Seattle Indivisible supports the call from Black leaders to “defund the police.” We call on Mayor Durkan and the Seattle City Council to cut the Seattle Police Department budget by at least $100 million this year, and reinvest those dollars in the community as Black Lives Matter/Seattle-King County has demanded.

We hear many of you asking: What does defunding the police even mean? It means transforming how we, as a society, view and address “public safety.” It means recognizing how the existing system disproportionately underfunds, harrasses, and terrorizes Black communities. It means shifting from using law enforcement, jails, and prisons as a pipeline to pull Black individuals out of their communities, to instead investing resources into Black communities.  More importantly, defunding the police means exactly what Black leaders are telling us it means. It’s time for us to listen.

In a recent interview by journalist Tonya Mosley, Patrisse Cullors posed three crucial questions. These questions provide an excellent framework to begin discussing why Seattle Indivisible agrees we need to scale back the size, scope, and responsibility of American police departments and the Seattle Police Department in particular:

We couldn’t think of a good answer to Patrisse Cullors’ three questions. Can you? Can Mayor Durkan? Can our Seattle City Council? No training or reforms will ever make an armed patrol the safest or most effective response to these social crises. Rashad Brooks—like countless other Black men killed by police—would be alive and with his family today if the response to an unarmed man asleep in his car was not an armed police officer. 

But isn’t cutting $100M from SPD’s budget pretty radical?

We don’t think so. Cutting the Seattle Police Department’s $409 million budget by $100 million isn’t “radical” if we substantially narrow the job of law enforcement. Cutting $100 million from SPD’s budget isn’t “radical” when the City is trying to find ways to make up for an expected $300 million budget shortfall due to COVID-19.  The Seattle Police Department’s budget has increased by nearly 40% in the past five years even though crime has gone down. Shaving $100 million from SPD’s budget would still leave SPD with a bigger budget than they had just four years ago. 

Some Seattle City Councilmembers say they are ready to transform the nature of policing in our city, even to cut SPD’s budget in half, as some protesters have urged. Councilmember Mosqueda, Chair of the City Council budget committee, has begun a budget inquest and recommendations are expected in July.

—U.S. leads the world in criminalization and incarceration

The United States has 5% of the world’s population but 21% of the incarcerated. We spend over $100 billion a year on policing, plus an estimated $182 billion on mass incarceration. The Guardian reported the U.S. is not just an “outlier in terms of police violence. . . America is the outlier.” Comparisons by country are gob-smacking as laid out in “By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years.”  

In 1980, there were 500,000 people incarcerated in this country. By 2015, 2.2 million Americans were behind bars according to the NAACP. “For four decades, the U.S. has been engaged in a globally unprecedented experiment to make every part of its criminal justice system more expansive and more punitive,” explains The Prison Policy Initiative.

“Progressive” Washington isn’t immune to this uniquely American way of using the police and incarceration as a first response to social ills. View this comparison of Washington incarceration rates to our NATO allies—image courtesy of the Prison Policy Initiative.

This criminalization of America—largely Black America—comes at a high cost. It consumes an outsized portion of local resources, starving programs and services that would make a positive social difference in our communities. For example, spending on prisons and jails has increased at triple the rate of spending on Pre‐K‐12 public education in the last thirty years. And let’s get real, Black Americans have always paid the highest price for our prioritizing policing and incarceration over social services. Not only are Black men 2.5 times more likely to be imprisoned than white men—and more likely to stay in prison longer for the same crimes—Blacks are disproportionately killed by police in America.

—Can’t we call it something other than “defunding”?

Many well-intentioned white progressives say they get the need to spend less money on a militarized police force and more money in the community. But, they ask: “Do you have to call it “defunding” the police? That sounds like you want to completely abolish all police. A much better term would be [fill in the blank with white idea].” 

It is not Seattle Indivisible’s place to edit or change how leaders in the Black Lives Matter movement verbalize their demands. It is our role to listen to Black leaders, seek to understand and help explain the meaning to our membership, and then offer our labor and support in making change happen.

But how will we stay safe? Aren’t police there, just in case, to protect us?

For many Americans, police have never been seen as here to “protect us.” Police departments began as slave patrols, then enforced Jim Crow laws, and since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s-70s have been Black American’s entry point to systematic mass incarceration. 

Check out Professor of History, Race and Public Policy Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s book “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America” and this episode of NPR’s Throughline featuring Prof. Muhammad to learn more about the origins of American policing and “how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.”

While White America was shocked as they watched a police officer murder George Floyd on national television, Black America was not—saddened, angered, re-traumatized yes, but not shocked. Tragically, the risk of harmful or lethal interactions with police is a daily reality in the Black community.

A study published last August from the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, and Washington University found that police use-of-force is now the 6th leading cause of death for young Black men. One in every 1000 Black males in America is killed by the police. The study concludes these police lethality numbers reinforce “calls to treat police violence as a public health issue.”

Defunding police departments and moving that funding into community-led organizations is an active step toward dismantling the systematically racist, white ideals of community safety. White Americans have been fed a cultural myth about policing from certain politicians, select news coverage, and crime shows like “Cops” that perpetuate the trope of cops always catching the bad guys. In reality, only one to five percent of arrests in the U.S. are for violent crimes, and violent crimes have been sharply decreasing for the past three decades. As Patrisse Cullors explained during her interview on Deconstructed:

“We have a myth about what the police do. So I think it’s important for listeners to understand none of us understand what a beat cop does, because what we watch on TV is that they solve murders and rapes; violent crime is only one to five percent. So what a beat cop does is mostly about dealing with poverty. That’s what a beat cop does, and I think it’s really, really important that we start to investigate how we understand policing, and the propaganda that we’ve been, you know, shoved down our throats around policing.”

Since a very small percentage of the Seattle Police Department’s job is responding to violent crime, reducing the police budget by 25-50% needn’t impact public safety. And, there’s no evidence that burgeoning police budgets focused on increasingly militarized policing and incarceration make civilians safer. On the contrary, a 2017 report by Popular Democracy found that the “choice to resource punitive systems instead of stabilizing and nourishing ones does not make communities safer. Instead, study after study shows that a living wage, access to holistic health services and treatment, educational opportunity, and stable housing are far more successful in reducing crime than police or prisons.”

Why cut funding, why don’t we just demand police reform, and step up accountability?

This is Mayor Durkan’s optimistic default as a white Democrat and former U.S. Attorney. She agrees communities of color need an infusion of resources, but struggles to understand why that money should come out of the police budget. She believes cops are generally good people who would do better with more resources and training, not less. But this is a fatal flaw in white liberal logic we are calling on Mayor Durkan to reexamine. Systemic racism does not depend on the “bad character” of individuals, and undue focus on the individual distracts from the root problem.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates in “The Myth of Police Reform” The Atlantic (April 2015) explained:

“reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.”

Our system of using a militarized police force to deal with poverty and social ills needs to be dismantled and rebuilt—and that starts with divesting from the police budget and investing in communities.

—Expensive police “reform” has been tried for decades in Seattle; it doesn’t work.

They say repeating the same behavior over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. After decades of pouring money and resources into police “reforms,” Black folks are being killed by police in record numbers. It’s time to admit that bigger training budgets, layers of administrative oversight, and incremental “reforms” will not stop abusive policing of Black Americans. Does anyone who watched the video of Officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds as Floyd repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe, really think George Floyd would be alive today if Officer Chauvin had only had five more hours of implicit bias training?

As Patrisse Cullors, explained:

“It’s not possible for the entity of law enforcement to be a compassionate, caring governmental agency in black communities. That’s not the training, that’s not the institution. We have spent the last seven years asking for training, asking for body cameras. The body cameras have done nothing more than show us what’s happened over and over again. The training has done nothing but show us that law enforcement and the culture of law enforcement is incapable of changing.”

Calls for police reform in Seattle date back to the 1800s. But the current conversation really started in 1999 following the clash between police and Seattleites protesting the World Trade Organization meeting President Clinton hosted in Seattle. Here are just a few highlights of Seattle police “reforms,” each effort meant to finally fix SPD’s use of violence against Seattle residents, particularly if the resident is Black.

• Dubbed the “Battle in Seattle,” media coverage of Seattle police tear-gassing WTO protesters went global in 1999. Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper resigned following the debacle, police “reforms” were ushered in, and to this day Norm Stamper believes giving the order to tear gas Seattle protesters was the biggest mistake of his career.

• In 2011, the Seattle Police Department’s excessive use of force spurred an investigation by the Dept. of Justice, which found “a pattern or practice of constitutional violations regarding the use of force that result from structural problems, as well as serious concerns about biased policing.” More than 50% of cases “determined to be unnecessary or excessive uses of force” involved minorities. 

• In 2012, the City of Seattle entered into a “Consent Decree,” agreeing to costly, court-supervised police reforms that were expected to take five years to implement.

• In 2017, Seattle Police shot and killed pregnant Charleena Lyles while she was in her own apartment with her three children. Protests erupted. SPD remained under the court-supervised Consent Decree. Additional police reforms were promised. 

• In 2017, stunned to learn that Washington had one of the highest rates of lethal police force in the nation, Seattle Indivisible endorsed De-escalate Washington’s Initiative 940 and worked hard for its passage. I-940 mandated de-escalation training for law enforcement officers and removed the requirement that “malice” be proven before a police officer could be held liable. But tragically, in 2019, there were still 36 fatal shootings by Washington police—more than double the incidence in 2015.

•  A May 2018 Community Engagement Report by the Seattle Police documents another long list of SPD community engagement reforms.

After 11 years of costly “reforms,” Seattle Police responded to protests of police violence following George Floyd’s murder with rubber bullets and chemical weapons. The City received 14,000 complaints of police misconduct and withdrew a motion seeking to end court supervision under the 2012 Consent Decree. Recently asked about new images of police across the nation using tear gas, batons and pepper spray on protesters, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper remarked: “We really are incapable of learning from our experience.” 

After more than a decade of failed efforts to “reform” the Seattle Police Department, talk of incremental reforms is just a way of avoiding needed transformative change. As explained in “The Myth of Police Reform” in The Atlantic,

“Body cameras are the least divisive and least invasive step toward reforming the practices of the men and women we permit to kill in our names. Body cameras are helpful in police work, but they are also helpful in avoiding a deeper conversation over what it means to keep whole swaths of America under the power of the justice system.” 

—Individual law enforcement officers should be held accountable for violent behavior, but this isn’t about individual “bad apples.”

Every family that has lost a loved one by police homicide deserves to have the police officer held accountable. Police should not be immune from liability. But exclusive focus on each individual police shooter perpetuates the myth of the “bad apple” and avoids the real problem.

As sociologist Alex Vitale explained in a podcast interview earlier this month addressing defunding the police, “we have to shift some of the discourse from a conversation about police accountability to a conversation about political accountability.” Police violence is a systemic problem—solving it will require us to transform how we approach public safety. Now, at this moment in history, we need visionary leadership from Mayor Durkan and our City Council.

Transformative change is not only possible, it’s already happening

The video of three police officers watching as Officer Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds with Floyd repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe,” spurred protests around the globe. 60,000 protesters turned out on the streets of Seattle during a pandemic for a protest march led by Black Lives Matter/Seattle-King County—a march with no police presence that was peaceful and without incident. George Floyd’s murder was a tipping point—the demand that we fundamentally change how we police our communities has never in our lifetime been louder. There are only two unanswered questions:

If Mayor Durkan or City Councilmembers are trying to figure out where to start, they don’t have to look far for examples. 

• If you call 911 in Eugene, Oregon you may be routed to a crisis worker/medic team instead of police in a program called CAHOOTS. This program has been operating for 30 years. These teams have never caused serious injury or death, they make the community feel safer, and they save the city about $15 million per year.  

• Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti has promised to cut $100-150 million from the police budget, and to invest $250 million in “communities of color and women and people who have been left behind.”

• Austin, Texas is investing millions into telehealth tools and an Expanded Mobile Crisis Outreach Team that can respond to police calls. And if you call 911, the dispatcher will send a mental health professional instead of a police officer as indicated.

• The Mayor and Supervisor of San Francisco have agreed to redirect money from the police department into the African-American community and have begun engaging the community in the re-budgeting process.

• And in Minneapolis, just two weeks after George Floyd’s murder, the City Council voted to disband its police department and replace it with a community-led public safety system.