No city matches Seattle for electing lunatic socialists to the city council as well as Congress (i.e., Rep. Pramila Jayapal). So having demonized police and letting the city descend into anarchic chaos, Seattle is now surprised and “rattled” by a sharp rise in crime, according to the Wall Street Journal this morning:
Long one of America’s safest cities, Seattle had 612 shootings and shots-fired incidents last year, nearly double its average before the pandemic. The city has just experienced its two worst years for homicides since the 1990s, when murder rates were at all-time highs. Gunfire has erupted all across surrounding King County, not just in neighborhoods plagued by violence. . .
Officials around the country are struggling to understand why.
Maybe “officials around the country” are officially idiots. There are come clues:
Nightly protests in the summer of 2020 after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer pulled Mr. Diaz’s officers away from their focus on gun violence, he said. The city council responded by cutting millions from the police department’s budget, including cutting the salary of then-chief Carmen Best, part of a national push to reallocate police funds to social programs.
Demoralized officers have since left in droves, similar to other cities, said Travis Hill, a recently departed police sergeant who spent 14 years on the force. Letting protesters take over a precinct during the city’s unrest in 2020 was particularly disheartening, he said. “When you don’t feel the city has your back, your proactive work goes down,” Mr. Hill said.
About 360 officers left Seattle’s force in the past two years, leaving about 950 in the department to battle the rise in shootings. At the beginning of the pandemic, Seattle had 1,305 officers.
Stops and other activity initiated by officers dropped by 27% in 2021, and police response times reached historic highs, according to the department.
I’m sure another tax increase and more social workers will fix everything.
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