Photo by Daniel Nash
Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole addresses members and attendees at the African American Community Advisory Council forum on Thursday, July 21.
By Daniel Nash
City Living Editor
In July 2015, satirical news website The Onion, responding to a run of publicized police slayings of black men in the U.S., published an article bearing the title “Black Man Bids Tearful Goodbye To Family Before Daily Commute.”
But to real-life men and fathers like Sean Connor, the reality of “driving while black” — to work or anywhere else — isn’t a joke.
“The mentality I have to have just to commute from my house to a building in Redmond is stressful,” Connor said.
Connor, a senior consultant for an IT firm and former community relations manager for the Seattle Storm, said he has no criminal record, yet police have approached him multiple times in public spaces while he was going about his day — such as talking to a friend outside the grocery store.
Andre Hochstetter didn’t have to venture out in public to have a bad experience with police.
“I’ve been held at gunpoint in the middle of the living room of the home I own in Seattle,” he said.
Hochstetter said American police departments would have to stop “circling the wagons” and come to terms with their history of brutality against the black community before he could teach his children to trust officers of the law.
Connor and Hochstetter were two of dozens to show up for a meeting of the African American Community Advisory Council at the Seattle Vocational Institute July 21. Departing from its standard agenda, the meeting took the form of an open discussion between Seattleites and Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole, who had just returned from a law enforcement conference in Washington, D.C.
The discussion was held in the wake of a series of highly public shootings of black men by police — such as the slaying of Philando Castile by an officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, livestreamed on Facebook — as well as testimony from black Seattle police officers in a civil trial filed by their former sergeant in the South Precinct.
Photo by Daniel Nash
Pamela Banks, president of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, said she wanted to see a return to a “community policing.”
In the lawsuit, Sgt. Ella Elias and two other officers claimed they were unfairly punished after she complained about black subordinates being favored for overtime shifts.
O’Toole maintained she transferred the three officers because the environment between officers and their supervisors in the South Precinct had become “a tinderbox.”
The jury in the case awarded Elias nearly $2 million on Monday, July 25.
Meeting attendee Fiola Johnson is the mother of Officer Wayne Johnson, who testified in the civil trial on July 19. Johnson said it was difficult to hear Elias’ claims against her son and other black officers, as well as to hear so little about their side of the story in the media.
“I was the only person sitting on that side, representing those four police officers,” she said.
O’Toole said she understood Johnson’s frustration. She said both she and the black officers in the precinct had become targets of slander as the lawsuit unfurled.
“There were a lot of lies, outright lies, told,” O’Toole said as she described how she had been painted as a career climber using the Seattle Police Department as a rung toward a more prestigious position.
“There were stories I heard that I only rented furniture here, that my husband was still on the East Coast,” O’Toole, a Massachusetts native, said.
Many at the meeting said they were concerned about policing that unfairly targeted ethnic minority groups.
Some thought the problem, at least in part, was a disconnect between officers of the peace and the citizens they’re sworn to protect.
“I think we need to go back to community policing,” said Pamela Banks, president of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle. “Where people know their police officers.”
South Precinct Captain John Hayes, who is African-American, agreed. He said officers like himself had a difficult but important role bridging the gap between police and and the black community.
O’Toole said she saw things improving in the long term. She noted that minority applicants to the department were up 30 percent in 2015 and that officers were undergoing cultural sensitivity and bias training.
But Connor and others said they thought “long term” was too long to wait.
“The anger, frustration and fear that I have … We shouldn’t live like this,” Connor said. “I don’t want to hear about long-term solutions right now. I want officers to be forced into a room with black men 18 to 29 and hear their frustration and pain.”
