- Around 40 demonstrators marched to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s condo on Sunday
- They demanded justice for Jaahnavi Kandula, who was killed by a cop SUV
- Protesters also railed against Harrell’s proposed $17m uplift for Seattle Police
Defund the police protesters have marched on Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s home after he announced a $17million uplift in the local policing budget.
Around 40 people gathered in the city’s Seward Park for the demonstration before marching to the mayor’s condo nearby.
The protest on Sunday was coordinated by two local campaign groups – Seattle South Asians 4 Black Lives and South Asians Resisting Imperialism.
They demanded ‘justice’ for Jaahnavi Kandula, the 23-year-old woman a Seattle police officer fatally struck with his car in January while driving 74mph in a 25mph zone with his lights flashing but no sirens on.
The Indian college student’s death has sparked several anti-police protests in Washington state, particularly after a video emerged of cop Daniel Auderer saying she had ‘limited value
This time, according to local reports, demonstrators also spoke out against Harrell’s 2024 budget, which proposes to boost SPD’s funding by $17 million up to $391 million.
With crime and response times on the rise in the Emerald City, the money will pay for hiring bonuses to bolster a depleted force.
A protester told the crowd gathered outside Harrell’s $1.4 million apartment on Sunday that police were ‘not here to protect us’ but rather posed a threat to the public.
‘Police were formed from slave-catchers and union busters,’ she said. ‘They are not here to protect us but to brutalize us.
‘Their purpose in a capitalist state is to protect the power and property of the wealthy.’
Harrell’s proposed rise in police funding comes on the back of an even bigger increase of $19 million, which he instigated at the start of his tenure in 2022 – from $355 million that year to $374 million in 2023.
But these uplifts were designed to replenish police provisions following previous cuts prompted by the notorious slaying of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Proposals to slash SPD funding by a whopping 50 percent were tabled in the wake of the father-of-five’s death.
The radical move gained majority support among members of Seattle’s City Council in 2020.
But public support gradually waned and Harrell’s predecessor, Jenny Durkan, eventually dismissed the feasibility of such an extreme cut.
Floyd died on May 25, 2020, during an arrest when white office Derek Chauvin pressed his knee against his neck for close to nine minutes. Chauvin has since been jailed for murder.
The horrific incident sparked Black Lives Matter protests calling for police reform and end to systematic racism.
Lawmakers in more than a dozen US cities responded with proposals to reform policing by defunding departments and reallocating financial resources to social needs and programs.
