After 23 years of serving the public, Seattle police lieutenant Jessica Taylor hung up her badge on August 1st to head off for retirement. She reportedly filled out the standard exit interview questionnaire, but that wasn’t enough for her. She included a blistering 15-page letter along with it. The letter was addressed to Police Chief Adrian Diaz, but she also directly singled out the Mayor of Seattle, Bruce Harrell, and the entire City Council. She called the council members “absurd,” referred to Mayor Harrell as “spineless,” and described Chief Diaz’s “failed leadership.” Seattle, she said, has hit rock bottom in this vacuum of strong leadership and self-destructive priorities, leaving the city as a “laughing stock” for the nation and the world. And then she got down to specifics. (Western Journal)
“Chief Diaz, let me tell you, the state of the Seattle Police Department and this city is a disgrace,” she wrote in the letter. “The toxic mix of the Seattle City Council’s absurdity, the spinelessness of the Mayor, the leniency of the prosecutor’s office, and your failed leadership has accelerated this city’s downhill slide straight to rock bottom. The problems were already brewing before you came on the scene, but since your arrival, it’s been a free fall into anarchy & chaos.”
The retired officer added that extremist city officials have “lost touch with reality, making decisions that defy common sense and basic logic.”
“Their priority is playing politics and pandering to radical ideologies rather than genuinely serving the city’s and its residents best interests,” Taylor said of council members.
By the time I finished reading this, I considered seeing if we could offer Lt. Taylor a gig writing for our network if she’s looking for some extra post-retirement cash. She clearly has a way with words and has watched Seattle fall into decay over the 23 years she spent on the force because of leadership that “prioritized political correctness over safety.”
Rather than a rant, Taylor’s letter reads more like a list of charges that an attorney would bring in a court case. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, since she doubtless worked with many prosecutors.) Of course, one of the groups that she targets is the prosecutor’s office, which fails to bring charges in too many of the cases that Taylor and her colleagues have brought to them. These failures, she says, have turned Seattle into a playground for anarchists and criminals. “If you haven’t noticed, the criminals are running the city.”
The Lieutenant also ran afoul of the city’s pandemic policies at one point. She had been diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia and on the advice of her doctor she applied for an exemption from the city’s vaccine mandate. Rather than considering her request, they instead suspended her without pay. And she wasn’t the only one. That was a serious problem in a city that already had an understaffed police department and a rampant crime problem.
On a related note, she pointed out that the City Council was full of people who advocated defunding the police. This “destroyed” the morale of the rank-and-file officers, leading to more losses.
“SPD is dangerously understaffed, and the officers and their families are suffering,” Taylor wrote. “The hours are ruthlessly long, and due to the staffing crisis (created by you, the mayor, and the council), these unsafe conditions are entirely unacceptable. Completely. They have also been working for years without a contract — Also unacceptable.”
Seattle has been disintegrating in a very public way for several years. We’ve covered the problems here extensively, but it’s really not all that different from Chicago, San Francisco, or any number of other blue cities that have been paying the price of their own policies. What makes this story different is that you get to see how all of this played out through the eyes of someone who was out there on the front lines fighting to save her city but was helpless to do so in the face of a bureaucracy that preferred to surrender the streets to chaos.
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