The members of the Seattle Police Department just got to a new level of outrage after the latest email they received from the city’s finance department. The communication was exposed by a local radio station and the all-staff email demeans Seattle police as “white supremacists”.
What’s worse, when the department was called out for its message, officials didn’t hesitate to defend it, as The Blaze reports.
How did it all happen?
KTTH-AM host Jason Rantz revealed the inflammatory text on Tuesday . He labeled the communication as an “unhinged email.” The message was sent to the entire staff of the Seattle Department of Finance and Administrative Services, or FAS, and it described Seattle police as “white supremacists.”
The sender was the “FAS Change Team.” The message was written by Daniel Holmberg, a FAS senior management systems analyst, according to The Blaze.
“White supremacy thrives without consequences” was the title and it was put under the heading “Black Lives Matter: A message and resources from the Change Team.”
Holmberg and his Change Team claimed that they did not mean to “paint all police with a broad brush.” However, the message started with an attack on law enforcement saying the police “serve the false gods of white supremacy and are not worthy of the power they wield.”
Cops who show restraint “only to white people are no longer guardians; they are mercenaries, paid in the wages of white privilege, inflicting their wicked commandments upon us,” Holmberg wrote.
Despite insisting that his claims dd not taint all cops, he wrote that “it strains the boundaries of credulity to believe that these are isolated issues, confined to a few bad apples.”
He went on to say that “white supremacists” are attracted to careers in law enforcement because “they get to use brute force to harm and restrain people of color and know their 'thin blue line' will encircle and defend them, no matter what.”
“They wear the uniform like camouflage, hiding in plain sight. I respect and hold gratitude for the service of anyone who does so with honor, but the dignity and duty espoused by the badge do not come with the badge; they need to be earned on the back of righteous deeds.
We talk about ignorance, unconscious bias, and the invisible systems that perpetuate racial inequity. But what about explicit bias? What about intentional, premeditated racism that is celebrated and rewarded? This racism cannot be scapegoated to fear or misplaced anger, or even economic anxiety. It is a deeply rooted, marvelously disguised, desire to harm non-white people. White supremacists hold positions of authority and influence. They make the arrests and file the reports; they testify as expert witnesses, and they control the custody of evidence.”
“We're not asking you to shoot guilty white people the way you shoot innocent Black people, we're asking you to protect innocent black people the way you protect guilty white people,” Holmberg concluded.
How did the police react?
The police officers certainly didn’t hold back their reactions to such an attack.
“This is a prime example of why officers are leaving the force in droves. There is absolutely zero support in this city. Now we have the people who work on our buildings and cars treating us like we are a public enemy,” one officer told Rantz.
“The email is inappropriate and full of misleading inaccuracies and over-generalizations,” was another reaction form an officer.
“If any SPD employee made disparaging remarks about another group of people, they would be under a full bias investigation, yet this individual gets to spew this hateful rhetoric to an entire division of city employees with no consequences. Articles like this one cause division and hate towards a group of people. To say they don't mean to paint all officers with the same brush while at the same time painting all officers with the same brush is hypocritical and reckless,” was how another police officer saw the double standard.
How did the city department defend the email?
When confronted about the content of the email, the city department went ahead and defended it.
“If we have learned anything from the past year, when COVID-19 disproportionately ravaged communities of color and the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others laid bare how entrenched systemic racism is in our country, it is that we cannot afford to stay comfortable.
Staying comfortable is costing lives, specifically black lives, and we stand behind our Change Team for keeping us accountable and challenging all of us to learn, to re-examine, to grow and, above all, to act in this urgent work,” FAS spokeswoman Melissa Mixon told Rantz in an email about the communication addressed to the Seattle Police Department.