Why Diaz got dumped

April 17, 2013

Steve Leigh explains the backdrop to the resignation of Seattle's top cop.

SEATTLE POLICE Chief John Diaz resigned on April 8 after almost four years in charge of the department and 36 years on the force. He claimed personal reasons for his resignation, but Diaz has presided over a department that came under intense criticism, not only from activists, but the U.S. Department of Justice.

Diaz will be temporarily replaced by Assistant Chief Jim Pugel. A permanent head of the department reportedly won't be named until after the mayoral election in the fall.

Occupy Seattle launched a "Dump Diaz" campaign and a variety of opponents of police brutality called for his ouster starting over a year ago. The No New Jim Crow in Seattle Campaign circulated a petition against him. All the opposition and organizing no doubt played a role in his resignation.

Why all the hostility to Diaz?

A longtime Seattle cop, Diaz was steeped in the culture of the department. That culture is perhaps best characterized by an article in a police union newsletter whose opposition to racial sensitivity training would have made a Tea Party supporter blush:

Seattle police chief John Diaz
Seattle police chief John Diaz (Jen Nance)

The city, using its Race and Social Justice Initiative, continues its assault on traditional and constitutional American values, such as self-reliance, equal justice and individual liberty. But more to our concern, the city is inflicting its socialist policies directly on the Seattle Police Department...

The "Perspectives in Profiling" class (or as one officer put it, one of our "de-policing classes") served as a good way to learn what the enemy is up to. (Yes, enemy. A liberal after my money in taxes may be my opponent, but a socialist attacking the Constitution and my liberty is my enemy.)

The consequences of this culture have played out in the cops' deadly and abusive confrontations with the public, especially people of color.

In August 2010, officer Ian Birk shot and killed John T. Williams, a Native American woodcarver, for refusing to drop his carving knife. Burk was never threatened, and Williams most likely never heard Birk's command to drop the knife since Williams was deaf. This death provoked a widespread movement that finally resulted in a Department of Justice investigation of the Seattle Police Department. However, Birk was never fired nor legally punished, but quit his job on his own accord.

In April 2010, officer Shandy Cobane was captured on video threatening a Latino suspect, Martin Monetti--who was already prone on the ground after being assaulted by police--that Cobane would "beat the fucking Mexican piss out of you, homey." Diaz decided not to fire Cobane, and the city government under liberal Mayor Mike McGinn attempted to get Monetti's lawsuit against the department dismissed on the grounds that Cobane's "language was used in a way to control, not simply offend." Monetti was exonerated of any wrongdoing---in fact, he was never even charged!

Josh Lawson and Christopher Franklin, two young Black men, were stopped at gunpoint by Seattle police not once, but twice--the second time just days after they were featured in a February 2012 television report detailing their account of their first encounter with poice, during which the two were shoved to the pavement and kicked in the face after being stopped at gunpoint on a false accusation.

In November 2011, Seattle police attacked marchers protesting a state crackdown on Occupy Oakland--indiscriminately pepper-spraying a priest, a pregnant teenager and an 84-year-old community activist.

And for each of these cases, there are many other victims of brutality and murder at the hands of Seattle police--people such as Daniel Maceo Saunders, Angel Rosenthal, D'Vontaveous Hoston and Christopher Harris.

And what has been the department and the city government's response to such shocking brutality? In the more than half a dozen brutality cases described above, the combined punishments for the police responsible for videotaped abuses amount to one 30-day suspension and one gross misdemeanor charge.


THESE AND many other examples show that the problem isn't just the police department, but the city government as a whole, including Mayor McGinn.

As a result, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation of the Seattle police. Evidence in the federal report on the department, corroborated by the accounts of citizens and Seattle police documents, shows a "pattern or practice," in which the officers violated the U.S. Constitution by engaging in excessive force.

The report also singles out "deficiencies in SPD's training, policies and oversight," where "starting from the top, SPD supervisors often fail to meet their responsibility to provide oversight of the use of force," with "troubling practices that could have a disproportionate impact on minority communities."

Though Justice Department investigators stopped short of calling the department racist, they did note a clear pattern of people of color being subjected to excessive force at a disproportionate rate.

Other reports have been more specific about racism in the criminal injustice system in Seattle and around the state.

According to a 2010 "Race and the Criminal Justice System" report cited in an article by CrossCut.com's John Stang, across Washington state, "race appeared to be a significant factor in the greater likelihood of a non-white person going to prison or jail than a white person would for committing the same crime," Stang wrote. In King County, which includes Seattle and the surrounding area, Black men are eight times as likely to be imprisoned or jailed as white men.

Critics of police brutality saw the Department of Justice report as further vindication of their criticism of Diaz and the police. Last year, Seattle NAACP President James Bible said that the Seattle Police Department needed to "clean house," echoing calls from community groups such as El Comité Pro-Reforma Migratoria y Justicia Social.


THOUGH THE Feds' report was welcomed by many activists, its proposals for reform were quite limited. But even these proposals were resisted by the Seattle officials and Chief Diaz, who have spent the better part of the last year fighting the Department of Justice, publicly and privately, over its recommendations.

Kathleen Taylor of Washington's American Civil Liberties Union wasn't impressed with the so-called 20/20 plan. She said its contents were "too vague to serve as the roadmap for reforming our police department's practices, and it lacks teeth to ensure implementation and enforcement"

The actions of the Seattle Police Department belie Diaz's supposed commitment to "reform." And now, his resignation under pressure is a real victory for the movement.

But the SPD was brutal and racist long before Diaz took over as chief--and before he joined the force 36 years ago. The response of the city's political establishment to this issue shows that Diaz's policies will continue long after Diaz leaves.

As Mary Patterson of the No New Jim Crow in Seattle Campaign said:

The resignation of Police Chief Diaz is a step forward because Chief Diaz has headed the SPD during some of its most public, violent incidents, and he has not held officers guilty of those incidents accountable...

But the police chief is only the tip of the iceberg of the SPD and of the corrupt, punitive, and too often racist system of law enforcement that we have in this country. So a lot more work has to be done than just the replacement of Diaz. I would like to see police forces that participate in growing systems of community-based transformative justice. Ultimately, police forces need to de-militarize, shrink in size and participate in pro-community networks that encourage peaceful, productive, healthy lives for everyone.

The record of the SPD is only one example of the role that police play across the world in maintaining a fundamentally racist system, based on the preservation of the property of the rich. The police will play that role as long as the system exists. However, our resistance to police brutality can make it harder for the police to play this role--and it can be a contribution to building a movement to end the oppressive and exploitive system as a whole.

One police chief down--one system to go!

Johnny Mao and Leela Yellesetty contributed to this article.

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