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posted July 24, 2009
Czar Kerlikowske
Seattle’s outgoing police chief has been heavy-handed and disdainful of critics; was he really a good pick for Obama’s administration?
by Paul Richmond
Numbered references appear at the end of this article.
Recently I was told the story of a Colorado man who approached then Vice President Dick Cheney and raised questions of his policies. Within minutes the man was arrested and handcuffed by a Secret Service agent for “assaulting” the vice president.[1] “Thank God that stuff’s over,” the person telling the story said to me.
Ironically, I’ve been having similar concerns over one of President Obama’s recent appointments, Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. While he’s being hailed by many as an enlightened, even brilliant choice my experience may temper that unbridled optimism. As an attorney who’s worked in the Seattle area, doing support for demonstrators, I have genuine concerns about his actions regarding the First Amendment, including several with parallels to the Cheney episode above. As a researcher who tracked much of the militarization of law enforcement around the drug war, I’m concerned about programs he’s already implemented.
I found Kerlikowske to have a marked disdain for critics. I experienced it personally when he appeared at UW Law School where I was enrolled and finishing a law degree. Kerlikowske responded to a difficult question I asked by singling me out by name and claiming I followed him everywhere—it was in fact the second time I’m aware I’d been at the same event as him. I was a white law student, so that was as far as it went.
Others have not been as lucky. Shortly after I graduated, I came to represent Anwar Peace, a young black man who was concerned about the number of black men shot by the Seattle Police. Peace who had no criminal history, wanted to have a meeting with Chief Kerlikowske to discuss this. Peace left phone messages, would attempt to speak with Kerlikowske at public events, and ultimately set up a table on the sidewalk in front of the police department.
Kerlikowske’s response was to file a Restraining Order, (which was granted as these usually are) and then pursue criminal charges the next time Peace contacted him.[2] The criminal trials dragged on and on, and the police invested an incredible amount of time and money into this. Rather astounding when you consider GWB never sought a restraining order against Cindy Sheehan.
This also seemed to follow a pattern of little tolerance for any dissent. From my experience I can say, Kerlikowske has shown a record of contempt for the rights of demonstrators and a history of responding to them with disproportionate force. This has included:
• Overseeing the mass arrests of people trying to leave the site of the first anniversary of the WTO demonstrations, on November 30, 2000. Demonstrators were promised if they left the area they would be free to go. They were directed down a street where they were surrounded by fences and riot police. Over a hundred were arrested, the first of these being the legal observers.[3] A year later, on the third anniversary, police spent over $300,000 in overtime to march 200 demonstrators about 10 blocks down a hill, making a liberal number of arrests along the way for things like stepping off sidewalks.[4]
• When the October 22 group attempted to have their annual demonstration in 2003, police not only limited them to the sidewalk, but drove a line of vans on the lane alongside that sidewalk, hiding the march from sight. This resulted in a federal suit from the ACLU filed in federal court as C04-860Z.
• Also in 2003 Kerlikowske spearheaded the prosecution of a few women from the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) who dropped a banner off of a construction crane under an old felony statute enacted to go after the Wobblies. Let me be clear these women were facing many years in prison for simply hanging a banner from a crane. As one of the lawyers involved in defending these women, I believe that the owners of the construction site had no interest in this prosecution, the push coming from Kerlikowske’s office and the prosecutors.
• During the first days of the Iraq invasion, Kerlikowske’s police not only terrorized demonstrators with a heavy show of force, again corralling demonstrators and making liberal numbers of arrests. We also began noticing a number of them carrying highly lethal rifles, many of them M-16 variants.
• In June of 2003 the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU) held its annual convention in Seattle and hundreds of demonstrators came out. Kerlikowske’s police responded by penning the demonstrators in a small area for twenty five minutes, firing less lethal weaponry and chemical agents at them through this time.
Kerlikowske’s adherence to these military tactics against demonstrators is not surprising. His earlier role in the federal was the COPS program. This was the part of the 1995 Crime Bill designed to put 100,000 new cops on the street. Funding was short term with long term funding depending on asset forfeiture by these new cops. This corresponded neatly with the spread of paramilitary SWAT units throughout the country. Kerlikowske’s love for these tactics was shown in an early editorial he did for the Seattle Times (August 30, 2000) praising the tactics of his officers who showed with two paramilitary vehicles, SWAT Teams dressed in camaflage carrying military weapons to apprehend a single unarmed suspect. [5]
In short then, though
Kerlikowske has received even some praise for not opposing policies
to lower the priority of marijuana enforcement in Seattle, these policies
did not come from him. His history and future actions can probably
be more accurately seen by looking at the intolerance he has had for
dissent including both heavy handed tactics in the street and heavy
handed prosecutions as well as his earlier promotion of what are in
essence programs that militarized the police and vastly expanded some
of the worst aspects of the war on drugs.
The author, Paul
Richmond is a long time community activist and independent media reporter.
He has produced several thousand hours of local television in Portland,
was one of the founders of the independent media center during the WTO,
and one of the coordinators of the legal observer program. He
authored the report “Waging War on Dissent,” and was a consultant
on the documentary Urban Warrior. As a lawyer he has represented
dozens of activists and has recently gotten dismissals of criminal charges
brought by the US Border Patrol at their checkpoints on the Olympic
Peninsula.
References
[1] http://airamerica.com/node/
[2] www.seattleweekly.com/2003-09-
[3] My account of this appeared
locally at http://eatthestate.org/05-07/
[4] These figures were supplied to me by then City Council Person Judith Nicastro.
[5] http://community.seattletimes.