“Blues for John T. Williams,” narrative nonfiction by Steve Griggs
Raven Chronicles Literary Press nominated 6 poems & prose works for the 2019 Pushcart Prize, XLIV Edition. This is one of the nominated pieces:
Blues for John T. Williams
“Hey! Hey! HEY!” the cop shouted. “Put the knife down! Put the knife down! PUT THE KNIFE DOWN!” The old Indian, walking along the sidewalk, lifted his gaze from his carving and looked over his right shoulder toward the young, white lawman nine feet behind him. The officer jerked the trigger of his sidearm five times. The Indian fell to the sidewalk, dead. It was just past 4 p.m. on August 30, 2010, at the corner of Boren and Howell. The sky was blue. The air was still. The Seattle Police Officer’s name was Ian Birk. The Indian’s name was John T. Williams.
Deliberate and unlawful killing of one person by another is homicide. The officer’s shooting was ruled as “unjustified,” but the officer was not charged with homicide. The killing was awful but lawful.
Why can police legally kill, even when unjustified? I had to know the answer. John T. Williams was an artist, born in 1960, just twenty-eight days before me. It is my responsibility as a fellow artist to witness and try to understand this injustice.
Following the killing, the relationship between the victim’s family and police worsened. John’s brother, Rick, took on the role of spokesperson, and through his grief and anger, spoke of the wisdom of his ancestors. “I must be a warrior for peace.”
Two weeks after John’s death, a lawyer on behalf of his family convened a Restorative Circle at the Chief Seattle Club. The club served as a sacred healing space where those linked by this shared tragedy could express themselves, seek understanding, and connect. Afterward, Rick said, “What we need are more opportunities for safe, direct communications like those we had.”
Within days of the restorative circle, drummers, elders, and protest marchers chanted tribal thunder in City Hall. The protesters raised their voices and a city councilman raised his hands.
“I’m going to ask that we try to look at this event through the eyes and the lens of Officer Birk,” the council member said. “And I will tell you why—because if we can do that, we can then say with a heightened sense of strength and courage and conviction that you must see this incident through the eyes of John T. Williams. From any perspective other than your own . . . this is the challenge of fighting institutional racism.”
The eyes of Officer Ian Birk—what did they see? Were his eyes blinded behind the one-way lenses of racism? And the eyes of John T. Williams? Did a beer buzz cloud a vision that this was how his days would end? And me. Can I see this from any perspective other than my own? Probably not, but I will try. I invite you to try.
Four days after the shooting that took Williams’ life, officer Birk recounted the events for the Firearms Review Board. The light turned red at the corner of Boren and Howell. Birk stopped his patrol car. The sun was shining and a man shuffled in front of Birk’s car. The man was stabbing and scraping a piece of wood with a knife. The man appeared to be mentally impaired and oblivious of the presence of a police officer.
What was Birk thinking? Unless he tells us, we may never know. Police hide their thoughts from the public. But as a twenty-seven-year-old officer with merely two years on the job, Birk likely had thoughts similar to another fresh white recruit who killed his first civilian and wrote about it, Norm Stamper. In his book Breaking Rank, Stamper shares his experience with the rampant racist fears of white officers. He wrote, “Why am I so certain that white cops are afraid of black men? Because I was a white cop. In a world of white cops. For thirty-four years.”
Stamper goes on to recount his early police academy training which taught, “that of all the people we’d encounter on the streets, those most dangerous to our safety, to our survival, were black men.” Specifically, black Muslims “will kill any police officer when the opportunity presents itself, regardless of the circumstances or outcome.” I don’t have any quotes from white officers about indigenous people, so I am going to take the liberty to suggest that Stamper’s quote refers to all non-white people and that the police academy trains new police to see the community as a war zone.
Stamper’s racist academy training was reinforced by racist field training. Stamper was ordered to take his police baton, referred to as a “nigger knocker,” into a bar and arrest the “biggest, blackest, meanest motherfucking nigger in the place.” Halfway to the door, Stamper was called back. The field trainer was laughing. Stamper stopped shaking five minutes later. Field training emphasizes aggressive warrior tactics.
Soon after this hazing, Stamper watched a different white officer interact with blacks in a “respectful, transparently fearless approach.” This contrast in styles of white/black contact helped Stamper recognize his own “panicky, impulsive” approach. Stamper went on to confess, “I was hardly your ideal cop candidate. Like many other screwed-up kids who go on to become police officers, I used the job, or it used me, to work out all kinds of developmental and emotional challenges. I figure upwards of a hundred San Diegans paid a price for my on-the-job ‘therapy’ during my rookie year alone.”
So what were Ian Birk’s developmental and emotional challenges? How had he been trained to see indigenous people? Would Williams have to pay the price of Birk’s on-the-job therapy?
Unknown to Birk, Williams descended from the Ditidaht Tribe, from the Nuu-cha-nulth Nation of western Vancouver Island. For centuries, these tribes have transformed tree trunks into effigies of spirit characters from their stories—eagles, orcas, frogs, beavers, wolves, minks. The stories provide lessons from connections between nature and humans. Stories that entertain. Stories that instruct. Stories that preserve a culture of this place, from ancient history to the present. Carved wood from the Williams family reference these vital stories. While John’s brother Rick carved, he told a reporter for Seattle Met magazine, “I’m not whittling here. I’m telling stories without talking.”
In the book, A Totem Pole History, Michael Pavel writes, “Every Coast Salish community needs artists to record our history in the pieces we bring to life. In doing so, we did what our ancestors did: we carry forth a profound and beautiful way of life.”
Birk also did not know that John T. Williams was only one of a large family of carvers living in Seattle for generations. John’s older brother Harvey had been the subject of a 1965 Seattle Times full-page story, “Victoria’s Boy Totem-Carver.” The article includes a picture of Harvey carving while his parents and five siblings, including John, watched. Even though Harvey received this public recognition, carving four totems a day, later he acknowledged John’s superior talent saying, “Some of his carvings made me feel like an amateur.”
John and his siblings had learned carving traditions from Ray, their father, who had learned from Sam, his grandfather, who had learned from a lineage stretching back four generations before. “We’re really proud people as carvers,” Rick told Seattle Met., “It’s who I am. I’m in my element when I’m carving.” And the reputation of the Williams family of carvers was wide. “North, south, east and west. Dad, Sam, John, Dave, Eric and I were in different points of Seattle,” Rick said. “Everybody knew who we were in those days.”
John’s grandfather Sam came to Seattle back in 1901, and carved totems for sale at Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. The book ,1001 Curious Things: Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and Native American Art (2001), contains many pictures and stories of Sam and his work, including a three-and-a-half-story-tall totem purchased by Robert Ripley in 1936. Ripley, famous for the Believe It or Not! franchise, also purchased Sam’s ten-foot-tall carving Potlatch Man. Ripley displayed Potlatch Man at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Ripley was not the only person to purchase a Williams totem. Of all the totem poles sold at Ye Olde Curiosity Shop since it opened in 1899, one estimate is that over seventy percent of them were carved by a Williams family member. Art by generations of the Williams family can be admired together on the shelves today. They were on display the day Ian Birk encountered John T. Williams. Before John was shot, he was likely carving something that would stand on the shelves next to the other family pieces.
Unbeknownst to Birk, Williams was transforming the chunk of scrap lumber into his favorite spirit animal, the eagle. The eagle flies on high, with a wide perspective, seeing the larger view beyond the details. Williams guided his small blade into the grain with skilled sculptor’s vision, unaided by an outline of pencil marks. Birk, from his limited perspective, did not see that the knife was only three inches long—half an inch less than the minimum
necessary to meet the definition of “dangerous knife” in the Seattle Municipal code—the laws Birk was sworn to enforce. Birk did not see that Williams was walking from his room on Eastlake to Victor Steinbrueck Park, where he and his brothers would carve under the fifty-foot totems.
While we can’t enter Birk’s mind, we can observe what he did, and didn’t do. Birk had seen a knife. His duty as a police officer was to initiate contact to determine if there was a crime or a threat to the public. He activated the revolving cruiser emergency lights, reported to the dispatcher his contact with a suspect, rocked out of his vehicle, reached for his holster, and released his sidearm.
Here, Birk’s misstep strayed from policies and training. He didn’t provide the dispatcher with any details about the suspect. He didn’t mention the knife. He didn’t say where Williams was or which direction the suspect was walking. He didn’t call for backup, even though there were officers with Tasers within twenty seconds of his location. Birk justified his deviation with a strange personal belief, not one supported by polices or training—he expected that other police listening to their department radios would rely on a “sixth sense” to intuit the specifics of his encounter.
Perhaps Birk thought the officers would just understand that this was just another chapter in the frequent mistreatment of indigenous people by the police. Maybe Birk bought into the idea that downtown Seattle on a summer afternoon was a war zone where his actions on camera would show he was a bad ass.
Approaching Williams from behind, Birk shouted, “Hey!” three times and “Put the knife down!” three times. He did not identify himself as a Police Officer and he did not warn that he would shoot.
Birk left the protective cover of his vehicle and closed the distance between himself and a man with a knife. But why? Police are trained to maintain at least twenty-one feet distance from a knife-wielding suspect to allow enough time to draw a sidearm and shoot twice at the center of body mass.
Williams turned his head toward Birk. Birk saw a “very stern, very serious, very confrontational look on his face.” Birk testified, “His brow was furrowed, eyes were fixed in a thousand-yard stare. His jaw was set. He had the knife raised up.”
What could Williams’ face have been saying? Williams’ skin, darkened by years on the street, may have triggered a fear of the “other” in Birk. Williams could have furrowed his brow, perhaps struggling to understand the voice behind him through his impaired hearing. Williams likely widened his eyes, snapped out of his concentration on carving. Imagine the focus and coordination required to walk and carve at the same time. Williams clenched his jaw, disgruntled at being detained from meeting his brothers. If Williams frowned, perhaps he was recalling his one hundred misdemeanor arrests over the previous twenty-five years and wondering if the recent beer he drank would again lead to jail. Williams raised the knife, maybe to show that it was small and he was closing the blade.
“Knowing that he could attack at any moment,” Birk testified, “that he had failed to comply with my lawful orders, and that he was so close that he could attack me before I could react, I made the decision to fire.” The first officer responding to the report of shots fired told Birk, “Good job.”
At the King County inquest, Birk explained, “The concern was basically immediate, and I needed to respond as fast as possible. . . . There was no intent on my part to kill Mr. Williams. My intent was to stop the threat.” But the four pedestrians nearby testified that Williams did not pose a threat. Birk’s statement of “no intent to kill” was critical for legal protection.
What Birk said next compartmentalizes the consequences of his actions, skirting accountability for taking Williams’ life. Birk said, “We don’t decide who lives or dies. It’s a terrible thing.”
I am uncomfortable hearing this statement. I hope you are too. “We don’t decide who lives or dies.” I assume the “we” Birk referred to are police officers. If so, Birk is hiding behind his badge. I suppose that police “don’t decide” means that officers take action based on hard-wired training and unbiased policies, that police are just doing their job, that whatever a police officer does is necessary, no matter the result. Birk’s testimony suggests that he decided to fire with no intent to kill. So if he didn’t intend to kill Williams but Williams died from his shots, who is accountable for that mistake? By shooting four bullets into Williams without taking responsibility for killing, Birk is somehow blaming the system.
Let’s look closer at this system. Eighty police officers told their stories of deadly force in a 2006 book Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force. The “kill zone” is the area where a suspect might kill an officer. This “kill zone” surrounds every suspect where police are trained to fear for their lives. This zone, where police are vulnerable to attack, is the place where they are legally protected to use deadly force. Understand, the police detect an invisible kill zone around every one of us. Whether you know it or not, police are trained to use deadly force in this zone. Birk was trained to use deadly force, was legally protected in doing so, but he didn’t intend to kill. That doesn’t add up.
A common question asked of people applying to be police officers is, “Will you be able to shoot, and perhaps kill, another human being?” One officer in the book Into the Kill Zone responded, “I read a lot as a kid. I read a lot of everything, from cowboy books, to quite a few police books, to a lot of spy novels. I knew from all this reading and from watching occasional news pieces that there were some seriously bad, evil people out there and that there was a potential that I would come into contact with them. I knew that I would be able to handle it. I never questioned my ability to take somebody’s life if it was a situation of where it was them or me, or them or my family, or them or some innocent person they were trying to victimize. So I always felt that I would be able to shoot somebody if it was necessary.” My question is, what if it isn’t necessary? What if an officer makes a mistake? And what if these mistakes happen in the kill zone?
If the officer believes you have a knife, the kill zone surrounds you in every direction for twenty-one feet. It doesn’t matter if you actually have a knife. I doubt John T. Williams realized where his kill zone was. Birk entered the kill zone for Williams. Will you be aware when police enter your kill zone? Do you see that you are at the center of a place where police are legally justified to kill you because they are afraid? How much more lethal is your kill zone if the officer thinks he’s in a war with people of color? Who will speak for the victims at the center of their kill zones—Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Che Taylor, Charleena Lyles, John T. Williams?
The length of time between Birk’s first “Hey!” and his decision to fire was seven seconds. Then Birk quickly squeezed the trigger five times. One bullet missed. The other four hollow-point bullets pierced Williams in his right side because he had not yet turned around to face Birk. Hollow-point bullets mushroom on impact to cause more tissue damage in the wound path. One bullet entered Williams’ chin on the right and exited on the left. Another entered the back of his upper right arm, exiting under his right collar bone. A third entered the middle of his right forearm, the arm holding his knife, and exited the other side. The fourth, the most deadly, entered his right chest above the nipple, traveled through his lungs and heart, and exited his left armpit. Williams fell to the sidewalk. The Chief Medical Examiner concluded in his Coroner Report, “The manner of death is homicide.”
In just under seven seconds, Birk escalated from making contact to assess a threat to fearing for his life. He decided Williams was a threat and needed to be shot. Birk deviated from policies and training to create the situation that increased his own risk. Why? We may never know. The Firearms Review Board ruled that the shooting was “unjustified.”
So what should come from an unjustified homicide by a police officer? I believe that an officer should be held accountable for his actions. Under our Declaration of Independence, John T. Williams was endowed by his Creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Birk took those constitutional rights away. Who will pay for that theft?
But Washington State law is not on the side of police shooting victims. Our law contains the strongest protection in America against police officers being convicted of homicide. The Revised Code of Washington, Title 9A, Chapter 16, Section 040, Subsection 3 states, “A public officer or peace officer shall not be held criminally liable for using deadly force without malice and with a good faith belief that such act is justifiable.” In plain English, that means a police officer without evil intent in Washington State cannot be charged with killing a human being. This is where Birk’s statement of “no intent to kill” shields his actions from prosecution.
It has been lawful for police in Washington to shoot and kill a fleeing suspect since 1909. But the Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that using deadly force to prevent the escape of an unarmed suspect violated their constitutional rights. In response, two Democratic senators from Seattle sponsored a bill that would merit lethal force if there was a perception of peril to the officer or anyone else. The Washington Association of Sheriffs and
Police Chiefs inserted the good faith and malice clause. Leo Poort, legal adviser to the Seattle police chief told the Seattle Times, “We wanted it clear that if you were acting in good faith, that a prosecutor should not be able to charge a crime.” The bill became law in 1986. So we are left with this rule. Awful but lawful.
While Washington State law may be terrible, according to a 2015 Amnesty International report, “all fifty states and Washington D.C. fail to comply with international law and standards on the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers.”
Maybe the death of John T. Williams will change things. Five months after he was shot, the Justice Department opened an investigation of the Seattle Police Department. Eight and a half months later, the investigation confirmed that “SPD has engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force that violates the Constitution and federal law. Our investigation further raised serious concerns that some SPD policies and practices, particularly those related to pedestrian encounters, could result in discriminatory policing.” Seven months later, Seattle agreed to a settlement for a consent decree to address these concerns. But a consent decree is dispute resolution between two parties without admission of guilt.
John T. Williams’ death led his brother to embody the peacemaker teachings of his elders. Rick kept his knife pointed to art, not anger, and carved a thirty-four-foot totem in John’s memory. In front of the totem at Seattle Center, architect Johnpaul Jones, the architect of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C., has designed the Wa-Nish Circle of Peace to welcome all indigenous people.
The crosswalk at Boren and Howell has been decorated with a symbol of the peacemaker, and the utility box next to the place where John was killed is now covered with a story of the peacemaker, White Deer, as told by a tribal elder. This elder, Sara Jack, talked about why there is repetition in the story, the repetition of visiting an old tree to receive the power of White Deer. The elder said, “Why is it repeated several times? The ritual of going back again and again. Going home and going back to where there is knowledge. It is work. You have to work for knowledge. You have to go back and forth, back and forth. You have to study where you walk, wherever you walk, you have to study yourself; you have to feel things. You have to keep that within your heart and humble yourself. It is a lot of work to do that. That’s the meaning of that, going back and forth.”
As a community we need to study where we walk. I want to study where I walk—where John T. Williams walked.
Published in Raven Chronicles Last Call, Vol. 26, 2018.
Steve Griggs has written for the The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, and Earshot Jazz. His work has also been published in Rhythm in the Rain: Jazz in the Pacific Northwest, Stories of Music Volume 2, and Creative Colloquy Volume 3. “Blues for John T. Williams” is a script for a performance of music at the John T. Williams Honor Totem on August 30, 2017, the seventh anniversary of his death. It was commissioned through a CityArtist grant from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. Ian Devier filmed the performance for broadcast on the Seattle Channel.