Gonzalez continued: "The mayor does not agree with the city council and the people of Seattle... As a result, she is spreading misinformation and fear about what the council intends to do in order to undermine our genuine efforts to transform community safety in our city."

So we have a city council president cultivating misty aspirations like 'genuine efforts to transform community safety' into a plan that she prays will define itself and then has the gall to disparraige the mayor's input as 'misinformation'. There is no objective reality in the Seattle City Council.

https://stopdefunding.com

One of our previous Mayors has admitted that our current Mayor was not part of the negotiations for the consent decree, and is gaslighting the media (which is full of lots of PR consultants or wanting-to-be PR consultants who want to cash out with sweet sweet payouts for themselves and their police spouses).

Dig deeper.

Hey, did you like the sealed indictments you found out about today? It's going to be a very very fun summer and fall. I recommend a sabbatical.

At least 50% of the city’s residents are tired of being gaslit by her and the idiots on Council.

So, I'm a fan of reducing the size of SPD, but I find the Stranger's reporting on the issue to be irksome at best. They make no effort to speak with a labor attorney, or any attorney at all.

To express how lazy this article is on this point..... Councilwoman Mosqueda was the chief lobbyist for the Washington State Labor Council for many years before running for office. Might she have thoughts on the matter?

As a practicing attorney I'd be shocked if it either wasn't possible to lay the officers out of order, or could only be done at such great expense as to be non-feasible. In addition, every public or private acknowledgment by a government official that desire for out of order layoffs is motivated by race is evidence that out of order layoffs are unconstitutional.

To clarify... out of order layoffs is almost certainly illegal.

Funding the SPD at current levels is like funding the local Nazi party. No excuse for the 35 percent increase in budget the past years other than union lobbying. Call bullshit on this pathetic mayor and police chief!

Eventually the bloated budget for military wannabe cops will be cut no matter what. The economic devastation from the pandemic and the federal government's refusal to do a fucking thing about it will see cities nationwide gutted and destroyed financially. Of course they will cut everything ELSE first, but it will hit the cops, too, you can bet on it. Of course Seattle won't care one bit, right, because Bezos is raking in BILLIONS and his little worker bees make enough to pay rent (or their mortgage), so who cares if the rest of the city goes to shit, right? It will be tens of thousands of homeless, no city government, and Amazon's towers. The American dreamland. Good thing everyone living in the suburbs won't have to worry about low income housing anymore. Oh and Trump will just be the president until the end of time (as a dead, stuffed carcass). Gotta love AmeriKKKa and of it's fucking FREEDUMB.

@11: I trust you followed that with a highball and went to sleep.

@4 & @5: Laying off SPD members in order other than seniority will almost certainly violate our city's contract with SPOG; doing so for blatantly racist reasons is certainly illegal. Either will get us sued, and both will see us lose that suit in such a swift and humiliating manner, it will make our expensive and needless loss in court over the Showbox look like a shut-out victory.

@13: Stopping the Navigation Teams is an ideological demand which CMs Sawant and Herbold will attach to any piece of legislation they can. Every time a majority of campers refuse the Nav' Teams offers of aid, it's a propaganda defeat for the homeless-industrial complex those CMs relentlessly fund. Eliminating the Nav' Teams is the only way to stop reality from continually defeating their propaganda.

I'm sick of our Council enacting their ideology over reality, only to have us pay for it, in multiple ways, and having nothing good to show for it.

The irony of Gonzales' statement is she and the rest of the council are the ones doing the actual gaslighting by insisting anyone that points out the fallacies of their "plan" is acting in bad faith. This whole effort seems more focused on punishing the police rather than improving public safety but the council is so safely encased in their idealogical bubble its impossible for them to change course. I fully expect a lawsuit to be filed next year against the council for not fully funding public safety and of course this issue will continue to play out all year leading up the mayoral and at large council position election.

Derek Chauvin had implicit bias training and was part of a department that that had implemented diversity in hiring years earlier.

In practice, Chauvin's implicit bias training allowed him to murder a restrained black man with complete indifference and diversity in hiring ensured it was minority cops who watched and did nothing, then agreed to sign off on a false police report about what happened.

Feel good "reforms" like diversity in police hiring and implicit bias training have done nothing to limit criminal brutality and systemic racism in police departments around the country. I separate these two problems because police brutality and systemic racism (along with a lack of accountability) are parallel problems in policing that feed each other, but require different solutions.

People were murdered and raped in the CHOP region of Seattle before, during, and now after CHOP. During CHOP the police blamed any rape and murder in the region on lack of police access to the area. That rape and murders occurred before and will continue after CHOP with police simply shrugging about it again as they did before CHOP is lost on no one.

The police are going to be defunded and the rape, murder and theft that the police rarely did anything about before will now be blamed on budget cuts even before any budget cuts take place. Just as in New York the police industry started blaming crime on bail reform before it had even taken affect. The police will always find room in their budget, however small for the crimes like prostitution and drug enforcement that are low risk, high asset forfeiture cases. They will never quite find the budget, no matter how big, to stop the crimes people in the community care about.

Police, prosectors, mayors and the prison industry who feed off the current system of unaccountable tax money will scream the sky is falling because for them any loss of free money is. Thankfully, the public doesn't seem to be buying fake fear tactics any longer, but don't expect them to stop. In the absence of anything like effective policing fear is really all they have. Their statements will only become more deranged and panicked as they loose control over the fear based money raising they have always done.

We are threatening to reduce police spending on a group of welfare queens with guns. Expect them to keep squealing.

"One of the more contentious items involved personnel layoffs."

They can learn coding.

I'm not so sure, they would probably throw a lot of objections and go into endless loops, @18

SPD, much like Seattle itself, is an absolute disaster. People from other states regard both as a joke and an embarrassment, I know because as an out of stater myself (who's been in WA for almost a decade) I hear it all the time from family and friends.

First there was federal oversight, now defunding SPD. The problem with Washington state is too many special interest groups determined to get their piece of the pie no matter who's hurt in the process. No wonder Boeing, Amazon, and Microsoft are gradually withdrawing from the state, the foundations these companies built here to support their businesses are being eroded by termites with two legs.

@11 xina nailed it again for the WIN! Keep on rocking the house.
@12: xina tells it like it IS, Rainy. I hope you checked your blood sugar before dozing off.

@7 "defund navigation teams? great! bum camps forever!"

Were the navigation teams not a response to just sending a few officers out to provide security for the backhoe and garbage trucks? Provide some training and information on social services out with the officers to help people seek assistance. Defund them and it will be back to the old ways of doing things. The bums will not know it's moving day until they hear the John Deere scraping up their camp.