Durkan addressing a crowd of protesters in May 2020 as Fire Chief Scoggins looks on

Who ordered the abandonment of the East Precinct? If the answer is in the text messages of Mayor Jenny Durkan, former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, or Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, we may never know.

Texts from the three key Seattle leaders from the critical weeks last June around the formation of the Capitol Hill protest zone and the decision for Seattle Police to pull out of the East Precinct have gone missing city officials and lawyers suing the city say, the Seattle Times reports:

The Fire Department didn’t immediately comment Friday evening. The Police Department didn’t provide a reason Best’s messages are gone. Best retired in September and now appears on television as a law enforcement analyst. “SPD turned over all requested phones to the City Attorney’s Office,” the department said in a statement. “SPD understands that the vendor hired by the City Attorney’s Office to retrieve data advised that it was unable to retrieve Chief Best’s text messages for a period of time. While SPD understands that the City Attorney’s Office has been in communication with Chief Best on this point, SPD is not able to comment substantively on matters relating to pending litigation.”

The Times says Durkan’s chief of staff said the mayor’s missing texts were an “unknown technology issue” and the city “hired a consultant to conduct forensic work on Durkan’s phones, but the consultant has yet to write an analysis on what happened.” A log from the city’s service provider was used to recreate some of the mayor’s text records but not all, the mayor’s office says.

The revelations come as lawsuits over last summer’s protests and the CHOP protest zone mount and journalist’s requests for public information releases come due, throwing the Durkan administration’s information and document retention policies into new, troubling light.

Litigation being pursued against the city includes this civil rights lawsuit brought on behalf of protesters including Capitol Hill activist Summer Taylor who was hit and killed during a protest on I-5, this federal suit brought on behalf of property owners and businesses over the city’s handling of CHOP, and the latest major federal civil rights lawsuit brought on behalf of the family of Lorenzo Anderson, the 19-year-old shot and killed last June at 10th and Pine on the edge of the CHOP protest area.

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