Holly MatkinSeattle, WA – A former public defender who has referred to police as “serial killers” and voiced her support for antifa’s riotous property destruction is vying to become Seattle’s next city attorney.
Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, 46, decided to run for office just hours before the May 21 filing deadline, The Seattle Times reported.
She came out on top in the primary election with 36.4 percent of the vote.
Thomas-Kennedy repeatedly bashed police on social media since the summer of 2020, The Seattle Times reported.
“I’m way left but atm (at the moment) can only tweet about my rabid hatred of the police. I currently read like a single issue law enforcement abolition anarchist,” she tweeted on July 11, 2020, according to The Seattle Times.
When a rioter breached a barrier outside the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) East Precinct and blew a hole in the station wall using an explosive device on July 25, 2020, Thomas Kennedy lauded the attack.
“This person is a hero,” she declared in a tweet, according to The Seattle Times.
Officers were injured during violent uprisings that day, but Thomas-Kennedy called police “pathetic” and suggested they should “go to college and get a real job.”
When then-SPD Chief Carmen Best spoke out about the department’s efforts to rebuild community trust in August of 2020, Thomas-Kennedy was again divisive.
“Enjoy sitting in your dirty diaper you crybabies,” she wrote, according to The Seattle Times.
The city attorney hopeful staunchly defended destructive rioters in an Aug. 25, 2020 tweet, declaring that “property destruction in a moral imperative,” according to the paper.
“I have not taken any of this anti-bias training but I for sure hate this country,” Thomas-Kennedy tweeted the following month.
On Dec. 24, 2020, she encouraged police to “eat some covid laced sh—t and quit ur jobs,” (Note: Censored by The Police Tribune).
Thomas-Kennedy lashed out again on April 22 after a jury convicted former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd.
“Big whoop,” she tweeted. “This changes nothing. ACA(Still)B. They’re not done killing.”
She referred to law enforcement officers as “stains on humanity,” “Nazis,” and “pigs” in other tweets, KIRO reported.
The former public defender declared in another message that the U.S. Supreme Court “has never been legit,” according to The Seattle Times.
Many of her tweets have since been deleted.
Thomas-Kennedy dismissed criticism surrounding her anti-police messages, and said she wrote some of them after allegedly having to buy a gas mask for her nine-year-old daughter to wear inside their house due to tear gas and pepper balls the SPD was firing in their neighborhood during the riots, The Seattle Times reported.
She described most of her messages as “absurdist satire,” according to the paper.
“So that was in 2020, and the reality of what was happening at that time was it was huge, massive protests all across the country against racist police killings,” Thomas-Kennedy told KIRO. “The response by police in Seattle was to become even more brutal than they had ever been before.”
“My neighborhood was gassed 11 times in a row,” she claimed. “I had to buy a gas mask for my 9-year-old daughter. SPD repeatedly lied about why they did it. They said an umbrella was a riot and a candle was a bomb. I mean, there were a lot of things that were going on at that time and I was angry.”
Thomas-Kennedy said she “definitely trolled police” on Twitter, and that she defends “the right of every private citizen to troll whoever they want on Twitter,” KIRO reported.
She noted she was not running for public office at the time, and that she wouldn’t have tweeted such messages if she had been.
“It’s not like I was the President of the United States of America,” Thomas-Kennedy told KIRO. “I was a private citizen. A lot of those tweets have one ‘like’ maybe, I think the most have six likes…I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t think anybody took me that seriously.”
A group of 30 retired judges as well as prominent Washington state Democrats have thrown their support behind Thomas-Kennedy’s Republican competitor, Ann Davison, according to The Seattle Times.
Former Seattle Municipal Court Judge C. Kimi Kondo, who served 28 years on the bench before retiring in 2019, described Thomas-Kennedy as an “avowed anarchist,” The Seattle Times reported.
Kondo referenced additional tweets Thomas-Kennedy made earlier this year encouraging potential jurors to lie about their viewpoints in order to get onto juries to stop people from being convicted, according to the paper.
“You can’t have a fair trial of anybody if you can’t trust the jury system,” the retired judge said.
Thomas-Kennedy has also vowed to forgo prosecuting most misdemeanors if she is elected, according to KIRO.
“Right now, the reality is that a lot of the misdemeanors that are currently being charged are crimes of poverty and disability,” she claimed during an interview with the news outlet. “And there is nothing about prosecuting crimes of poverty or disability that change the underlying conditions of poverty or disability. So, I would like to actually address the root causes of crimes, so that way we can deter crimes in the future.”
Thomas-Kennedy said in a recent political ad that complete abolition of police and jails should be considered.
“Abolition is not an unreasonable idea,” she said. “Mass incarceration is.”
She also advocates decriminalizing drugs, according to Real Change News.
“As a public defender, I kind of had it in my face every day that this system is pretty racist,” Thomas-Kennedy told Real Change News. “That’s one of many reasons why I would like an abolitionist framework going forward in the city attorney’s office. We’re not going to fix this. The system doesn’t need some incremental tweaks. That’s what we’ve been doing for 100 years: trying to figure how to make the system less racist. But the foundations of this system are racist and classist.”
