Seattle’s Office of Inspector General for Public Safety has released the second in a series of five painstaking and sometimes frustratingly methodical analyses part of the city’s official review of public safety implications from 2020’s Black Lives Matter and anti-police protests and the Seattle Police Department’s flawed response to the unrest.

The focus of Wave 2: Mostly 11th and Pine.

The takeaways from the 23-member community panel for Wave 2: Massive distrust of SPD and the department’s flawed actions led to the transformation of Black Lives Matter protests into anti-police demonstrations, and tactics including tear gas, blast balls, and fixed barriers blocking streets made an unsafe environment for police, protesters, and residents of the surrounding Capitol Hill neighborhood.

While the Wave 1 report examined the dates of May 29th to June 1st, 2020 when the seeds were planted for weeks of protests including the CHOP occupied protest and came away with findings critical of SPD responses and tactics that contributed to the unrest, the Wave 2 report, below, examines what came next as citywide demonstrations were focused on Capitol Hill and the demonstrations quickly shifted leading to the establishment of CHOP.

“By the start of Wave 2,” the Wave 2 report reads, “what had begun as a broad social movement against systemic racism and police brutality had evolved into a more focused statement from many in the community against SPD’s legitimacy and its ability to control crowd movements.”

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Former Chief Best at a press conference at CHOP in the summer of 2020 (Image: CHS)

A Seattle City Council committee meeting Tuesday morning included calls for training and policy changes but also opened the door to a wider ranging probe connecting the so-called “improper ruse” of the Proud Boys disinformation effort to the decision to abandon the East Precinct and other operations by the Seattle Police Department during the summer of 2020 in which investigators have identified and sometimes recommended discipline for lower ranking commanders and officers for their parts in the inappropriate and often dangerous actions while citing a lack of documentation and oversight at the department’s highest levels including then Chief Carmen Best and current interim Chief Adrian Diaz.

“People in the high command didn’t know about things,” Councilmember Andrew Lewis said during his questions to Andrew Myerberg, director of the city’s Office of Police Accountability. “At what point should people have known?”

Tuesday’s meeting of the council’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee was the first public hearing following last week’s delayed release of the OPA report on findings that former Assistant Chief Bryan Grenon, as head of the department’s Special Operations Center convened to manage the city’s response to the 2020 protest, signed off on a dangerous disinformation ploy targeting demonstrators as the CHOP protest zone formed on Capitol Hill.

Committee chair Lisa Herbold said her focus was on policies and the use of “ruses” that she said are legal under state law but “need additional oversight and must be documented.”

But the OPA director said, while he shared Herbold’s concerns about policy, he agreed with Lewis that the larger concern about the Proud Boy radio ruse in which officers were approved to broadcast false reports of an armed right wing group headed for Capitol Hill as the protest camp formed wasn’t about the use of a tactic that can be appropriate “in the context of a criminal investigation” but about Seattle Police officers deploying an intentional disinformation campaign. Continue reading →