They have declared “systemic racism” a public health emergency. Do they realize that they are that system?
The Board of Health is a composite of Port Townsend’s political and economic elite. Only one of of its members does not have a city mailing address. They represent what passes for our local ruling class.
If there is “systemic racism” they are to blame. They run the show. They make the laws and regulations. They have set the narrative and governed the society they now condemn as sick.
In their resolution, passed October 15, 2020, with only one dissenting vote and a minor edit, they commit themselves to healing themselves. The resolution is really all about them, anyway. It is their ritual self debasement. Maybe they need redemption. Maybe they just want to show how virtuous they can be in a Mandala Center for Change acting-out-sort-of-way. Over a year ago they had suggested putting the whole Board of Health through one of Racism Central’s cultish indoctrination workshops. The Mandala Center is where you go in Port Townsend to become a racist, or hone your pre-existing racism, and emerge with a complicating symptom of tedious self-righteousness. I hope to be writing more about that down the line.
The Board members commit to ongoing work around race and equity such as participating in racial equity training, engaging and being responsive to communities and residents impacted by racism as partners in identifying and implementing solutions, establishing an agreed upon understanding of racial equity principles to work towards antiracist policies and practices and to serve as ambassadors of racial equity work, seeking diversity in board membership, the need to include voices of people of color when addressing issues of racism, and to hold one another accountable to addressing implicit biases of all kinds.
That’s from the Board of Health’s systemic racism declaration. The treatment will require more than a few weeks at a re-education camp. Of course, taxpayers will be paying for their therapy sessions while the Board of Health continues to ignore Jefferson County’s real health crises: joblessness, poverty, addiction, depression, despair and suicide.
The Board of Health already has before it a simple first step towards correcting its racist ways. But they won’t take it.
They endorsed Black Genocide and chose to honor an organization created to control, reduce and eventually exterminate Black Americans.
I wrote in June about their decision to celebrate a full century of Planned Parenthood’s work, including its racist and eugenicist origins. (“Black Lives Don’t Matter: Systemic Racism in the Jefferson County Public Health Department“) For most of its history Planned Parenthood was led by Margaret Sanger, whom everyone who is not lying to themselves knows was an avowed racist. Heck, she was a popular speaker at gatherings of the Ku Klux Klan. She wrote openly of how Black people were at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder. She is still the organization’s spiritual and intellectual inspiration. Their highest award is today named after the woman who warned White women that Black men could not help but be rapists because it was in their primitive nature.
Our racist Board of Health members effectively held up her work and writings and said, “Right on! You go, girl!”
Does this make them racist? Yup. We don’t want to toss that word around as recklessly as CNN does. But seriously, nobody made them celebrate Sanger’s work. They chose to bake the cake for her ugly baby’s 100th birthday.
More and more Black Americans are condemning Planned Parenthood and Sanger’s deplorable beliefs. I wrote about that in the article linked in the preceding paragraph. Since then, new, louder and more prominent Black voices have spoken against the implementation of Sanger’s planned Black Genocide through her institutional offspring. The latest voice joining that chorus is Kanye West who spoke on a podcast to Josh Rogan’s almost 20 million followers. “We’re in a genocide,” West declared as he called out Planned Parenthood’s program to kill Black babies.
“Let me talk about Planned Parenthood. There’s the last figure I saw is there were 210,000 deaths that’s due to COVID in America. And everywhere you go, you see someone with a mask on … With abortion culture, there are 1,000 Black children aborted a day,” he said. “So, more Black children have died in the past, since February, than people have died of COVID, and everyone wears a mask,” he continued. “So, it’s a matter of where are we turning a blind eye to?”
Dear Board of Health, remember, ALL Black lives matter. Your silence is violence.
Of course, the Board of Health may not be hearing Kanye West or other Black voices saying that abortion is killing them at numbers greater than those killed in the North American slave trade. Why? Because, to quote Joe Biden, “they ain’t Black.”
If you want to see real racism, look at how White liberals react to Black conservatives. They ignore them. Or they ridicule and attack them to deter others from jumping off the intellectual plantation.
That’s what you will hear from Black conservatives who have been on the receiving end of White liberal racism. Larry Elder’s, “Uncle Tom” documentary tells their story. It is eye opening for it shows (1) the rich intellectual, philosophical and political diversity of Black America that is ignored by establishment media; (2) the brilliance, eloquence and determination of conservative Black Americans; and (3) the sordid truth that liberal America is in fact the source of any systemic racism that exists in this nation. The photo at the top shows Elder with some of the scholars and activists featured in his film. These are your therapists, dear Board of Health.
“I will not pretend to be a victim in this country,” says Candace Owens in the film. “I know that makes many people on the Left uncomfortable.”
We hear that getting uncomfortable is the first step for Whites to shake off their White supremacy. Hey, Board of Health, this may be something you really need to hear. If you have the courage to listen.
“At their core, the White liberal is the ultimate narcissist,” says Owens. “It’s the people who adopt animals for the purpose of saying, ‘I adopted an animal.’ Like, to them we are these pathetic, cute little playthings that they can then take to their friends and say, ‘Look at this person that I helped.'”
Uncomfortable yet? Here’s more self-awareness therapy for the Board of Health:
It is the Democrat Party, the party of every member of the Board of Health, that spread slavery across the country and provoked a bloody Civil War to preserve it. Like they chose to embrace Sanger, they have chosen to give their loyalty to this party. The party of the Board of the Health lynched Blacks, burned their homes and blocked them from participating in American democracy and prosperity for over a hundred years after Appomattox. The Board of Health belongs to the party of the Klan and Jim Crow. Democrats are responsible for the 1994 federal crime bill authored by Joe Biden, a friend to segregationists throughout his Senate career. This legislation, passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by a Democrat President sent a generation of Black Americans to prison when White Americans committing equivalent crimes got probation as punishment. The Board of Health is of the party that creates and maintains urban plantations of despair wherever it has monopoly power over city politics.
The Board of Health says it wants to change the way it thinks about Black Americans and racism. They don’t need a reeducation camp. They can all watch Elder’s “Uncle Tom” and take their first step on the path to healing what’s wrong with them.
And they can revoke their celebration and endorsement of the racist legacy of Planned Parenthood. Easy peazy, if the will is there.
Cheaper than a brainwashing session at the Mandala Center ($150 for an online workshop), Elder’s excellent, critically-acclaimed documentary is available on DVD for only $17. I am ordering a copy for the Board of Health. They can pass it around and begin to purge themselves of the systemic racism they believe they have helped graft onto this county of wonderful, kind, people. I really hope the Board of Health members will watch Elder’s video. It would be racist not to.
Lesson 1. Here is an out take from the film that convicts White liberals for what they are doing to Black Americans. “I can change a bigot faster than I can change a patronizing liberal,” says Robert L. Woodson at the beginning and its gets more and more uncomfortable for White liberals from there. But that’s good, right? https://youtu.be/YvIVSe8VH0w
Iran is actively supporting Joe Biden’s run for the White House. Both the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence have confirmed that Iran is attempting to interfere in the election to favor Biden’s candidacy. The latest covert actions to surface were fake messages meant to scare Democrat voters. They were dressed up as messages from the Proud Boys, but were actually written by Iran’s espionage and terrorist cadres.
Local Democrats not long ago demonstrated their support for the Ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guards of Iran, even if it came at the expense of American lives. After President Trump ordered a missile strike to prevent a terrorist attack against American troops, local Democrats flooded the internet with memes supporting Iran. One meme circulated widely purported to be a joke calling for Iran to bomb the location in Florida where the President keeps a house.
What was funny about that? Imagine in another time calling for Hitler’s war machine to bomb FDR’s retreat on the Hudson. Not so funny then. Not funny now. The Iranian theocratic dictatorship is a murderous oppressor of women, and ethnic and religious minorities. It is the world’s leading, and most blood thirsty sponsor of terrorism. About ten thousand Iranian women yearly are beaten and imprisoned for clothing issues. Women charged with adultery are still murdered. Iran denies that the Holocaust ever happened and is committed to the violent destruction of Israel and Jews everywhere.
Gary B. Larson serves as the “external communications” director for the Jefferson County Democrats. He is the elected Precinct Committee Officer for Precinct 703. He has managed the Jefferson County Democrats Facebook page and works at their campaign store in Port Townsend.
At a time when Iran was preparing to launch missile attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, he made the Iranian flag the profile image for his Facebook page. And he put up this message, which I saved because it shocked me and should have shocked any American. He was cheering on the Iranian military as it prepared to kill to Americans.
Iran did launch its attack. Thankfully, our troops were prepared and none were killed. A major terrorist was eliminated, innocent lives were saved, and Democrats were disappointed.
The Obama/Biden Administration gave Iran over $1 billion in cash and let them get hundreds of millions of dollars that had been frozen in U.S. and foreign accounts due to their support for terrorism and the taking of U.S. hostages. The Obama/Biden administration let the Iranian pro-democracy movement be crushed, without once raising a finger to support a people demanding freedom and liberty. President Trump reversed U.S. policy and isolated Iran, while increasing sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy and curtailed its violent aggression. Arab states that fear Iran’s militarism have joined with Israel and the United States in a number of treaties and reciprocal trade and travel agreements. Israel and Bahrain are opening embassies in each other’s capitals. Morocco, Egypt, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia and now Sudan are joining an alliance the Trump administration is building to further isolate Iran.
Iran wants a friend again in the White House. Jefferson County Democrats want Iran to get its wish.
Leaders of the local group telling our community how the police should do their job have no training or experience in law enforcement and criminal justice. But they have been frequent subjects of police calls for assistance and the subjects of arrests.
I have obtained their Port Townsend police records. These are public records. I have also requested their records from the Jefferson and Clallam County Sheriff Offices, and am awaiting a response. I do know that one prominent Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County organizer has a felony record for a vehicular theft compounded by a police chase in which he struck a horse then led police on a foot chase. He objects to the fact they had to draw their weapons to make him stop running. That incident occurred when he was a minor. But his contacts with police did not stop then.
I am not going to name these people because the purpose here is not to cause embarrassment or trouble with employment. The purpose here is to let our community know who is driving this defund, disarm and abolish attack on our local law enforcement. These are the people making fantastical accusations about vigilante and white supremacy groups operating in Jefferson County, of Blacks being lynched here, of an incurably racist, oppressive system that can only be fixed by tearing it down and turning it over to “the people.”
These are the people who have attacked the character and integrity, the professionalism and the humanity of our police officers and deputies. Just who are they?
Each of the described incidents comes straight from Port Townsend Police incident and case reports.
The Arrests
Attempted Residential Burglary
A Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County organizer was arrested for attempted residential burglary on March 15 of this year. A resident of Polk Street called 911 to report that a man was trying to open their front door and would not leave. The homeowner had felt the need to arm himself. This person kept banging on the door and demanding to enter, according to the transcript of the 911 call, for a full 5 or 6 minutes, even when told police had been called. He left the porch as police approached and was stopped about half a block away. He matched the description in the 911 call and was positively identified by the homeowner who had been looking directly at him through the front door window as he tried to get in. The BLM organizer said the homeowner was lying and he had just been riding his bike past the house. A police officer confronted him with the fact the house in question was at the dead end of street, at the edge of a cliff, so there was no way he could have been “just riding by.” He was known to the police from prior incidents (described below) and lived on the opposite side of town.
The BLM organizer, according to police reports, “was obviously intoxicated by the way he spoke” with “the strong odor of intoxicants coming off him.” Police took him first to the hospital emergency room for clearance. The BLM organizer did not understand why he was under arrest “and did not seem to understand that trying to get into someone’s home was a crime.” He demanded that his “mom and dad” be brought to the hospital, was told he could call them from jail, then insisted that he had the right to have his parents there. The officer told him that, as this individual was over 30 years old, he had no right to have his parents brought to him, but did have a right to an attorney.
He began telling the officer he was “a dick” and “a piece of shit” and refused to stand up. The officer needed the assistance of hospital security to get him to his feet, at which point the BLM organizer told the officer, “you know what’s funny? You’re a piece of shit.” The interchange was recorded by the officer.
Bench Warrants, Repeated Arrests and Other Police Contacts
A current, prominent Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County organizer was arrested in May 2016 on a warrant out of Jefferson County District Court for failure to appear at a hearing on the charge of driving on suspended license. He was rearrested three days later for the same underlying offense–driving on a suspended license, with the additional charge of possession of a controlled substance. Just over a year later, the BLM organizer was arrested again for driving on a suspended license. In addition, Port Townsend police–the same police he now accuses of inherent, incurable racism–as a courtesy let him know in 2018 that a warrant out of Port Angeles had been issued for his arrest and encouraged him to respond responsibly instead of taking him into custody once more.
This BLM organizer was a subject in a call involving a domestic dispute between two couples. His actions amounted to assault but he was let off with a lecture instead of being charged and arrested. The officer observed in his report that all four individuals in the altercation appeared to be under the influence of marijuana. This individual was also involved in another domestic dispute call the previous year and accused of having made threats.
A local Black Lives Matter spokesperson has been caught multiple times violating traffic safety laws. Port Townsend police, as is their policy, sought to educate rather than punish him. In these incidents he was stopped and warned about lacking a front license plate, riding a bicycle at night without any front or rear lights, running a red light at night and having no valid identification.
This individual was the subject of a night time 911 call from an employee of a downtown business. He reported someone with a bicycle yelling “in a weird way” and hearing “thumping,” which conceivably was him banging on parked cars. The responding officer observed that this person “HBD” (had been drinking”) and fell off his bike as he attempted to pick up money he had dropped. He refused a ride home from the officer.
Calling Police for Help
Black Lives Matter organizers who have called for abolishing police and accused them of racism just by being police have not been reluctant to call for and accept help from those same police when they need it.
A prominent Black Lives Matter organizer has made no less than eight calls requesting police assistance dealing with transients, vandalism, a suspicious person, a dog, and, in a desperate call for help, pleading with police to find his girlfriend who was evading court ordered drug therapy. He wanted police to take her into custody over night then put her on the bus that would take her to her treatment facility. Police had no probable cause to take her into custody but did undertake a search for her out of concern for her safety.
A Black Lives Matter organizer has twice called police for help when he felt he was being threatened.
A Black Lives Matter organizer’s passport was dropped off at the police department. Police tried to find him, could not, so they left the passport with his brother.
Coming to the Rescue
On August 5, 2020, a 911 call from a woman living across the street from Fort Worden State Park reported a crash and a man stumbling at the front entrance. The 911 log reflects concern that this individual was injured and may have a broken knee. The Fort Worden Ranger did not respond and State Highway patrol was not available, so a Port Townsend police officer went to the scene. He found a bicycle crumpled “like a soda can” and the post that secured the front gate dented and pushed back, causing a rut in the pavement at its base. A Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County organizer was bleeding from a knee and hand and smelled of marijuana. It appeared to the officer that he may have urinated on himself. This person gave a fake name and only truthfully identified himself when the officer assured him he would not be arrested for DUI on a bicycle. He made up a story about a phantom car side-swiping him. A witness to the accident said there had been no car present before the crash. It was clear to the officer what had happened: this individual who smelled of marijuana had been traveling at a high rate of speed down the Cherry Street hill and ran head on into the closed gate. A tire mark on the damaged stop sign on the gate showed the point of impact. The area was dark, without any overhead lights. He was not wearing his eyeglasses and did not have a front light on his bicycle.
No Complaints of Racism or Abusive Conduct
In all twenty-nine contacts between police and Black Lives Matter organizers, not one complaint was lodged that the police had acted in a racist or abusive manner. Indeed, in the data supplied by the Port Townsend police to the City Council’s ad hoc Committee on Public Safety and Law Enforcement, there is not one complaint that police have mistreated anyone because of race, skin color or ethnicity. Going back to 2017, there are only eight complaints. Some are comical, such as a person who had accosted an officer not appreciating the officer’s joke that they could be charged with “illegal finger pointing.” All were investigated, including one from a complainant who claimed she had been harassed into pornography and sex by the Chief and was suffering joint pain and muscle spasms due to “dark lasers.” All complaints were determined to be unfounded.
Update as of 4/20/21: The jury has rendered its verdict. In our legal system, unless a court finds reversible error or there is a gross miscarriage of justice, that verdict should be accepted.
Officer Chauvin, I am sorry for rushing to judgment. Like the rest of America I recoiled in horror as I watched the video taken by a bystander of you with your knee on the back of Mr. Floyd’s neck. He died in front of us. It was brutal to watch. And like the rest of America, I jumped to conclusions based on information I didn’t have.
I didn’t know what led up to those last moments. I didn’t know that Mr. Floyd had been out of his mind, incoherent, sweating profusely, not making any sense, struggling, resisting, kicking. He complained he couldn’t breathe while he was standing up outside the patrol car, and also inside the patrol car. But he was able to keep talking without any difficulty whatsoever.
I didn’t know that Mr. Floyd, as the toxicology report would show, had in his blood more than three times the level of fentanyl known to cause death. The toxicologist also found meth and morphine in Mr. Floyd’s blood. I hadn’t known that.
I didn’t know that Mr. Floyd did not die of asphyxiation. Your neck on his knee–he must have suffocated him, is what I and tens of millions believed. But we didn’t know that the autopsy would find there was no injury to his neck. His windpipe had not been constricted, there were no bruises, no sign that his carotid artery had been impinged and his brain denied blood.
I didn’t know, until I read the autopsy, that Mr. Floyd was a very, very sick man, with a terribly bad heart weakened further by a recent attack from the COVID-19 virus.
I didn’t know that there were no life threatening injuries that could explain his death. In other words, I didn’t know that there is no physical evidence that anything you did stopped his heart from beating.
I didn’t know that the officers on the scene had called for an ambulance not once, but twice, requesting that it hurry with lights flashing and siren wailing. I didn’t know that you and the other officers wanted the ambulance because you were concerned Mr. Floyd was suffering excited delirium. Even when I heard this discussion on the officers’ tape recordings, I didn’t know until I looked into it that excited delirium can be fatal, and it kills by a sudden stopping of the heart. I know now that Mr. Floyd’s behavior fit precisely the symptoms of this fatal, drug-induced syndrome.
I didn’t know that your putting a knee on the back of his neck was precisely what you and other Minneapolis police officers had been trained to do to restrain someone showing the signs of excited delirium. You were taught to do this to prevent such a person from harming himself and others and to secure him until the ambulance arrived. The page from your training manual, reproduced at the top of this article, shows you were doing exactly what you had been instructed to do. Placing a knee on the back of the neck is taught as a way to hold someone undergoing Mr. Floyd’s distress and alleviate the risk of asphyxiation.
I didn’t know that there is no reported instance of the method you used to restrain Mr. Floyd having caused death in any other case. I didn’t know that this method of restraint had been reviewed and approved by physicians before becoming part of your training manual.
I have previously said that, when I described Mr. Floyd as a good man in another article, I hadn’t known of his long criminal record, and that he had led a violent home invasion. I didn’t know he had disguised himself as a utility worker to gain entrance into the home then shoved a handgun in a woman’s stomach, and ransacked the house while the woman and her friend screamed as they were being viciously beaten.
I corrected myself then. I want now to correct myself for ever saying you were “a bad apple,” or things like “just because one policeman acted wrongly doesn’t mean we judge others by his misconduct.” With what I know now, from watching all those body cams, the interview of Officer Thao, listening to and reading the transcripts of the audio recordings, and the official autopsy and full toxicology report–I can’t see where you did anything wrong.
I didn’t even realize until last week that the autopsy does not use the word homicide. It does not declare a cause of death but is entitled “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression.”
I had to read that case title twice to understand. It does not say that the actions of law enforcement officers caused cardiopulmonary arrest. Cardiopulmonary arrest is what complicated the way Mr. Floyd was held under control. The autopsy found Mr. Floyd had severe arteriosclerosis and hypertensive heart disease. He had ingested drugs in potentially lethal quantities that stress the heart tremendously. His heart stopped. That is what killed him.
Now that I know better, now that I have actual facts instead of my imagination to fill in the blank spaces, when I watch again the horrible video of Mr. Floyd on the ground and hear him saying, “I can’t breathe,” I realize he is exhibiting no trouble breathing. He is talking the whole time. At no point does he gasp or gulp for air. And now I know that it was Mr. Floyd who asked to lay on the ground when he wanted out of the patrol car, not that you dragged him to the ground for no reason. And I know that he suffered no physical injuries from your actions that in any way jeopardized his life.
I study the video closely and force myself to calm my emotions: it does not appear you ever put your full weight into the knee upon the back of Mr. Floyd’s neck. If you were trying to kill him, as is alleged, you would have tried a lot harder.
I know you will get a trial, but how could anyone be sure it will be a fair trial? So much of the nation instantly hated you–because we didn’t know, well, anything really. We recoiled in horror at a scene police officers and EMTs see far too often in this nation. We can’t relate one bit to having to hold onto someone suffering fentanyl, meth and morphine induced mania, let alone someone weighing over 300 pounds and standing six feet seven inches tall. We don’t put ourselves in the position of trying to arrest or help people like Mr. Floyd. We leave those people and their problems to you. Then from the comfort of our living room couch we judge you with all the time in the world to criticize every step you took under the pressure of the moment.
Our rush to judgment — based on our feelings in watching just a fraction of the encounter — was more about us than anything you did.
I know now that the evidence shows you are innocent of the charge of intentionally killing Mr. Floyd. I know now that the evidence shows you did not negligently cause his death. You and the other officers are going to be acquitted, but only after you have survived prison until March 2021 or later. You’ll be released, but you’ll never get your life back. Just like the officer in the Ferguson case, instantly reviled, but never guilty of anything. Three separate investigations found he had acted in self-defense against repeated attacks from a larger, more powerful Michael Brown who had tried to seize that officer’s weapon. The last two of those investigations were led by liberal, progressive Black prosecutors, including President Obama’s attorney general.
Though that officer was completely cleared of wrongdoing, he and his family remain in hiding and will probably spend decades fearing for their lives….
…because he did his job, just as you did yours.
Officer Chauvin, I am so very, very sorry.
[For the information upon which this apology is based, please see the following:
On Friday, July 24th the citizens and businesses of Seattle were told by their police chief Carmen Best that because of Seattle City Council decisions, they would be without law enforcement protection if a peaceful protest/riot occurred in their neighborhood.
“City Council Ordinance 119805 Crowd Control Tool goes into effect this weekend on Sunday, July 26th, 2020,: Chief Best told the city. “This ordinance bans Seattle Police officers the use of less lethal tools, including pepper spray, that is commonly used to disperse crowds that have turned violent. Simply put the legislation gives officers NO ability to safely intercede to preserve property in the midst of a large violent crowd.”
If you remember news reports from the “peaceful” protest held the following Sunday, several construction trailers at the site of soon-to-be-built youth justice center were torched by arsonists, a Starbucks was smashed and looted, a neighborhood was trashed.
Are we laying out an open invitation for the same to happen here as the Port Townsend City Council rushes to virtue signal to the mob in their efforts to defund our already bare bones police force?
The media tells us that these “Mostly Peaceful Protests” are either in support of Black Lives Matters, in opposition to the oppression of federal law enforcement, or possibly, a new uprising against generations of systematic racism.
What more than a few of the “protesters”have said during interviews with the handful of journalists brave enough to wade into the fray is very clear: “We need to burn the whole thing down”
I have heard this phrase repeated many times in the video feeds that have allowed all of us to witness this national catastrophe as it has unfolded in Democrat run cities across our county.
While searching for answers I came across this observation:
Critical race theory’s adherents appear to believe that the only way to fix societal injustice is to burn everything down and start over.
Critical race theory emerged from academia in the 1980’s, has its roots in Marxism, and is defined by Encyclopedia Britannica thusly:
Law and legal institutions are inherently racist and race itself, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of color.
These peaceful protesters that want to burn everything down are not fighting for equal justice under the law or freedom of the individual from an oppressive government. They have been educated to believe that everything we have today needs to be destroyed so that their vision of what our country should be–and that would be a country completely under their control–can be built upon the ashes. They are speaking the language of Cultural Revolution.
“Cultural Revolutions are insidious and not just because they seek to change the way people think, write, speak and act. They are also dangerous because they are fueled by self-righteous sanctimoniousness, expressed in seemingly innocuous terms such as “social activism”, “equality” and “fairness”. The ultimate aim of the Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist is raw power – force of the sort sought by Hugo Chavez or the Castro Dynasty to get rich, inflict payback on their perceived enemies, reward friends, and be perceived as saviors. Cubans and Venezuelans got poor and killed; Woke Chavezes and Castros got rich and murderous.” Victor Davis Hansen, amgreatness.com, July 19, 2020
When a mob, a movement–a cultural revolution–is telling us what they want, we need to believe them.
[Editor’s note: Carmen Best, Seattle’s first Black police chief, resigned 8/11/20. The Seattle Council resolution prohibiting police from using non-lethal crowd control tools was temporarily enjoined by a Federal court and is in litigation. Crime of all kinds, from murder to vandalism to sexual assaults, is soaring in Seattle at the same time that City Council has unanimously voted to cut the police force in half and disband key crime prevention units, such as the Navigation Teams that brought the chronically homeless population in contact with social services and cleared out homeless encampments posing dangers to occupants and neighbors.]
Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County requested a police escort for its Juneteenth march down Port Townsend’s Water Street. They got it, at taxpayer’s expense.
A public records request by Port Townsend Free Press has obtained the application for the special use permit under which BLM Jeffco was able to block off and claim the use of Water Street and part of Sims Way for its June 19 march. They also were granted use of Pope Marine Park. The application was submitted by Sean Vinson, who has identified himself as lead organizer for the event. He was the keynote speaker at the conclusion of the march.
The application also covered painting of a block-long mural on Water Street outside City Hall. Vinson requested that that portion of Water Street be closed to traffic through midnight of Sunday June 21.
BLM has called for the abolition and defunding of police across the nation. On a recent KPTZ show, another lead organizer of the local BLM said there was nothing police could ever do to satisfy them. Police were inherently racist, white supremacist and must be abolished altogether so that “the people” could do the job themselves.
But BLM of Jeffco wanted a police escort enough to ask for it twice in its application.
At this time, while our public records request has not received a complete response, it is unknown exactly how many law enforcement officers and vehicles were provided in response to the request of BLM Jeffco for an officer escort. Photos of the event published in local newspapers and on social media show law enforcement officers at the front and along the route–as BLM Jeffco had requested.
“Special use permits will not be issued until insurance has been approved.“
So states the application submitted by BLM Jeffco.
Every special use permit seeking use of city spaces requires that the organizer provide proof of insurance to indemnify the city in the event of damage to property, personal injury or other loss. City businesses that seek to use a portion of a sidewalk or the edge of a street for outdoor dining and display of merchandise must prove that they have obtained adequate insurance.
Coverage under the required insurance policy must be primarily for the City’s benefit. It must provide a minimum of $1 million commercial general liability coverage and $500,000 automobile liability.
Evidence of insurance meeting these requirements must be submitted no less than 15 days before the event.
In this case, BLM Jeffco was given exclusive use of nearly all of Water Street, Pope Marine Park and part of Sims Way. They had an entire block of Water Street for several days while painting the BLM mural on a city street with paint supplied by taxpayers.
By June 19th, the nation had seen massive violence and destruction in the wake of BLM protests and marches. Criminals in these “protests” killed or attacked people in dozens of cities, most of them Blacks or other minorities. Seattle by June 19 had experienced destructive and violent rioting, resulting in the torching of police vehicles, injuries to scores of officers and first responders, arson of private property, hundreds of smashed windows and the vandalism of hundreds of businesses.
BLM Jeffco could not have obtained the required insurance. It was not at the time any sort of legally recognized entity that could sign a contract. It had no structure, no officers, no board of directors nor any registered agent. BLM Jeffco did not file for non-profit status until July 22. That action followed our report published July 17 raising questions about where donations to BLM Jeffco were going.
So far, no proof of insurance for the event has been produced in response to our request for public records.
Even now one thing is clear: the City did not obtain any proof of insurance as required by its own special use permit law. Proof of acceptable insurance must be submitted no less than 15 days before the event. This is intended to give city staff adequate time to examine and verify the insurance. Vinson submitted the application for a special use permit less than two days before the march.
In light of its preferential treatment of BLM Jeffco, the City will have a hard time in the future enforcing its special use permit regulations against other groups. It cannot enforce the law in a way that discriminates on the basis of the content of the message advanced by groups wanting to march in its street. It cannot enforce against other groups the regulations it chose not to enforce against BLM Jeffco.
A young man who has been involved with events in Portland and Seattle told me has been thinking about organizing an armed open-carry march down Water Street, something that is completely legal. The requirement for insurance in the name of a legal entity may have been an obstacle he could not overcome. But no longer need he be concerned about obtaining insurance if he moves forward with his idea.
At this time, while our public records request has not received a complete response, it is unknown exactly how many law enforcement officers and vehicles were provided in response to the request of BLM Jeffco for an officer escort. Photos of the event published in local newspapers and on social media show law enforcement officers at the front and along the route–as BLM Jeffco had requested.