Black Lives Matter has a problem in Seattle.
Beyond months of looting, rioting and a cross-over alliance with violent Antifa terrorists, black residents of the liberal city don’t want what the group is pushing.
“I don’t support Black Lives Matter, at least locally what local groups are doing,” said Andre Taylor, a police reform activist and “Not This Time” co-founder.
Taylor is among a coalition of prominent black community leaders who are speaking out against Black Lives Matter.
They’re also undermining the “defund the police” agenda that successfully led to the City Council cutting $23 million from the Seattle Police Department’s 2020 budget.
Hours after the budget cut was passed, Police Chief Carmen Best, a black woman, resigned.
“I’m done,” Best told reporters, ending her 28 years on the city’s police force.
Facing a pay cut, 100 police officer layoffs and critical funding shortages, even the social-justice-inclined Best said that the city’s activist-inspired approach to law-enforcement was no longer tenable.
“It really is about the overarching lack of respect for the officers,” she said.
Despite being a resounding victory for Black Lives Matter, the city’s black leadership groups want Best back. They also want BLM-Antifa violence and vandalism to stop.
Taylor’s sister, Devitta Brisco, blamed the City Council for pushing Best out.
“I feel because she was disrespected, she stepped down that was the only option that she had,” Brisco told KOMO News.
Reverend Leslie Braxton of the New Beginnings Christian Fellowship said Best was a “unique package” of qualities that made her the right person for the job.
“Being a black woman, she has the perspective of some of the groups that have the most troubled relationships with law enforcement near,” Braxton said.
Taylor criticized the recent riots and Black Lives Matter radicalism for hijacking authentic calls for change from within the black community.
“There is an idea with some of these organizations they are going to disrupt and overthrow the government, that they are going to end policing,” Taylor said.
“In my opinion, there is a disservice being done,” he said. “If the protest of agitation allows of a level of violence – at least they don’t speak out against it – then people that want violence can mingle right in.”
