Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best has been run out of town. The white liberals of Seattle drove away their black police chief, but I guess we’re just going to ignore that, right? This is what happens when you play the identity politics game. You’re eventually going to look like an idiot. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Still, we simply cannot let this terrible irony go. The white told a black cop to get out simply because she wanted to—I don’t know—do her job. The council did everything it could to make her job all but impossible. They tried to ban the use of crowd control devices. Best even showed that these protests were really just unhinged Marxists rioting in the city, unveiling a van impounded by police that contained a variety of weapons that were most likely distributed to agitators during the city’s rioting. That’s terrorism.
With the city council now slashing the police department, Best decided she had enough of the council’s insane leftism and bolted. The Democratic Party hates cops hate law and order, and pretty much will facilitate the destruction of cities and try to weaponize that against Trump. We have little Emperor Neros setting fires everywhere. For any police officer out there, there are more people who support you enforcing the law and keeping order. Back the Blue is stronger and more widespread than Black Lives Matter, which is really a Marxist leech on society. Yet, when it comes to some pockets of the country, it’s the Democrats you may hate you more.
Regarding the ouster of Ms. Best, well, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board was not going to let the disturbing aspect of her departure slide:
From the beginning of the unrest she has been one of the city’s rare voices of reason, opposing, for example, the city’s surrender of a police precinct to protesters in the so-called Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) area.
But instead of supporting her, Seattle’s progressive political class has undermined her at every turn. While Chief Best complained that CHOP was preventing police from responding to reports of violent crime, Mayor Jenny Durkan called it a “summer of love” on national TV. When Chief Best wrote to the City Council to argue that limiting the police use of tools such as tear gas and pepper spray to control crowds left them with few alternatives, she was ignored. When she asked the City Council to condemn “aggressive protestors” who targeted her home, she was ignored again.
On Monday this same council approved a budget that included cutting salaries for Chief Best and 12 other police leaders, cutting the police budget by $4 million for the remainder of this year, eliminating funding for 100 officers and reducing the budget for SWAT teams. The sole dissenting vote came from Kshama Sawant, who voted no because she thought the cuts didn’t go far enough.
In the name of Black Lives Matter the progressives in Seattle have now pushed out a black police chief. In so doing they have revealed that their efforts are not an attempt to correct police abuses but an attack on policing itself. Good for Chief Best for resigning rather than trying to do a job that Seattle’s political class is actively trying to stop her and her fellow officers from doing.
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We wish Chief Best a happy retirement. And if Seattle burns to the ground because social workers can’t enforce law and order, they deserve it. They deserve to lose everything.
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