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City of Seattle Nearly Gifted BLM an Entire Police Station During Summer of 2020 Riots

Neil Campbell
Neil lives in Canada and writes about society and politics.
Published: February 1, 2022
The City of Seattle under former Democrat Mayor Jenny Durkan nearly gifted Black Lives Matter an entire police station in the summer of 2020 riots.
Rioters outside of the Seattle Police Departments East Precinct during the summer of 2020 riots. Former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s administration drafted a resolution to gift the East Precinct to Black Lives Matter, documents reveal. (Image: David Ryder/Getty Images)

The administration for the former Mayor of Seattle ordered the draft of a resolution that would have donated an entire police station, worth more than $5 million USD, to the city’s Black Lives Matter chapter, a new report by a local news outlet revealed. 

Jenny Durkan, a former U.S. District Attorney who served as Mayor of Seattle from 2017 until December of 2021, received an email from Department of Finance and Administrative Services (FAS) Director Calvin Goings during the afternoon of June 8, 2020 which stated, “Please see the attached documents as requested,” enclosing a trio of draft memos in addition to a resolution.

The resolution as drafted contained a series of “whereas” clauses containing boilerplate socialist rhetoric about systemic racism and injustice against the black community in the wake of violence and vandalism spurned by the pretext of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.

Notably, Durkan’s office referred to the Seattle-King County chapter of Black Lives Matter, an organization whose founders have openly admitted roots as trained Marxist revolutionaries, as “a grassroots, volunteer-run, social-justice nonprofit organization focused on the empowerment and liberation of Blacks and other people of color through advocacy and direct action.”

Following the platitudes, the resolution sought to donate the Seattle Police Department East Precinct to BLMSKC, including the “ongoing maintenance of the building as needed” to the organization.

FURTHER READING:

The story, broken by the Seattle Times in a Jan. 31-updated article, is significant. June 8 was the same day that the unabated siege of rioters caused the East Precinct to be evacuated after “more than a week of intense protests, including standoffs over multiple nights between police and protesters at barricades around the precinct.”

The area became the home of the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), a so-called “autonomous zone” where the City’s rule of law was eliminated in favor of a localized Marxist-anarchist welfare state

The Times reported that by June 15, BLMSKC wrote to Durkan and other city leaders, demanding that “the precinct be ceded to the organization as part of a process to repurpose the building with Public Health—Seattle & King County for community needs.”

BLMSKC stated in the letter they had the wherewithal to “contribute $2 million for renovations and $4 million to help support operations.”

Although the FAS indeed spent man hours and resources on examining ways to donate a key law enforcement position to a self-proclaimed racial justice organization culminating in a series of memos issued by Goings’s department two days later on July 17, Durkan ultimately announced the CHOP was finished on June 22 “after a weekend of shootings” in the zone.

Seattle Police did not actually reclaim their precinct until July 1, however.

According to the Times, when Durkan made the announcement, the Democrat clung tightly to the rhetoric of converting the department into something more flowery, “I truly believe we can reimagine the space, a shared space, including a community room in the East Precinct and things in and around Capitol Hill.”

The prosaicism inevitably did not bear any fruit. 

A representative of the Seattle PD notably confirmed to the outlet that they were kept in the dark about the behind-closed-doors activities to transfer their precinct to BLM, “We were not aware of any plans on the city’s part to permanently leave the precinct, or any plans to share the space with the community.”

While a spokesperson for the former Mayor told the Times, “The very preliminary work by FAS and the realities of policing confirmed it was neither feasible nor in the best interest of public safety” was the reason to not submit the motion to Seattle Council for a vote, former Deputy Mayor Casey Sixkiller stated otherwise during a civil suit.

Testifying under oath during a deposition, the Times paraphrased Sixkiller as claiming the transfer option only fell through “after [BLM] decided they didn’t want the property,” and that “It was a coincidence that the draft resolution was shared on the same afternoon the precinct was abandoned.”