(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) On her way out the door from a job that she once loved, a longtime Seattle cop lambasted the police chief, the mayor and the woke city council for their soft-on-crime policies that have allowed the Democrat-run city to descend into “anarchy and chaos.”
Instead of filling out the standard exit paperwork, now-retired Lt. Jessica Taylor went freestyle with a 15-page, “unfiltered, raw, and unapologetic” resignation letter to Chief Adrian Diaz in which she underscored that the local leadership cabal is failing Seattle residents by ignoring rampant lawlessness.
“[T]he state of the Seattle Police Department and this city is a disgrace,” Taylor declared in one of the opening paragraphs at the outset of the letter, an epistle that contained a lot to unpack.
“The toxic mix of the Seattle City Council’s absurdity, the spinelessness of the Mayor, the leniency of the prosecutor’s office, and your failed leadership has accelerated this city’s downhill slide straight to rock bottom,“ she asserted in a rhetorical mic drop.
“The problems were already brewing before you came on the scene, but since your arrival, it’s been a free fall into anarchy & chaos.”
According to Taylor, who served on the force for more than 20 years and retired effective Aug. 1, the far-left council, in particular, prioritizes “radical ideologies” at the expense of public safety, with the net result is that Seattle has devolved “into a playground for anarchists and criminals.”
The council, she insisted seems “utterly unconcerned with the devastating consequences of their actions. If you haven’t noticed, the criminals are running this city.”
In that context, she insinuated that that Mayor Bruce Harrell and Chief Diaz are just go-along-to-get-along politicians.
As far as the chief — whose ascendancy was allegedly fast tracked in bypassing more qualified candidates — Taylor called him out, among other things, as someone “willing to throw the entire department under the bus” to get a promotion to “the fancy corner office.”
In allegedly serving his ambition, he failed Seattle citizens who “are getting hurt and killed in this city left and right.”
She also warned that the police department is dangerously understaffed.
In a scenario that has also played out in other Democrat-controlled municipalities, about 600 police officers left the Seattle department after the 2020 BLM-related unrest and the city’s defund-the-police movement, faced termination for refusing to comply with coronavirus vaccination mandates, or simply retired or transferred.
Taylor herself was apparently sidelined for about two years by the COVID jab mandate.
In a conversation with Seattle talk show host Jason Rantz, the journalist and former Tucker Carlson Tonight contributor who first reported on her letter, Taylor implied that the manpower shortage in terms of cops actually on the street and deployable is much worse that what city officials are letting on.
She praised the overworked officers still on the job for doing their best to protect the citizenry particularly given the lack of support from city hall.
After the letter went public, the veteran officer told Fox News that when she moved to Seattle in 1998, the city was beautiful and clean, including a police force that enjoyed an outstanding reputation.
“But over the years, it has just gone from the very top to the very bottom.”
In a separate FNC appearance, ex-Lt. Taylor opined that law and order in Seattle markedly deteriorated when the city notoriously allowed anarchists and vagrants to set up a so-called autonomous zone (a.k.a. CHAZ or CHOP) in a large section of downtown during the 2020 protests.
“The city of Seattle is just a hot mess,” she told host Jesse Watters. “And I just can’t participate in it any longer.”
In a variation on this theme, it recently came to light that Seattle firefighters boning up for the lieutenant exam have to study social justice along with mastering first-responder skills.
