Yet another black police officer now knows that Black Lives Matter isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and has decided to take off her badge.
Carmen Best (shown), the black woman police chief in Seattle, will quit her job as of September 2.
Best blamed the city council’s attack on her department with votes to cut the police budget and salaries of key personnel at the behest of BLM.
City councilmen have been more interested in pleasing the BLM mobs that besieged the city, and Best’s home, than in keeping city dwellers safe and backing the cops.
And so Best said enough is enough.
“Vindictive” Council
Best broke the news to her force in an e-mail last night.
“This was a difficult decision for me, but when it’s time, it’s time,” the 28-year veteran wrote. “I am confident the department will make it through these difficult times. You truly are the best police department in the country, and please trust me when I say, the vast majority of people in Seattle support you and appreciate you.”
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Her decision follows the city council’s vote yesterday to cut her $285,000 salary by six percent, a $17,000 hit, and to cut the pay of other top cops even more. As well, the council voted to cut 100 positions from the department and $3 million from its $400 million budget.
That wasn’t enough, though, for the council’s BLM stooges. “It completely fails to defund the police by 50%, as six of the eight council members had promised to support,” a councilwoman named Kshama Sawant complained.
Best elaborated at a press conference today and reprised what she said in her note to the force.
Best said she “wrestled with” the decision. “When you know it’s time to go, it’s time to go.”
Best said her decision is not based on the salary cut or the frightening BLM protest at her house on August 1, but instead on the council’s “overarching lack of respect” for the police and their vote to slash the police department budget and salaries of key personnel.
Best said the council’s move was “vindictive.”
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan denounced the council for “targeting” Best and her colleagues.
Attempted Raid on Best’s Home
Yet even if the protest itself did not motivate the retirement, perhaps the council’s response to it did.
When BLM crazies showed up outside Best’s home in Snohomish County on August 1, city councilmen did not denounce them.
The Lynnwood Times reported that the BLM mob terrified the neighbors and appeared to be ready to start trouble when 40 vehicles showed up on Best’s street.
“A neighbor tipped off residents to dozens of vehicles traversing the street of the private residence of Best,” the newspaper reported. “Neighbors aware of Best’s physical home location, established a perimeter to protect her home from possible mischief.”
The 40 vehicles carted in an angry mob:
A crowd of about 200 persons, mostly white men and women in their twenties, were dressed in black with masks and black hoods and carried signs that read “Black Lives Matter.” Black Lives Matter protestors shouted profanity and insults at neighbors, took license plate information on vehicles, took pictures of homes, and asked little kids who lived in the neighborhood what schools they attended.
As well, the newspaper reported, the BLM gang carried duffle bags and refused to disclose the contents to inquiring residents of the neighborhood.
In a letter to the worthies of the city council, Best recounted the intimidation raid. “My neighbors were concerned by such a large group, but they were successful in ensuring the crowd was not able to trespass or engage in other illegal behavior in the area, despite repeated attempts to do so,” she wrote.
“The entire council,” she wrote, “must stand up for what is right.”
These direct actions against elected officials, and especially civil servants like myself, are out of line with and go against every democratic principle that guides our nation. Before this devolves into the new way of doing business by mob rule here in Seattle, and across the nation, elected officials like you must forcefully call for the end of these tactics.
The council said nothing, and the mob already ruled Seattle and had seized a police precinct when Best wrote the letter.
The mostly white BLM Marxists took over and renamed a major section of the city in June. The illegal occupation lasted nearly a month before the mayor finally found the courage to order police to clear out the deranged revolutionaries on July 1.
Two days before riots in late July wounded 59 cops, Best admitted that police could not protect the lives and property of the city’s residents.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
