Comments

3

Let's be clear. Black Lives Matter is suing Seattle taxpayers (= City of Seattle), ultimately depleting revenue that would have been used for the community.

4

"#BlackLivesMatter and the movement to remove statues of white supremacists is global:"

Our biggest monument to white supremacy and modern day slavery in in Seattle is the King County jail. Perhaps it's time to take that down as well?

Be warned, Prosecutor's Pete Holmes and Dan Satterberg are life long supporter of our local monument to "The New Jim Crowe," so expect a fight if you can find them hiding from the media.
I mean, the King County jail and prison system isn't going to just fill itself with marginalized minorities on its own!

5

In his post this afternoon, Charles Mudede shared a super-useful page that I hadn't come across before, "Daily COVID-19 outbreak summary:"
https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/daily-summary.aspx

(I'd seen some previous graphs from the county--maybe on the same page--that were far from helpful. They were using a logarithmic scale and not making it easy to view the data by date.)

It's in that new, useful page that you can see that, in terms of new cases and deaths, things are really looking good in King County.

So then I go to the spreadsheet I check every day after the WA DOH releases its daily numbers:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m4Uxht9mn3BlMu5zq7EB5Ud05GhMLwawvuZuNqXg8vg/htmlview#gid=927112079

So you can see in that data that the statewide trend is suddenly bad. Three straight days with 6.0+% of the tests being positive, plus the 15 deaths, as Jasmyne Keimig shares, which is the highest daily death toll since May 26.

Hearing that the outbreak now is really in Yakima County, this starts to make some sense. And at least the state knows where to send the fire brigade.

I just wonder, though, with the protests and the partial reopening whether King County is going to see its mini second wave in a couple weeks. The testing has still not really ramped up yet, and if the testing has not ramped up, I doubt the contact tracing has either. The combination of mask compliance with testing and tracing is what really gives you the confidence to transition to some quasi-normal.

6

Oh, and it's just remarkable to me that in the year 2020 Belgium still had a statue of King Leopold on public display. Even to me with my limited knowledge of European colonization of Africa, King Leopold is synonymous with massive-scale atrocities.

This reminds me, seeing Andrew Jackson's face removed from the $20 bill (whether he be replaced by Harriet Tubman or any decent American) cannot happen soon enough. When I think Jackson, I think the Trail of Tears. Or whatever genocidal monstrosity he involved on our pre-Columbian peoples.

7

"3: "Let's be clear. Black Lives Matter is suing Seattle taxpayers (= City of Seattle), ultimately depleting revenue that would have been used for the community."

Great point!

I know there's some debate about how much money to deduct from the police budget. Whatever this settlement is, we should be deducted that amount from the Seattle police budget in addition to whatever other amount we decide to deduct.

It will send a clear message that violently attacking our civil rights will cost the police funding.

8

Ah, concern trolling about Black Lives Matter suing the taxpayers. Please. Cops are state sanctioned, taxpayer funded terrorists. Take the lawsuit winnings out of the police budget.

Why is the schools' relationship being suspended instead of severed?

Cops (the show) never should have existed. Good riddance.

Everyone is so bent out of shape about defunding the police. Look at how this country (at ever level) has defunded education. If Seattle took the budgets for education and the police and swapped them (you can see them both at Seattle.gov) that would be an incredible start to much needed change.

Imagine if this country took the bloated military budget and put 50% of it toward education and community programming.

Of course this country is far more interested in money, power, violence, and white supremacist terrorism than it is in anything else.

9

@3 I'm not sure what you think happens to the money awarded in a civil case, raindrop, but it doesn't just vaporize.

Are you suggesting the fraction of that money that the city would spend on programs benefiting black people would be greater than the fraction Black Lives Matter would allocate to that end? Or are you suggesting the city would simply defund programs benefiting black people in order to defray the cost of the settlement?

And do you think a finding in favor of BLM in the case would have no deterrent effect? Who is more likely to change their harmful behavior-- one who faces consequences for bad deeds, or one who does not?

11

If it can be done this easily, you know the police are way overfunded. This is what is meant by defund the police.

Los Angeles mayor says he will redirect up to $150 million from police to community
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/6/8/1951568/-Los-Angeles-mayor-says-he-will-redirect-up-to-150-million-from-police-to-community#read-more

And I agree wholeheartedly with this from the above: A step I would like to see, personally, is having police pensions tied to payouts of wrongful death lawsuits and other civil rights lawsuits.

My personal opinion: cops who kill need to be fired, indicted, and prosecuted. Lose their pensions, too. Never allowed to be cops again, anywhere. Never allowed to own any type of gun, again, anywhere, in any capacity. These steps would reduce cops murdering black people by at least 99% is my guess.

12

Regarding defund the police, yet again supposed conservatives are opposed to easing their own tax burden and reducing government intrusion into private life. It's almost like they have no ideological principles other than Minorities Bad, Rape Good.

13

Either Durkan authorized police to launch an attack on medics treating protesters wounded by police, or she was powerless to stop the police from committing the ground-level equivalent of a war crime. Either way, her mayoral career is done and over. She should take the dignified way out and resign.

14

@11 $150M sounds like a lot, but it's only 8% of the LAPD's annual budget.

It's a start I guess, but it's not nearly as bold a step as Garcetti would like us to believe.

15

@9: That's right, the taxpayers face the consequences of Seattle's bad deeds whether or not behavior is changed in that taxes have to be used for the city's insurance premiums. But that's true with all lawsuits. It's a cumulative thing. It's not one case that's bad, it's the culture of litigation that is quite pernicious.

16

`11: "My personal opinion: cops who kill need to be fired, indicted, and prosecuted."

Well as any cop or prosecutor will tell you, if you take away their extra-constitutional right to rape, murder and gas innocent civilians with impunity, good luck finding anyone who wants to become a cop!

17

@15 Kinda missed the first part there, didn't you raindrop?

18

There are two Confederate statues in Washington State.

Be a shame if those were removed.

19

@17 - I suggest just comment on my premise of the problems with a litigious society, especially when the defendants are our municipal interests.

20

@19 You're still ducking the question.

Do you think the money awarded just vaporizes?

Do you think the people who benefit from Seattle Black Lives Matter spending are not taxpayers?

Don't try to change the subject. You made an assertion about the potential tax burden and benefit of this particular case, not about the general peril of too many poor people using the civil courts to hold their local governments to account.

21

@20. No, but that's private spending and the recipient isn't under obligations I assume. And no, because we're all taxpayers.

Of course, holding local governments to account is important -- but it's difficult to contest that large lawsuit litigation (from very worthy plaintiffs of course) does not become burdensome for local governments.

See also:
https://www.instituteforlegalreform.com/uploads/sites/1/Mitigating-Municipality-Litigation-2019-Research.pdf

22

Hahaha! @21 linked to some rightwing policy bs from a US Chamber of Commerce affiliate!

But no one would have expected anything different.

23

The police were always the enforcement arm of the maximized-profit capitalism system, nothing more; nothing less. Given a decent education, healthcare, job and home-ownership opportunities, your average person has better things to do than roll around shirtless in the grass with a police dog (and need the $200 incentive to sign the TV release form). Oddly though, working-class people always made up the bulk of "Cops" viewers: we saw the perps as individual losers, not exemplars of our class. "Frasier (supposedly) showed Seattle, but what other show gave a damn about Parkland? So it was the only window TV gave into our world (sorry Rosanne: our lives aren't short burst of gotcha comebacks to the man between bursts of power blues). The middle class preferred to look the other way. Middle class professionals earned the nice houses and cars and groceries by finding methods to further alienate the poor on behalf of the ownership class, expecting them to die out quietly (though some deaths would occasionally entail a knee on the neck).

24

So much wishful thinking, as if just rerouting the money hose solves the problems. Sure--reallocate dollars, but that wont change a thing unless the scope the Police are expected to handle isn't reduced to real crime. Redirecting money to social uses will work--years if not decades into the future. Meanwhile, Chicago sets a daily murder record, mostly in the same neighborhoods that are over policed. Just moving money around is not a magic spell that gets rid of racism and violence.

27

@18
"Maury Island was named in 1841 during the Wilkes Expedition[citation needed] in honor of William Lewis Maury, who between 1863 and 1864 raided Union ships on behalf of the Confederacy and is buried in Caroline County, Virginia"

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maury_Island?wprov=sfla1

28

@22: Nevertheless, you can still glean knowledge from research compiled by sources that you find adversarial (that could possibly make more rebuttal stronger maybe).


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