Nonviolent Collective Action: A Required Response

May 25, 2025

Less than three weeks ago, a 41-year-old man named Justin Moegling was shot and killed by Poulsbo police. According to his stepfather, who is a Suquamish elder, Moegling was in the middle of a mental health crisis. He was driving very slowly on Viking Way at night when the police began pursuing him, called for assistance from Kitsap County officers, and stopped him just outside the city limits. When he didn’t obey their commands, they smashed his rear window and shot pepper balls into his car. They shouted at him and briefly attempted to de-escalate. When the confused and traumatized man emerged from the car with a knife in his hand, the police, considering him a deadly threat, tazed him twice, and then shot and killed him.

The incident is now in the hands of the state’s Office of Independent Investigation, and we await their findings. A thoughtful synopsis of the death of Justin Moegling and the questions raised by this event can be found in the Kitsap Sun in an opinion by writer Sarah Van Gelder, linked here.

Remember that the Poulsbo police shot and killed another Suquamish community member, Stonechild Chiefstick, six years ago at the July 3 fireworks celebration right here in Waterfront Park. That tragic incident occurred during a period of growing public awareness and media coverage of racist killings throughout the nation. Trayvon Martin was shot and killed for wearing a hoodie in the wrong neighborhood, Ahmaud Arbery for jogging through the wrong neighborhood, Breonna Taylor for sleeping in her own apartment. But for police to be frequently shooting people, many of them unarmed, was a new story in the news.

Today we solemnly observe the fifth anniversary of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  On May 25, 2020, he repeated “I can’t breathe,” as Officer Derek Chauvin put his knee to Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and snuffed the life out of him. There followed solemn promises to change, to train the police better. But the New York Times reports that police killings have actually increased since then, not decreased.

Last year, police killed at least 1,226 people, an 18 percent increase over 2019 (the year before George Floyd was killed, and the year Stonechild Chiefstick was killed in Poulsbo). A prominent criminal justice scholar interviewed in the Times says, “given all the promise of five years ago, in terms of the promises of police reform, from where I sit, the reality is that policing hasn’t changed.” And the statistics are clear about the inherent racism in police-involved killings: since 2015, the number of Native Americans killed by police is 6.8 per 100,000 people; African Americans, 6.7 per 100,000 people; Hispanic, 2.9; White, 2.5.

This is some of the historical context of the killing of Justin Moegling.    

The shooting here on May 5 has met with many reactions, in addition to, of course, the Suquamish community’s grief. Some people ask us to put ourselves in the place of police officers and the life-and-death situations they face. Others urge us to be patient until the investigation is completed. Others are quick to attack and condemn the police’s use of deadly force.

Let’s ask some obvious questions. Why did the cops pursue Moegling’s car in the first place? The initial police report doesn’t say. And crucially, what forms of de-escalation did they try, and for how long? What kind of in-depth training in de-escalation do Poulsbo’s police receive? How does enhanced weaponry and other gadgetry influence the impulse of police to use violence? Nurses can tell you that in decades of working in hospitals in ERs and wards where there are violent patients, they have never had to kill a single one. 

What’s the difference in training between nurses and police, and how can we beg the police, our employees, to work on that? Our Indianola neighbor Zann has had a beautiful letter to the editor published in the Kitsap Sun that concludes, “I call on the good people of Poulsbo and Kitsap County to join me in demanding truth, compassion, respect, and substantial change. Over-policing by under-trained officers makes us unsafe. We deserve better for ourselves, our families, and our neighbors.” Thank you, Zann!

One more important subject--and this is why we protest and will continue to protest. Trump’s BIG UGLY BILL, which has passed the House and will soon go to the Senate, promises to make the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor and working class to the uber-rich in history.  The content of the bill is alarming in its cruelty, and yet the House has passed it. It will gut Medicaid and cut over a half trillion dollars from Medicare, depriving at least thirteen million people of healthcare. It will deprive eleven million people of food assistance. It eliminates entire government agencies we depend on for food safety, consumer protection, the weather, disaster relief, affordable college. It gives obscene tax breaks to the richest. It will increase the debt by four trillion dollars.

A scholarly study has concluded that when 3 ½  percent of the population actually goes into action, rises up, hits the streets, protests, and obstructs business as usual, when public institutions like Harvard and individuals speak out--individuals like Bruce Springsteen and Jane Fonda and New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver and Bernie Sanders and AOC and Milwaukee judge Hannah Dugan and Rick Steves and retired judge Michael Luttig and historian Tim Snyder and journalist Rachel Maddow and so many thousands of others, the more we all refuse to cave, the more the national tide turns.      

Nonviolent collective action, protest in the streets, has brought huge change and even peaceful revolution many times over: think of the American Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Gandhi’s Salt March in India in 1930, the People Power revolution in the Philippines in 1986, Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, and Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution in 1989—they’ve all resulted in a national turnaround when it did not seem possible.

This is serious business. Anyone who is not awake and resisting now, anyone just being depressed on Facebook and sitting home, is responsible, a part of the ongoing rot and corruption and destruction of our nation.  Katie Phang writes today, “the notion of sitting on the sidelines during the biggest battle of our lives is unconscionable and unacceptable.” Get your friends and neighbors out into the streets and build our national 3 ½ percent! Call elected officials right now, especially Republican senators in other states (the app 5 calls makes this very easy), as Trump’s Big Ugly Bill is about to go to the Senate. And KEEP JOINING PUBLIC PROTESTS to make your voice heard!  Go to not just one protest, but all the ones you can!

Our lives depend on it.  

No one is coming to save us but US.                   

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