Police brutality and unaccountability have been with us a long time, and it hasn't always been Black folk as the victims, and it hasn't always been in the South or in the Midwest, or even NYC. Ten years ago, Native woodcarver John T. Williams was shot and killed by Seattle police, and the journey to justice for his brother Rick has been a long, lone road.
THE BROTHER’S WORDS COME TO HIM AT NIGHT. They come clear and strong, no matter what sounds roil off six-lane Aurora Avenue and through the motel room window. They come to him in the morning, on the bus as it hammers south into the city. And as he sits on the patch of grass in the shadow of the Space Needle, where he carves nearly every day. Wherever Rick Williams is, whatever he’s doing, if anger or rage or even revenge fills his mind, the words of his late brother John put out the storm.
He first heard them more than 50 years ago, when he was 14. John was nine. “I want you to say ‘peace,’” the younger brother said, “and I want you to learn peace.” Unusual thing for a child to say, enough that the words stuck with Rick through the decades.
They came to him again on the afternoon of August 30, 2010, when a cop told him another officer had shot his brother to death. “Say peace.” “Learn peace.” Hard concepts to juggle in the moment. Even harder once the details came to light.
As the city learned of his brother’s final moments, so did Rick. How Seattle police officer Ian Birk—unprovoked, gun already drawn—rushed up to 50-year-old John T. Williams, who was hearing impaired in one ear, losing his eyesight, and held only a pocketknife and a piece of cedar, the tools of his trade. How Birk commanded Williams to drop the knife and, seven seconds into their encounter, fired five bullets, four striking and killing the woodcarver. How when other officers arrived they could see that the knife on the ground was closed.
Protests began almost immediately, Seattle’s streets a preview of the scenes a decade later, of Black Lives Matter and the long hunt for justice for those murdered by police. During the inquest, Officer Birk told jurors a story that contradicted that of eyewitnesses. Williams was menacing, Birk said, in attack mode, seconds from lunging with the knife.
The inquest left no one satisfied. At least one witness would remain traumatized for years, by both what she saw in the moments of the shooting and the lack of justice afterward. On the question of whether Officer Birk should be charged with a crime, the decision lay in the hands of the King County prosecutor. The choice he made haunted him in subsequent reelection bids, made his stomach burn whenever he talked about it. Most significantly the U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the SPD’s discriminatory policing and overall use of force.
This one was hard to read. So often have the lives of Black and Indigenous persons of color ended the way John T. Williams's life did. I'm tired of it, the stress hurts some days, the wondering, the fear.
The only way accountability comes is to demand it.
Through it all, Rick Williams, the older brother turned family spokesman, clenched his jaw in every hearing, through every bad thing he heard about John, every time he saw a cop on the street and was expected to act like there was no bad blood. He held back his rage as much as he could, held it back even as he watched, like everyone else in the city, again and again, the video.
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