What an all around failure. A man is acting recklessly and needs to be dealt with; social services are called, can't do much, cops are called and they escalate the situation until people are maced and injured. We don't currently have the structures to deal with this; cops have proven time and again to be the wrong tool for the job, and even if we defund the police there is no guarantee we will get an effective response. Cities have the amount of disorder they allow, and I think most of Seattle believes we currently allow too much; but getting us to agree on a solution is much harder, and getting us to agree on the funding source for that solution is even harder still.

Scare quotes are delicious, aren't they Rich? Like adding freshly ground pepper!

Probably my fault here, but I don't feel like I'm any better informed after reading between the lines of these interviews than I was after reading between the lines of the police report.

Hey you, handing out food and drinks, up against the wall! That one looks homeless, and that one's a queer- get em against the wall!

Shorter RW Trolls:

"Cops never lie."

@7: Because the facts of what actually happened are both pretty straightforward and don't fit The Stranger's chosen narratives on homelessness and protesting, Rich cobbled together some accounts and tried to make those 'facts' fit The Stranger's narratives. It didn't work, but at least The Stranger has now admitted, however inadvertently, that there is a link between mental illness and homelessness:

"...the area's homeless population, some of whom suffer with mental health issues."

Cracks have finally begun to appear in the "it's all Eeebul Amazon's fault!" narrative The Stranger has been fruitlessly pushing for years.

(Also, Ali can go down to Pioneer Square and volunteer at one of the Missions already, and thus stop making messes for our SPD and Parks Dep't. to clean up and fix.)

Shorter LW Trolls:

"The only good cop is a dead cop."

Agree with @2 and @7.

@10 There's a difference between feeling like The Stranger's reporting on this particular incident hasn't added much, vs just blindly gargling the copcock.

@15: Oooh, testy, testy! My deconstruction of The Stranger's false narrative must've hit a nerve. Nowhere did I refer to any official police version of events, and I was in fact thinking of The Stranger's own story, from last Friday. Compare and contrast.

Once we can all agree that mental illness and drug addiction afflict most of our homeless population -- a point which is blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever had any interaction at all with any of our recent homeless population -- we can start creating real solutions to help these real people. Until then, we can throw all of the money we want at "housing affordability," and continue to obtain the results we now have.

@16 Deconstruction?

Christ. Thank you. I needed a laugh.

Divide et impera

@22 only if it's a Republican administration. When Regan said government is the problem it was promise.