Will James
speaker
142 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 2d ago
Will James’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
A lot of the mayor's staff is there, deputy mayors.
Tom Mahaffey was an assistant police chief.
and the person responsible for overseeing the police's response to the protests.
The mayor's staff wanted him to open up the street.
They told police to plan on emptying the precinct of guns, ammo, and evidence.
Protesters could break in.
But Tom couldn't shake his fear that protesters would burn down the whole precinct.
Tom Mahaffey says he came up with a plan to deal with the threat of a fire.
He was going to let the protesters march past the East Precinct, but he wasn't just going to remove weapons and documents like the mayor's office wanted.
He was going to remove the officers, too.
If protesters just walked past, then great, police could just wait them out and go back to work in the precinct.
If protesters attacked, tried to set the building on fire or break in, police would swoop in from outside and make arrests.
And if the building did burn down, at least there wouldn't be any officers to get trapped inside.
Tammy Floyd, who worked as Tom's aide, had been worrying for days that police leaders would abandon the East Precinct.
And now, to her, it was actually happening.
started crying.
Tammy wondered, why did police fight so hard to defend the precinct if this was the outcome?
For Tammy, this was the decision that set the stage for CHOP and everything that came after.
It
After we talked with Tom Mahaffey and Tammy Floyd, we asked Seattle police about the department's conduct during the protests.
Showing 101–120 of 142 · page 6 of 8
← Previous
Next →