In a Guest Rant last week, political operatives Kamau Chege and Rian Watt asserted that Alexis Mercedes Rinck won her City Council race because she ran as a new kind of candidate—a progressive public safety candidate—and they encouraged others to replicate it.
The article wants you to believe that the progressive left has reclaimed the public safety narrative in a new way. But a close read of their argument reveals their true message: They like moderate criminal punishment policies and think the left should promote them.
Laundering moderate policy positions about crime as “progressive” isn’t just misleading—it genuinely harms the left. To see that in action, we only need to look at the presidential election, where conservative philosophies of policing and crime were “rebranded”—driving the Democratic party’s failed turn to the right.
Rinck won for a variety of reasons. To claim, without evidence, that a pet moderate issue—defanging the left against the militarized arm of the state—carried her is opportunistic, revisionist, and unhelpful for landing future victories.
“Public Safety Candidate”
To prove that Rinck won as a progressive public safety candidate, we would first have to prove that Rinck made public safety a centerpiece of her campaign. But that doesn’t reflect the message she consistently brought to the voters. During her campaign, she leaned far more heavily on appeals to working people. In her stump speech, Rinck billed herself as a renter and public transit user that went from waiting tables next to the Space Needle to writing policy in the UW tower. She typically buttoned with her line of choice: “I’m running for Seattle City Council to fight for a city that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few.”
She also positioned herself as the more politically savvy in the race in her stump speech. She would flex her experience bringing people together when she worked at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority or diving into the budget at UW.
Finally, Rinck would close her stump speech by promising to protect City services. Born to teenagers, she said she relied on her grandparents, good teachers, and the Boys and Girls Club. She called herself a testament to the fact that investing in young people, regardless of their starting point, can change generations. Then she would vow to increase progressive revenue to protect critical services.
By contrast, her opponent Tanya Woo did run as a public safety candidate. Her stump speech usually included a mention of her Community Night Watch. She also listed public safety as “number one” in her top three priorities.
This opening message, one that brands Rinck as the candidate for working people and Woo as a “public safety” candidate, appeared on the Seattle Channel, at debates, and in interviews with the press to name a few concrete examples.
Rinck did mention “public safety” in the King County voter guide. In that case, to define her as a “public safety candidate,” we would have to prove that the mere mention of public safety in the voter guide outweighs the repetition of her stump speech. And why then other progressive candidates who mention public safety to a similar extent in their voter guide statement—Alex Hudson, Maren Costa, and Andrew Lewis—all lost their races.
Hello, Fellow Communists
Even if the writers could establish Rinck branded herself as the “public safety” candidate, they’d also have to prove that she did so from a left perspective. It is 100% the case that public safety includes social services, housing, and other things besides cops, which Chege and Watt mentioned in their post. But I disagree with the framing that Rinck “reclaimed” public safety for the left when she actually took a more centrist approach when it comes to policing—the main lever our local government reaches for when they get scared of crime.
You may hear a deflection from the droning demands to hire more police when Rinck advocates to staff up all departments of first responders—“law enforcement to fire, emergency medical, but also behavioral health alternative response”—but that’s something candidates across the political spectrum say to voters including Council Member Rob Saka, a clear conservative who often emphasizes getting the “right” response.
Further, Rinck conceded the argument on growing the SPD’s footprint to conservatives, advocating for the City to pay for more cops and said she would support programs to encourage new hires in her appearance on the Seattle Channel.
Rinck also told KOMO that “one thing” that’s “not working” in terms of public safety in Seattle is that SPD does not respond fast enough, an argument that many of the more conservative candidates based their 2023 campaign on, namely Maritza Rivera. The opinion does not take into account that not all those calls need a five minute response or would be best served by police officers in general.
The article said that Rinck said she “wanted to hire police officers—paired with accountability measures”—a moderate approach, at best considering literally every single conservative on the City Council caveats their calls for more police with calls for more accountability measures. To advocate for more cops marks a concession to an unrealistic task of hiring in large numbers during a nationwide shortage and validates the shaky claim from the right that more cops makes communities more safe. A progressive public safety platform does not advocate for more cops, particularly as libraries and other public institutions face their own staffing shortage. A progressive council member should vote no anytime their conservative colleagues try to inflate the Seattle Police Department’s bloated budget and look for ways to shrink the department’s footprint. That stance is incompatible with one that seeks to hire more officers.
Next, they said Rinck “supported enforcement of public drug use laws—paired with expanding diversion programs.” Conservatives always bring up, genuinely or not, that they want to pair enforcement with diversion, even Council President Sara Nelson. And I laugh at the insinuation that arresting people for using drugs is an “evidence-based” approach. Research repeatedly shows that jailing people for drug use can actually increase recidivism rates, increase overdose rates, and create barriers to accessing housing and jobs. An evidence-based, progressive platform would assert that the police and the criminal punishment system are not appropriate conduits through which to carry out a public-health approach to substance abuse disorder. And, a progressive who wants drug use to be safer and less visible would advocate to reignite the fight for safe consumption sites.
They button their argument, writing, “It wasn’t abolition—and it wasn’t enforcement-only, either.” Not a single candidate who made it through the primary in 2023 was an abolitionist – besides maybe Christiana ObeySumner would call themselves that—that’s just what the corporate donors wanted voters to think.
One Simple Trick To Win An Election The Right Doesn’t Want You To Know
Finally, the article failed to argue that voter’s perception of Rinck as a “public safety candidate” won her the race, but the public safety platform the authors claim she won with did not carry other, recent candidates to a victory. For example, Costa took up the same stance on hiring more cops while increasing accountability measures in 2023 and she lost by 9 percentage points. Lewis blames his loss on the fact that he supported the drug use ban, but voted no so the council could pair it with diversion programs, much like the point the op-ed amplified in Rinck’s platform.
Rinck won for a variety of reasons—organized labor rallied behind her early, the Democratic LDs gave her their sole endorsement, progressive PACs fundraised competitively with the corporate donors, voters already rejected Woo once, and Seattle has a reactive, anti-incumbent streak. I already broke down the number of factors that may have led to her win, but I was not so arrogant as to say a single issue led to her landslide victory.
The “progressive public safety” narrative feels like little more than an excuse to dunk on abolitionists and other lefties who take hard stances against the bootlicking narrative. “Rinck conceded to the obvious but difficult-to-navigate reality that Seattle voters view public safety as the single most important issue in local elections and, importantly, that those views actually reflect a material reality that bears serious public attention and public work,” they wrote. But I do not know what candidate did not recognize “public safety” as an important issue—from the conservatives to the abolitionists. And if they mean that previous abolitionist candidates such as Nicole Thomas-Kennedy pretended crime does not happen, I question their recollection of the race. When candidates such as Thomas-Kennedy opposed charging and jailing people who commit nonviolent misdemeanors, she didn’t deny that these crimes occur; She rightly rejected that prosecution and jail time prevented or decreased crimes of poverty as she argued in many debates. Instead, she wanted to focus City resources on making victims whole—repairing broken windows, paying the corner store for a stolen Snickers bar.
The article suggests other candidates campaign on public safety like Rinck; they want to change how progressives talk about public safety by constructing a narrative where a “public safety candidate from the left” is one that concedes to the right. Other candidates have won on public safety platforms that do no such thing. Shaun Scott just won his State House race by an even larger margin as an abolitionist. Last year, Council Member Tammy Morales also beat Tanya Woo all while holding a more lefty line on public safety.
In an age of disinformation, rampant rightwing propaganda, pundits have no excuse for revising history to market the political strategy that actually has no clear proof of concept. This “progressive public safety” narrative does not hold up to basic scrutiny, and it should not be allowed to shape future progressive campaigns.
Additional reporting by Ashley Nerbovig.
Correction: This original article quoted an previous version of Watt and Chege’s Guest Rant, and identified Watt and Chege as democratic operatives, rather than political operatives. Both have been updated.
Fine, run another Nicole Thomas-Kennedy and watch Seattle elect a literal Republican. 🤣 Rinck did a great job avoiding that crap, sorry if the rejection stings.
The Ideologue’s Mantra:
“This just proves I was right all along!”
Practice saying these magical words after any event and never be wrong about anything ever again!
AMR is not the first.
Go listen to Lisa Herbold and Andrew Lewis back in 2019…Both ran on the promise of a huge increase in SPD officers and won in large part my making that concession. Make no mistake, both of them were lying through their teeth during the campaign and joined the idiotic “revolution” in 2020 as soon as the opportunity presented itself. But it’s what was required to win in 2019, and for Lewis, the decline in safety in his district (and his responsibility for that decline) is probably the single biggest factor to his losing in 2023.
It’s clearly what is required to win, because people actually don’t like getting assaulted, hearing gunshots outside, and getting their stuff stolen. Time will tell if AMR was just lying to get elected.
Sean Scott won because it was a mirror race from the NTK race. An articulate non-looney of a political position most folks would prefer not to vote for against a looney. NTK = Suarez in that case, albeit extremist looneys of a different flavor. It serves as a case study of nothing beyond “don’t vote in a looney” in the primary. Using Scott as a reference for the relative popularity of abolition is like using Davidson as an example of how popular the GOP is here.
@3: Herbold won by citing her record of supporting SPD: ‘Regarding support for police, she says the “most objective measure” she can point to is continuing to vote for increasing SPD’s funding, plus back pay in the new contract, and hiring bonuses.’
(https://westseattleblog.com/2019/07/election-2019-talking-with-city-council-district-1-incumbent-lisa-herbold/)
Yes, that’s right, one of the Stranger’s recent hate-objects, hiring bonuses for cops, was something then-CM Herbold cited to get re-elected.
As you noted, she never had any intention of keeping that promise, and that broken promise alone may have driven her out of office. With the George Floyd riots on Capitol Hill and the closure of the West Seattle Bridge, we who lived in West Seattle felt like we were living on an island. Having CM Herbold threaten our police protection may well have ended her career.
Why is this noted as a Guest Rant – Hannah is staff, not a guest. I get she’s but hurt that “so called progressives” would dare deviate from the golden path but this just seems odd / diminishes the value of this conceit (that being the Guest Rant).
One aside, something AMR was very good at was discussing topics without the crutch of activist speak (see the above use of Democratic Operative) – maybe Hannah will learn how to avoid cringe DSA lingo / hoping AMR will be a positive influence on the discourse of TS (but given DSA’s history, not optimistic).
I disagree with this. Here’s what I see as the key paragraph of Chege & Watts’s article:
“Unlike her opponent, Rinck’s policy proposals to tackle voters’ biggest concerns are evidence-based. She supports deep investments in affordable housing—and is willing to raise revenue to pay for it. She’ll work to expand mental health treatment opportunities for those who need it. She’ll fully fund critical municipal services that connect people to resources before they fall into crisis. And she’ll work to build more housing everywhere.”
What I read them to mean, right or wrong, is that Rinck successfully refocused the idea of “public safety” as something other than just more and more police. This is actually the entire goal of abolition, something that is widely (and usually intentionally) misunderstood. Abolitionists don’t not care about public safety they just have different ideas about how to ensure it–largely through meeting people’s basic and, in some cases, more intense needs. To the extent Rinck was able to successfully make that case I agree with the authors that would be a massive, and potentially or even likely replicable, shift in the narrative in this city.
@4 “Sean Scott won because it was a mirror race from the NTK race. An articulate non-looney of a political position most folks would prefer not to vote for against a looney.”
That’s not really fair or accurate. Davison won her election by about 10k votes or just under 4%, which supports your description of that race as a difficult decision between two perceived bad options. On the other hand Sean Scott won his election by 27k votes or a little over 37%. People weren’t holding their nose to vote for Scott despite “prefer[ing] not,” they overwhelmingly supported him and his policies. He isn’t a lesser of two evils like Davison he is exactly who his constituents wanted.
@8 NTK was a looney that closer mirrored the views of the left of the city, such as the writer of this “guest rant” who is actually staff. Suarez was a looney that was a blatant racist, exemplified by her campaign videos and twitter feed. So she, even more than NTK drove folks to vote against her. NTK made folks think she cared more about the mugger than the mugee. Suarez may as well have worn a white sheet. Thus the difference.
If only “abolishionists” themselves were not equally obsessed with the Police. Imagine if they considered something as simple as timing. Funding for increased social services first…wait and witness the decline in the need for cops, then cut the force.
To have pushed for a draw down 1)in the midst of a pandemic 2) without first securing some kind of verifiable return for new social spending was a strategic error of the highest order, but it was also unquestionably an emotional imperative. Tm Wolfe remarked decades ago on Radical Chic thought, and hating on cops often comes with its own self defeating baggage.
@10 I think you also need to factor in the potential impact of the candidate. When you are looking at city attorney or council the winner is either the sole decision maker or in the case of the council 1 of 9. Their ability to have a major impact on the lives of people via tax policy, public safety and other positions is much much greater than a state representative who is part of a much larger body with a diversity of voices. I heard from many people they voted for Scott so his views would be part of shaping policy but also had no expectation that his polices would actually make it through to become law. I think in large part this is why he succeeded as a state candid and not as a city candidate. I also think Scott learned some lessons from 2019 and was much tactful on his views.
If TS and the progressive take on this last election is extreme candidates can win by leaning into those positions based on Scott’s run they are going to be disappointed once again. I’m pretty sure “urbanist godfather” Ron Davis will be running against Nelson next year so we’ll get a good view of that battle and I would bet Davis will pull back on some of his rhetoric to be more appealing to voters.
@11 was for @8, my error
@11 Fair point on the role.
From what I’ve seen on social media, Davis is a full of himself pompous egotist. I highly doubt he’s capable of controlling himself that way. He’s more likely to condescendingly lecture the voters.
Ok, Zoomer.
@10 “Funding for increased social services first…wait and witness the decline in the need for cops, then cut the force.”
This is logical on its face but there are two issues. First, the pool of municipal revenue is not unlimited. There’s no guarantee it would have been easier to convince the public to support increased taxation to fund social services than to divert some percentage of the police budget, and it may actually have been more difficult.
Second, the police and their unions are incredibly skilled at controlling policy narratives. For example they successfully convinced the city to send cops along on all CARE team responses, despite the fact the whole point of that team was to respond to situations that don’t require police. There’s no situation in which they would ever concede that an increase in services resulted in a “decline in the need for cops” so even if advocates pursued your course of action they’d inevitably find themselves in the same fight regardless.
Given these circumstances it probably did make the most sense to push for everything at the moment the public writ large was more sympathetic to the cause than ever (even though they ultimately failed entirely).
@15: During the #BLM moment, Seattle had consensus on the need for real police reform, as years of plodding efforts had produced almost nothing. “Defund” immediately obliterated that consensus. It was, and is, a polarizingly divisive approach. As I noted, it instantly turned West Seattle (an entire Council district, almost by itself) into a place which would never elect Lisa Herbold again. The CHAZ/CHOP fiasco became the public face of Defund, with young Black men dying violently in what was supposedly a #BLM event.
“For example they successfully convinced the city to send cops along on all CARE team responses, despite the fact the whole point of that team was to respond to situations that don’t require police.”
Given the number of homeless persons in Seattle who go into crisis, the CARE team should have police escort, and coordinate with the police after data shows which incidents benefit from the police standing off.
@16 “Given the number of homeless persons in Seattle who go into crisis, the CARE team should have police escort”
Why? That’s not how equivalent responses operate in other cities.
@17 good luck hiring for that!
@18 other cities aren’t having any problem. Maybe your perspective is skewed because you’re more scared of homeless than a normal person?
@19 not homeless just the junkies with addiction and metal issue that seem to be in abundance around here. Honestly who do you think will be generating the bulk of those calls? It won’t be the homeless mom with her kid that is just tying to get off the street. It’s going to be the multi repeat offender who randomly is stabbing people like the recent case In NY.
@17, @19: Who in Seattle cares about other cities? Seattle’s citizens want more public safety, and they therefore elected a non-progressive City Council — and a Republican (!) City Attorney — to get it.
As my subtlety was a bit too, uh, subtle for you, I’ll state it explicitly. In the ill-fated failed experiment of the CHAZ/CHOP, young Black men died violently from a LACK of police presence. That’s not actually a very good argument for reducing police presence citywide.
@20 stabbings will still go to police, obviously. CARE team is for nonviolent crises. You may be terrified to interact with people with addiction or mental illness but plenty of people (the vast majority?) are not. It’s ok we won’t let the bad man get you.
@21 if a couple people getting killed in CHOP is evidence to you that antifa self government is no good how do you respond to the thousands of people who get killed in cities all around the country under police watch? Two deaths and in your mind CHOP is a failure, thousands of deaths and shoot we better increase the cops’ budget! Make it make sense
@22: If you want to intervene with a Travis Berge or Cordell Goosby without any police backup, I will not attempt to stop you. (Mainly because I’ll be running the other way.) I’m glad you personally own an absolutely infallible secret decoder ring, which always instantly tells you, with unquestionable certainty, who will become violent and who never will, but as @18 and @20 noted, not everyone will be willing to bet their lives upon that, each and every day on the job.
“Two deaths and in your mind CHOP is a failure, thousands of deaths and shoot we better increase the cops’ budget!”
The CHOP existed for a very short time, on a tiny piece of ground. Now, scale those two violent deaths of young Black men up to all of Seattle for an entire year, and how many thousands of violent fatalities will little Seattle see in that one year? The cure proves worse than the disease, as most of the voters in Seattle subsequently agreed.
@23 “The CHOP existed for a very short time, on a tiny piece of ground”
Good point it’s far too small a sample size to extrapolate and form any conclusions. We really can’t know whether antifa or police oversight is safer in the long run absent further study. Would you want to pursue such further study or are you alright with the level of crime in Seattle currently?
@24: If you want anyone to believe you care about the treatment of persons by police, then perhaps blithely shrugging off the deaths of persons who had no police protection would not make for the very best possible way to demonstrate this?
Because readers might fairly surmise you merely wanted to use any deaths in police custody to advance your predetermined anti-police political agenda, not because you actually care about these deaths.
@24, @22, @19, @17, @15, @8 & @7:
thank you for your Service!
the ‘centrist’ pov is Strong
here @ tS and a Counter-
Narrative is Deeply
Appreciated.
moving to the
so-called ‘right”s
gonna become evermore
Popular with a far “right” Ideology
running/ruining OUR Federal Government
for At Least Two Years
their Overreach sure to come
fear and loathing to run Rampant
hostility & revenge trumpfing civility
and any signs of Compassion viewed as
Weakness/
Wokeness & quickly
run outta town on a rail
unless
“… not
because you actually
care about these deaths.”
–@Wormtongue
who cares so deeply
about Israeli deaths that
Palestinian lives’ve beome
apparently utterly meaningless:
it’s not really
Genocide it’s merely
Massacre on a Very Grand scale
@27: It’s Hamas, abusing the entire population of Gaza for human shields. That’s a war crime, and the deaths are Hamas’ responsibility. Hamas’ leader was very clear on wanting these casualties to happen.
There may be war crimes committed by the IDF, and all allegations should be investigated, but the numbers pale compared to what Hamas has intentionally done.
You’re free to argue with any or all of that anytime you like. So far, you have completely failed to address it.
@25 “persons who had no police protection”
Are you calling the city’s first Black female chief of police a liar?
https://komonews.com/news/local/chief-best-seattles-chop-is-not-a-no-police-zone
@29: While you like to maintain the delusion you could actually obtain a fact to support one of your beliefs, you really should try reading the links you post. The one you provided there starts with these words:
‘Police Chief Carmen Best doubled down on CNN Monday night saying police are responding to calls inside the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest Zone” or CHOP, but they’re not always crossing the barrier.’
So they’re responding. They’re just not actually always going in and accomplishing anything useful. It’s that kind of “responding.”
In case that was somehow a bit confusing, the article goes on to clarify:
“A video showing a confrontation raised questions about emergency service as a burglary suspect was swarmed by a makeshift security team instead of police officers.
“The confrontation between the group and a man they said robbed an auto shop and set it on fire—is an example of the concern. Business owners said the police were nowhere to be found.
“Police said they responded from a distance and didn’t see a disturbance or smoke.”
Well, that’s some awesome responding they did there! “Nothing to see here, so we didn’t move along to it. We abandoned it to the local vigilantes.”
@30 so to be clear police were, by their chief’s own admission, still responsible for public safety in the zone, they just did a shit job. And you think that supports your opinion not mine. Interesting take.