An investigation by Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability found that officers in the Seattle Police Department improperly transmitted false information during a time of social unrest in 2020.
An assistant police chief, who is now retired, approved the dishonest radio chatter about seeing members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, marching around downtown Seattle on the night of June 8, 2020, with some of them possibly armed.
The OPA report, obtained by Capitol Hill Seattle, said the disinformation campaign escalated an already dangerous situation and was not properly documented or reported. The fake radio reports may have been meant to test the response of people the department believed were monitoring the police radio, according to a lieutenant with the police operations center.
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“The use of the Proud Boys when it was known that the transmissions would be monitored took a volatile situation and made it even more so,” the report said. “It was reasonably foreseeable to believe that the demonstrators would be afraid and concerned that the Proud Boys — some of whom were said to be open-carrying — would come to CHAZ/CHOP. It was also reasonably foreseeable to believe that this could cause demonstrators within the zone to take steps to arm and defend themselves.”
#Breaking @SeattleOPA sustained allegations against two former senior @SeattlePD Officers who organized a hoax on June 8, 2020. Officers said on police radios that an armed group of Proud Boys were heading to Cal Anderson to confront protesters. Everything in below audio is fake. pic.twitter.com/mQ915fhQ6S
— Omari Salisbury (@Omarisal) January 5, 2022
The investigation into the police response to the protests began when a journalist for Converge Media requested body camera footage from the members of the police force who talked about the members of Proud Boys marching. However, no body camera footage was found to substantiate the reports.
The summertime social unrest in Seattle followed the death of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis who was killed by a white police officer in May 2020. Protesters blocked off the East Precinct of the city and approximately six blocks and called the blocked area the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP, which was formerly known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ.
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Two officers who approved and supervised the disinformation campaign violated department policies for the ruse that “improperly added fuel to the fire,” OPA Director Andrew Myerberg wrote, but they have since retired from the department. Four other employees involved were determined to have exercised poor judgment but ultimately were following orders from their superiors, according to the report.
The findings are being reviewed by the interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz and the city’s new mayor.
