By Erica C. Barnett

Reporters covering the reactions to Seattle police chief Carmen Best’s resignation yesterday received two different versions of a joint statement from council members Lorena González, Teresa Mosqueda, and Tammy Morales. The first pushed back explicitly on Best’s claim that the council cut SPD’s budget, and the salaries of the department’s command staff, for personal and “retaliatory” reasons. The second, less than half the length of the original, thanked Best for her service and reiterated the council’s commitment to systemic changes in the city’s approach to public safety.

The original statement, which the council’s communications office “recalled” and replaced minutes after sending it, contextualized the cuts as part of a larger effort to address “accountability and systemic racism in Seattle’s Police Department [and repair] the harm done by this City to Black and Brown communities.” It also emphasized that both Best and the three Latina council members were all women of color, who “face the impossible task of reforming and improving institutions never designed to serve our communities.”

“As women of color in public service, it can feel impossible to do this work in very visible positions of power. We cannot lead by tearing each other down, despite whatever policy disagreements we may have,” the initial statement said.

Although the hasty recall and overhaul of the original statement might imply that the three council members regretted their original comments, all three confirmed to The C Is for Crank that they still stood by what they said in the initial press release.

“This was never personal; it was always about changing systems,” Mosqueda said Wednesday afternoon. “It’s unfortunate that she saw [cuts to the police department] as personal in nature. This was never, ever an adversarial comment made about the chief. This was always about the system.”

González, who said “gave [the chief] my commitment that I would never tear her down because as a woman of color I understood what a difficult position she was in,” said she didn’t regret her vote to cut the command staff’s salaries, a decision Best has explicitly called “vindictive and punitive.”

“When we were looking at the budget and attempting to respond to the calls of community to take action, to invest in solutions that produce racial justice outcomes,  the reality is that everything is on the table,” González said, “and the SPD executives’ salaries were clearly out of line with the salaries of other executive teams in the city.”

And Morales, who represents Southeast Seattle, said that although she’s “sad to see Chief Best go” because she “brings a unique perspective and lived experience that would have been valuable to the work we’re going to try to do,” the city has been trying to address police accountability and violence since long “before Chief Best was the chief.

“It wasn’t about her—it was about the institution she was a part of, and this is an institution that’s rooted in racism,” Morales said. “Chief Best is loved by her staff and her department, but they are all still part of that system, and that’s what we’re trying to change … the institution and the harm that it’s done. Speaking as the representative from District 2″—the most diverse, and Blackest, district in the city—”that’s what I came into this office to do.”