Focusing on the amount of money the City Council took from the SPD is very disingenuous. The Council did attempt to reach the magic 1/2 "defund" figure, but after telling Seattle's self-appointed, screaming 'activist' class that 1/2 was indeed the goal, it turned out the City had contractual obligations it could not abrogate. Go figure. (Just as anti-defund citizens had been telling the Council all along.) While the Council miserably failed at enacting activists' demands, the Council did succeed in creating a hostile and toxic work environment for the police, which alone might help to explain the SPD's poor performance since then.

Ironically, this post then praises as correct one of the statements which is actually wrong: “The police department is prioritizing the wrong things, like homeless encampment removal..." These encampments have long been lawless zones, and removing them helps to lower the crime rate, and not just by finding persons with outstanding warrants. (Yes, the Stranger simply will not report on crime in the camps, that has been made very clear here for years, but crime happens in the camps nonetheless.)

Finally, the author gives it away be referring to defund as a "common-sense policy" when it's actually the Underpants Gnomes in action: cut the budget by some arbitrary amount, and things will get better, but no one really knows how. (Whining about how the media "undermines support" for a policy voters already rejected last November just tops the cake.)

Real reform is difficult and takes time. The Council's undermining of that reform two years ago means reform will take even longer. Good work, team.

Thanks for this, Will. Who pays for Kruses' poor reporting skills? I want to ask them why they employ a reporter with such low skills as to omit (likely due to confirmation bias) important parts of the story and suggest they find a reporter with better skills to replace her.

Given that sexual assaults are occurring in encampments, the mayor and police chief are handling this issue with the staffing and budget available.

We'll be in a triage mode for staffing sexual assault and all other crimes for quite some time until brighter heads prevail.

Brandi is right on this. Left wing policies drove the staffing shortage. The same leftists are now crying rape to undermine a policy they don’t support (clearing of homeless encampment and referral to congregate shelters). It is disingenuous.

@2 Kruse is self employed now and is paid by people who support her content. Knock yourself out if you want to convince them she isn’t worth it

“I want to ask them why they employ a reporter with such low skills as to omit (likely due to confirmation bias) important parts of the story and suggest they find a reporter with better skills to replace her.”

You do realize this describes everyone at TS as well? Lol

What Kruse said is essentially true. No doubt about that at all.

The democrats (virtually the entire city council... clear majority of democrats) voted to defund the SPD and abandoned reason for madness.

Defunding reduced staff levels across the board at the SPD. No question about that at all.

You can't make bricks without straw and you can't do police work, investigate crimes without a staff.

Nice picture of the officers in formation.... not really relevant to the main issue you are trying jaundice which is insufficient police detectives looking into cases.

Unsurprisingly, Brandi's boyfriend is an officer in one of our local police/sheriff/state patrol departments (I don't remember which one). "Law enforcement stenographer" is an understatement.

@7 I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that sounds like the kind of thing a Qanon believer would latch on to. Kruse's commentary is based on what her producer thinks is likely to draw podcast subscribers. Her agenda is just that simple.

If Will Casey doesn't like dishonest reporting, I'd encourage him to have a conversation with Will Casey about how dishonest reporting is bad. After all, this post written by Will Casey completely misrepresents the survey it discusses:

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2022/04/28/71999670/rigorous-survey-finds-king-county-wants-police-alternatives

Stones, glass houses, etc.

@9: Great comment, as usual. Sweeping encampments was long, long overdue, and it's interesting that the Seattle Times, Kruse, and now the Stranger are all putting their blame on the wrong entity:

“The police department is prioritizing the wrong things, like homeless encampment removal and property crime ahead of crimes like rape.”

The police department is prioritizing encampment sweeps because Mayor Harrell campaigned on a promise to sweep encampments, and he won in a massive landslide. The police department is prioritizing encampment sweeps because the candidate for City Attorney who promised not to prosecute camping and theft, lost decisively -- to a Republican (!). Seattle's voters now actively oppose the Stranger's positions on defund, policing in general, and homelessness policy, and the Stranger is cynically crying rape because the candidates they endorsed lost in massive citywide landslides.

"the right wants to keep having the dumbest conversation about public safety"

Joined in this, evidently, by the Stranger's resident rabble of totebaggers and chuds.

@17: That you immediately went straight to name-calling, instead of attempting to engage other commenters on the facts, demonstrated perfectly everything that is wrong with the Stranger.

Thank you.

@9 Jeeze, blame him for the Russian invasion of Ukraine while you're at it. Like "and now look at all that suffering because of your Drag Queen Story Hour".

"As has been pointed out the SPD does not have sufficient staff, because of you and the rest of the progressive-defund-screaming activist class."

eyeroll Nothing but just-so stories out of you.

"To stop a crime like that as it was happening, Seattle would need a cop stationed on every corner. Even if we wanted to live in that police state, we couldn't afford it."

Nonsense. we absolutely CAN
Afford a Police State which is
why 'republicans' wanna arm
every last Human Being so's
the onliest Rational response
is a Cop -- or Drone -- on
EVERY Corner. don'tchya
feel "safer" now muther-
Fuckers? well don't-
Chya?

oh
and
if ya got
Nuthin' to Hide
Why do ya even fucking
Need a stupid Constitution?

speaking
as a LWNJ
that B. Carlisle
group gal is the
nuttiest (and Per-
susiviest!)* RWNJ around.

*unless there's folks
like Will to point
her far far FAR
'right' Prop-
aganda's
many
Loopholes which
one could drive a fuck-
ing Yugo thru way too ez-peasily

say that Reminds me:
THANKS Will!

"Democrats, Republicans, and the unaffiliated are rightly upset that they feel less safe than they did even a few years ago. A rational response to that feeling would be to

look to the cops and ask for a better return on the hundreds of millions of dollars the City invests in the department." --@Will

OMG
and Pragmatism
rears its Ugly Head

Were you not here for the defund debacle? Your people literally said they hated the police, the whole system was irrevocably broken and needed to be dismantled. Check out the articles in your own paper. The Stranger endored a woman for city atourney that wanted to stop arresting people for domestic violence. She tweeted she hates the police and wants them to die.
And the whole, we've been in charge for 6 years but none of this is our fault! Republicans have 0 power in this city. So dumb.

@8- I'm not sure how Qanon comes into a statement of fact about a person's current partner. She used to work in a local TV station newsroom; I worked and still work at that station and the fact that her partner is an officer of some sort is just something that I know about her.
I think we've long given up the expectation of objective journalism from Ms. Kruse but if you don't think the fact that her boyfriend is a law enforcement officer colors these "opinion/reporting" pieces that she does you're just not thinking it through.
There's lots of reasons that I am not a live theatre reviewer, not the least of which is that my wife is a stage actor. Any review that I wrote would and should be seen as being influenced by that. Being that close to the theatre world would destroy my objectivity, as being that close to law enforcement destroys Brandi's objectivity about the subject.

@25: And yet, the Stranger's Defunderpants Gnomes still use the same 'logic,' but make it clear that Seattle's actual experience of defunding absolutely should not matter when talking about how peachy more defunding would have made everything:

"That move would free up the police to spend their remaining resources on solving violent crimes like the sexual assaults SPD de-prioritized due to resources constraints."

So, when the Council de-funded SPD by 17%, it produced the disastrous de-prioritization of sexual assaults, but if the Council had just defunded SPD by almost three times that much (50%), then somehow SPD would have followed up on all rape cases. This truly is Underpants Gnomes beliefs on steroids. (And, it completely overlooks the small fact that the City had contractual obligations to fund, and so the attempt to defund to 50% would merely have added the expenses of lawsuits and penalties, without ever reaching 50%.)