Seattle’s African-American police officers walk tightrope between two worlds
Jul 9, 2016, 4:47 PM | Updated: 4:49 pm
Harry Bailey joined Seattle Police when African-American officers on the force were very rare. After 38 years, he came back from retirement to serve as interim chief for Mayor Ed Murray.
(African-American police officers) have the burden of being black in what traditionally has been a white profession. And then you have the burden of those people in your own community that don’t want to understand living in those two worlds that you have to live in.
Bailey surprised himself, choking up when asked how he’d heal relations between the African-American community and police.
“It would have to be where young officers and young people of this community have a conversation,” not the top leaders and administrators, Bailey said, but the young people who face each other on the streets.
“When you see things like Dallas,” Bailey said, it remands you of things like what happened in Lakewood that is close to you.”
Four Lakewood police officers were killed while having Sunday coffee in November 2009.
“And some of (my) tears are for the people that lost their lives that caused the demonstration to happen in the beginning,” he said, referring to this week’s controversial police shootings of African-American men in Louisiana and Minnesota.
“So one doesn’t cancel out the other,” he said.
Bailey says he would advise young African-Americans to become police officers, but to always be true to who they are.
