News - Letter from Lacey Police Chief - Stop Asian Hate
-------- Forwarding a letter from Lacey Police Chief --------
From: Robert Almada <RAlmada@ci.lacey.wa.us>
Date: April 7, 2021 at 2:39:04 PM PDT
To: president@olympiachinese.org
Cc: Scott Spence <SSpence@ci.lacey.wa.us>, Shannon Kelley-Fong <SKelley@ci.lacey.wa.us>, Andy Ryder <ARyder@ci.lacey.wa.us>,Hallie West <HWest@ci.lacey.wa.us>
Subject: Message of Support
Good Afternoon President Lin,
My name is Robert Almada and I am the Interim Chief of Police for the City of Lacey. City Manager Scott Spence shared your March 19th, 2021 letter to Mayor Ryder with me.
I wanted to thank you for reaching out to the City of Lacey and offer my support and endorsement of the goals stated in your letter. No one should be targeted based upon their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, appearance, or political views. The Lacey Police Department has no tolerance for hate groups or any group that espouses a message of violence. We are committed to constitutional policing and to being actively engaged with our community. Recently, an online school event was disrupted by racial slurs and intolerance. Although the hate-speech was not technically a criminal violation, we conducted the appropriate follow up without delay to ensure the safety of the participants of the online school event. We successfully identified the responsible party (despite attempting to hide their true identity) and ensured that they were held accountable.
Although the size of our police department precludes the forming of a single-purpose unit such as an anti-hate crime unit, we do provide all officers with training on the identification of hate groups, the investigation of hate crimes, as well as partnering with regional, state and federal partners to address this issue.
I would like to meet with you in the near future to have further discussions on this topic. We can meet online or in an appropriate socially distanced setting. My contact information is included below.
Thankyou again for your letter and for the attention your organization has brought to this important issue.
All the best,
