Police Team-Building Scavenger Hunt Challenges Officers To Arrest Someone From Every Race

SEATTLE—As part of an attempt to more equitably implement a strategy of profiling and mass incarceration, members of the Seattle Police Department engaged in a team-building scavenger hunt this week in which they were challenged to arrest someone of every race. “Officers are partnering up to go around the city looking for one person of every race to stop without probable cause and then arrest on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence,” said Sgt. Earl Dennis, explaining how scavenger-hunt participants were given a skin-color scorecard on which they would check off each racial category as they competed to see who could overfill jails with a diverse group of inmates that were reflective of the population at large. “It’s good for our department to have a fun, friendly competition in which they are encouraged to use lethal force against someone regardless of their background or ancestry. We want to reimagine public safety in such a way that it will one day become commonplace to see an Asian guy dying in a banned chokehold, or a young white kid shot in the back 15 times. I think our guys will be pretty motivated, because the winning team gets a pizza party back at the precinct house.” At press time, department sources confirmed five days had passed with no one successfully completing the scavenger hunt, and so the rules were simplified to make it the usual contest of who could club the most Black men.