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Seattle War Zone: Dori Monson Nails It
In the past few days, there have been multiple shootings in downtown Seattle. Ordinary citizens are wondering if they should be going there at all, and are expressing their opinions publicly. Local businesses are appealing to city government to improve conditions in their neighborhoods, so they are not confronted with drug deals, gang shootings, and homeless people in their doorways on a daily basis.
Dori Monson, a host on KIRO Radio, has published an excellent article on the local site MyNorthwest.com. He attributes many of Seattle’s problems to the city’s elected officials, many of whom are politically-correct 1960s radicals who now hold the power. City police, distrusted by many, seem powerless to stop the rampant crime and drug dealing. Criminals with multiple felony convictions are released onto the streets to continue their mayhem. Respected local businesses, like Bartell Drugs and Barnes and Noble Booksellers are closing shop, leaving empty storefronts behind.
But the Citizens of Seattle elect their Government. Too bad they get what they elect.
Cross-posted at RushBabe49.com.
Published in Policing
I started reading. I could only get so far. The prosecutors and judges are the worst criminals. Lock them up. Replace them with someone who will do the job. Then let the police do theirs.
You must understand that the criminals are just victims of white supremacists. Arresting and prosecuting them simply continues the legacy of racism on which this nation was founded. (Okay, no more sarcasm.)
The fundamental problem is that the majority of people who work and shop in the city don’t live there, but commute from the suburbs. The politicians in the city can play out their youthful, leftist fantasies without fear of serious opposition. When the city turns into the Detroit of the Pacific Northwest, they’ll have long since cashed in and skipped town. The suburbs may also be leftist, but of a different variety; genteel, saccharine and insincere. Meant to maintain appearances via an ersatz “woke” posture.
Try Chicago. Detroit’s not that bad. Mike Duggan has been doing a pretty good job for a Democrat. More like Rudy Giuliani or Richard J. Daley than, say, Rahm Emmanuel.
Emmanuel, for all of his innumerable faults such as never letting a crisis go to waste, stood head-and-shoulders above Lightfoot. The rot in The City That Works has accelerated.
We sold our house in Winnetka last August and are glad to be out of Dimocrat land. The new governor Fredo Pritzker is an idiot.
If you want an excellent window onto whats going on in Chicago, Second City Cop is great.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
HL Mencken
Our big cities are certainly confirming this.
I almost referred to Lightfoot as “Groot.” Then I remembered that anyone not reading Second City Cop would have no idea who I was talking about.
However, the root cause of the problem is the voting block that put them in office. It would be a tragedy to see Seattle’s downtown turn into a wasteland, but it sounds as if they’re well on their way . . .
That’s the last straw. I’m leaving this state.
Where to?
What a surprise, I’m stunned. From the Seattle Times about the two suspects in the downtown shooting that are on the run:
From the column:
Reading the comments of the mayor, the governor, and some of their supporters arguing with others in the comments on the KIRO webpage, you can see that the desire here is to continue to blame the guns, and not the policing and the prosecution policies being taken by city, county and state leaders, and that’s immaterial of their views on gun control — Michael Bloomberg may have repudiated part of his own crime control policy in New York in order to pander to the left side of the Democratic Party while running for president. But his viability rests on the city continuing to have lowered its crime rate from the Giuliani years during Bloomberg’s 12 years at City Hall, and he’s the poster child for gun grabbing.
What Bloomberg understood with his ‘Stop and Frisk’ policy, that no one in Seattle or Washington state wants to admit, is there’s a quid pro quo to being a maniacal gun grabber. If you are going to take away the public’s ability to protect themselves, it’s then up to the government to do everything within it’s power to have the police protect you. Seattle pols instead follow the Bill de Blasio script, which is to still want to ban and confiscate everyone’s guns, but then not provide the policing to allow the unarmed public to be safe. Which is also in large part why de Blasio’s presidential campaign was the joke it was, even among Democrats.
(Bloomberg’s policy only has a chance to work, of course, in a high density area like New York or Seattle, where the public is close to patrol officers. Rural or suburban areas can’t have enough policing to guarantee that.)
We should remember that this is standard Marxist doctrine: Crime exists only because of “capitalism”, which is why in the Soviet Gulags vicious criminals were treated more leniently than quiet peaceful political dissenters.
But in fact today’s “progressives” are even more deranged than the Marxists who ran the Soviet Union because in the Soviet Union they at least had the sense to put thieves and violent criminals in prison.
In an article in yesterday’s Seattle Times, our mayor is quoted as saying, “I do not think Seattle is in crisis. I think Seattle is a big city that has big-city challenges.” Simply gobsmacking.
She far too short to be Groot. Maybe her wife, though…
You were already leaving.
Same as the late 1960s through early 1990s liberal boilerplate — there’s no crisis, and even if there is a crisis, it’s systemic to all big cities. It’s an attempt to pretend the problem is simply due to the coarsening of society itself, and not the refusal to attempt corrective policies, because you’re so tied into the ‘root causes’ theory of crime that you think criminal behavior is caused by unfair and unbalanced policing.
But it’s harder to get away with that spin in 2020 because people not only remember the 1990s turnaround in lower crime rates, and not just in New York but in other major cities due to stricter law enforcement techniques, but the two people who got the most favorable media attention for cutting crime rates — Giuliani and Bloomberg — haven’t faded into the distant mists of political time, but are major parts of the 2020 presidential election.
They’re still around, which makes it tougher for the left to spin that there’s no way to solve the problem. There is a way to cut crime rates, saner people know there’s a way, but what the left has been trying to do instead has been to remove the laws and ordinances that were used as part of ‘broken windows’ policing, so that anyone trying it again in the 2020s will be blocked from working with the exact same methods. That’s even more outrageous than the 1960s-90s progressives, because the current group of progs are saying nothing can be done about the crime problem at the same time they’re trying to alter laws to make sure no one can do anything about the crime problem in the future, without not only changing mayors or governors, but entire city or state legislative bodies.
This article is quite unconvincing to me.
It does not establish a significant crime problem in Seattle. It is purely anecdotal.
It is possible that Seattle has a significant crime problem. The way to demonstrate this is though citation to crime statistics, not sensationalized reporting on specific, tragic crimes.
I don’t mind if someone is prompted, by a specific event, to actually get the facts. This seems quite proper. But I am getting quite annoyed by this type of slipshod and lazy reporting, devoid of any meaningful information, which can be accessed quite easily at the Uniform Crime Reports website.
I’ve seen it done by Black Lives Matter, and debunked. Recently, I repeatedly debunked claims of anti-Semitic violence (while acknowledging that there might be a recent spike in the NYC area, though this assertion lacked adequate factual support). I see this tactic used heavily on the Left, with factually unsupported assertions of significant levels of violence directed at Muslims, or homosexuals, or trannys, or whatever.
Let’s not do the same thing ourselves.
My criticism isn’t really directed at you, RushBabe. We should get better information from the media. But facts don’t sell, apparently, while sensationalism certainly does.
Here’s the thing. It is quite possible that there is a spike in crime in Seattle. But if you want to claim that there is, do the darned work and get the statistics. Here’s the UCR link, if anyone has the time.
Even with the crime stats, you’d still have to factor in the variables caused by local politicians. Bill de Blasio can say New York is safer under him than under Bloomberg in part because the city has decriminalized a bunch of quality-of-life crimes since 2013. So the crime rate is ‘lower’ but the public knows better. Not sure if Seattle pols have followed that model, but that KOMO “Seattle is Dying” special 10 months ago probably doesn’t have the impact it did in terms of viewership if the perception wasn’t there.
Given the various political motivations to overreport or underreport crimes of one kind or another, do you really think the Uniform Crime Reports website is reliable?
Pennsylvania.
Hush. Ain’t nobody axed ya!
I think so, but this question is worthy of further research. Will you report back?
In the early 1990s I taught at King County Juvenile Detention for a year. I watched the revolving door on that system and was appalled. Kids who stole cars repeatedly would show up, spend a couple of days in lock-up, and then be released just return a week or so later. More that half of the kids I worked with had one or more gun charge on their record. The facility was great, the juvenile correction officers were terrific people, hard working, intelligent and deeply caring. The problem was the judges, the courts, and the prosecutors who simply refused to take juvenile crime, mostly felonies, seriously. Those kids I worked with, if they survived, are now adults, adults who learned only one lesson, the criminal justice system is impotent.
I haven’t lived in Seattle for more than 20 years. I live in Pierce county south of Seattle. So far, where I live is pretty safe if you don’t mind meth labs and homeless encampments. None are that close to my place, but they are in the area. What is happening in Seattle isn’t surprising. It wasn’t happening when I moved there in 1969, but I saw the evolution occur over the years. It is like a cancer and the politicians in Seattle remind me of Christian Scientists in terms of their willingness and ability to deal effectively with this disease.
I am so stealing this analogy.
Here are some follow-on stories.
Seattle’s Social Experiment Has Failed
Seattle Police Plans Hiring Campaign
Pertinent quote from the above article:
But in 2019, they hired 108 officers, a recent record, and only lost 92.
Chief Best says they’ve seen “an upward trend.” That’s a pretty low retention rate.
Very.
Here is an article that talks about a different aspect of the problem than the one I asked about: the way “serious” crimes are categorized is not very informative. It doesn’t distinguish violent crimes from “serious” crimes.
According to the article, the FBI is rolling out a new reporting system this year in an attempt to deal with that problem.
However, the article doesn’t deal with the problem of politically-induced underreporting or overreporting
They have their problems too . . .