Lieutenant Jessica Taylor, who retired Aug. 1 after 23 years in uniform, wrote a 15-page letter to Chief Diaz that blamed him for “failed leadership that has brought this department and this city to its knees.”
The public now knows about the letter after a copy was shared with the Jason Rantz, a Seattle radio host on KTTH.
Law enforcement advocate Randy Sutton, himself a former police lieutenant, tells AFN the now-retired Seattle cop wrote a “powerful” manifesto.
“It literally put everything onto paper,” he says, “which every cop in Seattle is thinking to themselves.”
Elsewhere in the letter, Taylor called Mayor Bruce Harrell "spineless” and the city council "incompetent," but she called Chief Diaz "vindictive and power hungry,” and she blamed him for overseeing a “corrupt” police department in a once-great city.
Diaz, a veteran of the Seattle Police Department, served as interim chief for two years before he was named police chief in January by a 8-1 city council vote. That means Diaz was the top cop when city leaders cut the police budget by more than 10% - after threatening to cut it in half – and was interim chief while more than 400 officers quit or retired out of frustration.
In a related story about the letter, Newsweek reported violent crime jumped 20% at the end of 2021, including a 18% jump in robberies and a 24% spike in aggravated assaults.
Sutton says he knows the frustrations of police officers across the country, because he has talked to hundreds of them, so he also knows the letter from Taylor speaks for cops who can’t speak up.
“If they do [speak out], they will get benched, reassigned to some desk job or outright fired,” he says.
Despite the spike in crime, Seattle has experienced a bump in population growth after suffering through the COVID-19 pandemic, according to The Seattle Times.
