![]() “People were throwing stuff,” Kruse says. “For the first three hours, I was just having a conversation with people.” After 10 o’clock, though, the mood shifted. “We go down there, and we’re in the riot gear, and people were pleasant,” he says. ![]() Matthew Kruse was among the cops standing guard. Protests spread from Minneapolis across the country, and the first large-scale demonstrations took shape on Friday night, 29 May, in Seattle’s Chinatown district. Do you need something? Do you want to get checked out by medical? If I have water on me, do you want some water?”īut any potential differences between the police in Seattle and those in other places mattered little to the mood of the city in the late spring of 2020. “It’s kind of ingrained, but it’s also just doing the right thing. “Especially in Seattle, we really emphasise once they’re in handcuffs and they’re under control you turn to the medical attention,” he says. ![]() Matthew Kruse, a young patrol officer who had joined the force in 2018, was struck that a handcuffed man would fail to get immediate medical care. “We put a knee in between the shoulder blades, and it never chokes anybody out.” “That’s not even a proper technique,” says Smith. Smith had spent years pursuing drug dealers, killers, and pimps and had subdued a lot of people. Smith, a Marine veteran of the first Gulf War and a Seattle police officer since 1998. It became pretty apparent that there’s a big difference in training and tactics and procedures in the West Coast versus East Coast and other places.” That’s just basic fucking stuff that we knew and learned and had trained on for years and years. “I thought it was disgusting,” she says of Chauvin’s actions. San Miguel, a canine handler who had moved from the Big Island of Hawaii to join the Seattle police in 2008. Video footage of the incident circulated around the world in the days that followed. On Monday, in Minneapolis, a man named George Floyd died after police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd face-down on the pavement with a knee to Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. It is a cop’s-eye view of Seattle’s undoing. What follows, based on interviews with a number of past and present police officers - five of whom are on the record in this article - is an attempt to offer an obvious but unheeded perspective. But the majority view in Seattle appears to have shifted toward an acknowledgement that the unrest and destruction that occurred after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 marked a turning point and that the city’s policies toward its police force, whose ranks are now depleted, are relevant to understanding the story. “No single cause for 2021’s surge in gunfire in Seattle,” declared a typical recent headline over an article that points only to possibilities such as the pandemic or an unlucky cycle of “retaliatory violence”. In the news section of the Seattle Times, for instance, a reader is unlikely to see any consideration of a link between policing and public safety. What happened to Seattle? The answer, of course, depends on your politics. Petty crime plagues every neighbourhood of the city, and downtown businesses have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund their own security. The year 2020 saw a 68% spike in homicides, the highest number in 26 years, and the year 2021 saw a 40% surge in 911 calls for shots fired and a 100% surge in drive-by shootings. Traffic enforcement is minimal to nonexistent. Blocks from the Four Seasons hotel and the Fairmont Hotel, tents crowd the sidewalks, and drug users sit under awnings holding pieces of foil over lighter flames. Businesses on both sides of Third Avenue, a major thoroughfare, are boarded up. Yet much of Seattle’s core looks like a pockmarked ghost town. That such woes should afflict one of the richest cities in the country, with a median household income of over $100,000, cannot be blamed on economic decline. In mid-March, Amazon announced that it was abandoning a 312,000-square-foot office space in downtown, citing concerns over crime. “It seems like every day I hear stories of longtime small businesses closing their doors for good or leaving our city.” But it’s not just small businesses. “The truth is the status quo is unacceptable,” he said in his first state of the city address. This February, Bruce Harrell, newly installed as mayor of Seattle, made it official that his city has gone into decline.
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