CRG officer Richard Bonesteel is a real charmer.
He went on two dates last year that ended with a woman calling the cops because he was belligerently drunk and abusive. (THREAD)
Bonesteel may go by Richard, but acts like a “Dick” both on and off the job.
According to an OPA complaint, the friend of a woman in Renton Bonesteel was dating called 911 after he drunkenly manhandled her during a dispute. (1/9)
The local police declined to arrest him and OPA also recommended no discipline for the incident.
Months later, there was a similar fracas at a different woman’s house—this time in Edmonds. The woman called EPD to report Bonesteel was drunk and wouldn’t leave. (2/9)
OPA sustained a complaint against him, but curiously noted that this was “out of character” for him.
Really?
From 2012-2020 OPA investigated Bonesteel 19 times. Four were sustained, and one resulted in suspension. (3/9)
In a recent complaint from the 2020 protests, Bonesteel rudely berated an Asian woman.
He asked if she was “born here,” invoking the anti-Asian “perpetual foreigner” trope.
OPA didn’t sustain bias allegations, but gave Bonesteel a training referral for professionalism (4/9)
In 2017, Bonesteel received multiple complaints over an incident that occurred at a post-Charlottesville anti-hate rally in which he violently shoved a woman.
OPA ruled that it was impossible to determine from the evidence whether the push was justified. (5/9)
In a 2016 complaint, it was alleged that Bonesteel used excessive force when he put his knee on the head of an arrestee. Though this was reported by a civilian witness, OPA judged this “inconclusive” because it wasn’t captured on video. (6/9)
In 2014, a complaint alleged he retaliated against a woman for asking for his identification during a Terry stop. He tells the woman she’s free to go, but when she asks for his ID, he gets snippy & detains her further to run her name for warrants. (7/9)
Bonesteel has an unusually high amount of reported force—nearly 60 instances since 2014. 35% of those were against Black people (7% of Seattle’s population) (8/9)
Bonesteel was featured in one of SPD’s “Officers in their Own Words” propaganda videos. It has since been removed from Youtube. 🤔(9/9)
Cops are forming a line and making arrests. Some familiar faces. Larry Longley, Chris Gregorio and former council candidate Aaron Marshall wielding a 40 mm
LRAD just issued a warning to stay in the counter demo zone. About 15 bike cops are staging on the east side of the demo
@AshleyNerbovig Early in her time at the Stranger she broke the story of racist cop Burton Hill, who was later fired for calling his Chinese neighbor a racial slur. thestranger.com/news/2023/09/2…
@AshleyNerbovig She wrote about how the police union has sabotaged SPD's alternative response: thestranger.com/news/2024/03/2…
Actually, the criticism is: 1) She's a Republican who lives in DuPont who organized a rally to "take back" a city that she doesn't live in. (not even the same county/area code)
2) This event is the latest in a series of deeply cynical GOP efforts aimed at breaking off Asians from the Democratic Party. That's clearly laid out in the thread.
If she was just a person who happened to be Republican and decided to organize a vigil to honor the victim, there would be nothing to criticize about it. However, all the messaging betrays a partisan agenda while the GOP's role has been consciously concealed.
This seems like an opportunistic move that's part of a larger Republican strategy to woo Asian voters through a combination of grievance politics (see also that kid who didn't get accepted to Berkeley) and fear-mongering about crime and homelessness.
It's hard to overstate how deeply and transparently cynical this is. The original flyer for this thrown-together event didn't even spell Kwon's name correctly.
It shows how little they actually care about this woman whose death they're exploiting.
The version Brandi just posted changed the title to "Unite for Safety" and deleted the inflammatory references to women being "robbed, assaulted, and raped"