Seattle hired a “street czar” to help police the city and will pay him $150,000 over the course of a year.
“A street czar is a person who has a particular genius in a particular area,” activist Andre Taylor told KOMO News on Tuesday. He cited President Barack Obama’s use of czars during his administration as inspiration for the title. “I know the term ‘street czar’ is quite provocative.”
His contract will last one year, totaling $150,000 in pay for Taylor and his team, called Not This Time, to provide “expertise and support services in de-escalation, community engagement, and alternatives to policing.”
“Somebody can’t put a price tag on going into community meetings and having sitdowns with gang members, where they won’t sit down with anybody else,” he said.
Taylor, who allegedly previously worked as a pimp, drew criticism from those associated with Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone for acting as an agent for city leadership. He said he was in CHOP after the fatal shooting of Horace Anderson this summer to de-escalate the violence.
Seattle previously worked with Taylor in 2019, paying his group $100,000 for a series of speeches called “Conversations with the Streets.”
“No one raised any questions about the $100,000 that the city gave us for ‘Conversations with the Streets,’” he said. “And we are kind of bewildered that people are now raising an issue about $150,000 for our de-escalation efforts that we’ve been doing since my brother, Che Taylor, was killed. It’s amazing to me. It’s a nonstarter and a nonissue.”
Taylor also pointed to the hypocrisy of local community members questioning the new contract.
“Black people are not normally paid for positions, nor their organizations, but white people with the same positions are paid, and this is an ongoing problem not only here but all over this country,” Taylor said. “White people have been paid for some of the same stuff, and nobody has ever said anything about it. But the moment a black man demands respect and you value the work and you want to use my credibility, that should have some value to it.”
Some in the community and the City Council lobbied to cut the police budget by 50% in the wake of protests over the death of George Floyd and other black people who died during interactions with police. The City Council voted in August to cut the police budget by 14% for the remainder of 2020.
