Seattle officials are defending an all-staff email sent to a city hall department demeaning the city’s police officers as “white supremacists.”
The email, sent to the entire staff of the Seattle Department of Finance and Administrative Services, was written by FAS senior management systems analyst Daniel Holmberg.
It was titled, “White supremacy thrives without consequences,” and it went on to allege that white supremacy is “ensconced” in American institutions and that police “serve the false gods of white supremacy” and “are not worthy of the power they wield.”
Racist cops who extend restraint “only to white people” are “no longer guardians,” Holmberg wrote, “they are mercenaries and zealots, paid in the wages of white privilege, inflicting their wicked commandments upon us.”
Holmberg added at one point that he didn’t want “to paint all police with a broad brush.”
He then argued white supremacists are attracted to careers in law enforcement because “they get to use brute force to harm and restrain people of color.”
When confronted about the email, the department defended it.
“If we have learned anything from the past year—when COVID-19 disproportionately ravaged communities of color and the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others laid bare how entrenched systemic racism is in our country—it is that we cannot afford to stay comfortable,” FAS spokeswoman Melissa Mixon said in a statement.
“Staying comfortable is costing lives, specifically [b]lack lives, and we stand behind our Change Team for keeping us accountable and challenging all of us to learn, to re-examine, to grow and, above all, to act in this urgent work,” she continued.
Seattle cops responded to the city department’s attacks, calling them “inappropriate, bigoted, and full of misleading inaccuracies and over-generalizations.”
“This is a prime example of why officers are leaving the force in droves,” one officer told KTTH-AM radio host Jason Rantz.
“There is absolutely zero support for SPD in this city,” the officer continued. “Now we have the people who work on our buildings and cars treating us like we are public enemy No. 1.”
