News Oct 1, 2014 at 4:00 am

Mayor Murray Says He Wants to Hire 100 More Police Officers, but Saying It Is the Easy Part

Comments

1
The mayor is a zombie? I don't get it.
2
One place officers won't be coming from: Stranger readers.
3
Just hire a private security company.
They can't be any worse, and they would be easier to fire.
4
Yeah, maybe "fix the nasty, broken, needlessly escalating, rights violating culture of SPD" should have been a higher priority than "hire new cops." Get the department right first, they're more likely to make good hires.
5
What a disturbing illustration, (makes Mayor Murray look like a plague-ridden fascist demagogue), distracts entirely too much from an otherwise reasonably written article.
6
Maybe we could train them not to be thugs this time?
7
He wants to hire new officers for this data driven policing, but what about hiring some IT people to supply that data?
8
Good question about how many officers are enough. As a point of comparison, the city Chief O'Toole came from, Boston, has a slightly smaller population and 1000 more officers. Not sure if that's the magic number, but it certainly is illustrative of how far behind we might be.
9
Seattle is way under policed. Drop any driver from North Seattle into any other city/town and they'd get ticketed within a week. Not that I want a bored suburban cop level of policing either, but the sheer number of shenanigans witnessed every time I leave the house is staggering. Blown stop signs, blown red lights, every third driver talking or texting, 50+ in the 30mph, complete ignorance of basic traffic law, all resulting from a total lack of any consequences of ignoring the laws. Have you ever seen anyone pulled over for a traffic infraction in Ballard? Why follow the rules if you have zero chance of getting busted? It's no wonder that all those worst driver rankings keep Seattle at or near the top of the list.
10
While we're at it, can we get the police we do have to actually follow up on property crimes? There was a van full of stolen bikes and bike parts, a literal bike chop shop operating in broad daylight for weeks and reported to the police a bunch of times, and yet they couldn't be bothered to shut it down or even look into it. The thieves only packed up and moved on when everyone in the neighborhood who had their bike stolen started going down there to recover them.
And what about car prowls? A few cops working the night shift focused on tracking them could catch all of these car prowlers in a couple weeks, but SPD would rather just have a bunch of reports filed the next day instead."It's a low priority" they say every time it happens instead of devoting some resources to stopping it from happening in the first place.
Speaking of stopping shit from happening in the first place...how about Golden Gardens every weekend? How hard would it be to just park a even a single patrol car there each Friday and Saturday night during the summer? There's always at least one fight, robbery, assault, and umpteen DUIs every weekend night, yet the police aren't there until after it's gone down and the suspects are long gone. Knowing that the cops are already there would cut out most of that bullshit. If they can get a couple hundred cops to make sure traffic backs up at every Mariners game, you'd think they could spare one to keep real crimes from happening.
11
First rule of police states: hire more cops.
12
@5 Agreed. The article lays out the challenges pretty clearly. The illustration is click bait demagoguery.
13
13 paragraphs spent dramatizing and drawing out a simple question which, the last five paragraphs (and two iin the middle) indicate, may not matter at all. If the perceived quality of policing increases, few will care if Muurray misses his hiring targets.If the apparent quality of policing decreases or stays the same, few will care if the mayor met his quota.

Politically, this is almost meaningless, and it isn't clear it makes any difference otherwise.
14
McGinn said proudly of his 2014 budget for officer hires that it was "the highest authorized staffing level ever for SPD." I guess everyone tries to top their predecessor. http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archive…
15
"And people who really want to be in this city, people who want to serve this city and have a deep appreciation for Seattle."

This would be a welcome change from SPD officers like Randy Jokela, who collects his $173,000 in annual pay and then retreats to Enumclaw with an obvious distain for the citizens of Seattle.
16
Actually. I like the illustration as a takeoff on the mid-century Soviet-style art.Comrades!
17
How about we have more buses and bus drivers instead of more cops. That would probably actually do us more good, in the long haul.
18
hey ed try hiring someone from seattle not ptsd suffering army guys from the burbs
19
@11 & 17: Amen! ( and ACAB! ;d --- http://www.copwatch.com ).
20
Seattle is the fastest-growing large city in the U.S.A.,so why aren't there more city-council seats? ( talk about watering down the votes . . . --- http://www.fairvote.org ).
21
Sure, Seattle is under policed. The officers focus 90% of their time and resources on overpolicing people of color, specifically brown, red and black people.



Hence you get instances where SPD cops ignore white herione addicts downtown, but hand out 80% of their public pot tickets to black people. Or the UW study that revealed that while the the vast majority of drug users and sellers are white in Seattle, the vast majority of enforcement goes towards blacks. And that the most popular drugs in Seattle are meth and herione (80% of illicit drug use), but the SPD uses 70% of its resources targeting crack users (4% of drug use in the city, per capita).



https://lib.law.washington.edu/content/g…



The SPD have become a public, open, VIOLENT hate group, that the council and mayor Murray are perfectly ok with...theyve been trying to scare the blacks and the browns out of Seattle for decades. Getting the cops to harass/beat/kill/arrest them until they go opens up more room for white hipsters to gentrify the city!
22
Little did I know, when I voted for this mayor, that he would be so pro tool (not the band)...I mean, Police.

SPD has enough problems, and they want too throw more bodies into the barrel.

The SPD do have some decent individuals in it, but the Culture is for shit. Our mayor ought to focus more attention, and money on changing the Culture of the SPD, then move forward with hiring more Tools.
23
1. If the police have time to write insubordinate pot tickets (which they apparently do), they don't have enough to do already. So either lay off a few cops or institute a hiring freeze.



2. Hire more cops, but sell 25% of the patrol cars. Sorry, no porn-surfing, ex-wife stalking or vetting of customers for your whore wife for you. Your happy ass is on a walking or bike beat where you get to, you know, actually talk to the people you're supposed to be protecting.

Please wait...

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