News Nov 15, 2022 at 1:07 pm

City Council, Mayor Largely Agree on Police Funding

Budget Committee Chair Teresa Mosqueda has crunched the numbers and decided she'd like to fight about something other than defunding the police. Nate Gowdy

Comments

3

@1: Our local arsonists continue to complain loudly about what they call “the mysteriously high and rising costs” of the fire department. They cite these ever-rising costs to justify their repeated calls to defund the SFD.

4

The phrase "defund the police" is almost as stupid as the "Caged youth" thing were were subjected to a few years back. There's no point in doing the conservatives work for them.

But more to the point: Anyone who knows anything about city government (and one would hope that would include council people) will understand that you can't just defund a department with a multimillion dollar budget that has long term labor and vendor contracts. Even if we were so inclined, eliminating the police department would take at least a decade, and most likely include hundreds of thousands of dollar in buyouts and other concessions.

And then we'd have to hire a security force or something, which would probably be both worse and more expensive.

5

Seattle lost $10 million in revenue due the botched move of Parking Enforcement Officers from SPD to SDOT. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/confusion-miscommunication-led-to-seattle-canceling-200000-parking-tickets/

I don't know how anyone could write a piece on Parking Enforcement Officers and Seattle's current budget crisis without acknowledging that fact.

6

Bruce or someone in his family has to be invested in the Shot Spotter company. With all of the evidence about how pointless and unworkable that tech is, his insistence really can't be explained any other way. Unless he's just a moron.

7

@2 morales is pretty safe in D2. The only way she loses would be too someone more progressive not less. Now that parts of Magnolia are in D6 there is a good chance with Strauss. I expect Herbold won’t run knowing how unpopular she is so D1 will be a toss up. Fwiw I think Juarez retires too so need to make sure there is a solid candidate for D5 lest a progressive take that seat. It will be a dogfight next year and the progressives will be aiming to reassert themselves.

8

For the first time in a decade the Seattle Council Budget Committee has proposed a budget amendment to finally bring authentic community voices, especially those impacted by police violence, into the discussion of police accountability and find a just method of aiding the victims of police violence and their families and provide an appeals system when the OPA fails to properly investigate complaints.

See pages 260-261 in the amendment package (amendment SPD-101-A-001-2023 for an "Affected Person's Program"): http://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=11452964&GUID=B8E83DF4-C10C-4DBC-A4D1-43DBAA797A69

You can see the brief discussion at time 02:27:10 in Monday's council review of budget amendments here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcpuWftVQWQ

9

re: above (budget amendment for an "Affected Person's Program"), also see: https://twitter.com/justice_forbert/status/1592645790664912897

10

re: the above (amendment SPD-101-A-001-2023 for an "Affected Person's Program"), also see: https://twitter.com/justice_forbert/status/1592645790664912897

11

Will continually complains about Shotspotter costing $1mil, leaving out the bit where the city fucked-up by failing to ensure the new parking enforcement office had all the right paperwork in-place to legally write tickets to people.
They didn't. They left at least $5mil on the table in tickets that had to be canceled/refunded. They coulda painted at least...1.5 crosswalks with that money.

12

@6: Ian Fleming once noted how politicians always seem to want easy answers, but usually can’t find those easy answers, and this fuels an audience for his fictional James Bond, who solves problems which are otherwise insoluble. Thinking a new gadget can magically reduce crime fits pretty well into that idea.

@10: The Stranger has no problem loudly advocating for multi-million dollar government programs that have been shown not to work (e.g. solving homelessness); their problem is with Mayor Harrell’s one-million-dollar program which has been shown not to work. That’s way worse, because shut up, that’s why. ;-)


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