While it’s heartening to see the Stranger FINALLY admit mental illness, not “capitalism,” is the driver of much homelessness in Seattle (will the Stranger finally also admit to drug use as another driver? How many dirty needles does it take?), groundless assumptions like this continue to prevent meaningful dialog on homelessness:

“It’s fair to assume that the almost daily encampment sweeps contribute to random violence rather than mitigate it. The City constantly shuffles around hundreds of people with untreated mental illness,”

The Stranger constantly pushes the “fact” that encampment sweeps merely move homeless persons around, as if the invisible lines on maps which describe Seattle’s city limits somehow also function as supremely impenetrable supermax prison walls — but only for the homeless. How do we know the swept campers didn’t simply leave town? If some or all of them did, then we could reasonably expect a persistent program of sweeps to reduce the crime rate.

“But my attack happened in February 2020. George Floyd was still alive. A council majority hadn’t yet nominally voiced support for the Defund movement, and the Seattle Police Department budget sat at $409 million, an all-time high.

“What’s more, the guy hit me in one of the most heavily policed parts of the city. He punched me on the sidewalk along NE 45th Street, a block away from my old apartment.”

This, of course, feeds the predetermined conclusion against using the police to stop assaults. What actually happened, as described in the Downtown Seattle Association’s “System Failure” reports, is that then-City Attorney Pete Holmes simply didn’t do his job:

“By declining, delaying and ultimately dismissing nearly two out of every three cases transmitted by the Seattle Police Department, the City Attorney’s Office is adversely impacting businesses, chronic victims, police officers and vulnerable defendants.”

(https://downtownseattle.org/2019/10/system-failure-2-declines-delays-dismissals/#:~:text=In%20System%20Failure%20Part%202,of%20our%20criminal%20justice%20system.)

This is how Holmes, then a four-term incumbent, lost a primary election (!), and then his abolitionist opponent lost the general election for City Attorney — to a Republican. Citizens had tired of seeing the same persons commit the same crimes in the same places, without anyone stepping in to break the cycle.

"If we address that problem, then we solve the problem of random violence."

Maybe, but it would be good to see the proof of this. To convince people to accept fewer police to protect them from People In Crisis wielding hammers, and in exchange see a corresponding increase in the number of HSD caseworkers, you would strengthen your case if you could produce documented instances where such a funding shift preceded a corresponding long-term drop in violent crime.

By presenting social spending and law enforcement as a zero-sum competition, the Defund movement puts mental health professionals and other social workers in the difficult position of having to prove that their work prevents more crime than the work that the police do. In effect it reverses the problem of insisting that cops act as first-responder mental health workers, by insisting that mental health workers act as cops and have their performance measured in terms of crime data.

Yes, more details please on what alternatives to a carceral approach are.

And I want to call out this tendency to go to a material, services/vendor approach and not lean into community, not lean into “care” as the author alluded. Each of these individuals has a family, a community they came from that should be stepping up. More hours by poorly equipped service providers isn’t real connection or care. More dollars might buy temporary housing but it doesn’t eliminate the root cause of addiction. Why don’t you see homelessness in the cities of Tokyo or Seoul? Culturally, there is shame associated with letting a family member fail so publicly. Children strive to do right by their families and families take care of their children. It isn’t perfect but it’s a better system than we have here. (Most countries are more collectively minded than the US; it can be a drag on the individual but what’s the point of individual success anyway if deaths of despair and homelessness continue to climb.) We need to shift our policies to supporting families to doing bigger lifts because governments and specialists and the institutional services we have created to replace actual families are failing very badly.

I'm sorry prison didn't "cure" the person whose "mental illness" didn't quite hobble them enough to stop a career of auto theft and burglary and domestic violence, but here's what it did do: it prevented him from victimizing any more innocent people while he was in there.

You really have to hammer this point home with decarceration activists: The Point Of Prison Is Not To Cure Psychopaths. It's to keep them away from the rest of us.

I think this is mostly reasonable but I would also take issue with the below statement:

It’s fair to assume that the almost daily encampment sweeps contribute to random violence rather than mitigate it.

Not sure why this is fair to assume and a good example of the fringe left being counter-productively unreasonable is the classification of something like evicting campers from public parks as a 'sweep'. This idea that all manner of disorder must be tolerated until homelessness is 'solved' is simply out of touch with reality. Homelessness is never going to be solved (mitigated would be something) and it is quite possible to acknowledge various things to be true without your head exploding, such as: public services related to mental illness and homelessness are woefully inadequate and concentrating on addressing this issue is not only more humane but more cost effective than defaulting to ever more punitive, reactionary measures. That said, tent cities in public parks/busy sidewalks/the middle of the street? A non-starter. Also the fringe left seems incapable of admitting that there are in fact violent assholes, whether they are poor, homeless, drug addicted, mentally ill, still violent assholes, and ultimately a matter of public safety that some of these people are removed from society.

Cops aren't going to save you in a 45 minute city
Praying won't do you no good
When the white nazi attacks
You have to put him out with one punch, man

Whether intended or not (guessing not), this snip summed up the solution (for me):

“Jay had no convictions between 2011 and 2017, when he was convicted for fourth-degree DV assault. He likely spent much of that time incarcerated or in a mental institution.”

Sounds like the solution was incarceration of one form or another. Jay obviously has no business being amongst civil society - he’s clearly unable or unwilling to leave folks be (based on his extensive criminal record).

@12 You'll be pleased to learn open carry of any firearm is perfectly legal in Washington state (you will have need to have purchased the AR pre-ban).

Will in Seattle proves one thing every day.

That he is a complete fucking moron.

@16 A reasonable assumption, but surprisingly enough the open carry laws are a little looser than concealed carry. For example, concealed carrying a pistol would require a permit, but you can have it holstered right on your hip with no permit required. It is true that anywhere guns are prohibited it does apply to both open and concealed carry, but generally this doesn't extend much further than places you would expect like schools, bars, and certain areas of jails and airports.

Mental illness should not be a get out of jail free card. Neither should drug addiction.
I’d be in favor of treatment while they are in prison. I know people are going to cry about how you can’t force someone into treatment if they aren’t ready for it, but I don’t care anymore.
The inmates have been running the asylum long enough.

Nope. Not open carry. You end up making yourself the first target. And for some of the suicidal people out there, you will become a stand-in for suicide by cop.

@15 it's a song

When the author of this published his “we should pay shoplifters not to shoplift” article I really didn’t think he could outdo the inanity of that piece. I appreciate him taking that very low bar and going even lower. I also appreciate TS publishing this weeks before the election to remind people what the policy’s their progressive slate of candidates represent. Chaos and violence towards innocent bystanders. Vote accordingly.

“… the thing about random violence is that it’s random.”

Nowhere does the author cite crime statistics to show this violence is random. (Were I a betting man, I’d say the chances of a “random” assault were far higher in places like the U-District, Capitol Hill, Belltown, and downtown than it is in, say, Magnolia, or outside of Broadmoor.) If it is truly random, that is an argument for hiring a HUGE number of new SPD officers, to cover the entire city.

As other commenters have noted, the first responsibility of Seattle is to protect everyone there from violence. For persons with who have assaulted others, any offers of help should be made only after those persons have been tried for their assaults, convicted, and separated from everyone else. Only then can the healing begin — for everyone.