's very specific conditions that are present under the manual, right?

And those conditions, You know, it has to be, you know, someone can use those for self-defense in certain circumstances, an officer can, if there's an immediate life safety emergency.

But even then, you know, personnel should avoid deploying the OC spray and the blast balls in the proximity of folks that aren't posing a risk to public safety or property.

Up for the manual?

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir.

That's correct.

So in fact, under that section that I enumerated earlier or set out earlier, if an officer can use that OC spray for self-defense or the defense of the public, they're required to verbally warn the person that the spray will be used, even in cases of crowd control, wait a reasonable amount of time for compliance with the warning.

And this is only ideally if they can limit the collateral exposure.

And that's what's required.

so you know a part of my concern and the reason that i bring every nightline of questioning up is that you know what i've been hearing from a lot of folks who are out there who you know who demonstrated in the past were politically active it has been that that they're not sensing that the that it's hot and the sort of give-and-take of the normal rules of protest are being observed and i think it's a fading police escalation that are anticipating on this use of force in a way that they from when they've been in typical typically situated demonstrations in the past in seattle uh...

you know i'm bringing that up because i i want if these are going to be ongoing demonstrations i want the temple of these demonstrations to to reflect the level of escalation of force that protesters in the city have grown to accept over time, and one that, honestly, in the past, the department has had a very good reputation of implementing.

So I just wanted to ask if you have any response to that observation from folks that we all of us on the council are getting from people that are surprised, frankly, actually, by this use of force that they're experiencing at these demonstrations.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

The force is supposed to be used to protect life and property, including the life and property of the officers.

And so I know that there'll be a thorough review, and I know that there'll be many questions that need to be answered on this.

You have a very clear knowledge and obviously have stated what both the policy and the Seattle Municipal Code present.

And our obligation is to follow those.

And if in fact they're not being followed, we fully expect that we'll make the midterm adjustments that need to be made for those issues.

I can tell you one of the things that we've done in light of the events on Monday night, we felt like possibly we needed to have an additional, I believe actually Omari mentioned this earlier, in his comments to counsel an additional line there, a barricade that creates a little more distance between officers in the crowd so that there's a little more time to determine if in fact there's a need to disperse or need to react with any sort of munitions.

So again, all of that will be reviewed.

We did take an immediate adjustment to that because we didn't want to repeat a Monday night's incidents where where people have to respond quickly after receiving rocks and bottles.

I assure you that everything will be looked at, that the injury to the officers and the rocks and bottles being taken, I don't have the clear perspective.

It depends on which account you're taking into, whether it was one or 20. So I think all of that information from our body-worn cameras, from the cameras at the scene, and from other perspectives will have to be reviewed to make sure that we understand clearly what happened at that incident.

And again, if anything happened that is outside either a policy of 1400 or the Seattle Municipal Code, then we will make sure that that's followed up on.

But we did take some immediate actions on what we saw.

I would say, because I have seen also some preliminary footage of events that happened last night, and the the thing that uh...

set out to me as i did see video today you know no one's disputing that there's video last night of folks throwing things at the police line uh...

and the you know that's something that that i don't abide by and that i hate to see and you know i i i don't like violence against anybody including are uniformed officers you know the one of the videos that i saw although i did see the the crowd uh...

uh...

evicting someone that was throwing things at the police line and we heard from a marty salsbury earlier you know and i can personally test this to their art they're great communicators that are in the east precinct in the police And I guess my concern is that even with that, there was still the deployment of tear gas last night.

And I just want to make sure that we're exhausting all of the efforts that we can as a department to effectively de-escalate these situations.

The use of tear gas in the street in residential neighborhoods that's been spoken to by my colleagues before during these demonstrations is just something that It's really hard for me to see.

Council Member Lewis, we gotta wrap this up.

I really appreciate this line of questioning, it's so important.

Chief Best, I really think that the words if feasible are being misused.

I think we need your incident commanders to be giving direction to officers in the street of what if feasible means and what kind of injury they need to protect themselves and others from.

There's a difference between water bottles and frozen water bottles.

I acknowledge that and the potential to harm.

But I've never, in 25 years of participating in protests in the city of Seattle, experienced such an indiscriminate use of tear gas, pepper spray, and flash bombs against people who are not doing anything wrong, with so little effort to de-escalate, to negotiate with protesters, to utilize peacekeepers who are willing to help you, and really to focus your efforts on the people who are doing wrong.

So I really, I know there's a demonstration coming down to City Hall, I think pretty much as we speak, and I know the chiefs want to I want to get off this call.

I committed to Council Member Sawant and Council Member Mosqueda to get their questions out.

I'm not going to expect you guys to answer them because I do respect that you have stayed a half an hour longer than we had asked.

But I do also want to respect my colleagues and allow them to get their questions out.

Well, Council Member Herbold, if I can just jump in real quick and say thank you for those closing comments.

You clairvoyantly interpreted part of my closing remarks and I'll let it stand there since you did it so ably and we'll move on.

And Chief Bess, I do thank you so much for answering my questions and hope we can work together on this.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Council Member Swann.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

I wanted to say first of all that I wanted to announce that Councilman Morales has agreed to sign on to the council sign-on letter that I've introduced on the consent decree and I really appreciate that.

I wanted to say I really appreciate Councilman Morales and Mosqueda having signed on to it.

I do think it's too bad the mayor is not here.

I have questions for Chief Best and to Mr. Mantilla, and I'm fine, as you said, Council Member Herbold, if the responses come later, that's totally fine, but we want, I second you in urging the officials here to give actual responses.

And if you send them in written form, that's fine.

We should have a follow-up meeting as well.

But I just have to say, I urge you, Chief Best, to speak as if you were actually in touch with the reality faced by thousands and thousands of Seattle's ordinary people.

And quite frankly, as if you were you, I urge you to speak as if you were in touch with the situation you and Mayor Durkan are in.

I mean, I don't know if you have any conception of the kind of anger And outrage that there is in Seattle right now, and that is not just going to go back into the bottle this is this is out there in the open, and you are going to have to answer for this mayor Durkin, and the city's establishment will have to answer for this.

I do think it is extremely unfortunate.

that you continue to use this idea that some people, and this is I'm quoting, quote, looking to start a fight, unquote, making a false equivalence between massive and ruthless forces of the state, including cops with fully fledged riot gear, and You know, tear gas canisters equating that to just ordinary people who are angry and they may be shouting.

But those two things are completely not in any in the same realm as well.

And to say that some white men or some people are looking to start a fight as both you and Mayor Durkan have repeatedly done.

I'm not just you know, I'm not.

cherry-picking one quote from you.

I have watched in detail the press conferences that you and Mayor Durkan have done.

And repeatedly, you both have said this, you know, in different words, that there are some bad actors who are doing this.

In my view, this is a shameful abdication of responsibility for a stunningly violent police force.

And as Nikita Oliver has said, the good versus bad protester trope is false dichotomy, and it's really gaslighting.

But the question I have is, Do your officers and do your commanders, and do you as police chief, do you need a rule to tell you that the police officer should not orchestrate deliberate violence?

Do you need a rule to tell you that the officer should not grab a demonstrator's pink umbrella?

All the demonstrator is doing, as we saw in the video, and thank you, Council Member Lewis, for sharing that, is animatedly speaking out.

So do you need a rule?

And I'm not being facetious.

I'm actually asking you, do you need a rule to tell you that the officer should not be grabbing the umbrella?

Because the umbrellas are there as protection against what they thought was going to happen and what exactly happened, which was the spraying.

of tear gas.

So do you need a rule to say that the umbrella should not be grabbed and wrestled away from the protester and destroyed in the process?

And then as soon as that happens, another officer sprays that person who is no longer with protection, sprays her with mace.

And in the next seconds, the entire line of officers begin spraying the peaceful crowd with mace.

Do you need a rule to say that that should not happen?

My second question is, what is the consequence if the OPA rules that something should not be considered a riot.

I appreciate the questions from Council Member Lewis, but I don't, but this is, but it, all it did to me was to highlight why the OPA process is as usual going to be topless and that we need an independent community-led investigation, because what happens if something is ruled is not a riot?

Is the conclusion going to be that whatever violence was used was all justified?

My next question, you said, again, quoting you, you said, we should not believe what's on social media.

There are half-truths, hate and propaganda.

This is a quote from you.

Are you saying that the over 12,000 complaints to the Office of Professional Accountability from ordinary people in Seattle, many of them parents with children, that is all half-truth, hate and propaganda?

What exactly are you referring to when you say half-truth, hate and propaganda?

Are you talking about the thousands of residents on Capitol Hill who reported to me and other council members that even when they shut the windows at night, they could not keep the particles that were in the air out of their rooms and that babies and children and elderly were affected.

And last but not least, I want to share a photo, three photos from my screen.

I am going to share my screen now.

And this is also a question.

Council Member Swann, I know, but I'm at City Hall and I can I can hear people coming.

And so I'm really trying to be respectful of the law enforcement mission that the chiefs have to do.

But this is important.

These are three photos.

This is the first photo is of the little girl who was maced on May 30th.

The second photo is of Jesse Hagopian, who was maced while he was on the phone with his family on January 19, 2015. And this is Doralee Rainey, an octogenarian, who was maced at Occupy while I was there on that day on November 15, 2011. Obviously, all of this did not happen on Chief Best Watch, but it did happen on the Democratic Establishment Watch.

So my question is, do you see a pattern here, and do you see a serious problem that needs to be addressed?

I'll stop there.

Okay, I'd like the opportunity to answer.

I can categorically say I have never called out white men, ever.

I just don't speak that way.

I just have never called anybody out as a white man.

If by rules, you mean laws, we will follow, Council Member Sawant, any laws that the council puts in place.

And when you're asking if you need a rule, any law that you have, we're obligated to respond to it and follow it.

The OPA will investigate if we find that it was not, if for some reason Director Meyerberg finds that it was not actually a riot and did not fit the definition, or if you decide to in the future change that definition, we'll follow by those rules as well.

What I said was, I don't tell people what to believe in.

That's not my job and that's not my place.

I just simply stated social media is not news.

So people can take that and do with it what they choose.

I would never be so arrogant as to tell people what to believe.

And, you know, I would also say that in the incident with the young girl who was pepper sprayed, you know, you'll be able to talk to Director Meyerberg directly after this is my understanding.

And he can tell you that the person identified and the officer identified was not the officer involved and that there's still an ongoing investigation as to what did occur.

Again, we just want to let the facts lead us to the truth.

And so I thank you, and I mean that sincerely, for your opinions and your thoughts about how to move better forward.

And if we can work with anybody, any part of the council or others, and many of the folks that came and spoke today, we're happy to do so.

So thank you.

Council Member Chair Herbold, I must get Chief Best and Chief Scoggins back into operations.

I'm sorry, Deputy Mayor, I was next in line.

I do have just a few questions, if I might, Madam Chair.

Oh, and we're happy to follow up in writing as well on your follow-up questions, council members.

Absolutely.

I mentioned that before.

I respect the request of the committee members to ask their questions.

And I also understand that our guests may need to follow up with the answers afterwards.

Madam Chair, may I state my comments so that it can be part of a record of this hearing?

I do hope that as the chief and others deploy to apparently address the crowd that's coming to Seattle Hall, that they do it in a safe manner that allows for people to exercise their free speech rights.

Madam Chair, if I could have the next few minutes just to say some comments and then the questions that I have, potentially the executive follow up when writing if that's possible.

Counselor Mosqueda, could you start with your question and then end with your comments so that they can actually hear the questions and leave and you can get your comments in the public record?

Yeah, absolutely.

So the request was made for us to offer evidence-based solutions and that the department and the executive would be all ears if we had evidence-based solutions to offer.

I offer that the Civil Rights Act passed and ended six days of riots when action was taken.

And so my questions for the executive are, given that we heard from the chief that she is tired and her folks are tired, we're asking folks to act.

We are saying, instead of waiting the month that it will take in order for the investigations to happen, as we've heard from Director Myerberg and others, we want there to be action now.

So my first question is, will you stop using tear gas today?

Because when you deploy tear gas in dense neighborhoods, people are harmed, the folks who live there, the people in the street.

And frankly, it is part of the reason people continue to come out to the street day to day because they see that excessive use of force and the use of tear gas.

So my question is, will you stop using tear gas?

hearing no answer and waiting for that to become in writing.

I'll go to my second question.

Will you stop using flashbang devices like the ones that we saw in the video that were just showed by Council Member Lewis and the ones that we've seen repeatedly online?

Will you stop using those devices as they're causing harm, bodily harm to people who were there peacefully protesting, harm to reporters who have been trying to cover this at the national level?

Will you stop using those flashbang devices?

Hearing no question, I'll go to the next one.

Answer, I'll go to the next one.

Will you stop deploying rubber bullets?

My understanding is that the Seattle Police Department is in charge of any of the folks who we come in through the memorandum that we have for additional allies, or I should say additional departments, whether that's state patrol or National Guard, if the city of Seattle maintains direction and control over those officers who are coming into the city of Seattle, will the order come from the city of Seattle to stop using rubber bullets?

Hearing no answer, I'll go on to the next.

Will you stop arresting people?

We are in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

We have tried to do everything we can to de-densify jails and shelters.

And any arrests that are happening right now are putting people in harm's way of being exposed to COVID.

Will you stop arresting people so that we don't have more people exposed to COVID?

Hearing no answer, going to next question.

Instead of waiting a month for the investigations to happen, will you immediately take action to fire the officers and provide some discipline for those who we know have been acting inappropriately or illegally?

For example, we've seen action.

In Florida, an officer was suspended for pushing a woman over.

In Atlanta, two officers were fired for their excessive use of force.

In Denver, a police officer was fired for saying, let's start a riot.

When I'm looking at a dispatch post from yesterday, noting that there was an officer that said, shoot them all.

Will there be action taken on the individuals who we know what their badge numbers are and immediate action so we don't have to wait for the investigation?

hearing no answer.

Will you revisit the de-escalation strategies that I think Councilmember Lewis was directly asking about so that we don't see these type of actions deployed tonight, tomorrow, and over the next X number of days or weeks?

Finally, Will you do all of the above so that we can actually begin to rebuild trust in our community?

People will continue to come out to the street as they should to protest against this type of force.

If we show that there's going to be a difference in strategy, then people will begin to see that there's going to be a change and their protests and their calls for action are being heard.

I think this council has been very clear in the last few days as we've gathered we are very interested in redeploying resources.

As you saw from my blog post yesterday, we want to follow through on the commitments that many people have talked about so that the first person that you call when you, or the first person you get when you call 911, if it's a mental health issue or an issue related to someone who's unsheltered outside or trying to call for help in your own home, is not met with force.

And instead we have more community policing solutions and community-driven solutions.

So will you do all of the above so that we can actually see peace come back and for people's words and actions to be followed through on?

They are asking for different tactics.

They are asking for demilitarization of the police, and they are asking for people to hear their calls for less people to die.

With that, I just want to thank I want to thank Chief Scoggins for his work.

I know that there was a lot of folks who put their self out there to put out fires and I think that we have a huge amount of respect for all the work that your members do to put out literal fires and to be the first responders in many cases as I did a ride around with you.

or your members a few years ago, we know you're responding daily to folks who don't have enough housing and don't have enough mental health and health care.

And so I appreciate the role that you've had in the last few days with making sure people's wounds are tended to and fires are literally put out.

And I know that this has been a situation during a deadly global pandemic where your members have already been at risk.

So I don't want that to go unsaid.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I think you're on mute and I'll look forward to getting those answers to the question.

I'm sorry that we're having to cut this.

really important conversation short.

I have questions that I wanted to ask as well, and really sorry, and will pledge to get another conversation going with Chief Bass to follow up on the many questions that we still have.

I would like to move on to item three.

Will the clerk please read item three into the record?

Item 3, Seattle's civilian-led police accountability framework briefing and discussion, 30 minutes.

Thank you, Alex.

So next we'll hear from leaders of each of the three civilian-led organizations that make up Seattle's police accountability system.

The three-legged accountability system has been in place since 2017. We'll hear first from the leaders of the Community Police Commission, known as the CPC.

The CPC provides community input on policing policies, reforms, and accountability.

The CPC listens to, amplifies, and builds common ground around communities affected by policing in Seattle.

They champion policing practices centered in justice and equity.

After that, we'll hear from Andrew Meyerberg, the Director of the Office of Police Accountability, or the OPA.

The OPA investigates individual allegations of employee misconduct at the SPD.

If you have a complaint about SPD employee misconduct you witnessed during the demonstrations, you can email that information and links to any video to OPA at Seattle.gov.

And then finally, we'll hear from Inspector General Judge.

The Office of the Inspector General provides civilian auditing of the management practices and policies.

of the Seattle Police Department and Office of Police Accountability.

They also oversee organizational reforms pursuant to the 2012 federal consent decree.

So I would like to start off by handing it over to our CPC co-chairs.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

My name is Prachi Thave.

I'm one of the co-chairs of the Community Police Commission, the CPC.

I want to thank you very much for your invitation for me to speak on behalf of the CPC here today.

And I also want to thank the community members who are here to testify today to their own pain and suffering that they have experienced not only over the last several days, but over the last several generations.

That they continue to engage in this way is an act of courage that I want to recognize.

As you all know, but for the benefit of those who don't, the CPC is one of three civilian-led police accountability bodies in the city, the OPA and OIG being the other two.

It's designed to be the community's voice in the police reform process.

We have 21 commissioners with a broad range of expertise, and we trace our roots directly to activism against police misconduct and the power of community groups who demanded change.

For context, in 2010, a Seattle police officer shot and killed First Nations woodcarver John D. Williams.

It was one of many incidents involving excessive use of force by SPD during that same time period.

Because of that violence and misconduct, 35 community organizations came together and requested the Obama administration's DOJ to investigate SPD.

The findings led to federal oversight of the police department under the consent decree, which is also what created the CPC.

I say all this to also honor the fact that community has been asking for fundamentally meaningful change for many years, and yet police misconduct, racial bias, and excessive use of force are not problems of the present as we see now.

In fact, they are potently impacting our Black communities at this very moment.

The killing of George Floyd and the types of systems that enabled that killing are, of course, not just an issue in Minneapolis.

There are problems everywhere in this nation, including here in Seattle, as we are currently witnessing.

The police response to the ongoing protests showed that there is still so much work to be done.

The CPC is currently reviewing many of the stories, videos, and pictures that continue to be posted.

Additionally, as one might expect, we've received a great deal of public comment, and that public comment will be posted to our website for all to review.

CPC commissioners and staff members, including myself, have been attending the protests, and many of us have been disheartened with what we've seen.

The protests against police violence have been met, of course, with additional police violence.

Indeed, law enforcement officers at one protest can be heard on camera speaking to each other saying, don't kill them, but hit them hard.

This was at a peaceful protest.

During the CPC meeting today, which I know that many of you attended, we heard the deep pain and grief that is felt by our Black community members in particular.

They have been experiencing police violence multi-generationally, and people are tired.

They're tired, of course, because they've been asking for fundamental change, and it has not yet been coming.

I know Andrew Meyerberg will speak about this in a bit, but it's just, it's overwhelming to think about the fact that OPA has received 12,000 complaints.

and I'm sure that that number is building by the day.

We have had to sit with that number for a while as we hear these numbers come in and as we hear some of these stories come in.

As individuals continue to protest, we at the CPC stand ready now, as we have always done, to work in concert with our accountability partners at OIG and at OPA to address the systemic problems that we see with real solutions, many of which I want to flag the CPC has been advancing and advocating for years because the situation was predictable.

We've seen it before.

This is what led the CPC to issue its recommendation about reforming policing at protests in 2015 after the Black Lives Matter protests in Seattle.

In 2016, we again urged Seattle police to stop using blast walls during protests after numerous protesters, journalists, and police officers were injured.

Those recommendations were unheeded, as well as calls about the use of hardened gear and riot gear that so many community members also raised today.

I looked back at those letters from 2015 and 2016, and it was striking to me that we could it much, or just very easily reissue those exact letters today.

Sadly, that's the case.

And we're seeing the same problems that we saw back then, including the various injuries resulting from the utilization of plasma balls.

In some ways, the thing that's more concerning, and I know has been raised several times during this conversation, is the disregard for some of the rules altogether.

The CPC worked with SPD to reform policies around crowd management.

Those policy reforms, as you know, require officers to give orders to disperse, or feasible, that definition needs to be addressed, before using blast balls, pepper spray, or tear gas.

And as you all know, from the firsthand accounts that we've reviewed, that policy appears to have been disregarded over the last several years.

Through all of this, the community's confidence that police who have engaged in misconduct will be held accountable has been shaken.

We have faith in our civilian-led accountability system, but three years ago this week, we worked together to unanimously pass the landmark accountability legislation.

And of course, since then, many important reforms that ensure strong police accountability have been rolled back by police contract negotiations.

This is all happening just weeks, and this has also come up during this hearing just weeks after the city filed a motion in federal court arguing that the sustainment plan, a bulk of the consent decree, should be terminated and federal oversight of the department greatly reduced.

This is not the time, I submit, for us to be self-congratulatory.

The city is requesting this as trust between the community and SPD has reached new lows.

This despite rebuilding public trust being a central purpose of the consent decree to begin with.

The city is also requesting this despite repeatedly missing deadlines issued by the court to work with the CPC to address weaknesses in the police accountability system.

As we all know, the court provided that order, gave that order more than a year ago now, and the city has yet to deliver upon the court's order and respond to the court's order.

The CPC is scheduled to file a brief with the federal court this coming Tuesday in response to the city's request to terminate those portions of the consent decree.

And as we go about that process, the events that have played out during this crisis are front of mind.

I want to reiterate that we continue to want to be engaged.

We continue to hear from our communities and we continue to be prepared to stand in partnership with police accountability entities in order to ensure that the pain and the grief that's being experienced by our community members is lessened dramatically over the next several weeks.

Thank you.

Thank you, Coach Adavi.

Director Meyerberg?

Good afternoon.

I'm Andrew Mayerberg.

I'm the Director of the Office of Police Accountability.

I want to thank the City Council for having all of us here today, our accountability system partners.

I also want to thank the community experts that spoke earlier.

We very much value that input and what they're seeing on the street.

I wanted to provide a brief overview of the numbers that we're seeing right now.

We've received now About 15,000 complaints, and the numbers keep going up.

The vast majority of those complaints, as I think you've seen, I've told various media outlets, are concerning the pepper spraying of a young girl.

We, though, are isolating other incidents as well as overarching issues that may have occurred either through the use of flashbangs or the use of tear gas.

As has been discussed at length during this proceeding, the Monday night dispersal from Capitol Hill and the use of flashbangs and tear gas, we will be looking at that incident in its entirety.

And as things come up, we will be looking at those issues as well.

Right now, we have 14 separate investigations.

Each has been given a case number.

What we are doing is we are trying to be as transparent as possible.

And I know that's a big buzzword that everyone uses, but we are actively posting on our Twitter, not just general information, but we are going to be posting exactly what we are doing in these cases, what to expect for timeline, when we're interviewing people.

Obviously, there's limitations to what we can disclose based on the law and collective bargaining rights, but we are going to disclose as much as we possibly can.

When these findings are issued, we will then present on the findings, whether it's before council, before community, or really before anyone who asks, and explain everything that we've done and why.

It's crucial to explain what we're doing as city leaders and as accountability partners, and we're committed to doing that.

And it's something that we've done in the past with families affected by officer-involved shootings and with other I mean, we're committed to being in the future.

What I want to be careful, though, to note, and it's something that Prachi and I have talked about at length and Lisa Judge and I have talked about at length, is I don't want people to think that an OPA investigation can be a panacea for what is ailing us as a society and what is ailing this system.

For OPA, everything has to be on the table right now.

Everything has to be on the table.

We need to reevaluate top to bottom the way we're policing protests, the way we are investigating these cases.

OPA is obviously not more important than the community, than the community's concern and than the community's interests.

If in the wisdom of the council, you feel like there's another way or ways that we can supplement or increase visibility to make it more community centric, we're open to hearing that.

Again, there is a sense of urgency that I know the accountability partners feel, that everyone in my office feels, that we've been engaged in with community.

We have communication specialists that are regularly talking to many people throughout the community, but we're committed to conducting these investigations ethically, objectively, and in a timely fashion.

And I know that even two months, even 30 days is too long for people.

I understand that, and I can't get around that.

We are required by contract to take certain steps before we can investigate, but we are doing things as quickly as we possibly can while doing so thoroughly.

We are dedicating 100% of our resources to this, and that's not an exaggeration, 100% of our resources.

The other police, the police unions, SPOG and SPMA have agreed to toll all other investigations moving forward, at least for the next 30 days, and then we will revisit it.

So we will be focusing entirely on these cases.

So I know that there are concerns about even OPA and every single system that we operate in.

And the fact is that these systems are flawed.

Every system is flawed.

We are operating in a flawed system, but we are trying to do our best as human beings and as people within that system to do the right thing.

So I'm happy to provide any more detail on investigations, to take questions from the council, whatever I can do to be helpful.

And of course, it's not just today.

Today's not the answer.

It's tomorrow.

It's the next day.

It's the next three months, six months, two years.

We've got to figure this out and we're willing to do whatever we can to get there.

Um, before we before we move on to, uh, Inspector General Judge, I do want to, um, express my hope, uh, Director Meyer Berg that you can work with the CPC in sort of flushing out this idea of a community driven investigation process, whether or not that is, um, sort of authorizing the community to come up with a list of witnesses that you consider interviewing.

Another idea that has been brought to me is the idea of on OPA's online website, creating an open wall for people to, whether or not you end up interviewing them at all, they can still share their experiences or their opinions, but I hope we can work together to really figure out how, as we often say, you know, like you mentioned, transparency is sometimes a catch word.

Centering community voices is another one, and I want to do what we can do to try to make that real.

And I appreciate that, Councilmember.

You know, we are, and like when I spoke about the imperfect system that we are in, it's not just that There is no system, I mean, when this accountability law was passed in 2017, there was hours, I mean, hundreds of hours, if not thousands of hours of research that went into it to try to create a system that was a national model.

And we did a really good job.

But even the system that we're seeing right now, it has shortcomings because every system does.

There are other ways out there to address some of them, to address needs.

Some of those are what you mentioned, Council Member.

Of course, though, we are limited with what we can do simply by labor law and by collective bargaining agreements.

But, you know, I will be honest.

It's not just OPA that I think believes that something needs to change, and obviously the council does and the community does, but I think SPD, too, recognizes it.

The unions certainly have expressed willingness to cooperate however they can in these investigations.

Again, are all these things a panacea?

Will they fix what's going on?

I don't know, but we have to try.

And again, we're open to whatever suggestions there are out there.

Throughout my tenure as the director, I have committed to working with the CPC.

And I think the CPC will attest to the fact that I have never shied away from answering their questions, from being at their meetings.

I respect them immensely.

I was their lawyer for a period of time before I was the council's lawyer.

I'm always willing to hear from them.

I anticipate that they will have a lot to add to this process, and they already have.

You're muted.

It's good to have a judge.

Please.

Thank you very much, Council Member Herbold.

I appreciate this opportunity.

I would like to begin my remarks by acknowledging the tragedy that's brought us all to the table today, the horrific killing of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis.

has really broken open a dam of anger and grief that's been building and roiling for centuries over institutionalized racism and oppression.

I acknowledge the profound pain and relive trauma that this event is causing many members of our local communities.

And I want to assure you that I and other members of my office hear this deep call for systemic change.

I would also like to appreciate and thank my accountability partners here today, the CPC has truly, and also OPA has been a great partner for OIG.

And I think the only way that we do anything meaningful and impactful is by working together.

So I do appreciate you.

And I'm very appreciative of the opportunity that you've provided here today to hear from the community panel.

I thought that Omari Salisbury and Dominique Davis really had some insightful observations and some suggestions for SPD.

I'm taking in all of the comments here.

Council members, you are raising great questions that need to be answered.

I'm taking notes and like Andrew, my staff is all hands on deck as well, trying to get our hands around what a review of this situation looks like moving forward.

So just briefly, OIG is the independent civilian agency that provides oversight of both the Seattle Police Department and the Office of Police Accountability.

Andrews mentioned that he's taken in excess of 12,000 complaints.

My office is also a conduit for complaints and we're taking those in and sending the individual allegations to Director Meyerberg and then handling those that are dealing with systemic issues in my office.

So in addition to that, we also review and certify every OPA investigation.

So we will have a role in quality assurance with Andrew Meyerberg's investigations as well.

So just, you know, this moment is a moment that must be seized and recognized as a powerful catalyst for lasting systemic change.

So in building on this moment, OIG is seeking to conduct a sentinel event review of the Seattle Police Department's response to these mass demonstrations to identify areas for system improvement.

So as we envision it, such a review would seek to identify the root causes of systemic issues that contribute to tragic outcomes such as these in our community and others around the country, with a goal of not repeating those mistakes in the future.

And it seems like we, you know, as much effort has gone into it in the past, these things seem to be happening again.

So there's got to be a way to go at it and make this change happen.

It is clear to me that any kind of review must begin with a community-centered process to incorporate community concerns, questions, and it's got to inform the work that OIG does in this regard.

Hearing the voice of community is both an ongoing charge in my office and an ongoing challenge.

Community must be involved to make this work, to be relevant, to be responsive, and to be impactful.

So my office has been reaching out to CPC and OPA and other stakeholders such as ACLU to try to put together a process that can be as inclusive and community centered as we can make it.

So change essentially is long overdue and it's coming with or without us.

So the Office of Inspector General, as the accountability entity responsible for systemic oversight of SPD and of the Office of Police Accountability, wants to be part of that change.

Policing as an institution and as a profession has a lot of work to do.

And I'm committed to working alongside community and the Seattle Police Department to do that work here in Seattle.

So thank you very much.

We're starting to work on a process right now that's probably going to be phased so that we can have a community voice Part that informs our work and then some deep dive audits into issues that are identified by that phase one work and I would be happy to Update you as as we come to a better understanding of what this process looks like and I would love any input suggestions critiques that anyone might have that would help inform how we develop the process.

Thank you.

You're on mute, Council Member.

Thank you so much.

I see Council Member Peterson's hand is up.

Is that from before?

Do you want to go?

You're on mute.

It is from before, however, if we're finished hearing the initial comments from our panelists, happy to jump in whenever.

Please.

Sure.

So I want to start by thanking my constituents.

I received over a thousand emails over the last couple of days from constituents in District 4. Thank you for taking the time to contact my office.

They've expressed grief, outrage, asked tough questions about police accountability.

I've read all of these emails personally.

I want to make sure that their questions are answered.

I also want to thank Council President Gonzalez and Public Safety Chair Herbold for enabling this meeting to happen today and for the law enforcement leaders and police accountability leaders for being here and the community panelists who were giving their eyewitness accounts to us.

And I wanna say that, I just wanna, it's important for me to say that black lives matter.

And coming from a privileged white man, I realized this can ring hollow and people want actions, not just words.

I joined the Peaceful March in Northeast Seattle this past weekend, organized by students of Nathan Hale High School to decry the wrongful killing of George Floyd and the history of institutional racism.

Monday night after our city council meeting, I observed for several hours the restraint exercised by Seattle police officers from the North Precinct who kept things as peaceful as possible with another protest in Northeast Seattle.

And I want to thank the police officers for that, for their professionalism.

I also, however, watched these deeply disturbing video footages of the response from some officers to the protesters downtown.

Council Member Lewis shared one of those.

Council Member Sawant shared some disturbing photos, and that's why we're here today.

Now, my council colleagues have already asked most of the questions I've received from my constituents.

The civilian-led Office of Police Accountability has already acknowledged in a formal statement, and today they're looking into several of these disturbing issues, why the badges were covered, why body cameras were turned off or kept off, why police rifles were stolen, why crowds of Seattle residents were engaged and dispersed by police officers, by some police officers using disturbing tactics that made things worse.

Now, my constituents in District 4, they range from people who highly value our professional police officers to those who had negative experiences with police departments.

But they all want to know whether this evolving system we have of police accountability The Community Police Commission, the Office of Inspector General, the Office of Police Accountability can really make sure that any officers engaged in misconduct, including excessive force, face justice.

Many of the constituents want to know whether the federal consent decree can remain in place for longer, whether the new labor contract with our police officers will finally incorporate additional police reforms and whether city leaders sitting here today will thoroughly examine how we allocate our city budget dollars to ensure we do no further harm.

I do want to follow up on the issue of the badges.

Chief Best discussed it briefly, but I'm hoping that she implements this immediately where the dark tape to mourn other officers who have fallen is affixed in a manner that does not cover up their name and their badge number.

I think that's really important.

I am concerned about the curfew that has been extended all the way to June 6, I believe.

I'm hoping the council considers discussing that further.

I'll submit more questions to Chair Herbold.

just some basic facts about how many officers were deployed, how many flashbangs used, how many people injured, how many arrests were made.

Are there still protesters in jail right now who did not destroy property, who did not physically harm another person?

So I'll send those questions on to Chair Herbold.

Thank you for letting me get all these questions out.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Peterson.

Council Member Gonzalez, please.

Council President Gonzalez.

Thank you.

I appreciate an opportunity to address my colleagues and the accountability partners.

I, of course, unfortunately, was unable to ask my questions of the chief who was here beforehand and hope to be able to send those questions along related to many of these issues.

So I hope to be able to get clear responses to many of the questions that I have.

I do want to thank our accountability partners for being such good partners to me for the past four years as we have endeavored to really dig into these issues and to work collaboratively on making sure that we have a system that community can trust when there are incidents that need to be investigated.

And certainly there are many incidents in this case that need to be investigated and I recognize that it is a test of the system.

I wanted to just really quickly address some of the issues around the consent decree and some of the work that we have yet left to do.

This morning I had an opportunity to talk to the Seattle Times and indicated my support for a withdrawal of the motion of the consent decree motion that was filed by the city attorney's office.

I continue to believe that in the last couple of weeks we have certainly received a lot more information that is relevant to the issues related to where we are at in terms of our progress with the consent decree.

And we have many new sets of facts now that are relevant to that question and to that discussion.

And I think that the last five days have shown us that that as it relates to our use of force policies, we may not be ready to go it alone without the court supervision and without the ongoing assessment of how we are putting into practice our use of force policies.

So I'm gonna continue to support the efforts around making sure that that happens.

And I understand that there will be an announcement shortly about the motion to have the consent decree terminated, and I look forward to hearing more about that announcement here shortly.

So I just want to encourage my colleagues to be open to ongoing conversations about how the consent decree plays into these broader accountability issues.

Of course, I think Director Meyerberg put it really well that no single system is going to address the underlying current of distress and issues and mistrust that are at play here.

Similarly, a consent decree is not going to save our community.

A sort of bureaucratic, technical, legal case is not what is going to help with healing and unity and with preventing the wrongful killing of black Americans in our community and across the country.

And so I just really wanted to acknowledge that I appreciate your all's ongoing effort in this process.

And then broadly, I wanted to have an opportunity to just ask Commissioner Dobby, a quick question about the system still.

So obviously we have an opportunity to, and this was predated your personal participation, but so when I say we, I mean the institution of Community Police Commission.

We had an opportunity in 2017 to work on the police accountability ordinance that you have identified.

We're on that anniversary, one of the anniversaries sitting here today.

And, you know, I want to just ask you pointedly whether the Community Police Commission has changed its position or thinking around the structure of the accountability system as it currently exists.

We've heard some folks suggest that we need to radically modify the existing police accountability system as memorialized in the accountability ordinance.

And then we hear other members of community saying, We need the accountability system as it was designed in the 2017 police accountability ordinance.

And so I wanna be able to give you an opportunity.

from the Community Police Commission to give us a better sense of how the CPC is thinking about those spectrums as it relates to the structure of our existing police accountability system in light of recent events.

Thank you very much for the question and giving me an opportunity to answer it.

You know, I do not believe our position has changed.

You know, I think that one of the very clear difficulties for us all is that the promise of the 2017 accountability legislation has never really been realized.

But there is a structure within the legislation which I think allows for various kinds of flexibility in the ways in which we can kind of achieve, you know, community kind of responsive accountability, and that we can do that within the structure of the ordinance.

But at this moment in time, I think the place that we have been and we have been consistently is that we want to realize the actual promise of the 2017 legislation, and we've not been able to do that yet.

So from our perspective, that is a focus and that is

I appreciate that, because I do think it's important for us to hear that, because I think there have been some suggestions that we abandon the structure that was originally recommended and endorsed by the Community Police Commission and that community-driven process that informed the ideals that we memorialized in the Police Accountability Ordinance in 2017. And so it's really important for, I think, me, the public, and my colleagues to hear that the Community Police Commission has not shifted its position on how it's currently structured from a structural perspective, right?

And then I think what is really important to me is to also acknowledge that the police contract did not memorialize everything that we had envisioned in the 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance.

And we have an opportunity now as we move forward to strengthen our processes around how do we make sure that the members of the City Council who are representatives on the Labor Relations Policy Committee hear from community, either through the Community Police Commission, with the Community Police Commission, or in tandem with the CPC to make sure that we understand fundamentally what our charge is when we go into the Labor Relations Policy Committee meetings and what and how we can lift up some of those issues.

And I'm going to make some comments about sort of how we're reshaping our process in that space.

But I want to, again, give you, Commissioner Davey, an opportunity to maybe talk a little bit about where the opportunities may be as it relates to that sort of coordination of work as we, as the city council, begin to think and structure our internal processes to achieve what was promised in the 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance, which I still remain committed to trying to achieve through these collective bargaining agreements.

Thank you for that question.

Yeah, so I think that, you know, from our perspective, the accountability structure within the ordinance is a structure that can be utilized in order to achieve sustainable change.

And I think that that is one of the things that's important about the accountability system that's been laid out, is that it's not ad hoc, it's not piecemeal.

It can result in sustainable policy change within the structures that we are considering and examining, and many of which we've talked about today.

With respect to the – with respect to bargaining, I very much appreciate your desire to have the CPC involved.

It is our desire also for the voice of the CPC to be involved in the process.

And I know that there are you know, thoughts about the various ways in which the CPC can do so.

And we certainly have various different ideas about what makes sense.

From our perspective, of course, we want someone who is well-versed with police accountability, well-versed with the history of policing in Seattle, well-versed with labor issues.

And so we really would like a person who is a technical advisor who can do all of that, represent all of those points of views and do that in fidelity to a community and the voices of community, those that have been raised right for many years now, but certainly those that have been raised over the last several days.

And I think that if a person like that is a person that the council admits into the process, then we can still meet the promise of the 2017 accountability legislation when we are talking about the bargaining process and when we're talking about those discrepancies between the contracts and the legislation.

So I would say that from the CPC's perspective, those are our desires for the person who would be involved in playing that role for you.

and hopefully in assistance to you all so that we can achieve the best possible outcomes here.

I appreciate that.

And again, when the chair asked me to, I'll sort of describe what next steps are going to be in that regard that have been informed by offline conversations with Commissioner Dabe and and the other accountability partners, but wanted to, again, have an opportunity to address that directly now as part of the panel.

I just have a few more questions for the other panelists, if I might, Chair Herbold.

Okay.

So, This one's for Inspector General Judge.

I know that you were listening to the community panel and I appreciate you listening and taking notes.

And I'm sure you heard something that I heard, which was that some community members believe that black organized or black led protests are treated tactically treated tactically, treated differently by the Seattle Police Department than non-Black organized protests.

And so I was wondering whether as part of your annual work plan, which you take into consideration at the end of the previous year, but I know that it's an iterative process, whether there's an opportunity to to frame an audit and an evaluation of the tactics that have historically been utilized in black organized versus non-black organized protests?

Yes, thank you for that question, Council President Gonzalez.

So this issue has come up, it's come up in complaints to our office from other people, but it's been in the context of political spectrum, that there's a differential and a disparity in treatment of protests in left-organized protests versus right-wing organized protests.

And so that may very well actually be written into our work plan as a near-horizon project to look at mass demonstration response for disparity.

And so I fully intend to work that into this particular project, that there's no reason to put it off when it's clearly an issue here?

That's great.

I mean, I think it's really important.

And I know that there's the political spectrum question, which is sort of what is the subject matter of the First Amendment action?

And I think my question is, I think the nuance that was being raised by the community panelists is just slightly different, which is, I suppose that the subject of a Black Lives Matter protest could be construed as political spectrum, but really it's sort of the difference between, you know, who is organizing it.

And so I just think it's really important for us to listen to that concern that when it is a, you know, black organized or led protest that somehow that the tactics in the field being used are fundamentally different than in different circumstances?

Yeah, absolutely.

I hear that it had come up in that other context, but clearly the context of race and differential and disparate treatment based on race and particularly black organized protests will be a focus of any analysis that we do.

Great.

And then in terms, and I think this is a question for any of the panelists, but in particular for for you, Inspector General Judge, and any of the other experts, and I'm not asking you to sort of opine on the usage of these devices in the specific instances of these cases and complaints, but from a best standards and best practices perspective, my understanding is that tear gas, for example, has been banned by the Geneva Convention as a tool that is used for dispersal.

And of course this came to a head when we saw that the Trump administration was using tear gas at the southern US-Mexico border on immigrants and refugees who were seeking asylum in our court.

So as it relates to American policing, where do we stand in terms of the use of tear gas in crowd management practices?

And do any of you have an opinion now as to the appropriateness of using tear gas ever for purposes of crowd management?

Yeah, can I just make sure that I'm very clear in my understanding of your question.

Are you differentiating between tear gas or CS gas and OC spray?

I am.

I am not referring to OC spray.

I'm specifically referring to what is colloquially referred to as tear gas.

Yeah, I just want to make sure I understand the question clearly.

I can speak to my experience with former agencies that I've worked for.

That was not an agent that was used.

And I think it speaks to broader tactics of using munitions at all in crowds where there are largely peaceful protests.

And when I say peaceful protests, that doesn't mean that there isn't anger.

That doesn't mean there isn't shouting.

It means that there's not you know, other sorts of criminal activity going on.

But I don't want to go into that.

But I think in my experience, and I came from an agency that had quite a bit of experience with large scale protests that turned into riot situations, that we finally came to an understanding that putting officers out there who are specially trained in of the communities that they're going to be engaging with in effective communication with those folks that are out there protesting.

And people who had made a commitment to be committed to protecting the exercise of First Amendment activity was really critical in staffing a protest with officers, in putting them out there in uniforms that looked sometimes even like normal clothing, polo shirts, or things that weren't militaristic, and that to the extent you put officers out in a situation that invites confrontation, what you tend to get is confrontation.

And so I think all of those things, questions about whether certain munitions are effective, whether they're even appropriate tactics, all of that would be things that I would want to look at and that are legitimate questions that community should have answers to.

I mean, I do think it's important for us from a from a sort of foundational question to look at all of the tactics being used here, but in particular, the chemical weapons that are being deployed.

And I think it's important for us to look at that in the context of What the International Human Rights Commission is, what the international rights community has clearly stated, which is that chemical weapons like tear gas should absolutely not be used.

And so I'm concerned that we are deviating from those human rights recommendations and that we need to act swiftly to terminate the use of those types of those agents and would look to you all as subject matter experts in helping us shepherd through a policy that would allow for that prohibition to occur.

I would be happy to get my staff working on some research and some technical assistance for you in the immediate term.

That I think would be extremely useful and helpful to us.

We did hear the chief seemingly state that she wanted to hear what ideas we had that would be alternatives.

And so this would be a good opportunity for us to provide her with those alternatives to see if she takes them on.

Yeah.

And I also want to just take a moment to go back to one of the community presenters.

And I think it was it was maybe Mr. Davis who talked about notice, giving the crowd notice and warning and an opportunity to understand what is happening and to potentially make other choices if that's appropriate.

I think that's also going to be a large issue here and moving forward that seems like a very easy thing for SPD to rectify to ensure that there is appropriate notice being given before the deployment of any kind of munitions and an opportunity for folks to get out of there or to protect themselves.

And just one last question.

Sure.

We are obviously dealing with this in real time.

And many of us in this committee hearing are seeing um, videos and reports of highly concerning things and questions about whether the force is proportional to, um, to what is actually occurring in the field.

Is there anything in the system that needs to be or should be changed now immediately to allow for either you, Inspector General Judge or you, Director Meyerberg or or the Community Police Commission to be able to effectively in real time say, XYZ tactic must end and it must end now for the following reasons.

I think both my office and Director Meyerberg's office have the ability to issue recommendations, but that's what they are, the recommendations.

I don't know that we have teeth, even the ordinance as well intended and well crafted as it is doesn't give us necessary teeth in certain areas, this being one of those, we could certainly convene a group based, I think we've got all the information that we need right now, having attended a number of these sessions, observed on my own operations and the collective understanding of the situation right now, I think that the partners could certainly convene and work to come up with some kind of immediate recommendations in concert with community and with council.

That's just one thing that I think is on the table.

Right now, I'd be interested in what my partners have to say about that.

I would concur.

I think we can work together.

OPA's jurisdiction is more limited than the CPC and the OIG and that we're focused on individual incidents and not the overall systemic policies and practices of the department.

That being said, we do have the ability to issue what are called management action recommendations, which are policy recommendations.

As a general matter, they occur over a full investigation, but I don't think there's anything that would prevent us from working together with our partners, obviously deferring to the CPC and to the OIG who are tasked with that systemic review, but working together with those partners to develop immediate recommendations.

I concur.

We have received, you know, during our meeting, received a great deal of public comment as well that we will be working on distilling down as well.

And so I concur, I think we'd be happy to work with our partners in order to issue immediate recommendations, especially based on what we've received.

Yeah, and with regard to- I think the real time nature of recommendations is important, and I think that's what I'm sort of getting at.

I think it's important sort of in real time, based on the last four days, how do we how do we prop up our accountability system partners to be nimble and move fast in terms of being able to say, look, the last five days of things that we have seen lead us to say that these types of practices, whatever these types of practices should be, should no longer be deployed in the field or there will be a risk of significant consequence to the city, right?

And so I guess I'm hoping that there'll be an opportunity for you all to be that nimble and flexible.

And again, it's not passing judgment on specific incidents, but it is fulfilling what I think is the promise of this accountability system, which is being able to be fast and nimble enough to express from your independent perspectives when there are significant concerns and we are going down the wrong path.

When SPD is going down the wrong path, it's my expectation and my desire that each of you feel like you are empowered and independent enough and strong enough to be able to use your voices to throw up the flag and say, this is not correct and needs to cease.

And that doesn't mean that you're prejudging things, it means that you're anticipating that things could get worse.

And we need you all in our accountability system to help us with that exercise as a subject matter experts.

Yeah, I really agree, Council President, that the embracing of our accountability partners, of their potential to not just pass judgment and make recommendations on things that have happened in the past, but to help us all as a city mitigate risk moving forward is really important.

And we have urgency.

and momentum to propel us forward in those discussions.

And I really think that is critical so that we can get the confidence of the community that we aren't just using nice words and we expect to get an annual report with some recommendations and put it on the shelf.

So I know Council Member Sawant had another really quick question as did Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Sawant, I heard from you first.

Thank you Council Member Herbold.

My question is, how can the – and I think the speakers have already alluded to this.

I think one of the phrases also that was used was, not so much with teeth, this process.

So my question is, how can the OPA investigation process result in consequences for the officers who inflicted violence against members of the public, given that the process uses Seattle police officers themselves to conduct the investigations, to do the interviews, and to gather the evidence?

Thank you.

So, um, I'll address that in a couple of ways.

First, um, uh, our investigators are a hybrid model between civilian and sworn.

Um, it's not all sworn investigators that are going to be working on this cases.

In fact, pepper spray cases assigned to our civilian investigator.

So, um, we, Even that being said, our sworn investigators all report to civilians.

As you know, Council Member, I'm a civilian.

I have a civilian deputy director of investigations, another civilian intermediate supervisor of investigations, all of whom have been involved in police oversight, all of whom are reviewing all of these cases.

We are committed and the sworn staff that work in OPA are committed to that civilian leadership and are committed to uncovering evidence.

We are working with the community to pull whatever video we can find, all the body worn video.

There is no evidence to hide if that was the implication.

There's nothing to hide.

All of our information is transparent.

Every single document that we produce can be requested publicly.

by reports are transparent.

They're all on our website and all can be requested publicly.

So I believe in the staff that works at OPA, whether civilian or sworn.

And again, that was a model created by the City Council and others to create that hybrid model working together.

And just like the CBC commissioners are both civilian and sworn, it works at OPA too.

So I strongly believe that we'll be able to uncover evidence and that the investigators, whether sworn or civilian, will do their best to make sure where things went wrong, we identify those and call them out.

I know I said, be next, but Councilmember Strauss just made me realize that I skipped over him.

I'm so sorry.

I'm going to turn it over to Councilmember Strauss.

Thank you for your patience.

I do want to first announce to folks, Councilmembers may have seen it, but I just for anybody who's viewing, the city attorney has announced that he is withdrawing the motion to dismiss the filing on the consent decree.

So that's some sort of breaking news that is very timely and consistent with public expectations, given that there are a new set of circumstances to consider as it relates to many of the issues that the consent decree addressed.

Council Member Strauss.

Thank you, Chair Herbold, and thank you to CPC, OIG, OPA, There is so much more work for us to do to ensure that accountability is created for our police officers.

And I will be very direct that without you present already part of our governance, I would be so lost and I would be very upset with where we are today.

So I am reassured by your presence and I know that there's more to do.

My questions are actually for the second panel that came just before you.

I'm going to read them into the record for them to be reflected on the record and my questions will be emailed to Senior Deputy Mayor Fong and Chief Best.

And so I just My questions really are understanding why and how we've put this curfew in place beyond after the weekend.

What purpose does it serve and how effective has it been?

A sub question to that is what metrics need to be attained for the curfew to be removed.

I agree with Chief Best that we can't allow for acts of aggressions to be made against the public or officers.

No one should be on the receiving ends of rocks, bottles or feces.

And with that understanding, it is clear to me from the last two days that military-grade weapons are not a proportional response to rocks, bottles, or feces.

Military-grade weapons do not assist in de-escalation, and so my questions are directly, can you ensure that – to the deputy mayor and to Chief Best, can you ensure that tear gas and flashbang grenades will not be used this evening?

What needs to occur to ensure that the use of gas and grenades ends?

We also saw that additional six foot spacing from the barricade lines de-escalated the scene between Monday and Tuesday.

What additional steps are being taken today and for the remainder of the week to continue de-escalation?

And I agree with Chief Best about social media.

I am asking her to join her and her officers this evening so that I may have an unfiltered experience.

And I'm asking what time and place should I join their incident command?

Those are my question, and I'll be just very clear at the end of this.

We cannot continue to use our military-grade weapons against the residents of our community, and it does not de-escalate what is currently an escalating situation.

We must stop using tear gas and flashbang grenades immediately.

The sooner we remove the curfew, the better, and in my judgment, this curfew should be lifted today.

The curfew, the use of tear gas, and the use of flashbang grenades are unnecessarily escalating tensions in our city.

also left my phone number for them to contact me.

So just wanted to take that moment for the record to reflect.

Thank you, everyone, for your work and thank you for letting me have time during this committee.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss.

Really good questions.

Great list of expectations that I share.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

So I first want to say thank you to, I believe it was Director Myerberg, you posted a clarification about the officer who had assumed, folks had assumed that he was the one who had tear gassed the child, the nine-year-old child in the face, and that there was some clarification that it wasn't that officer.

Thanks for posting that clarification.

You know, immediately I thought, well, I wonder what would have helped us identify the right officer probably the badge number.

And so I think that's just a great example of where we need those badge members shown now.

I understand as opposed to this afternoon, those badge numbers are still not being shown.

So I appreciate that the clarification on who is going to be held accountable for that action will be directed to the right officer.

But I think we still have a problem with badge numbers not being shown.

and want to put it out there for you all to comment on getting clarification or issuing recommendations on getting those badge numbers shown ASAP, even though I know the chair, thank you very much, Madam Chair, for your leadership on this, has been working to try to figure out how to push the mayors and the executive office and the SPD to show badge numbers immediately and use other strategies to mourn fallen officers.

We still have badge numbers that are not being shown tonight.

And yesterday the mayor's comment was, it's not going to happen overnight when quite literally, I think, tape can be removed overnight.

So looking forward to hearing your recommendations for how to make sure that those badge numbers can be shown overnight.

Number two, I want to build off of the question that I believe was just asked by one of my colleagues a moment ago.

You know, we have, I have listed a number of officers in other cities who have been reprimanded already for their irreprehensible behavior.

That includes Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Denver, Colorado, Atlanta, Georgia, where officers have already been either suspended or fired because of actions taken on camera or reported on camera.

And I really appreciate t that we have built into t your due diligence to go I'm wondering if there's we can do in a more exped for some of the more egreg caught on camera to do th and door to issue a recommendation quickly so that there's accountability for those actions.

And then Madam Chair, my last question builds off of the question that Council President asked last in her line of inquiry.

I am asking you to, I'm asking you to today issue guidance or your recommendation for stopping the use of tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber bullets at a bare minimum.

These are the three things I asked of the chief before she had to leave.

Deputy Mayor Fong was on the line and he did not answer.

I know that we have a situation where sometimes there's individuals that we might need to isolate because of potentially you know, dangerous or vi been referenced by the ch de-escalation strategies for the officers to deplo isolating individuals who And when we heard the res of flashbangs, rubber bullets, and tear gas being used because there was, quote, a few individuals or one individual in the crowd who was potentially starting a fight or rushing forward.

They need to isolate that individual, not use tear gas, rubber bullets, and flashbangs on the entire crowd, which we've seen now twice.

I would also say, you know, I think that the deployment of these Weapons of war were used on Saturday night as well, and I think it is disputable whether or not that would, I think that they were not warranted.

I think that yes, there were definitely situations that were dangerous, including broken windows and cars on fire.

but the stories that we heard repeatedly were people were really just trying to get downtown to express their support for the Black Lives Matter movement and mourning all of the individuals who have been killed and experienced excessive violence at the hands of police, and they weren't allowed to get downtown either.

So I think not just singling out Monday and Tuesday's action, but I would love for you all on this third question to tell us if immediately, as I think the council president was urging, if there could be, and I don't want to put words in the council president's mouth, so I'll just own this, if there could be a more immediate issue of a recommendation to immediately stop using flash bangs, tear gas, and rubber bullets.

Thank you, those are my three questions.

And panelists, before you answer them, I do want to flag again that we do have a recommendation from 2015 in 2016 from the CPC for the discontinuation of the use of flashballs.

So it's really important to recognize and honor the work that's been done before.

I definitely want to hear from the OPA and the OIG on their thoughts, but I think it's really important to honor the work that our CPC has done on two different occasions because of two different incidences.

And so there's a, I don't want to continue a pattern of not acting on the CPC's good recommendations.

Also, before we get into the bit about the morning bags, I do want to flag that I've seen photos of Chief Best today wearing a morning band over her badge number.

And I am very, very disappointed because I believe she can show leadership by simply moving the location of her morning band.

I understand the police policy says it needs to be in the center.

I am going to, I'm working on legislation right now to to marry the tradition of mourning bands with our existing law about the prohibition on covering names to extend that prohibition to cover badge numbers, but to allow for the continuation of the placement of mourning bands on badges, but just in a way that doesn't cover badge numbers.

So I'll leave that there.

Thank you.

I understand.

Council Member Morales, I see you have a question.

I'm going to let our accountability partners respond to Council Member Mosqueda's questions first.

So, Council Member Mosqueda, I think the question that was asked for OPA was your second question in regard to the jurisdictions that have taken immediate action and why that's not done here.

I just want to be clear that, and I think you all understand this, for OPA's perspective, we can recommend discipline after a full investigation.

We have no authority, statutory or otherwise, to put any officer on leave.

The chief does have the right to do so under the CBAs where she can put officers on paid leave or she can, in the interest of justice, take other disciplinary action, but OPA has no authority to do so.

We, um, with regard to the timing, and I think I said this before in my initial comments, um, we are trying to move forward with these investigations with all due haste.

Um, I do not want to, obviously I want them to be thorough, but we are hearing loud and clear.

Like we cannot wait six months for these cases to be resolved.

We cannot do it.

Um, again, that's why we're trying to reallocate our resources.

to allow us to do those investigations in a timely fashion.

But we've already been communicating with people on Twitter and community members that are saying, you know, why is it going to take 60 days?

Why can't you do it in 15 days and 30 days?

We're trying to give them the reasons why.

And it's not going to satisfy people.

It cannot satisfy people.

And we understand that.

But we're doing our best to move forward while respecting due process rights and contractual rights of city employees, because that's what the officers are.

So we're trying to balance both these things together, exercising the authority that we have to exercise.

Just to follow up on that.

Yeah, sure.

Sorry, I hear a little echo.

I think that's fair.

You have limited resources.

We want there to be thorough investigations.

Can we at the very least for, I would say, the 20 or so most egregious videos that we've seen, at least request that those officers not be on the front line to respond to protests right now?

Is that a request that we could put in to the chief's office that she would then have in front of her to respond to so that those officers who potentially are kneeling on people, punching people close fist in the face, spraying children in the face with tear gas, elderly or disabled people as we saw on camera, that those folks who have done that and if you know who they are and you're doing an investigation, can those individuals be requested to remain off of the front line while your investigation continues?

It's certainly a request that can be made of the chief and that the chief has the authority under the city charter and collective bargaining agreements to take action if she so chooses, but it is solely within the discretion of the chief of police.

And it's not within OPA's authority to request that the chief consider doing that?

No.

Well, then investigation continues.

No.

Okay, thank you.

And one other note, council member, you had mentioned earlier today about the comment that was made on radio on dispatch about shoot them.

I don't know exactly what the comment was.

Council member, just wanted to let you know that we have initiated an investigation into that.

I wasn't aware of it until you had brought it up.

So thank you for that.

And that will be given a case number.

We'll put out a social media posting to let people know what that case number is so that they can follow it.

Thank you.

Just for a reminder for folks, the three questions were the use of the black tape to cover the police officer's number, suspensions or firing and what action can be taken.

Thank you for answering that second question.

And the third was the more immediate directive or request that we stop using these weapons of war.

Can I chime in?

Yes, please, Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

So this might, this is a related question to what Council Member Mosqueda was asking, but might actually.

I'm sorry, Council Member Morales, I believe the co-chair was about to respond.

I don't want to interrupt you.

I just want to make sure.

Oh.

I saw her take her.

Okay.

I can wait if you had a related question and then respond.

I was just going to say that, you know, it is our intention, this was one of the things that came up during the meeting earlier, for us to resend the recommendations that we had made, as Council Member Herbold had mentioned, the recommendations that we made in 2015 and 2016. It's our intention to send those as part of a new set of recommendations as well, as we have previously said that this is our position.

Those are, right, of course, recommendations and not directives, but that's something that we would be thinking about.

Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

So, yes, so my question is related to what Council Member Mosqueda was asking.

which is that I have been trying to understand, it's possible this work was done before, but trying to understand where all of this military grade equipment is coming from.

So I know that the 1033 program had been suspended for a while.

That's the program that allows, sort of pushes out surplus military gear to local police departments.

My understanding is that Trump sort of re-energized the program.

When I was looking up on our state website which jurisdictions participate, Seattle was not on the list, at least as of a couple of years ago.

And so I'm trying to understand where this equipment is coming from and how much we spend on it.

And what is our existing sort of inventory?

And I guess more importantly, for whatever equipment has been used over the last week or, you know, how do we ensure that we don't replace it?

So those might be questions for the previous panel.

I'm sure we will discuss it in the, you know, upcoming budget conversations.

But I am just trying to understand where this, year is coming from.

Do any of our panelists have any insight on that?

All right.

Well, we will flag it for discussion with the budget chair's agreement within the context of budget and work on submitting it through central staff as a budget question.

So if folks are okay, because we do still have probably about 30 people signed up for public comment, I would love to wrap up this portion.

I'd like to, I discussed with Council Member Gonzalez, turn, oh, sorry.

I just wanted to say- Yes, Inspector Judge.

Sorry, Madam Chair.

Yes, I just wanted to add, One thing, we've had an email box created for concerns and comments and input on our Sentinel event review process.

That email address is sentineleventatseattle.gov.

So I just wanted to put that information out there.

Thank you.

And what are people sending there?

Any sort of questions, input, comments, or anything on the review process that we're creating.

And is there information on your website about the framework of the review process so people have something to comment on?

We have a very...

very drafty framework, but what we're hoping to do is use community input to inform that framework.

The majority of the public does not know what a Sentinel review process is.

We do.

Yes, we have information about that process, and we will put up information about what we're hoping to achieve here.

So folks will have some guidance.

Thank you.

And Council Member, sorry if I can piggyback on that just very quickly.

We're also looking for as much information while respecting the trauma that these incidents have caused people.

We are looking for direct witnesses that saw applications of force.

We very much would like to speak to the family of the young girl who was affected by pepper spray.

I mean, these are very, very important witnesses for us to interview.

Obviously, we respect, we respect.

It's up to them whether or not they want to informed we would do our best to respect what they went through and what the this young girl has suffered in the trauma she has incurred and particularly her family too but any direct witnesses please let us know you can email us at OPA at Seattle gov but however we can whatever with somebody who has signed up for public comment I don't know if they're still on public comment who was a witness to that incident inspector general judge

Yes, if I could add something to Councilmember Morales' question about CS gas.

I've got staff right now taking a look at the issue.

There's some belief that there was City of Seattle legislation that restricted in some way the acceptance of that munition, but we're trying to find that information out and we will provide that information to you.

Thank you.

I had discussed with Council President Gonzalez my interest in turning over closing remarks related to this particular panel to her.

As the previous council public safety chair.

She can speak to the commitment to continuous change towards police accountability with her leadership, passing the 2017 Historic Accountability Ordinance.

But even more importantly, as current chair of the Labor Relations Policy Committee, she can speak to the commitment that council members on the LRPC have to regaining important elements of that ordinance lost in the last police guild contract.

And I think she wants to share some information about the work that the LRPC has been doing in that area.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Chair Hurmold.

I apologize to the public for not showing video and just having audio, but realities of telecommuting.

I am nursing my five-month-old, so I figured not everybody needed to see that.

So I appreciate the understanding from the general public as I make my remarks with just a picture up.

So thank you, Chair Herbold, for an opportunity to address the committee and the members of the public on this particular point.

Of course, we can all remember the last round of collective bargaining with the Police Officers Guild, and I think it's fair to say that many of us felt that the contract that was put before us was certainly imperfect and did not deliver on the full promise of the 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance that so many of us worked you know, hundreds of hours on to negotiate and to legislate and put before the council for a full vote.

And there's a lot of complicated reasons about why that happened.

I will just say that I'm not gonna go into all of those and rehash the history, but I will say that You know, we have a new opportunity before us as it relates to issues that the community is concerned about with regard to how the city approaches its labor negotiations with police unions.

And I am looking forward to being able to structure conversations on the council side that will allow us to make sure that we are centering community voices in our decision-making process.

We will do that in conjunction with recognizing that we have a good faith obligation to comply with our state labor laws and our city labor laws, and nothing that we plan to do will cut against our commitments to being a pro-labor union city.

But I do want to share with folks that as members of the LRPC, which include myself, Councilmember Mosqueda, Councilmember Herbold, Councilmember Lewis, and Councilmember Morales.

We together are committed to making sure that we have a process in place where we are well informed, where we are community informed, and where we will make decisions with the partnership of a technical advisor to be able to make sure that we understand the impact of the choices that are before to make sure that we are making the best choices available to us as it relates to continuing to negotiate additional portions of the 2017 police accountability ordinance into the collective bargaining agreement.

We will have a select labor committee process where my colleagues and I will be able to convene and have these discussions.

We will be able to invite representatives of the Community Police Commission to have conversations with us about what their goals are and what their hopes are in being able to advance the principles of the 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance.

And I very much look forward to being able to structure a process that will really truly meaningfully allow the council members on the Select Labor Committee an opportunity to benefit from the subject matter expertise of community, of Director Meyerberg and of Inspector General Judge as we look at the complexities of our accountability system and how we can better represent those principles and the promise of the 2017 police accountability ordinance in our next labor contract.

So with that being said, I will hand it back over to the chair.

Thank you.

You're on mute.

Thank you so much.

Just unless there are any other comments or questions.

I'm going to move back into public comment.

We've got about 20 people who have hung on to give public comment.

And I would like us to hear from those folks.

And if you're able to continue to join me, I appreciate it.

The public comment period, I, again, really appreciate everybody out there who has registered and waited for us to reach this point in the agenda.

We are going to have public comment for, I'm going to set it for 30 minutes with the understanding that we may need to extend it.

And public comment is going to be reduced from two minutes from the first session to one minute per person moving forward.

If there's no objection, the public comment period will be extended for 30 minutes.

Hearing no objection, the public comment period is extended for an additional 30 minutes.

Again, the public comment period will be moderated in the same way, and I will keep calling on speakers in the order of registration.

The online registration will remain open until the conclusion of the public comment period.

And the rules applied to Part 1 of the public comment period will also apply to this one moving forward, with the exception of, of course, the fact that the time limit is now one minute.

You will still receive a 10-second warning to wrap up comments.

Speakers' mics will be muted at the end of the allotted public comment time, and speakers are asked to begin their comments by stating their names.

And just moving over to the names.

I think what we'll do is we'll start with Kayla Sargent.

Kayla Sargent, speaker number 24.

Hi, my name is Kayla Sargent, and I'm just going to add my voice to the many saying that for so, so long, the United States has needed to completely take apart our racist, unjust, and violent policing and criminal justice system and rebuild them and reimagine them.

And that process really has to start here on the local level.

Coming from leaders like you.

So please listen to the protesters, listen to the activists, listen to everyone commenting today and really take action on it immediately.

Thank you.

Oh, I cede my time.

Thank you, Kayla.

Our next speaker that we have listed is, let's see, Aubrey Marks-Johnson.

Hi, yeah, my name's Aubrey Marks-Johnson.

I wanna say thanks to the city council and to everyone who called in and all the presenters.

I'm actually now more alarmed after watching the city council meeting and all the presentations.

It really, it seems to me that we're paying taxes for Jenny Durkin to essentially pay for an outside mercenary force.

88% of police officers don't live in Seattle.

They have no accountability or empathy for the communities they're policing.

And now we're hearing that essentially the only person who can discipline any of them is police chief Beth, who is clearly not acting in good faith.

I mean, she's out there with a black tape over her badge right now, I just heard, and apparently the city council and none of the police accountability offices even know where any of this military equipment is coming from.

It's now being stolen out of the back of police cars.

Yeah, I yield the rest of my time.

Thank you.

The next speaker we have is Destiny Evers, please.

Destiny.

Yes, hi.

Thank you for giving us this space.

I had submitted comments earlier today, so I'll refer to those.

But I just mostly wanted to observe on the fact that this meeting at noon started off so well, and I had goosebumps cheering from people.

And then it became very clear, listening to Chief Best, that there is zero drive to do any substantive change.

And if anything is going to come from our Seattle leadership, it's going to come from this council.

So I hope that you will take that into account when you decide how to go forward.

And I appreciate your time.

Thank you, Destinee.

Next speaker we have is Brayden League, please.

Brayden.

Hello, my name is Braden.

I'm from California and moved to Seattle in February to work for a tech company after working in Sweden for the last few years.

The first day I switched my residence to Washington State and I lived in the Wallingford area.

It was a protest on Saturday afternoon.

It was peaceful right up to the moment it was not.

I'm not sure what happened.

The next thing I know there was pepper spray and I couldn't see.

I was in Baltimore during the 2015 riots and protests revolving around Freddie Gray's murder.

And throughout that week-long state of emergency, I never felt as unsafe as I did on Saturday.

I'm calling to defund the Seattle Police Department.

Most everything the police would be called for would be better handled by social workers.

We're experiencing record unemployment.

We should hire, train, and train social workers.

You should also probably tax people like me more.

Thank you.

Yield my time.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Jonathan White.

Hi.

Hi, I'm a good morning after everyone.

My name is Jonathan white and I'm a resident of district four.

I'm calling to urge the council to consider deep police reforms, and I believe the following be necessary.

So first there should be an intensive culture reform, not only through training, but also through creating a police accountability board led by Seattle residents that has more actionable authority beyond just providing recommendations.

So authority with teeth, I mean, including things like the ability to remove SPD staff that can't or won't.

prioritize the concerns being raised by so many in our community.

Um, the second is council should propose and vote for a 50% cut from the $363 million already budgeted for SPD in order to demilitarize demilitarize SPD as well as to address the city's 300 million budget shortfall caused by COVID.

Um, I believe the city's money could be better spent in preventative policies, like reducing homelessness, addressing housing insecurity.

as well as improving health care, mental health care, and low-income programs.

So thank you for holding this meeting.

I hope the city will act upon the community's calls.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next speaker is Kinsey Shaw.

I'm just...

Kinsey Shaw, Capitol Hill resident.

I'm disgusted and ashamed that Mayor Durkan, Chief Best, and every single Seattle police officer in attendance at the protest on Saturday, they all should be losing sleep at night over their actions.

I spent hours on Saturday protesting peacefully, kneeling, and even sitting in the rain.

Everyone around me was peaceful.

Not 90%, not 99%, 100% peaceful.

I saw with my own eyes, SPD officers escalate, antagonize, and incite violence against innocent and peaceful protesters, including children.

I wish I could give you a word that could sum up the pain, anger, and sadness I feel for my black brothers and sisters in this community, but there are no more words to be said.

Only action will be acceptable from this point on.

I know that the city of Seattle Mayor Durkin's SPD don't care about black lives.

And that was very very clear to us.

So show us that you actually hear us that you actually care.

Lay down your riot weapons and walk along with us.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Next speaker is Isaac Mellum.

Hi this is.

Hello this is Isaac Mellum.

My first request and I think I speak on on behalf of most people is that the police stop using tear gas, especially during a global pandemic that affects respiratory functions.

Plus, I mean, we're all demonstrating against police brutality that led to the suffocation of a black man.

It's very hypocritical.

It contributes to a huge, huge problem that's still ongoing, which is the COVID-19 epidemic, especially when our black community is about two times more Uh, susceptible to death and white communities due to COVID-19.

We need to think about this and how tear gas can really influence that.

It increases the spread.

And I've also sent an email to the city council, giving all of the documentation on that.

Um, also I don't see anything in the police contract that allows for the use of tear gas or flash banks.

So that should be looked into.

They are breaching contract.

Um, thank you for your time.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Howard Gale.

Hi, Howard Gale from Queen Anne, and I think it's obscene to keep people waiting five hours and then cut their time to one minute.

We keep on hearing from city leaders that we have a trustworthy and a world-renowned system of accountability, and yet the families are Charlena Lyles, IOCF Altego, Danny Rodriguez, Ryan Smith, Sean Furr, and it's still a named african-american killed two weeks ago with disagree the opa is civilian-led on what it director meyerberg is being dishonest when he says there will be civilian investigations is one investigator out of thirteen and they could only investigate things that might not work result in the termination of an officer this is an unacceptable system of accountability finally It's not flash bang devices that are used, it's blast balls.

They are far more dangerous.

They blew someone's face off four years ago.

Stop using these.

Be more honest about what this system, the accountability system is.

Thank you, Howard.

The next speaker we have is Helen Gilbert.

hi i'm helen gilbert and i'm speaking today for radical women and freedom socialist party i and many of my friends have been at almost every demonstration in the last few days and on saturday i thought those hundreds of police lined up like soldiers geared up and ready to attack they denied people their free speech right they couldn't get to the rally and then they they harassed and brutalized people who were exercising speech and justifiable rage against discrimination.

I was at WTO and many demonstrations before and after many about police murders.

And despite all the promises to change it just gets worse.

And the only thing that will make a difference is an elected civilian review board over police with the power to independently investigate discipline press charges and fire offending officers.

The U.S. is founded on racism.

and capitalism continues to make enormous profits from racism.

Those who suffer the most are also dying from the coronavirus and experiencing the most at the hands of police and the most poverty.

Thank you.

The next speaker we have listed here is Paul Kang.

I'm Paul Kang, Capitol Hill resident.

I'd like to address the police brutality that I witnessed firsthand in my community in response to peaceful demonstrations.

My father lived through the unrest in South Korea, where protesters calling for democratic elections were gassed and beaten, many of them to death by military units in the street.

The government condemned these protesters as agitators who did not represent their true constituents.

The government was on the wrong side of history, and key decision-makers from those who sanctioned the disproportionate and retaliatory response to those whose complacency allowed it to transpire were later convicted of high treason because they betrayed a duty to their country and community that transcended the unjust laws of their society.

Council members, I'd like to ask you if you believe you are currently standing on the right side of history.

I have seen black vans rolling down Broadway in the dead of night, shots being fired at my neighbors and friends, and chemical weapons being used on peaceful protesters during a respiratory pandemic.

I will remain in the streets of my community, shoulder to shoulder with my neighbors, your constituents, until I see a satisfactory answer to that question.

Thank you.

I yield the rest of my time.

Thank you so much, Paul.

Our next speaker is Bree Pat.

Hello.

I think it's ridiculous to think that any kind of accountability group or oversight can be done by a white person.

White people have proven themselves to be unable to hold each other accountable for the violence against black people in our communities.

Any oversight committee needs to be run by a person of color, especially a black person.

In addition to that, Seattle needs to stop acting like it doesn't have the resources within its city limits to effect change for Black communities right now.

Abundance of Hope Center is a non-profit run by a family of Black women that has been operating in Seattle for a few years.

They were denied funding by the city, and they provide holistic, trauma-enforced, person-of-color-centered treatment and operations for our homeless and transient youth.

in this city.

If they have funding, it could have been effective change before all of this.

We need to invest in the Black leaders that we have right now.

Abundance Hope Center, Seattle, Washington.

Book them up.

Fund them.

Get it done.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is J.P.

DiGennaro.

Hi there.

Thanks.

J.P. DiGennaro from Beacon Hill.

I'm deeply horrified by the Seattle Police's response to this crisis and the absolute failure of our leadership from our elected officials.

To see, at the start of Pride Month, that the queer community completely cut off from our shared spaces due to a global pandemic, blasted every day with tear gas indiscriminately by a police force completely lacking empathy, is more than just disgusting, more than a disgrace.

Do we even know the long-term ramifications of blasting a residential neighborhood continuously with these harsh chemicals?

Is the city prepared to pay for any damages occurred?

There is a failure of you, our elected officials to hold the police accountable.

You talk about your accountability committees and review boards, but how can your bureaucratic red tape help us in the present moment?

Thank you, I yield my time.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Megan Riel-Meehan.

Hi.

Hi, my name is Megan Royal-Meehan.

I live in Capitol Hill near Seattle U. I'm a scientist, and I work in the Allen Institute for Self-Science, and I'm speaking about police violence in our city.

I was also in the CPC meeting this morning, and I've seen so many examples of people who have been working so hard to hold people accountable, but like other people have said, it's just from this meeting and that meeting, the oversight in this city does not have nearly enough power to hold officers accountable.

I also want to reiterate what others have said, that this curfew is a violation of all of our rights, and serves no purpose other than to criminalize lawful action.

In listening to the police chief in both of these meetings, this whole morning ban is insulting to our intelligence.

It's a blatant disregard for oversight and accountability, and I can't believe she thinks we'll buy that this is some sort of thing that they've always done.

I think these officers need to be held accountable for hiding their badges.

And I fully support the call to defund the police, but I honestly don't think that goes far enough.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Clifton Gordon.

Hi, Clifton Gordon Ballard.

I'm disgusted that we're asking crowds of thousands of rightfully angry citizens to be absolutely perfect because as soon as a water bottle is thrown or a pink umbrella hangs over a barricade, police in full riot gear will gas four heavily populated city blocks, use rubber bullets, and more.

We've heard for years about SPD de-escalation efforts, but all we've seen is swift and brutal escalation.

They had six officers assault a lone man playing a trumpet last night, so I guess we can add trumpets to the list of dangerous weapons that Chief Best keeps whining about.

Along with calls for immediate release of protesters today, I joined my fellow community members in calling for substantive change.

including defund the Seattle Police Department, fund community-based health and safety initiatives, and not prosecute anyone arrested for protest.

We will remember those who stand with us against murdering and systemic oppression of Black people and protesters, and we will remember those who remain silent or offer nothing but platitudes like Jenny Durkin.

Black Lives Matter, stop using gas, defund the police, and Jenny Durkin resigns.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Next speaker is Zach Lynch.

Hi there.

Hi there.

Um, I am a social worker and I've attended protests in both Seattle and Olympia and have been gassed pepper sprayed and had my bones rattled by concussion grenades at both.

My most important point is that if you are brave and propose bold actions, people will stand with you.

Also, I was left speechless by best utterly soulless and disingenuous remarks.

Chief's best excuses were hauntingly sociopathic.

and she just used totally circular logic to re-justify the use of excessive force that was devoid of any concern folks have been sharing about up to that point.

It was indeed a charade and a gaslighting extravaganza, as Sawant put it.

This kind of person should not have power in our society, simply.

She's well aware that her real job is to enforce social hierarchy.

Also, it was a nice touch to adopt fake news and prettier words to clarify that to challenge her is illegitimate.

This arrogance must be annihilated with sweeping change.

Please eviscerate their budget and take away their tools of war.

I yield my time.

Thank you, Zach.

The next speaker is Fahir Saeed Ibrahim.

Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to testify.

My name is Fedra side to bring him and I'm a resident of Columbia city.

Um, I'm here to testify for deep reform of the Seattle police department, the investigation into SPD led by the U S attorney and mayor Durkin found the department using unconstitutional level of force and showed a pattern of bias.

And the new contract rolled back new police accountability measures that the city had approved in 2018, including a critical review process through which officers can appeal discipline.

Mayor Durkin and the city have promised to codify strong accountability measures in negotiations with the unions.

I strongly urge you to follow through with that accountability and not roll back protections designed to ensure our people, our communities are safe.

We're spending more than twice the amount of millions of dollars in the police than we do health and human services.

That doesn't make for safer communities.

It makes for poorly and neglected resources, poorly resourced and neglected ones.