Update: Seattle police chief responds to criticism over May Day actions

Update at 12:25: Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole has responded to a letter from the Seattle Community Police Commission that questions the actions officers took during this year’s May Day riot.

In her letter, the chief thanked the commission and said she appreciates the different perspectives about SPD’s response to the demonstrations.

“The Seattle Police Department will continue to collaborate with Court Monitor Merrick Bobb and the Department of Justice in review of all techniques used by officers,” O’Toole wrote. “We are discussing a unique opportunity for assessment of SPD demonstration management, as we are committed to continuous improvement.”

Original story:

After the May Day riots in Seattle this year, there was a very strong consensus that the Seattle Police Department did a very good job handling the violent rioters. The average person believes that when agitators assault officers and try to destroy neighborhoods, police should get involved. The SPD did just that and it was quite effective.

But, of course, the activists aren’t happy.

KIRO Radio’s Jason Rantz learned Tuesday night and first reported, that the Seattle Community Police Commission wrote a scathing and remarkably dishonest email to Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole with the goal of taking over the public conversation about acceptable police tactics on May 1.

The commission is doing this, in part, because activists are upset that SPD arrested rioters found with weapons including a machete, wrenches, and rocks.

Read the letter from Seattle Community Police Commission

Feeling irrelevant, the Seattle Community Police Commission wants to dominate the conversation about what it identifies as “demonstration command level decisions and policing practices that are unnecessarily destructive to the community trust.”

Like arresting activists who commit assaults on officers.

The commission is trying to hold a “structured dialogue” because it believes the SPD mishandled the May Day protests. It wants the SPD to change tactics – the tactics you and I know to be the right move given the situation.

The people the commission is listening to are not our voices but the voices of the activists who hate cops, the ones who injure cops, the ones walking around with signs about wanting to put “angel wings on pigs.”

And if you read the letter, it’s a big suck up to the activist community. They take issue with cops not allowing Black Lives Matter protesters to just walk wherever they wanted, disrupting businesses and commutes. The cops protected the city from these activists and they’re being attacked for it. They’re mad that police used pepper spray and blast balls during a riot on May Day. Why? Essentially because they hurt.

So the commission is getting involved because it “believes it is in the interests of the entire community, as well as SPD, to identify any policing practices that unnecessarily diminish community trust and exacerbate conflict.”

Related: Seattle councilmember calls officer’s May Day behavior ‘idiotic’

The SPD is under attack by activists for breaking up a riot, for ensuring basic order, for arresting rioters with weapons trying to hurt police officers and for destroying property.

This isn’t a Seattle thing either. It’s part of a bigger strategy to ensure that these dangerous activists are able to do what they want, when they want it.

Part of that strategy is to allow agitators, rioters, bad guys to try to tie the hands of the SPD so that when another riot happens next May Day, they won’t be able to respond the right way; the necessary way to protect the city.

So what are you going to do? Whose side are you going to take? Normally we tune out these lunatics because they’re lunatics, which gives them power. Maybe it’s time we took back our influence?