Report: Seattle Police Department should ban tear gas, remind officers to protect protesters' rights
Source: Seattle Times
The Seattle Police Department should ban the use of tear gas, rewrite its crowd-control policies and remind officers that they are there to protect protesters’ rights, not violate them, according to a report that was set to be presented Wednesday to the mayor’s office by former monitor Merrick Bobb.
The review of SPD’s use of crowd-control weapons was requested by Mayor Jenny Durkan and the federal judge who has overseen the department’s seven-year reform effort to satisfy a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice over 2011 findings that SPD officers routinely used excessive force.
Bobb, who acted as the court-appointed monitor of those efforts until his resignation two weeks ago, found “an apparent absence of an overall strategic plan” to deal with Seattle’s sudden and massive racial justice protests that erupted around the death of George Floyd, killed by Minneapolis police on May 25. He concluded the department’s “crowd-management tactics were deficient,” in significant part because the SPD “lacked seasoned and well-trained commanders” capable of responding to the crisis.
“In the absence of the strategic plan and well-trained commanders, there was a lack of adequate preparation and training of rank-and-file police officers and their supervisors,” Bobb wrote. For instance, he said, officers were asked to use tear gas — one of the more dangerous weapons in a less-lethal arsenal — “without having been trained on how to use it.”
Read more: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/report-seattle-police-department-should-ban-tear-gas-remind-officers-to-protect-protesters-rights/?utm_medium=notification&utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=671836
