Obviously SPOG is the problem.

Until that is replaced, nothing will change

The city of Seattle spent 11 years and $200 million on reshaping the police department in ways the federal government often dictated.

And after all that, our city council members voted to "defund the SPD" '.... brilliant.

Up next, just hiring a marshal, two deputies and more social workers to police the city.

Its working so well... its a real paradise here now.

@1 uh oh, someone's been hanging around with Bezos and Howard Schultz. Break them unions!

“The city of Seattle spent 11 years and $200 million on reshaping the police department…”

Both amounts are trivial compared to the amounts of time, money, and effort it will take for full reform of the SPD. Humans do not change our cultures easily or quickly. Making this particular change even more difficult, police culture is tribal and insular. Furthermore, alternatives to traditional policing will require expenditures beyond what Seattle now spends on the SPD. There will never be any “defund” bonanza to spend on social workers.

“Whether the city council could have reduced SPD’s budget by 50%, as some of them initially proposed, doesn’t really matter anymore.”

“Defund” continues to harm the cause of police reform in Seattle. It promised reform will be simple and inexpensive, when the diametrical opposites are true. “Defund” frightens citizens, making them less likely to consider alternatives to traditional policing. “Defund” poisoned the relationship between CM Herbold and District 1’s citizens; she had stood for re-election on the promise of securing reasonable funding of the SPD. Now her political career will end, and some less-experienced Council Member will hold the Chair of the Public Safety Committee.

“The political will to make such a significant cut waned that very year,”

And ended when Seattle’s voters soundly rejected “defund” and abolitionist candidates in the November 2021 elections.

Nobody Defunded Police - A study of budgets in over 400 American cities over the last 5 years shows that, despite persistent claims by politicians, pundits, and police unions, there was no mass defunding of police. Police departments got the same average cut of the city budget in 2021 as they did in previous years.

Defunding the police became a mainstream political topic in June of 2020, when nine members of the Minneapolis City Council announced their intentions to dismantle the city’s police department with cardboard signs saying “Defund Police.” George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis Police officers had set off a nationwide wave of protests which often called for cuts to law enforcement budgets as a way to curb police violence—and, briefly, it was floated as policy.

The call to “defund” was less of a unified call for abolition, and more of a general sentiment that directing nearly a third of taxpayer money to the police seemed inconsistent with the regular high-profile incidents of police violence. Opponents worried that fewer police would lead to more crime, and these ideas could have been the start of a long-overdue conversation about policing in America.

https://therealnews.com/nobody-defunded-the-police-a-study

‘’Street power’ will be dissipated if organizers leave the levers of power in the hands of local Democrats.”

Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report Executive Editor, Yes, Defund the Cops – And Put Them Under Community Control

“Movements are about amassing power to the people, not collecting promises from corporate flunkies.”

Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report Executive Editor, Community Control of the Police – and a Whole Lot More

https://www.blackagendareport.com/community-control-police-and-whole-lot-more

@7: SPD now has the same number of officers as it did thirty years ago; Seattle’s population has grown 40% over that time, and Seattle’s multitude of unsanctioned, crime-generating encampments did not exist back then. Seattle now has the lowest per-capita number of police officers of any major U.S. city. SPD was effectively defunded, despite Seattle’s voters massively rejecting defund and abolitionist candidates in 2021.

Defund was a triumph of activist policymaking over popular opposition and reality, it has set the cause of police reform and police alternatives back years (if not decades), and the mess will take many more years (if not decades) to fix — and Seattle can’t even start fixing it until the next Council. Defund has been an absolute, unmitigated disaster, producing the diametrical opposite results from those defund activists had claimed. Little wonder defund proponents have been reduced to ineffectually lying about how it never happened.

@10 tensorna I'm having difficulty making sense of your point. You're saying that defunders, a movement that started in force 3 years ago, got what they wanted because the police department has been the same size for the past 30 years?

@13: I did not say the SPD has been the same size for the last thirty years, because it has declined rapidly in size since the City Council started treating defund as if it was a serious proposition, one actually worthy of consideration in a real city:

“Over the past two-and-a-half years, the city of Seattle said over 400 police officers have left the department through retirement or resignation. The number of trained and deployable officers in 2022 is 954, the lowest mark in over 30 years. Seattle's population was almost half of what it is today.”

(https://www.king5.com/amp/article/news/local/seattle/mayor-bruce-harrell-new-seattle-police-recruitment-plan-staffing-reaches-30-year-low/281-e98429ee-fc88-47f6-8890-b961393e2047)

So, talk of defunding the police to 50% actually produced that per-capita result, when compared to the SPD of thirty years ago. How’s life in Seattle these days?

@15: “unchecked capitalism,” “rich folks,” “pay their fair share,” BINGO! on my left-wing wacko Seattle card. Thank you for getting me the win — and in just your first sentence, no less. You must have a lot of practice at this. (I will, however, have to deduct points for your failure to point your racist finger at elderly Asians.)

“…resulting in visible homelessness drug use.”

Way back when Mayor Murray declared a homelessness crisis, the city asked homeless persons about themselves. The results? A majority said they had arrived in Seattle already homeless (p.1). A majority said they used drugs (p.4). Over two-thirds said they had not been able to afford rent in Seattle for twenty years (p. 24). Yeah, insufficient taxes on “rich people” caused all of that, sure. (http://humaninterests.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/City-of-Seattle-Report-FINAL-with-4.11.17-additions.pdf)

Since then, Seattle has spent over half a billion dollars addressing homelessness. How’s that worked out?

“If they had been defunded then we would still have the same number of cops but money to spend on other stuff…”

Yes, the current City Council really was that incompetent, achieving all of the entirely-predictable bad consequences of defund without saving any money. (And you’d happily vote for them again, but they’re mostly leaving ahead of losing, and possibly fleeing indictments for their chronic failure to oversee the City’s treasury.)

“It’s sad watching people suffer in real life and then coming here to read idiots like you get the whole thing wrong.”

Yes, that’s why I’m glad I left. Thanks for the confirmation.