Over the weekend, the Seattle Police Division (SPD) launched surveillance and bodycam video of an SPD officer capturing a person within the safe parking zone of the division’s Southwest Precinct facility on March 19. After a quick standoff with officers, City Andrew Seay, 36, was shot useless by Officer Kyle Hay. The dying has been listed by the King County Medical Examiner’s Workplace (MEO) as a murder. Hay has since been positioned on administrative go away pending an investigation.
Per the SPD’s Blotter weblog, Seay’s spouse known as 911 simply after midday final Wednesday and instructed dispatchers that her husband had been making suicidal statements and was within the Residence Depot parking zone abutting the precinct. Surveillance video then exhibits Seay scaling the fence of the precinct’s safe lot. He’s then approached by officers who ask him to exit the lot and direct him to a door within the fence.
Upon reaching the door, he stops, turns round, and attracts a small folding knife. At this level, officers put distance between themselves and Seay, commanding him to drop the knife. One officer attracts a taser and tells Seay, “Hey, keep down on the bottom, please. Go forward and put the knife down.”
Officers then start asking each other to group up farther from the suspect and find a “40” —quick for a 40mm launcher, a much less deadly weapon that fires both a big sponge-tipped slug or a lot of smaller rubber pellets; it’s meant to cease topics with ache and affect.
Seay backs away earlier than rounding two parked police cruisers. As he comes across the cruisers, he begins transferring in direction of the group of officers at a stroll. A refrain of officers says, “Hit him with the 40! The 40, the 40,” as Seay hurries up. Video from one other officer’s bodycam exhibits that officer firing off one 40mm spherical from behind and to the suitable of Seay. Nearly concurrently, Hay, who was immediately in Seay’s path, begins firing his service pistol, killing Seay.
Police Chief Shon Barnes, in an announcement instantly after the capturing, mentioned, “Officers tried de-escalation ways to incorporate the deployment of a lower than deadly system. These efforts had been unsuccessful, and finally an officer, one officer, discharged his firearm, hanging the individual.”
Apart from the egregious use of passive voice right here, it’s value noting that if Hay had determined his colleague’s 40mm cannon wasn’t going to do the trick, he did so in a matter of milliseconds. His pistol pictures ring out about 600ms after the 40mm shot, based mostly on a Stranger evaluation utilizing VidTimer. Human response time is about 250ms, so it’s not unattainable that Hay noticed the much less deadly spherical miss, noticed Seay closing with him, and shot the best way cops are skilled to: at middle mass till the menace has ended. But it surely’s protected to say that, whereas much less deadly strategies had been deployed, the method of figuring out whether or not these strategies had labored was fairly actually split-second.
At the very least one native police accountability group believes Hay might have carried out extra to defuse the scenario.
“We imagine strongly in de-escalation and de-escalation coaching. One of many primary tenets of that coaching is time, distance, and canopy. I didn’t see these ways employed on this interplay, and it is disappointing,” says Dom Campese, a spokesperson for the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability (WCPA).
Formally, whether or not the capturing proves justified or not will probably be a matter for the Workplace of Inspector Normal (OIG) to find out. OIG didn’t reply to The Stranger’s request for remark. However Hay has beforehand been the topic of 13 Workplace of Police Accountability investigations—4 to be used of pressure, although none of these had been sustained.
Seay’s dying very a lot seems to be a “suicide by police,” although Campese takes difficulty with that phrase, as he believes it’s deceptive.
“If somebody is in a psychological well being disaster, the aim is for legislation enforcement to assist with the disaster, to not exacerbate it, and all too typically, they’re prepared to oblige [the person wishing to die]. I feel ‘suicide’ sort of takes away from the truth that the officers are killing the individual. It is not suicide,” he says.
The launched video doesn’t present officers aggressively pursuing Seay or pinning him in. They’re predominately asking him, in a relaxed, well mannered method, to please simply go away the parking zone.
For Campese, the scenario remembers the instances of Herbert Hightower and John T. Williams, each killed by police whereas holding knives. Fifteen years after police shot John T. Williams, a deaf Native American woodcarver who was additionally holding a small folding knife, our cops nonetheless haven’t found out easy methods to incapacitate somebody like that with out killing them. And it’s definitely not for an absence of spending on much less deadly know-how, or an absence of distribution. In 2023, SPD showcased their investments in new much less deadly weapons, together with the BoloWrap, new tasers, and the 40mm launcher utilized in final week’s capturing. Actual Change reported on the time that SPD mentioned they anticipated each officer to hold no less than one much less deadly weapon.
WCPA pushed for Home Invoice 1310, which handed in 2022, that required new hires to finish de-escalation coaching throughout the first 15 months on the pressure, and ongoing coaching thereafter. However Campese argues that until departments begin holding officers accountable for failing to observe that coaching, there’s little hope for these affected by these sorts of shootings.
Within the case of Seay, officers on the scene had each a taser and a 40mm cannon skilled on Seay. They knew he was suicidal. He brandished a knife for a number of minutes earlier than making any try and strategy an officer. In idea, they might have popped him with a foam or three around the second he unfolded his knife. Why, in the long run, was the 9mm the weapon they went with?
“You simply actually want somebody would take motion right here,” says Campese. “Possibly the brand new chief is the one to do it.”
Should you or somebody is combating ideas of suicide, assist is accessible—name or textual content 988 or the King County Disaster Connections Hotline for confidential and free help 24/7.
