Seattle Police Guild head: Council veto shows mob activism winning the day

Even though Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan had vetoed some of the major cuts to the city’s police department, the Seattle City Council overrode that veto by a 7-2 vote. Now, big cuts may be forthcoming. The president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, Mike Solan, joined the Dori Monson Show to discuss his reaction.

“I’m still optimistic. It’s the way I try to see things, however, I do think that the radical activist mob influenced some decisions yesterday, and it just shows you where we are in our city where mob mentality, radical activism is winning the day. I do feel as if the mayor still has some moves that she can make to try to alleviate this lawlessness, if you will, that’s enveloping Seattle,” Solan said.

“I’m confident that our stopdefunding.com campaign really had a significant play in the council walking a lot of the rhetoric back, but to save face, they had to double down on their agenda,” he added. “So we’ve got more work to do and I’m committed to protecting this community, putting the truth out there in terms of policing and how much of the radical activist talking points is a false narrative.”

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Solan believes that intimidation has become a major tactic of those who want the police defunded, and that politicians are allowing this to go on.

“Just mob behavior,” he said. “And that’s where we are in politics, not just here locally, across the state, but across the nation. This radical activist agenda to push a political agenda, which, to me, is completely against decency and against anything that is normal or sensical.”

“If we have feckless people in elected positions, obviously you can easily influence them. But clearly the ones that are not backing down are a strong representation of our community with other police officers,” he continued. “We’re going to push back against this unreasonable mob agenda to divide us from our communities because it’s all based on a false narrative. And I’ll sit down with anybody, at any time, in a reasonable location — not at people’s private homes — to have these long-form discussions.”

Solan says police officers locally and across the nation haven’t done a good job providing context to their actions to contradict what he sees as a dishonest narrative.

“One of the reasons why we’re in the position that we’re in is because police officers, we’ve done a horrendous job explaining actions, giving context, providing facts, and that needs to change,” he said.

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“It’s not exonerating our actions because we feel the system works to show that an overwhelming majority of the time our actions are indeed just. The problem is when these viral videos go out — obviously the media is using it for advertising dollars — it’s spun in a vacuum by these crazy radicals,” Solan said. “And so how do we connect with the reasonable community to explain actions, to provide context? In fact, that’s what dividing our society.”

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