Bennie Radford lives in Florida these days. It’s 3,000 miles and a lifetime away from pre-pandemic Seattle. But in the days since yet another shooting this spring at Seattle’s Garfield High School, Radford hasn’t been able to think of much else.
“My stomach is wrenching right now,” he said when I got him on the phone Tuesday, in Apollo Beach, Fla. “I never should have left. Those are my kids — that was my school.
” From 2008 to 2019, Radford was Garfield’s cop. “Officer Bennie,” the kids called him. He stood sentry at the front door, wandered the grounds during lunch periods and, every so often, was called on to enforce the peace.
For example, Radford once chased down and arrested a 25-year-old leader of the Deuce 8 street gang, in a school hallway. Prosecutors alleged the gang leader was using the high school as a recruiting ground for fresh members. “I was mostly on guard for folks coming around Garfield who didn’t belong,” Radford said Tuesday.
“I wasn’t arresting the students.” But the Seattle School Board canceled the job in 2020 during the backlash against policing after George Floyd’s murder. The board indefinitely shelved school police arrangements at Garfield and four other Seattle schools.
In a resolution , the board said it was “abandoning notions of policing and pathology,” and removing the officers as a show of how the school district “supports defunding police.” At the time, school buildings were empty due to the pandem.
