SEATTLE — An exclusive KING 5 News poll suggests more than half of adults surveyed had a positive experience when they most recently interacted with Seattle police.
Of the 700 Seattle adults surveyed in the poll, more than half said they have had an interaction with a city of Seattle police officer. Those 378 people were asked, was your most recent experience interacting with a Seattle police officer entirely positive, positive, neutral, negative, or entirely negative?
More than half said entirely positive or positive. Another 11% said negative, and 7% said entirely negative.
"I think that the Seattle Police Department still knows it has a job to do. They're going to focus on those positive numbers," said KING 5 Political Analyst Ron Sims, the former King County executive who also worked for the Obama administration. "But it doesn't mean that the negatives can be ignored. You have to work on continued improvement, continued interaction, because you don't want the negatives to grow and multiply."
Poll results also show an overwhelming majority, 90%, said they did not feel singled out for no reason by police, and 91% said that they did not feel discriminated against.
However, when you dig into the demographics and look at the same numbers, 21% of the Black men and women surveyed said they have felt discriminated against during interactions with SPD.
Sims says he's been pulled over eight times in Seattle and each time did not receive a ticket.
"The only reason I was being stopped was because I was an African American, and it made me angry," Sims said.
Sims says he wrote complaints to police about the traffic stops.
"It is not an experience that I would want to relive, and I haven't really lived it in years. So my assumptions are that the training programs they have, the accountability programs they have, the command structures they have are doing it much better today than they've done it in the past," said Sims.
Sims says continued training is what's needed.
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Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best declined an interview request Wednesday but recently released a video in regards to the protests that led to the East Precinct being boarded up.
"I do believe most people in Seattle support the police department and it's officers," Best said.