A childhood exploring Madison Valley

The divide — chasm, really — between urban cops and their communities has been the defining feature of this month’s seemingly unprovoked killings of Anton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota and the slaying of five police officers in Dallas during a resulting protest. 

Locally, the thousand people who marched to protest the killings of Sterling and Castile are operating in a different universe from our city’s leadership. What the last few weeks’ events clearly demonstrate is what Black Lives Matter  activists have been saying for two years: America, and Seattle, have a policing problem.

In the aftermath of the Dallas killings, most national media outlets outside the right wing fever swamp were surprisingly restrained in not blaming the events of Dallas on protesters and in treating the deaths of Sterling, Castile and the five officers as aspects of one story, rather than Dallas being used to bury the previous killings. The extraordinary live Facebook video taken by Castile’s girlfriend, which begins moments after the shooting while the officer who just killed Castile still has his gun pointed at her, has emerged after millions of views as another pivotal moment and a powerful counterweight to the horror in Dallas, humanizing victims of police violence in real time in a way we’ve never seen before. The Dallas police chief, amidst his own tragedies, also emerged as a thoughtful and sympathetic figure. The resulting media and political consensus seems to be using Dallas not to bury this country’s police problem, but to amplify it, as if to say, “the status quo cannot hold.” That’s all good.

Here in Seattle, Mayor Murray and Police Chief O’Toole, not surprisingly, said all the right things in two press conferences on the days after the shootings in Minnesota and Dallas. But on the night the drama in Dallas was unfolding, a Seattle Police Officers Guild Facebook post blamed the Dallas killings on the Black Lives Matter movement. A similar reaction happened two winters ago when, in the wake of publicity over Eric Garner’s death, some black nut job from Baltimore drove up to New York to shoot an NYPD officer. Then, the impulse to blame protesters was widespread, especially among those on the right; this month, the pundit, politician, and cop response has been mercifully free of such vitriol — except from the police guild.

That’s not surprising. The guild also claimed last year that by acknowledging problems with racism in American law enforcement, the Obama Administration was waging “a war on cops.” And it’s the same union that routinely gives “Officer of the Month” awards to SPD cops involved in controversial shootings of unarmed people of color. Earlier in the same eventful week, Mayor Murray — to the delight of police guild — announced he would not renew the contract of the city’s top civilian administrator on police accountability, Pierce Murphy; and in a KUOW interview, Murphy explicitly blamed the police guild for blocking SPD reform efforts: 

“I think somehow...[the guild] seems to think they’re in charge of the police department.”

This wasn’t the first time the mayor, who was elected with the police guild’s strong support, has returned the favor. One of Murray’s first mayoral acts in 2014 was to name a former guild executive as interim chief. And a leaked draft copy last month of the city’s secret proposed new contract with the police guild showed Murray agreeing to only token changes to a much-criticized system that lets fellow officers control civilian oversight of their peers’ actions, with predictable results.

These are not the actions of a city interested in restoring public trust in a department that has a decades-long record of abusing minority residents and operating above the law.

Nationally and locally,. some good might come of all of this yet. I sure hope so, because the alternative is an escalation of America’s already existing low-grade urban warfare, with its militarized police operating as armies with a seemingly limitless appetite for random violence against black and brown Americans. Responsible voices are saying, “This stuff’s got to end before it gets far worse.” They’re right. 

The proper response to all this is not to lionize members of forces like SPD, but to ensure that they are no longer treated as a breed apart — working instead to treat them as part of our communities rather than our communities’ occupying armies (heroic or otherwise). Changing that culture is going to take time, but it’s got to be done. The only alternative is more polarization and pointless violence. As with this country’s limitless appetite for warfare overseas, there are plenty of sociopathic forces who’d be thrilled with and enriched by that outcome, but the human cost is incalculable. Treating cops like respected — but accountable — members of our communities is the only constructive way this can go.

GEOV PARRISH is an activist and  founder of Eat the State!