A former city manager in Washington state who was deeply concerned about terrorism and “fixated on social unrest” across the country wanted to create a master map showing where Muslim residents lived in his community, an investigation published Monday found.
According to findings by an independent investigator, which were published by the Seattle Times, James “Donny” Payne, then the interim manager of the City of SeaTac, Washington, also proposed an “Americanization” program to help immigrants assimilate into the town of 28,000, where the majority of residents are non-white. He also floated ending a ban on city employees bringing guns to work.
Payne resigned on April 6, two days after the independent investigator submitted a summary of the findings to the SeaTac City Council.
In mid-February, Payne approached the city’s geographic information services coordinator to inquire about whether the city could create a highly specific mapping program showing where Sunni and Shiite Muslim residents lived by neighborhood, house, or person, according to the report.
Payne, an Army veteran and member of the Washington National Guard, referred to the proposed “tactical map” using military parlance and said such a map would help “in case he needed to go into neighborhoods to ‘make the peace,’” the report said. Multiple city staffers told the investigator they were uncomfortable with the idea, which they said could be construed as racial profiling.
In an interview with the Seattle Times, Payne called the investigator’s findings a “hatchet job” and said he was trying to “provide good governance” by compiling demographic data on all SeaTac residents.
“This is what is so outrageous to me: Because it was a white male asking for this information, suddenly people jumped to the conclusion that I must be out to get certain people. I’m deeply offended by that,” he told the paper.
Read the full report via the Seattle Times.
