Carmen Best Resigns As SPD Police Chief
 I Read the above linked article this morning. I had mixed emotions about Carmen Best's decision to leave the SPD. However, after reading this article, I think I am glad she left. The part of the article that stood out to me the most was that Donald Trump said he was "sad to see her go" and William Barr said, :..Her leadership and demonstrated commitment to her oath of office reflected all that is good about America's law enforcement." Statements of support from two people that many believe are avowed racists. Do I believe we should defund the police by 50%? Well, I will say those who appose it are scared Shi@#$less of everything...from being robbed, to someone breaking into their beautiful home, to anything that might cause them to have to defend themselves or do anything that might remotely look like standing up for themselves physically. If you are so scary that you think defunding the police is going to give someone a chance to rob you as you go to Safeway, buy a gun and learn how to use it properly. If you are scared of a physical confrontation, learn how to defend yourself and stop being a pu$$y! The BLM movement was (among other things) about police brutality and the state-sanctioned killing of unarmed black and brown men and women. Why the hell would I as a black man want more police on my block if that is what might happen to me??? Maybe some of you white folks are just a little too comfortable in your white privilege. I've read studies that show the more police you put in a predominantly black neighborhood, the more illegal arrests and police brutality occurs. Is that because them niggers are just running wild in the Hood committing crimes and doing general thuggery? That is exactly what a lot of white people think is going on. Hyper-Fear is what is really behind the argument not to defund the police. Many whites fear anything that might cause them a little discomfort. America freaked out when the unemployment rate hit 14% because of Covid-19. Black folks have been living with an unemployment rate of almost 16% for the last 50 years! How uncomfortable do you white folks think that made us? There are a lot of things that blacks experience almost daily that make us uncomfortable - that white people never have and never will experience. Community Policing and Social Services working together has always been a good idea - at least for poor and minority communities. It's working in other places. We simply must stop the police from treating mental illness situations as a criminal matter. and we must also stop the police from treating black people like animals. It is my guess that those who don't want to defund the SPD are the same ones who, deep down, believe George Floyd probably in some way deserved what he got, just like all the other blacks who were brutalized, shot and killed by the police. They must have been doing SOMETHING wrong, right? 

Minority Homelessness in Seattle - Can Progressive public policies save us?

 

King County’s plan to fix homelessness was supposed to put power in the hands of those who’ve been homeless. Did it?

July 31, 2020 at 6:00 am Updated July 31, 2020 at 5:03 pm

Kirk McClain, a member of the Lived Experience Coalition, speaks at a virtual session of the Regional Homeless Authority’s governance committee. Members of the coalition say that although the county included people on the committee who have... (KCRHA)

For the last 20 years in the Seattle-area fight against homelessness, efforts have been cyclical: Governments and providers say they’re going to solve the issue and seek input from experts and people who’ve actually been homeless, but then continue much the same way they have in the past. 2020 is supposed to be the year things change, with the creation of a Regional Homelessness Authority. A union of local governments with more representation and power than previously existed in one body, the authority would streamline, plan and make decisions about who receives all local government funding for homelessness. Beyond its power, one important new aspect of the authority is that it would give an unprecedented amount of say to the people it’s supposed to serve: people who’ve actually been homeless before.

The Seattle Times’ Project Homeless is supported by BECU, Campion Foundation, Raikes Foundation and Seattle Foundation. The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over Project Homeless content.

Three members of the governing committee — which has final say on all policy and hiring in the regional authority, and also has members from King County government, the City of Seattle, and an alliance of surrounding cities — are people who’ve experienced homelessness and also have experience in social services or advocacy. But those three — and the coalition of homeless and formerly homeless people they represent, called the Lived Experience Coalition — say they have been “railroaded” by the county and nonprofit leaders, said Sara Rankin, a co-founder of the Lived Experience Coalition and law professor at Seattle University. 

“It’s a generous con,” Rankin said. “They may be invited to the table, but once that box is ticked off, they’re not given a genuine, meaningful position of authority. … It seems like the Lived Experience Coalition is being systematically stripped.” Who chooses the seats? In the original design of the authority, people with lived experience would be chosen by and answer to the Lived Experience Coalition, a democratic group of homeless and formerly homeless people.

The Lived Experience Coalition was created in 2018 by organizers who’ve been homeless or were homeless at the time — some public employees, some advocates, some people who had advised county policy in the past. It’s made up of 100 general membership seats who meet bimonthly and vote on who among them will fill 25 leadership seats. That would provide a body to hold these unelected positions accountable, according to Marc Dones, executive director of the National Innovation Service and one of the architects of the new system. It could make it less likely those positions are filled by people hand-picked by nonprofits, something the authority wants to avoid, since much of its work involves deciding what money goes to which strategy and which nonprofit. Many members of the coalition are not afraid to criticize the system and even the nonprofit service providers who prop it up; in interviews, members criticized some homeless service providers, and called them part of a “homeless industrial complex.”

“In the housing and homelessness sector, we absolutely have a very strong nonprofit industrial complex,” Dones said. “And how systems work is they create the messengers they need for their own perpetuation.”

Bringing the Lived Experience Coalition onto the governing board wasn’t an idea everyone involved with the creation of the authority agreed with Former Bellevue Mayor John Chelminiak, for instance, advocated last year that the entire governing committee be made up of elected officials.

The coalition is very diverse, and its largest demographics are Black and African American (35%) and Native American (25%), the two groups who become homeless at the highest rates in King County, despite the fact they comprise smaller rates of the housed population. The coalition started the year in a rocky spot: Members who come to meetings are supposed to be paid $20 a meeting from the county for their time, but in January all stipends went unpaid until roughly May, according to Juanita Spotted-Elk, a member of the coalition. Leo Flor, director of the county Department of Community and Human Services, whose office was in charge of providing stipends, said they were delayed because of a change in the county’s “internal process.”

But leading members of the coalition feel this is simply one instance in a pattern of sidelining people with lived experience, not only by county employees, but nonprofit leaders and elected officials closely involved in homelessness work. Coalition members would like to choose who sits in the seats reserved for people with lived experience on the governing committee. But the final version of the Inter-Local Agreement creating the committee and the authority gave that power instead to a board of mostly nonprofit leaders, called the Continuum of Care Board, who would consider, but not be bound by the coalition’s recommendations.

Of the three people the Lived Experience Coalition’s leadership team recommended for the governing seat positions, only one was eventually appointed by the Continuum of Care Board — and the two others nominated weren’t even members of the Coalition (although they have since joined). "At their whim, the (Continuum of Care) Advisory Board could remove the leaders with lived experience off of those seats, could determine how long the tenure is in those seats. And so they have a lot of power and control,” said Lamont Green, a co-founder and interim co-chair of the Lived Experience Coalition.

“We’re learning as we go along,” said Sara Levin, who sits on that advisory board and is vice president of United Way of King County. “It’s new muscles we’re stretching as we learn how to share power, and when authority is delegated and when it isn’t.”

The coalition members and other regional homeless authority members are currently writing the bylaws for the authority, where they hope their role can be further enshrined and they can be given more control over the seats. But since their appointments, governing board members with lived experience say they’ve been kept out of the loop, informed sometimes just an hour before about staffing meetings, and not provided meeting materials beforehand, several members said in a governing board meeting in June. Flor said his department, which is in charge of these meetings, was in transition and “working kinks out.”

Why do the Police hate the Black Lives Matter movement?

Let's begin with some hard facts about police brutality in the United States: from MIC.com website

In May, the Washington Post analyzed the 385 fatal police shootings in the United States that had occurred so far in 2015. The Post noted its number, which came out to two officer-involved shooting deaths per day, was more than twice the rate that the government had recorded over the past decade.
2. That same report found blacks to be killed at three times the rate of whites or other minorities.
3. It also found that almost a quarter of those killed were identified as mentally ill by police or family members.
4. The youngest victims at the end of May, according to the Washington Post, were 16 years old (though at the time, nine ages were unknown).
5. Another Washington Post investigation from August found that black men — who constitute 6% of the nation's population — account for 40% of the 60 unarmed people who had been fatally shot by police by that time.
6. The Guardian's The Counted project, which crowdsources and reports on police deaths, analyzed the first half of 2015 to find that an average of three people were killed daily during that time. 
7. Mapping Police Violence found that black people living in Oklahoma were six times more likely to be killed by police than in Georgia.
8. It also found 98% of these events did not end with an officer being charged with a crime.
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In 2015 the police killed at least 246 black people in the U.S. In 2016 the police have killed 160 and counting. Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites. 30 percent of those blacks killed in 2016 were unarmed. Unarmed black people were killed at 5x the rate of unarmed whites in 2015.

To really understand police brutality and fatal shootings of black people, we need to understand the history of the relationship between the police and African Americans. This history directly relates to why modern-day police appear to find it so easy to take a black person's life. History tells us clearly that nearly everything that white people have done to other races involved the conquest of land, the taking of resources and the accumulation of wealth. No educated white person could argue this point. Back in the day they called it names like, "Manifest Destiny" or the Great Westward Expansion beginning with the Louisiana Purchase by Thomas Jefferson from France for fifteen million dollars. For white people, it has ALWAYS been about wealth, power and the control of resources. Skip to the late 1800's right after the very first civil rights act was signed into law: 1865. As a result of the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation, "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free" many whites simply ignored the proclamation and in their anger they started an epic campaign of lynching, murdering of black men, and rape of so many innocent African American women. All of this under the auspices of the various local police precincts in the South. The Ku Klux Klan operated during these times almost completely unhindered and was responsible for the murder of thousands and blacks while the police stood by and did nothing - and often helped the KKK in their killing sprees. Please see: Here for detailed information on this phenomenon.

Implicit Bias

Implicit bias studies have become popular of late because people are asking why. Why in a post-modern era are black men being brutalized, shot and killed by those who are supposed to "protect and serve" Our men in blue have a legacy of violence towards blacks that I believe is so ingrained that in situations that appear to be non-life threatening to everyone else (via webcam) can be a reason for a police officer to pull out his gun and start shooting. Add outdated training to that scenario and a black man usually ends up dead or shot several times. This is fact. A white police officer is still only a white man whose position gives him the power to kill when necessary. It would be absolutely idiotic to believe that a white guy in or out of a police uniform is somehow immune to what most other whites believe about blacks. We have given them this power and we should be able to hold them to a higher standard of behavior when it comes to fatal interactions with an unarmed civilian. Instead, the police are given the benefit of the doubt to the point that they are nearly always exonerated for any kind of excessive force, police brutality or fatal shooting of a civilian. A prime example of implicit bias is the police officer who recently shot a black man on the ground with his hands up in the air in surrender. When the man asked the police officer why he shot him, the officer answered, "I  don't know"

Why do we give them this kind of power, yet do not hold them responsible when they are wrong? Two reasons: First, most people are just scared. Scared of violent confrontations because they are not accustomed to them - especially whites. I know very few white guys who can actually handle themselves if they were to get into a physical confrontation. Moreover, I sincerely believe that most whites actually don't think black lives matter as much as white lives. In fact, it has been proven scientifically through research done by Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt of Harvard University. This bias is clearly shown in our court system when black men get longer prison sentences than whites for the same crime with the same or similar criminal background! Most Americans think blacks are not being discriminated against in rental housing, buying a car, buying a home, getting insurance, yet study after study have show blacks are discriminated against in all of the above mentioned situations and more, like education where it has been proven that black youth get kicked out of school more than whites for the same type of behavior, are reprimanded more harshly for the same type of behavior exhibited by white youth. These are facts. Most white people's perception of blacks is skewed by the media portrayal of blacks being lazy, unmotivated, and violent, i.e. Black Rage.

 Let me answer the black rage question. Blacks, or any other normal individual would not have rage if what happened 400 years ago wasn't still happening. Not slavery obviously, but discrimination and latent racism. Now, whites, ask yourself this question: If someone brutally killed your parents and your entire family a long, long time ago would you be able to get over it after say... 60 or 70 years. You would at least be able to function normally on a daily basis, and chances are pretty good you would be able to move on by now and not let it keep you down. But what if that person lived next door to you and constantly verbally reminded you of what happened, people look at you funny in the store because they think you might lash out in rage at any moment, you see commercials on t.v. that remind you of it, you hear it on the radio, you keep getting reminded of how it happened and how much that person doesn't care that it happened because it was so long ago. That would make it extremely hard to forget, and definitely impossible to forgive. It might even affect your ability to do other things like work effectively, or study if you happen to be in school.

Compare the police force to the supreme court: courts conclusions changed over time because the justices are voted into office and their opinions can evolve based upon evolving public mores, congressional laws and changing interpretations of the constitution. Police are accountable to no one, are not voted into the position, have the power to kill, and bank of the average person's fear of violence to justify violence they administer. They have a history of hunting and killing black people - all they need is the media to keep creating images of blacks as dangerous and they can continue killing us in the name of public safety. That is why Black lives don't matter to the police!