The Racist History of the Seattle Police Department
Here in Seattle, protests have ensued for over seventy days straight. Following the successes of Black Lives Matter activists in Minneapolis in pressuring the Minneapolis City Council to reimagine its police department, a core demand of the Seattle protests has been to defund the Seattle Police Department (SPD) by fifty percent. For those unacquainted with the SPD’s history, it could seem an overstep. If George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, why should Seattle defund our police department? Couldn’t things be different here?
In her letter of resignation to officers of the SPD, Police Chief Carmen Best wrote “you truly are the best police department in the country.” In an earlier statement on George Floyd’s death, Best had said “I know it can be challenging to see these incidents, even when they do not happen here.” These two comments, taken in conjunction, illustrate the danger of an ahistorical view of the SPD. Understanding the specific history of the Seattle Police Department demonstrates the flaws fundamental to policing itself. By looking more closely at a police department led by a Black woman in a famously liberal city, we can see that the issue is not that some police departments are racist, but that all of them are––regardless of the political environment in which they operate.
Before getting into the specific racist acts the SPD has perpetrated against its citizens, let’s first take what Best said for granted and assume that it is the “best police department in the nation.” What would that be relative to? In other words: best at what?
“THE BEST POLICE DEPARTMENT IN THE COUNTRY”
The common narrative about police is that they are responsible for keeping people safe. The fact of the matter is that the fundamental function of policing has never been––and still isn’t––about keeping people safe. Rather, it has much more to do with control, which is always exerted in racist ways.
As with all police forces, the Seattle Police Department was not founded with the intent to protect, or even serve, the people of Seattle. Rather, it was initially established to regulate the sale of pigs (ironic, no?). As Connie Hasset Walter writes in “The Racist Roots of American Policing,” “the first police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and more focused on responding to disorder than crime.” Indeed, police forces in the South started out as slave patrols, and those in the North were concerned wholly with protecting property, not people. Across the United States, police forces were formed to protect property and serve corporate interests, not to keep civilians safe. We see that expressed today in the fact that police have no constitutional duty to protect anyone, even in the case of a woman with a court-ordered protective order against an abusive husband.
As evidenced by their origins, police forces are not really responsible for keeping people safe. But perhaps the role of police is not to keep people safe, but rather to stop violent crime. Statistically speaking, more policing does not equate to less violent crime. Numbers of police in the United States have been dropping for the past five years, and the rate of police per 1,000 residents has been in decline for the past twenty––concurrently, violent crime has also declined. A high total number of police and high density of police per residents in an area does not correlate with a lower violence in an area; a city doesn’t need more police in order to lower crime rates.
Moreover, the Washington Post reports that “a review of spending on state and local police over the past 60 years ... shows no correlation nationally between spending and crime rates.” This data does not even begin to take into account state violence as a real and present form of violence in a community. Acts like police officers beating civilians or breaking their property is never counted as “violent crime,” because largely these acts (though violent!) are not considered criminal. As a concrete example: police in Seattle have long been responsible for raiding homeless encampments, destroying the tents and property of the people living there. In the recent protests, police have maced, tear-gassed, flash-bombed, and beaten protestors with bikes. In this respect only is there a relationship between violence and policing: more policing is generally equatable with more violence perpetrated by police. Policing in the United States has more to do with instilling “order” than it does suppressing violence.
The distance between policing and protection is exacerbated by the fact that police are beholden to upholding racist laws. Jim Crow laws are perhaps the most obvious example of racism being written into the job description, but police are still responsible for maintaining a racially disparate society today. For instance, in Virginia, there are still hundreds of racist laws on the books, including ones which “dictate that white and black Virginians live in separate neighborhoods, and that the races be kept apart on trains, playgrounds and steamboats.” These laws are now “mostly” defunct, but have yet to be scrapped. Further, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, but some businesses, like banks, are fully exempt. Even where laws are technically race-neutral, the ACLU writes that “race-based enforcement ... has defined American policing across the board, from severely segregated cities in the Midwest to the beacons of progressive politics in the Northeast and West Coast.”
On top of this, when personal bias sneaks in, or single racist police officers (the oft-cited “bad apples”) act out in overtly racist ways, there is little institutional repercussion. Qualified immunity protects police officers from facing consequences for their actions. As such, the mechanism of policing itself is not one that has robust methods in place to dispose of individual racists who theoretically infiltrate the forces. Policing is fundamentally racist because it is responsible for sustaining a racist society, but also because it is an environment which actively protects overt racists within its ranks.
To summarize, police forces in the United States were formed to protect property instead of people, police are not responsible for keeping citizens safe, are not responsible even for reducing violence, must uphold racist laws, and do not face repercussions for being racist on the job. Returning to Carmen Best’s claim: what does it mean to be the “best” police department? There is a contradiction at the heart of the statement: to be best at keeping the citizens of the city safe would counter some of the very basic tenets of policing, and to be best at policing would not succeed well at keeping citizens of the city safe. There is one thing, however, that the SPD has always been remarkably successful at, surpassing other police departments across the nation and garnering attention from the federal government: using violent force on our city’s communities of color.
I think, perhaps, what Best meant was that the SPD is better than the Minneapolis Police Department––and thus deserves to be distanced from George Floyd’s murder––because it is less racist. The issue is that to say it as such outright would be factually untrue: the Seattle Police Department has a long, troubling, racist history that is still ongoing. In fact, the SPD has long been more racist than many police departments in America.
“THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN HERE”
The SPD has always had a history of overt racism against its citizens––particularly against Black and Indigenous people––resulting in murders like that of George Floyd. Until the late 1960s, most of Seattle was a “sundown town”: meaning that after the work day, any nonwhite person (specifically Black people and functionally speaking primarily Black men) were expected to be out of the neighborhood, and would be apprehended by police and forced to leave if found––realistically speaking, Black people weren’t simply “apprehended” and “made to leave,” but brutalized and in direct danger if found. Black people were overtly criminalized for simply existing in the city. Coupled with redlining, this meant that huge swaths of the city were specifically allocated as all-white spaces, a division upheld and maintained by the SPD.
Not surprisingly, through the 50s and 60s the SPD only had one Black police officer, and various groups, including the NAACP, found the SPD responsible for racist policing. The history of racially-disparate policing is not passive, but rather involves a pattern of targeted murder against Black and Indigenous Seattleites. The cases of Berry Lawson, Robert L. Reese, John T. Williams, and Charleena Lyles are indicative of the terror the SPD has historically wrought upon the city.
BERRY LAWSON, a twenty-eight year old Black man, was arrested for loitering in the Mt. Fuji hotel lobby on Yesler Way on March 25th, 1938. Sometime during his arrest, he became fatally injured and died. The policemen who arrested him––officers Whalen, Paschal, and Stevenson––claimed Lawson fell down the stairs while resisting arrest. However, it soon became clear that the three officers had not only beat Lawson to death unprovoked, but also bribed the witness to the scene to leave town, literally buying him a train ticket to Oregon. Enough evidence was brought forth in court to have the three officers arrested for charges of manslaughter. Despite this, the governor pardoned two of the three only a year later.
ROBERT REESE, a forty year old Black man, was killed on June 20th, 1965 by Frank Junell and Harold Larsen, two off-duty SPD police officers. Junell and Larsen were eating at a restaurant, and were overheard making loud racist remarks, including “just show me a [n-word] – any [n-word] in here – and I’ll kill him, I’ve got a gun.” Black patrons left the restaurant, and one of them, Osborne Moore, called Robert Reese’s house to tell him what he had witnessed. Reese and a few others then drove to the restaurant, and upon entering were called a slur. A short brawl then took place between Reese & co and the officers. Testimonies differ as to the specifics after this point. Shortly after the entire group exited the restaurant, Larsen shot five times at the Black men, killing Reese. Witnesses differ reporting if the policemen identified themselves as officers or not. At this point, federal law and many state laws “allowed any force necessary to prevent the escape of a suspected felon fleeing arrest: it was up to the officer’s discretion to use deadly force or not.” As such, Reese’s death was ultimately ruled an excusable homicide; Larsen and Junell faced light reprimand from the Chief of Police. The four surviving Black men from the fight were sentenced to 90 days in prison each.
In response, Reverend John Adams organized the Seattle Freedom Patrols, a citizen patrol group to follow the SPD around on their shifts and report any malpractice. The Freedom Patrols emphasized nonviolence and observation: “Patrollers had to be over 21, attend trainings on nonviolence, and had to fill out applications listing their employment, other organizations they were part of, give references and say whether they had ever been convicted of a felony.”
JOHN T. WILLIAMS, a 50 year old Native American woodcarver, was crossing the street on August 30, 2010 when Seattle Police officer Ian Birk decided he appeared threatening. Birk turned his patrol car around, jumped out, and yelled “Hey! Drop the knife!” at Williams. Five seconds after that first “hey,” Birk had shot Williams and killed him. Birk later justified the killing by saying that Williams had approached him threateningly with a brandished knife. Williams, who had hearing difficulties, had in fact been holding a piece of wood and a closed pocket knife. Officer Birk resigned from the Seattle Police Department one day after King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg decided not to press criminal charges (Satterberg is still King County Prosecutor today.)
CHARLEENA LYLES, a 30 year old pregnant Black woman, called the SPD to report a burglary in June 2017. The two SPD officers who responded, Jason Anderson and Steven McNew, claimed that Lyles approached them wielding either a knife or knives. After noticing the knife/knives, the officers yelled at Lyles to “get back.” She was shot seven times, four of them in the back, just 15 seconds after the shout. She was never ordered to drop the knife. The two officers claimed they had no way to get away since their backs were pressed to a door––video evidence shows this was not the case. McNew, who is 6’2” and 250 pounds, later said he was a “little larger” than Lyles, who was 5’3” and 100 pounds, but that he “feared for his life nonetheless.” A lawsuit against the two officers was dismissed by a judge in 2019, and due to lawsuits placed by the King County Sheriff's Office and the cities of Auburn, Federal Way, and Kent, there is no inquest process currently to allow an investigation into the circumstances of the murder.
These cases are far from a comprehensive list of murders by the SPD, but rather illustrate how extrajudicial killings have been a part of the Seattle Police Department’s operations for years. Moreover, these cases largely go unpunished––in 2015, the Seattle Times reported that “killings by police in the line of duty have surged in Washington over the past decade,” and that “during that period, only one police officer has been criminally charged in state courts with the illegal use of deadly force on the job. In fact, that case is the only one to be brought in the three decades since Washington enacted the nation’s most restrictive law on holding officers accountable for the unjustified use of deadly force.” The 1968 law referenced decrees that no police officer should be prosecuted for killing someone in the line of duty so long as they acted in good faith and without malice, which is called “evil intent” by the law. In 2015, an Amnesty International report found this standard to be the “most egregious” law of its kind. The text of the law existed unchanged up until 2018, where it was amended to redefine “good faith”; it is otherwise still on the books today.
Seattle’s history of unchecked racist policing is so unique––even within the context of a nation of racist policing––that in 2012 the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division found the Seattle Police Department’s use of force to violate federal law. As such, the SPD entered into an agreement with the federal government to end a pattern of discrimination and excessive use of force. In early May, Mayor Durkan submitted a request to end oversight on the SPD, claiming that the police department has evolved past the need for a check on racial discrimination. Recent studies find that the SPD is still heavily policing communities of color and lightly policing white communities, reserving harsher punishments for people of color. In other words, recent studies find that the SPD is as racist as ever.
Calls for cuts to the Seattle Police Department are arising because of Seattle’s specific and particular history of racism and brutality. Carmen Best writing that incidents like George Floyd’s murder “do not happen here” would be funny if it weren’t so callous. Murders like George Floyd’s murder are not only “happening here,” but they have been happening here. The one thing the Seattle Police Department has truly been best at, from its very inception, has been upholding racial division. It has succeeded at perpetrating violence upon communities of color. It has succeeded at constant, assiduous upkeep of a racial order that reserves “safety” for white people and retribution for everyone else. Racism is fundamental to the job––when Carmen Best said the SPD is the best in the nation, she was correct: the issue is that to be a good police force does not keep people safe. Rather, a good police force keeps “order”––a concept rooted in white supremacy when applied via a police department. Just as Seattle’s strict racial covenants in housing were “ordered” but violent, or how policing the city as a sundown town kept “order” but was violent, or how returning escaped slaves to their captors reinstated “order” but was violent, our police department has excelled at upholding its history of keeping Seattle “ordered” through the constant threat of state violence.