There is a weird thing among Seattle residents where they get extremely defensive about our social problems and act as if nothing is wrong and these are 'normal city problems'. They're not. I am a longtime resident and while this area has never been the greatest in the last 5 years it has turned into an absolute shithole if I can speak honestly and frankly. I've seriously considered whether or not Seattle is some sort of progressive social experiment where we're all the lab mice blissfully unaware of our surroundings.
Just a month ago an engineer at AWS, a young Asian woman, had her skull cracked open when a random assailant hit her in the head with a baseball bat completely unprovoked. This was in the same neighborhood by the way.
The assailant had 26 offenses on his rap sheet, another graduate of our "catch and release" program of combating crime. This story was buried in the media rather than creating the widespread outrage it deserved.
The amount of social disorder this city tolerates is untenable. It was once a beautiful city that in the span of a few years was destroyed under the watch of a small crew of activist politicians. Many stores have closed because it's become too dangerous for the employees. The whole situation is very sad.
Yet the city squanders resources and prides itself on absolute nonsense like making plastic grocery sacks and straws illegal while the amount of trash on our streets or in our parks continues to increase. I'm not just referring to general litter either, we're talking syringes, feces, and toxic waste from derelict RVs that are allowed to park wherever they wish without fear of reprisal.
>Just a month ago an engineer at AWS, a young Asian woman, had her skull cracked open when a random assailant hit her in the head with a baseball bat completely unprovoked. This was in the same neighborhood by the way.
There needs to be a new Law of the Internet that describes this situation.
"When there's little outrage over a hate crime, the probability of the perpetrator being non-White approaches 1."
Because there are hundreds of these attacks since the coronavirus epidemic started against Asian-Americans, 99% of the time the assailant is non-white.
Orwell gave this behavior a name - doublethink - ability to believe in two opposite things simultaneously, in this case it's "our city is great, safe and progressive" and "we aren't going down this street to the pub because even police wouldn't come to save us." The actual art of doublethink is believing in the opposites, not just pretending to believe.
Things have definitely gotten bad (I visit downtown every weekend and live in Ballard), but the same thing has happened in other cities as well for similar reasons. So on the one hand, people saying “it’s nothing” are wrong, but people say “Seattle is dead” are also incorrect. These problems can be solved, well, managed, with a bit of a swing to the right (from the far left, which is happening now).
I remember Seattle from the late 70s (as a preschooler), the 80s, and the 90s. I even worked at 3rd and Pine McDonald’s in 1994, and it was pretty bad back then, except the retail and office crowd kept things from getting bad until about 7PM each night (I often closed). The new thing now is (a) laws not enforced at all and (b) downtown was completely drained of office workers. Both of those can be fixed.
The current progressive politics is completely deranged and detached from the classic liberal politics. It is not at all what I know as a lifelong liberal. Portland went from 3rd most desirable city to 66th in the nation after the continued self-destruction: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/06/12/portland-...
The destruction of Portland exists only in the mind of people who won't turn their TV off. I've had commenters on here tell me it's been burned down and they can't leave their houses.
Although "a highly desirable city" isn't the most accurate description of Portland either. It's more like a theme park for white people with waxed mustaches.
I wouldn’t say the media analysis is entirely overblown. The pearl district turned from a beautiful and fun place to visit to a place I can no longer safely walk through. Most shops are shuttered and people in clear psychosis are roaming the streets screaming at each other, threatening violence at passer-bys, etc. Even the 23rd avenue area is taking a turn for the worse in terms of being safe to walk through.
I’m curious what you think of those areas specifically.
The Pearl is most definitely still a safe place to walk around. Like any other big city there will be instances where you encounter a houseless person or someone with mental problems but the neighborhood is still one of the nicest in the downtown area. Granted crime has gone up but this is something that is taking place all over the city (and country for that matter)
Same thing can be said about 23rd street. Maybe you have your own personal fears but the two areas you called out are not nearly as shuttered as they were at the peak of pandemic / protests, or when compared to downtown. Also, people seem to be totally comfortable enjoying those two areas. Not sure if you’ve noticed but on sunny days you cannot keep people from congregating in the pearl and around 21st / 23rd ave.
By shuttered do you mean fully closed? That happened to SF because it has so many office workers who don't live there, but it's worse because it takes years to get approval to open a replacement business there anyway.
If it's either covid or safety it'll come back soon - bad neighborhoods attract first wave gentrifiers.
> Most shops are shuttered and people in clear psychosis are roaming the streets screaming at each other, threatening violence at passer-bys, etc.
I have to think Covid exacerbated business closures and mental health issues for poor / homeless folks, due to fewer in-person services, etc. Can't think of any city in America that wasn't similarly affected.
To be honest though, I think the US really screwed itself here. One big issue is that the mentally ill can get to the point where they are no longer of sound mind and should be committed. But involuntary commitment draws flack as well, so the response becomes to do nothing.
It's also interesting how much impact a single movie had on mental health treatment in the us.
You’re being downvoted, but this is an entirely accurate view of Seattle. I just left that hellhole after 22 years.
The last five years have been consistently hell.
Nobody wanted to do anything that will actually help people in the city; just things that allow them to humble brag on Facebook.
Ya, Seattle has died before and came back (and we are actually still growing right now because of the hot economy, as opposed to back then which was a full out recession).
I already know the answer to your question: It is a great city with a lot to offer. I'm happy to own a house nearby for the time being.
Also happy when people like the GP leave this place altogether.
Moreover; whether youre talking about Detroit, London, NY, Baltimore, SF, Seattle, Dubai - _whatever_ - claiming a place where millions of real people live their lives is "dead" or a "shithole" or whatever, is an entirely graceless act. Nobody is forcing you to live here, move on with your life, or I'm going to assume you have some sort of weird insecurity that causes you to do behave this way. Presumably that is why the GP created an account just to make this claim; they didn't want it associated with their other internet identities.
You know millions of people don’t live in Seattle right? In fact, not even a single million people live there. Unless you count all the posers that claim they are from Seattle.
I bet you do. Since you love the city so much, but can’t be bothered to live there.
When people refer to cities it tends to include the immediately surrounding suburbs and exurbs, but honestly I shouldn’t have to explain this to you. Just because you don’t live in shoreline or Renton or whatever doesn’t make you special at all. Have a nice life.
This is normal in a country where inequality is too high. The lower class starts to feel excluded from society. Over time as the groups are separated from each other by wealth, security gates, policing etc, they lose empathy for each other. As inequality grows, the underclass grows resentful, then eventually hostile.
"Reaching out" and "being compassionate" won't work, because it does nothing to solve the underlying problem (poverty and exclusion). In fact, it just comes off as condescending (which it is). "Getting tough on crime" only accelerates the decline because now you're declaring war on the underclass. Now they REALLY have nothing to lose, and are fighting for survival.
And so you watch in horror as your once beautiful city goes into decline, feeling powerless to do anything. The left pushes for more leniency, the right pushes for more punishment, and the whole city goes to shit while everyone ignores the elephant in the room.
Lumping together the violent criminal class as the underclass is pretty offensive. Just because you're poor/working class doesn't mean you have to resort to... er... cracking people's head open with a baseball bat unprovoked.
Actually, it's quite normal in highly unequal societies, and has been documented time and time again throughout history, as has the cycle of wealth redistribution. Nobody has managed to stop the inevitable march to redistribution, although they have managed to mitigate the late-stage violent period in some cases, and even avoid violent revolution.
there are many much more unequal societies than the US where this just isn't a problem. russia or china, for example. their rates of violent crimes like this are far below that of the US.
it's a pretty idiotic trend in recent years to reduce every societal problem to a income, wealth or other types of inequalities. there are societal problems that are completely and utterly caused by different issues, and this is one of them.
China has a huge wealth gap like in the US, yes, but _everyone_, even peasant farmers, can afford health care and real food that isn’t McDonalds. The lowest class materially knows their life is improving, year over year, so they don’t have cause to act out.
Saying “look at their rates of violent crime” overlooks how the Chinese government _very heavily_ cracks down on dissent or violent offenders in the general case, usually by shooting everyone indiscriminately or making a public example out of them.
Anecdotally, I’ve been at a Chinese bar when a fight broke out. People tried resolving it quickly, before the police found out. If a situation escalates enough, a whole truck of police show up and beat everyone there, including bystanders, for not “keeping the peace”.
> russia or china, for example. their rates of violent crimes like this are far below that of the US.
Hm. I am myself not from Russia exactly but from 90s Baltics and I personally remember repeated occasions I had to do end up in fights with local “trash”.
Once that ended with a guy punching one of the girls from our crowd in the face because she was being too outspoken about him trying to incite a fight with one of us. To be fair we should have expected that but none of us had any time to react.
To be clear that is actually quite a normal thing. Well, at least at the time it was and the area I lived in was not one of those incredibly poor areas. Russia has way worse places.
So yeah, we never reported that because truth to be told it was very usual and the whole general philosophy is to endure or to fight back yourself and not go to the police. So I would not think this stuff ends up in statistics.
What ends up in the stats is all of the really bad stuff like rape and killings at the same time. I would not even expect any medium-hard definition of “rape” would be reported on a regular basis let alone someone getting punched in their face.
china has been working continuously to get people out of poverty and that work continues. from the perspective of the people they mostly feel that they are better off than they were a decade or more ago.
this is the difference to the US. poor people in the US do not see that things are getting better for them.
also in china, everyone, even the poorest have access to affordable healthcare.
most poor people in china do not live in cities but outside where they have land to sustain themselves, so while their life may be poor for our standards, it is nothing like the experience of poor people in the US.
china values social stability first and foremost and works to keep it that way while in the US poor people are blamed for their own condition, like they should just work harder to get out of poverty, little is done to actually enable them to do so.
so no, china is absolutely not more unequal. much less so. there are poor areas and richer areas, but within each area everyone is pretty much equal.
Tell that to the police, who target the working class with crimes like loitering, jaywalking, or "driving on a suspended license" (inability to keep up with court fine on top of court fine)
From what I have seen in Minneapolis/St. Paul, those are things (low-level, livability crimes) which have stopped being enforced over the past 5-10 years. We are starting to see the effects of this inverse-broken-windows social experiment, and it's not looking good, at least where I live.
e.g. Aggressive panhandling, tent cities, traffic infractions, public transit fare evasion, shoplifting (<$1k), etc.
And that will continue getting steadily worse until public outcry causes the city to reverse course and get "tough on crime" again. After that, the "us vs them" mentality crystallises into fractured communities that eventually start to be run by gangs, similar to what you get in Brazil.
b/c there could be no other reasons for this to be the case, and the only solution is to arrest, jail, or fine people potentially exacerbating their poverty?
this sounds like pearl clutching and not wanting to think more about an issue with tons of variables.
Unprovoked? Neither “class” has realistic access to social services or health care in the US, so the mental health and addiction issues that often lead a person down this road go unaddressed.
Further, the US legal system (and US society) heavily stigmatizes “offenders”. Once a person is down its extremely hard to get back up, and people need money survive.
Not saying that violence is ok, but in many cases people just need help instead of punishment.
Agreed, we need to treat addiction much much more aggressively.
Here in CA/SF the current policy is to simply ignore low-level crime (which funds their drug addiction aka "to survive")... instead let's take people off the street (and take them off drugs).
Inequality is problem, but the problem sure as heck can’t be solved at the local level. Being tough on crime can help push the problem somewhere else at least: next door Bellevue will send SWAT out on anybody who so much as lays down on a bench (annoying the homeless population enough that they move on to Seattle). Being compassionate works in the opposite way: Seattle attracts people from as far away as Texas who have no chance at housing really anywhere, because they will get more support here than where they are from (recently read about some guy who decided to use their on release Texan prison open bus ticket to head to Seattle and then got caught breaking into someone’s house to sleep). Local solutions obviously have adverse impractical effects: you can push the problem to someone else or try to solve the entire country’s problem, there isn’t much middle ground to be had.
Some sort of federal solution really is needed, or our cities could be in huge trouble.
Unfortunately, history doesn't offer much comfort. The usual way that wealth is redistributed after a period of high inequality is via revolution. FDR managed to stave off disaster last time with the new deal, but congress was far less split along ideological lines then.
Most social revolutions only occurred because the people in charge were incompetent and almost completely clueless. As long as the regime can co-opt (or otherwise remove) the potential leaders of this revolution and commit to some modest reforms it can survive almost indefinitely (without external interference, e.g. climate change, plague or war) at least this seems to have almost always been the case historically.
The USA has gone through periods of high inequality before without relying on revolutions to solve the problem. Higher taxes on income and wealth, more support programs for the poor, etc… our political system is robust enough that we can solve our problems without shooting each other (I hope).
> Higher taxes on income and wealth, more support programs for the poor, etc…
Half of the country thinks that doing those things will literally destroy the country. The other half is willing to compromise with the first half. The same folks who preach no compromise, and tend to own more than one gun apiece.
My impression here that this sort of problem is a progressive problem though, seeing that the worst cases I see around here are always the progressive cities(Sf, etc). The right have their own issues, but this doesn't seem as severe in their strongholds?
Or perhaps it's a city thing. How does this compare to other cities?
Pretty much every major city is seeing skyrocketing housing prices amid wage stagnation. The economy is driving homelessness. Progressive policies attempt to serve the homeless population where in place, authoritarian policies house and feed the homeless in jails. Either approach works in a steady state, but they're addressing symptoms and not the root cause, a sick economy.
No clue to be honest. I've seen the finger pointed at progressive handling of crime in SF and Seattle, so I was curious if anyone had a counterexample for this.
It's so odd to be a Washingtonian from Snohomish, and hear about what a shithole Seattle is. Everett has a lot of the same problems but nowhere NEAR as bad as I hear things get down there.
Broadly speaking I love Washington. I think the people are nice, I think the state is beautiful, I think the towns are generally clean. The experience that I hear Seattleites talk about is not in any way representative of what I see in the rest of the state. And that's crazy to me. It's like Seattle is its own little world, completely insulated from the outside.
It's probably not as bad as you hear. I think there are two fallacies one can draw: 1. Everything is rosy in the Emerald City 2. Everything is Mad Max in the Emerald City.
The corner by McDonalds on 3rd has always been bad, and truly these days it is worse. I was recently down that way and was pretty shocked. But that also isn't most of Seattle these days.
WA is beautiful. Every city has its good and bad areas.
Seattle may not be quite as bad as “dead”, but many of the descriptions are accurate *for a given neighborhood* — there far more crappy areas these days than there used to be.
I have hope it’ll get better one day. It’s a lovely place most of the time.
I think you and I are solidly in agreement on all points. When it’s good, it’s really good. But the bad is heartbreaking and does rather seem to have increased of late.
This is happening well beyond Seattle, not sure if it is a West coast thing. In Vancouver, it is a similar story [0]. It has gotten substantially worse in the last 5 or so years to the point that it is feeling lawless [1].
I have noticed that there are a lot of policies that seem local but are actual not and are being resold/implemented. I'm really curious what's changed and why are we still digging a hole in this spot where it is clearly not working.
The city and province are now spending incredible amounts of money on homelessness saying this will solve the problem but crime is going in the other direction. Some stats are saying otherwise, but reporting is now way down. I was in a parking lot last week downtown and a guy was all messed up and had a fire going in the parking lot. I talked to the security guy he shrugged. When I came back the fire was out, but he was still doing his drug dance. I don't think there was any reporting. I think the security approach was to get the fire out and no other confrontation. The stairwell was full of feces, urine, cat litter, and garbage. I don't think that the parking company can keep up anymore.
There seems to be a sense that criminality is ok for those that want to be criminals. I fully get the idea of not criminalizing poverty or addiction, but it is going well beyond the self and creating an ever larger blast radius. A real debate about whose freedoms get protected and whose get run over would be interesting to watch by policy makers. Not sure how they are seeing this, they are as another person mentioned in the Orwellian mode so it isn't decipherable.
Is it city and policing policy? Is it the drugs are just too strong and people are beyond help or being expected to have any agency? I really don't understand why this is going on in this direction? I think that politicians are are tied in their own knot and don't know a way out.
Is it true that we should blame Campbell for closing that big mental hospital?
I'm a compassionate guy but I'm getting pretty sick of schizos yelling on the street. It doesn't feel dangerous though - I think a lot of people come downtown from the suburbs and get kinda spooked. Living downtown, you just avoid Granville (cause it's disgusting) and realize that schizophrenics are more scared of you than you are of them.
I really don't have the right answers. Better mental health support is likely part of it. BC is abysmal for mental health in general.
I have a friend that lives at Main and Keefer and we hangout on the patio and people watch. It is clear that there are people that are really locked into a major mental illness whether it is schizophrenia or something else. They are being given a place to stay and a meal, which I think is important, but they are left to figure out the rest on the streets. They look like prey for dealers. Once someone is mixing drugs with their illness it gets really messy and anit-social.
I've grown up in and around Vancouver. I've never felt that it was dangerous. I'm somewhat regularly down at Hastings and Main and not fearful. Like you mentioned people yelling etc. But business owners are taking it on the chin pretty hard with theft, vandalism and loss of customers.
I love Chinatown, but it is definitely at a low right now. I take my daughter, I don't want her to be intimidated and when it does come back I want her there. It is a great part of the city. It should be thriving.
The west coast cities are simultaneously too progressive to support punitive action, yet too “American” to pay for adequate solutions via wealth redistribution.
We do spend a lot of money on combating homelessness already, so I get the frustration from those who question throwing good money after bad. My short answer is that Democrats aren’t actual leftists, so they (claim to) want a bunch of progressive social policies but never pass anything that could actually reduce inequality since they’re just as beholden to the wealthy/corporations as Republicans are.
Here’s my laundry list of things politicians could do instead of letting tents fester on sidewalks:
- axe the whole health insurance industry.
- bring back institutionalization for the guy waving a machete on the bus, and provide wrap-around outpatient treatment for the more stable.
- in cities, build dense, massive public housing for all (not only for the poor) to flood the market with supply and drop prices. Some of these could be rented out on a subsidized basis or provided as welfare, with the rest owner-occupied. The US once subsidized a massive expansion of single-family homes for the middle class. We could do this for affordably-priced condos in big cities, keeping the American tradition of building equity though home ownership.
- for those who reject this new social safety net and pose harm to society, turn our prison system from a sick joke into something that actually rehabilitates people for life in the outside world.
- Tax big corporations to pay for all of it.
Of course, none of this will ever happen in the US, and instead Seattle can remain a city of million dollar homes with meaningless “in this house we believe” signs in the lawn and tent cities down the street that the latest law-and-order mayor can push to another neighborhood every few months.
When I first read "in this house we believe". I thought it meant they believed in the house, as if it was a deity. That seems like a fitting double entendre.
A couple of my co-workers got robbed by gunpoint in that area walking to the bus. Its not safe anymore. I no longer go downtown for anything, not even the ferry anymore, the traffic is even horrific.
what was the "ethnicity" of the people stolen from their land and brought to the US for free labor for hundreds of years? and then oppressed through new and improving ways of covert racism?
love the idea of people in the US admonishing ground of peoples for current and comparably minor transgressions and labeling them overall as violent. hn is in desperate need to break away from technobabble and read some books from different perspectives from their own from people that don't look like them and thus live in a much different world.
and to catch it before, yes violence is inexcusable. focusing on individualism and personal responsibly is myopic (and in this particular case, racist).
The corner of 3rd and Pine is the center of Seattle because it’s where all public transit intersects and is near the shopping district. It has had so much crime for so long that locals call the McDonalds there “McStabby’s.” It would be great if it felt as safe there as the rest of Seattle. Not sure what the city can do to change it, though.
Using extra police and keeping violent criminals in jail seems to be an option that works in large parts of the world where that is not politically unpopular. Transit hubs in almost every city I’ve been to are safer, not less safe due to the large number of witnesses.
And still, no country has prison populations as large as the US, neither in absolute numbers nor by capita. I know very respectable (and, as this may be relevant in that area: very white) coworkers who would never go to the States because they live in fear of getting in a traffic stop and accidentally getting shot. Obviously, the problem is not being "too lenient on crime".
How about we reframe this to “no country has high crime rates as large as the US”. Because that’s actually the problem. Not a bunch of people being in prison. What would you prefer we do with people that want to commit crime? Not lock them up? Because that’s what is causing all big cities to turn into catch and release garbage pits.
Actually, crime rate in the US is not even in the top 10 - they are in position 58. Sweden has more crime than the US. [1]
Most people who are engaged in criminal behaviour do not "want to commit crime". They are put into an environment that makes crime seem worth it.
So, how to civilise the US:
1. Raise emphasis and funding on schools and education.
2. Have a mandatory year of service (may be conscription/may be US peace corps) to build a sense of belonging and society - for everyone. Mix people randomly.
3. Legalise most (all?) substances - and make purchasing them safe and easy. Defund crime cartels, also eliminate a lot of associated crime. Maybe extend that to other areas which traditionally support organised crime (looking at you, prostitution)
4. Crack down on glorifying violent behaviour in media. Think movies, games, but also gangster rap here. Underprivileged early-teen kid keeps listening about some guy who wears gold chains, caps some other folks and gets all the girls? No wonder he's going to be interested in signing up for the next gang.
5. Enact some meaningful social reforms to lower the Gini coefficient. This starts with an universal healthcare system, but does not end with housing.
6. Reestablish a system of psychiatric clinics. Many people who are in prison should actually be in a psychiatry.
7. Lower the prison population - prisons are universities for crime. If you are in prison in the US, you'll eventually become part of a prison gang, guess what: that's for life - when you and your friend are out, you're not going to build a cabin in Alaska, you're going to do crime. Less people in prison means less networking and less follow-up crime.
8. Make plea bargains illegal. They are extortion tactics that make people admit to stuff they may not even have done. If an attorney is certain he can nail you down, he won't use them anyways.
9. Stop electing state attorneys, sheriffs or judges - make them public officials with a standard paycheque and a minimum education level in law.
10. Law Enforcement Officers should have a three-year apprentice period where they learn about deescalation, proper firearm techniques, the law and criminology.
11. Change the prison system to focus on reintegration into society instead of punishment.
12. Start meaningful programs to lower gun ownership, especially in inner
city environments.
13. Take powers away from town councils and move it to the state or federal level - this includes tax collection and spending. Doing so, you will avoid NIMBYist decisions that defunds the places of undesirables, making their areas even less desirable.
14. Avoid gerrymandering by using a fairer, ideally mathematical method to assign districts.
15. career politicians are now banned from having sources of income outside their activity as a politician (some leeway can be made for family-run businesses they have owned prior to getting elected). No politician will earn more than the median of the constituents they represent. Punishment for overstepping this or corruption will be harsh.
The US is obviously following the wrong path. To get back to normal standards, it should be obvious they need something different, not more of the same.
> Overall crime rate is calculated by dividing the total number of reported crimes of any kind by the total population, then multiplying the result by 100,000 (because crime rate is typically reported as X number of crimes per 100,000 people).
I haven't lived in Sweden, but I've lived somewhere lower on that ranking. Day to day life here feels much, much safer than in the USA (where I lived for years). In this country the idea of not reporting a violent crime is unthinkable.
Not so in the USA. If anything, it's the default.
> How else would you create a comparable metric for the occurrence of crime by country?
It may not be possible, but I'd probably try to look at how much crime actually happens rather than what finds its way into police records.
And how would you know how much crime "actually happens" if you don't have an objectively quantifiable measurement? Your argument seems to boil down to "these numbers feel too low, I feel less safe in the US, so the numbers must be cooked, let's assume the situation is a lot worse."
Also, if we take the idea of "general feeling of safety" into account ... do you really think you'd feel safer in Colombia, or Somalia, than the US? Many of the countries above the States in crime per capita have law enforcement systems that are even more corrupt, and even less likely to give good statistics - if the numbers of the US are cooked in that overview, chances are so are everyone elses.
You said "Sweden has more crime than the US." and as evidence you linked a ranking of countries by reported crimes. Not all crimes are reported. So your "objectively quantifiable measurement" doesn't support your claim.
Hence my statement: there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
> Your argument seems to boil down to... <strawman>
They keep several vans of police officers there now. The amazon office across the street was the most-defended building in seattle. It had 2-3 security guards on every street corner and either side of the door pre-pandemic.
Post-pandemic the lack of office workers in the area due to pandemic meant the pedestrians in the area changed demographics significantly recently.
I worked at McStabby’s in 1994. Most of my coworkers were street smart Filipinos (and a few Pacific Islanders and Vietnamese), it was actually a lot of fun working with them. But we had our window broken by the night crowd every week or so, after 7PM half our customers had the unshowered and/or drunk smell. Always an off duty cop at the store also.
McStabbys shut down after the spate of crimes. It got bad enough at that corner that a restaurant that was (correctly) nicknamed McStabbys was shut down.
Confirmation bias. Look at the historical numbers, 2004-2006 was worse. This is Seattle, you're not going to find any simple answers, and any solutions won't be friendly to either side of the political isle. You're going to have to put yourselves in the shoes of someone whom would commit violent crimes if you want to know why and real solutions to resolve it.
Just as a note, small government also means less police, and less money in policing. Chiefs in California and many major cities make over 1 million a year.
Police are largely responders to violent crime. Theyre not there to prevent it. The various laws and beliefs prevent individuals from defending themselves.
Police in major cities are a big political token. The city depends on policing to make money and retain power. They're not acab, or defund the police. Those are typically what you see on Twitter profiles not on city councils.
The solution is to imprison criminals. The incarceration rate had been increasing for decades, and crime had been dropping for decades. It's not a difficult concept: some people are bad and should be removed from society; there's no "fixing" them.
That's how we get big government, by throwing away freedoms for safety. The people whom get to decide the law are also those whom decide to "defund the police". Some people are bad, many of them much higher up the ladder of society and get to make the law. That's why we are careful in deciding what crimes result in what outcomes and if those outcomes actually achieve what we want.
Prisons overwhelmingly are not a punishment, they're a hiring event. An expectation of life even. That doesn't stop the crime. A good way to stop a violent crime is for us to bring power back to the individual with strong self defense protections.
Actually, you skipped the stage where they came about. How come American cities have so many more violent criminals than other Western cities. The US already has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Because they might raise difficult questions. Also, for example, how would one suppress the Wild West mythos in Texas if you figured out it contributed to a small% increase in crime?
Because we had more 30 years ago and people are still alive who were born then. It's not necessarily important what we're doing right now, but you need to start by acknowledging how much better it is now than in 1990.
It's also good to compare to our neighbors south of us rather than across the ocean - we have a lot in common with them too and too often forget that.
There are people on the Seattle city council who explicitly support defunding the police and they have done so in some instances. This article[1] describes a measure to cut the police budget for the third year in a row. The vote was 8-1 with the sole dissenting vote from the (self-described) socialist Kshama Sawant who wanted significantly larger cuts. In the past they've defunded specific teams and cut a former police chief's salary to the point she resigned. It's far from accurate to say that "defund the police" types aren't on the city council. In Seattle the city council is composed of nobody but "defund the police" types.
Police prevent crimes, violent and not, by two mechanisms. First, by increasing the probability that offenders will be punished. A potential offender who thinks they are going to be caught and punished will be less likely to offend - and the police are a part of that system. Second, by imprisoning people who have offended the police limit the extent to which those people can commit subsequent crimes against the general population by incarcerating the offender for a substantial length of time.
Small government may, in some cases, mean less policing. That seems like a non-sequitur though. People who think Seattle has a crime problem (I am one) aren't calling for smaller government. We are calling for law enforcement.
Note that the defunding in that vote simply comes from the SPD being unable to hire enough people (they are allowed to hire, but can’t find enough people qualified and willing to take the job). So the SPD is spending less money because they are understaffed. What the council voted for was not feeding back that money not spent due to labor shortages into hiring bonuses and other incentives. The city council is mainly guilty of not throwing some money at fixing that staffing problem, though I bet they will eventually relent on allowing overtime again (which did get out of control, but what choice do we have?).
Here is a better article that doesn’t require a subscription to read:
According to the article you've cited the SPD budget was 401, 363, and 355 for the years 2020, 2021, and 2022 respectively. That seems like three years of successive cuts to me.
Your article mentions that the council says "there are no cuts functionally for SPD". So, on the one hand, we have the steadily declining raw number, and, on the other hand, we have the preferred phrasing of some politicians. To me, the number seems more significant.
Again, the number arises based on how many police the SPD was able to hire and their realistic hiring targets for 2022 (that they could still fail to meet). If the council allowed for more incentives with the money they aren’t spending on people they haven’t been able to hire (the real gist of this bill), then they could probably hire more.
That they’ve been losing people for three years is the problem.
It's possible that what you're saying is true, but that doesn't change the basic facts from my original comment. Members of the Seattle City Council espouse the "Defund the police" idea and they are acting on it - to wit, they have decreased the SPD budget at least three years in a row. They have caused the dissolution of the Navigation team and caused a recent police chief to resign by cutting her salary.
I suspect a contributing reason to SPD losing and not being able to recruit people is the openly hostile attitude of city leadership towards law enforcement. Ineffective criminal justice in the city likely contributes as well.
I don’t know if this is true in Seattle, but in Portland we’re having a huge problem hiring police officers despite having the budget to do it. The reason is the police culture. It’s well known that our police force tolerates a lot of bad behavior, including open racism, and nobody wants to work there because of it. It also doesn’t help that because of that behavior, lots of people in the city hate the police.
First, when it was proposed to eliminate some of the open head count for the police, it was soundly defeated by a SCC vote. They aren’t going to defund the police so explicitly, even if their support has a lacking.
Second, if you haven’t noticed, everyone is having trouble hiring right now. The negative vibes for the job are definitely significant, but this is also part of a more broad labor shortage.
Seattle City Council members explicitly defunded the police by reducing the funding of the police for three years in a row. Some Seattle City Council members explicitly advocate for things like "Defund the police" - e.g. Kshama Sawant.
People have called Tacoma Tacompton for a long time. Tacoma has come a long way over the last couple decades and is now one of the fastest moving real estate markets in the country.
For those who have never heard of the Hilltop shootout:
Hmm sounds about right. Years ago I walked from pike place to the ferris wheel and on the way I saw a few “transactions” in the park, and had this uneasy feeling that I was going to be jumped. Luckily it was a group of people in the daytime.
That path would not have led you past this area. You would have been heading away from the area in the article. Not even sure what park is on that path.
Covid, the opioid epidemic, and stagnant wages for working people are just some of the problems contributing to all of this. Better enforcement might help, but the fact that this country incarcerates such an unusually large fraction of the population indicates solving this problem will not be so simple.
I can see a lot of blame here at liberals and progressive. So my question is what would we expect from more conservative right wing politicians? (Looking for honest answers) I am imagining more "tough on crime"
If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging.
The majority of these serious crimes are committed by people with extensive wrap sheets. We should go back to using the criminal justice system to incarcerate people who are a danger to society. In the large city I live, we have a county attorney who is more concerned with "social justice" than keeping the population safe. Even in the past year, he said his office would no longer prosecute felonies where the suspect was apprehended through minor traffic violations (with the exception of some major crimes). In my mind we have some institutional rot or mind virus, that has stopped part of our justice system from keeping people safe.
I consider myself fairly liberal but I have to say that the progressive movement has been far too focused on identity/social justice politics and not on things that will really impact and help the community. I'm left with no party that I think has it right. If anything I want a return to some moderate rational politics. Both sides just keep getting more and more extreme and shifting their policies to canceling each other and things they don't like without listening or trying to understand each other. I'm scared for where we are going.
I mean Seattle is "progressive" but we let all these homeless people live on the streets! If we are so progressive then why do we not provide and force them into housing (or mental wards or anything)? Why do we not have an income tax?! This state makes no sense but I am stuck here because my kids are in high school.
>we have a county attorney who is more concerned with "social justice" than keeping the population safe.
I'm not sure it's so cut and dry. This reasoning has always irked me because the question I have is why are social reform progressives so successful in piercing through the ranks of DAs and other attorneys, but no where else?
In California, at least, what it seems to me is that there is a reluctance to send people to prisons because they are at or over capacity (some at 200% capacity) and there is no appetite to build more. Ignoring all the social pushback you will get (why are building more prisons than schools/hospitals/homes), given California real estate, it's probably also very expensive. I'm not sure it's 100% a coincidence that all these cities with "catch & release" programs are also cities where the real estate prices are the highest.
Why not use lower crime areas, even if they're conservative/right wing areas, and emulate their policies?
The frequent response is "You can't translate them to X because the situations/demographics etc are incomparable". Tet similar objections are less often if ever raised about emulating the policies of tiny Scandinavian countries that are mostly white.
Because their politics are seen as "correct" by the media and academia, and the policymakers they create and indoctrinate. It's deliberately willfully ignorant of potential solutions because the solutions are provided by people whose policies are seen as "incorrect" (and in liberal/progressive circles, this often is reduced to "evil").
