Brickbat: The Purge
(Vladakg / Dreamstime.com)
Someone manually deleted 191 text messages from the phone of then-Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan following the 2020 protests in response to the death of George Floyd. That's one finding from a forensic report included in a lawsuit filed by business owners and residents over damages from those protests. The report also found "factory resets" were done on the phones of six other city officials, including then-police chief Carmen Best and Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, leading to the deletions of thousands of other text messages. Those texts should have been preserved under both state public records law and legal evidence rules.