By Steve Pomper
BLM Demonstration May 2020, Seattle
One problem with the mainstream media reporting on the bogus consent decree former President Barack Obama’s DOJ inflicted on the Seattle Police Department is how quickly they (conveniently) forgot just how controversial (and bogus) it was. The reporting from outlets such as The Seattle Times act as if the necessity of the decree was plain. It was anything but. For one thing, Seattle cops weren’t racist—the DOJ made that up.
The Times has also conveniently forgotten, Seattle University criminal justice professor and former DOJ statistician Matthew J. Hickman wrote a “courageous, Special to the Times: Department of Justice owes the Seattle Police Department an apology (Seattle Times Feb. 8th, 2010), he warned the SPD command staff to, “Call the DOJ’s bluff and demand an apology.”
The city leaders balked. Instead, the DOJ has gotten away with its corrupt harassment of a great police department against which charges of systemic racism and bias were and are ludicrous.
To refresh, the DOJ swooped into town, used a few high-profile use-of-force incidents (in which no officer was charged), manufactured “studies” the DOJ has never released the methodology it used to support the ludicrous data, and then implemented invasive oversight over of what had been one of the most highly regarded and emulated police agencies in America.
The consent decree descended like a storm cloud but rather than from nature, this tempest was created by unethical people. For over a decade, leftist officials have made the job harder and more dangerous for the professional men and women of the SPD.
It would appear the judge was about to lift the decree, and then, inevitably, a “unacceptable” use-of-force” would occur. Meaning, a cop did something the cop-haters (including in the mayor’s office and city council) didn’t like, and the fed judge would administer another dose of federal interference in effective local law enforcement.
The decree was supposed to deal with some phantom “systemic racism,” but if a “systemic” problem can be erased by an individual officer’s actions, then when would a decree ever be lifted? Cops will always do things cop-haters don’t like—like everything.
Well, here we are again. According to (forgive me) The Seattle Times, “Department of Justice and Seattle officials on Tuesday asked a federal judge to find the city’s Police Department has complied with ‘core requirements’ of a decade-old settlement agreement over police reform, calling on the judge to end most federal oversight of the agency.”
You’ll notice the foot-in-the-door caveat, “most… oversight….”
Ironically, aside from Mayor Bruce Harrell, Police Chief Adrian Diaz, and City Attorney Ann Davison, on hand was the Asst. U.S. AG for Civil Rights, Kristen Clarke, who has a few “bias” issues of her own. According to National Review, she even tried to sell a reportedly racist letter she’d written as satire with no evidence supporting that and evidence existing that it was not satire.
In a massive insult to the stellar officers who’ve served on the SPD during the over a decade-long decree, the “U.S. District Court, city and DOJ lawyers proclaimed the SPD is ’a transformed organization’ with little resemblance to the department that civil rights investigators in 2011 found routinely used unconstitutional, excessive force during arrests and showed disturbing signs of biased policing.” [bold and emphasis added]
BULL S#!T!
Yeah, I’ll take it personally. What they “found” were proven lies (look at Prof. Hickman’s work). They inflicted that bogus decree before I retired. So, I’m part of the “organization” they have supposedly “transformed” from.
That the SPD was a racist department or policed with bias is ludicrous. What we were was a police department that wasn’t yet fully mired in the radical left’s pro-criminal, anti-cop brand of “law enforcement” you see today.
This is twisted that it’s only now, after the radical leftists have intentionally hobbled the department, that they want to lift the decree. Today’s SPD is what needs to be transformed—back into the stellar agency it once was.
The decree and this ostensible lifting of it is a part of a more than decade-long gaslighting effort, conjuring a “problem” to “fix” only to break it. The consent decree was just as bogus when the DOJ inflicted it on the SPD as it is today.
But, in one sense, I will agree with them on the “transformation.” The Consent decree has aided the city’s radical leftist cop-haters in devastating policing in Seattle. Isn’t it just like them to call SPD a “transformed” organization (no longer racist), as the department staffing is threadbare and still shedding officers?
Seattle doesn’t know how fortunate they are to still have the caliber of cops they have responding to the crimes the city will still let them enforce.
They’re saying the bogus consent decree may now morph into a bogus “compliance agreement” with a “narrow focus and specific deadlines,” blah, blah, blah. Until some well-intentioned officer does something the cabal thinks is wrong, and the judge re-inflicts the consent decree on the SPD.
Think I’m wrong? If they could impose a pretend consent decree on the SPD for more than 10 years, they can also force a pretend compliance agreement, which sounds as bogus as the original “transformed organization” insult.
And to make matters worse, Seattle and DOJ officials are actually celebrating the supposed end of the fraud that helped eviscerate a once great police department.