Comments

1
Hey Ansel,

Dean Spade uses he pronouns, just a heads up.
2
We can't afford to give the homeless housing or jobs or money or food or healthcare, but we REALLY need to have the most expensive police station in the world. It will be a monument to the upstanding behavior of police everywhere in the country.
3
@1: Apologies; fixed.
4
FUCK THE POLICE
5
Twenty years? Police stations don't even last about as long as sports stadiums these days.
6
The north precinct is Tiny. The one they are proposing is huge. They want to put a huge amount of solar on it.
7
"I could see farmers markets there..." - O'Toole sounds out of touch. I'm really going to take my kids for a Sunday stroll to buy asparagus at a market located at department under investigation for excessive use of force, with guns laying around all over the place and officers on steroids fresh from the firing range. I might as well send my kids to Catholic summer camp. I appreciate having a police force for real emergencies, but at all other times, my feeling is that kids and police don't mix. And I'm white.
8
@5: Fnarf! You're alive! Have missed you, man.
9
I'm looking forward to a thorough review of the project cost, then it's construction.
I'm glad the council is questioning its cost, but that about it.
You all act like they're asking for a street car, trolley, sculpture park, or waterfront promenade. Nope. The current north precinct is too small, and the basement regularly floods.
It's amusing to hear that we don't need policing from professor dumbass. I guess that drug addicted burglars will just spontaneously seek treatment without committing crimes, damaging property, harming people. That's just not reality.
From the 3rd floor the entire north precinct should be able to see the prostitutes walking up north Aurora.
Aurora Ave N & N 130th St, Seattle, WA 98133
https://goo.gl/maps/SYjs8XbXaEA2
10
@9:

In that case, perhaps the City should use most of that $160,000,000 to train offiicers, hire more officers, increase patrols, etc., etc., instead of giving them a modern version of a massive citadel from which they can gaze down upon the hoi-polloi from a safe distance instead of, oh, I dunno, actually doing their fucking jobs.
11
$160 million? Are you fucking kidding me?

While I totally agree that the North precinct is way too small and needs to be replaced, spending that kind of money is fucking ridiculous.

This state has among the lowest funded schools in the country, the legislature is blowing off a state supreme court order to fund them, and the Seattle school district can barely keep its head above water. But these clowns want to blow $160 million on a police palace?

No. Fucking. Way.
12
This is the same old error as building that car tunnel when we should be looking forward towards car alternatives: transit, density, and other sustainable transport solutions. By the same token, we should be phasing out the existence of a police department.

Seattle has been trying to reform their corrupt police for something like 110 years. It's never going to happen. We're not better than all those who failed to reform the police all those other times. If none of them could do it, we can't either. Meanwhile, crime goes up, crime goes down, for reasons having nothing to do with how many police we have or what brand of guns they carry or what color cars they drive.

I realize there are some things the police do that we don't want to go without, but those services, like crisis intervention, or managing traffic, can be passed along to non-police agencies.

Same old same old, and I don't blame you for being sick of that topic. They ain't getting rid of the police, any more than they're going to quit spending tax money on sportsball stadiums for rich assholes. Here's what a really came here to ask:

What's the difference between "price" and "price point"?
13
@11
I agree
$160 million seems crazy
And putting ONE station for entire north end -- 1/2 of the city -- seems odd.
14
And yet we STILL lack sidewalks throughout major areas of the north end. Go figure.
16
Your math is a bit off.1984 makes it 32 years old not 20. That said, it's too expensive. Back to the drawing board!
17
The precinct building as proposed would protect all of the cars of the drive-in police staff by taking their vehicles off the streets and keeping them behind highly reinforced concrete walls. This is suggested by the Chief of Police is also an answer to neighborhood complaints about the police use of scarce residential parking options. An ironic side 'bonus' for the department would be a perfect job of preventing car prowls on their own vehicles. The building, we are told, will be to local code for earthquake mitigation. Unless things have changed, protection is designed to prevent death and injury from the initial earthquake. It is not designed to protect from aftershocks. The chief said that the precinct building is not like a fire department building with respect to occupants. The latter is most often full of its employees waiting to be deployed by alarms. A police precinct is a hub for a patrol mostly constantly deployed. In other words, the bulk of officers are absent, far from their cars, unable to pull them out of a garage post a major quake because they are going to be likely stupefyingly busy in place, and, also, likely unable to return to the precinct due to massively obstructed roads. The Red Cross, who have been practicing meeting emergencies for a long time, have the area dotted with storage places for supplies. Obviously volunteers are simply housed everywhere. I have never heard emergency management, with the exception of having a command center, recommend that all personnel and equipment be protected in one massive building. Dispersal of resources with supply lines and radio communication is the key. Not a fort hardly in the middle of anything. This appears to lack a realistic emergency planning perspective and city-wide policy work. Shouldn't we begin with assessing the emergency needs of the area instead of the mayor's emergency needs with respect to his political viability?
18
Fnarf, @5, "The station was built in 1984" so your 20 year comment is a bit off.
19
Incinerating four billion dollars on a downtown tunnel that will reduce efficiency by half? YESSSS!

150 million on a dumb police station? WE COULD CURE ZIKA WITH THAT MONEY! SUCH WASTE!
20
@18
The age of the building error is in the article.
21
Liberal progressives complaining about government spending but only in regard to law enforcement. If this was a property tax measure it would be defeated.
22
@21

It isn't necessarily only law enforcement. If Seattle had an Army, or a Navy, or a nuclear weapons stockpile, we'd be wanting to de-fund that too. Anything destructive, useless, and appallingly overpriced, liberal progressives no like.
23
Mike O'Brien doesn't want police anywhere. The get in the way of his Ballard Commons homeless utopia.
24
Can't we scale it down to like the 3rd or 4th most expensive police station in America or something? Maybe 5th? That would at least reduce the sting or controversy or something.
Please?

<sarcasm>
25
Hey, you said you guys wanted the SPD to be transparent.

Look at all that glass! You all just don't know what you want.
27
@14,
True, but the city has never been in the sidewalk construction business so I'm not sure that's relevant. Unless you count the sidewalks in front of city owned buildings.
28
As with all public buildings of the last 50 years or so- the first thing to do is fire the architects. Time after time the public has been failed by grand designs for schools, stations, etc- adding wasteful, non functional elements that add exponentially to costs. What does a Police precinct need? 1/4 of a city block w/ 2 levels of secured parking, 3 levels of office, meeting, holding and processing space? So build that w/o ornament. It needn't be a dreary monstrosity, but it also doesn't need to be a shining beacon of anything. A little tip- curved line add huge costs to buildings.
29
There's no fucking way that station will open its doors before $320M have been spent.
30
@28: and then what? hire different architects? ones that understand that the structure should be orthogonal, without ornament, but not a dreary monstrosity?

why not have some engineers design it? that always looks great!

it has a giant garage and a fucking shooting range in it. that much concrete costs money.
31
Anyone ever seen City Hall? Not exactly an economy build. It's what we do.

32
The parking garage is $27 million on its own, and it will have 324 parking spots. That's $83,333 per parking spot. You could re-buy the entire Pronto Bikeshare for the cost of 16 parking spots.
33
Just a reminder that everybody in the city (at least in the Internet comments sections) lost their collective shit when the council bought Pronto for about $1.4 million.

That purchase was a drop in the bucket compared to the moron stuff we spend money on, like $83,000 parking spaces literally on the corner of a BRT stop.

But I know it's fun to take huge messy shits all over those fucking cyclists and all that.

Please wait...

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