Guest editorial: Tacoma’s police chief invokes right to remain silent

This editorial was published by the News Tribune of Tacoma.

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Across the country people are intently watching and talking about the Tacoma Police Department. But you wouldn’t know it from the actions of TPD Chief Don Ramsdell, who’s largely been missing from the conversation.

Aside from two perfunctory public statements, and two interviews Thursday with The News Tribune, Ramsdell has invoked his right to remain silent while the world erupts in protests over racial injustice and deadly police tactics.

That’s a highly dubious decision, given that Tacoma police are under as much scrutiny as any force in the country right now — perhaps second only to Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed under an officer’s knee.

Ramsdell is hiding behind a legal argument that he can’t discuss the case of Manuel Ellis. The 33-year-old black man died of oxygen deprivation March 4 while under police restraint, according to the Pierce County medical examiner. Four TPD officers are on administrative leave pending a state homicide investigation.

But this is about more than Ellis; it’s about an ongoing loss of life and public trust due to institutional brutality and mistreatment of people of color in America. Ramsdell’s silence on these matters is deafening.

The chief hasn’t done enough to confront and defuse public outrage. In the challenging weeks to come, he can start by being a more visible presence, like police chiefs in cities such as Seattle and Minneapolis, who step up to the microphone with regularity.

From Grand Rapids, Mich.,to New York City, other chiefs have been willing to acknowledge Black Lives Matter in words and deeds. Ramsdell has not taken a knee, metaphoric or otherwise.

Nor has he taken the opportunity, unlike other chiefs, to join the important national dialogue on race relations, deescalation training, reform efforts, body cameras, union contracts and the “defund police” movement.

He needs to pick his spots to speak up, and others at City Hall should encourage — not discourage — a vocal chief.

This is not Ramsdell’s first rodeo when it comes to high-profile media coverage. He rose to the occasion in 2016, serving as consoler in chief after the line-of-duty death of officer Jake Gutierrez.

In 2003 Ramsdell was baptized by fire when he replaced David Brame, the Tacoma chief who publicly murdered his wife and killed himself with their young children present.

The department endured a months-long investigation, and Ramsdell was elevated from an assistant-chief role, which he’d held only nine months. In the Brame aftermath, he toured the city and held seven meetings to listen to residents’ concerns.

This is what his hometown needs from him now.

In an interview with the TNT Thursday, Ramsdell maintained that the four police officers involved in Ellis’ death are “exemplary.” He told a member of our editorial board that an investigation will reveal the facts of the case, and that due process will determine their innocence or guilt.

Beyond not being visible enough, Ramsdell’s problem is that he doesn’t really see a problem. He said he “didn’t know” if there was systemic racism in law enforcement, adding “there needs to be further research.”

When asked if he supported the Black Lives Matter protests, he repeated a few times: “I support anyone’s right to peacefully protest.”

Ramsdell’s plan forward consists of old paradigms; he mentioned the city’s five-year-old Project Peace and other outreach programs with community centers, churches and schools.

All of these are fine as far as they go. But it’ll take a heck of a lot more to combat the fear that kids of color live with because they’ve watched too many cellphone videos of black men and women being beaten by police.

Ramsdell and the city need new ideas fast. As we’ve written before, they can start with body cameras. Ramsdell says the project is now being “fast tracked.”

They can also fight for more diversity training. Use of brute force needs to be eliminated from police practices, but so do microaggressions, and most folks are blind to them. We can only remedy those by giving them a name.

Ramsdell has enjoyed a remarkably long tenure as police chief — Tacoma has had three fire chiefs in the same span — and he’s widely regarded as a good and decent, by-the-book commander, driven not by ego but by loyalty to the TPD badge he’s worn since 1985.

But faith in his leadership is alarmingly shaky right now. When Mayor Victoria Woodards was asked at a June 5 press conference whether he has her confidence, her answer was circumspect: “Don Ramsdell is the current chief. And right now all of my energy and focus is on the death of Manuel Ellis.”

As tragic as the deaths of Ellis and Floyd are, they serve as an overdue awakening that the water we’ve been swimming in has been tainted with racism all along.

If Ramsdell and other people aren’t aren’t willing to acknowledge the broad picture of injustice — if they’re not willing to say that systems are fundamentally flawed — we won’t get past this recurrent cycle of abuse, anger and retaliation.