One realizes that theSeattleTimes is beneath theStranger's contempt, but at least one brief entry of the sort: "Since the Times has come out in favor of "Compassion Seattle" we may know it for what it is, (a sop to the rich landed gentry; with no money source to pay for anything)"
((oh for the heydays when one could post a proper href in the comments...)) https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/share-your-thoughts-do-you-support-the-compassion-seattle-ballot-measure/

Unfortunately, its been New York, the city that always sleeps by 10pm, for a couple decades now.

I like the transition from “streets are too wide” to “city belatedly deals with safety concerns on street that is too narrow.”

@3:

Yeah, because there's so much underutilized land on the George Washington Memorial Bridge - I guess we could just erect a bunch of townhouses along the span, like they used to do with the bridges in Merrie Olde England back in the day. At least that would solve the jumper problem, assuming someone doesn't accidentally fall out while tossing the contents of their chamber pot over the side...

As for the John Waters footage: reviews, commentary and criticism of copyrighted works falls under the "fair use doctrine" of federal copyright law and you can probably challenge the takeover of YOUR intellectual property on that basis:

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/01/06/copyright-tips-for-review-sites/

Don't have time yet to watch that entire video, but watched the first minute.

In a recent WTF interview, Waters said they never called themselves the Dreamlanders, that that was a term the media created (but from the production company name of course).

You wouldn't have to worry about corvids if you just got your vaccine shots.

And stop wearing shiny jewelry.

I'm really confused how a site can have so many spelling errors in it. How hard is it just to run spell check before you post? "coservative"

@9 You must be new here.

@3 Matt is full of contradictions today. We also have the city saw multiple shootings over the weekend followed right below it by we should defund the police further to build tiny homes rather than rely on volunteer effort. Really?

I know it may also defeat The Strangers preferred narrative that all cops are pos but there was a reason they cleared Washington Square Park. You may not agree with it but the city decided to shut down the weekend parties occurring there. Hardly a "police riot" https://www.curbed.com/2021/06/washington-square-park-parties-curfew.html

@11 as well all know there are no shootings in places where police departments are extravagantly funded

I refuse to believe the name "Liz Economou" is not made up.

As for the streets being too wide, it's hard to value the knowledge that you can take your car onto any street and not cause a wreck. I remember visiting family in Chicago and being terrified in the passenger seat as all the drivers flew down sleepy residential streets at 40mph+, with what seemed to be to be only theoretical distance between our vehicle, parked cars and oncoming traffic.

@4 Yes, I visited my sister out there around the time you went, mid 2000s and I was so surprised. "The city that never sleeps," in fact sleeps, and very early. I remember a Sesame street piece from my 1980's childhood, showing New Yorkers going about their daytime activities, at night! It stuck with me, but alas that was a historical New York that is no more.

@11:

See @12. Also, it's not like SPD - or any other LEA for that matter - routinely prevents shootings. If that were so, we wouldn't have to read about them occurring on a daily basis.

LOL I love the commentary about NYC being shut down at 10PM. Where were you, in the theater district after a Broadway show? Midtown Manhattan is hardly where the action of any kind is at. Times Square as not been open 24/7 since the '70s.

But seriously, if you believe NYC closes at 10PM, it's clear you were not anywhere but where daytime tourists go. And NYC consists of 5 huge boroughs, not just midtown Manhattan.

I mean the High Line (a park, a tourist attraction) is open until 11PM in the summertime. And that's just a public park.

All bars in NYC are open until 4AM. Every concert venue is open until 2AM (because the headliners of shows don't go on state until 10PM or later - and when Prince was alive you'd wait until 3AM for the show to START because that's when he'd show up). There are plenty of 24/7 diners.

NYC is ever changing, but it hasn't changed that much.
The subway runs 24/7.

There is always something happening.

People go OUT at 10PM in NYC, so it sure as shit isn't closing down at 10PM.

Seattle, however, is an entirely different story.

In your roundup of mass shootings, you missed the quadruple homicide in Portland last night.

@12/15 c'mon. You both have been on here long enough to do better than that. That argument for continuing to defund the police is about as disingenuous as saying gun control laws do nothing do stop mass shootings so we should repeal them all. Until there is something better the police are the best deterrent to increases in violence. Idiots are more apt to think twice about popping off a few caps if they think they might get caught.

The horrible deadly crash on the Aurora bridge was because of the now-thankfully-extinct Death Ducks being allowed on city streets. It had NOTHING to do with the striping or anything else on that bridge. Thanks for propagating a lie... what is this, MAGA-Facebook? I -do- agree that the speed limit should be dropped on it.

I'm just here to say they should put a single track streetcar running down the middle of the Aurora bridge, with two wider lanes on either side.

Oh, and to link to the original wide street study (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2021.1903973). How much of our $100B in wasted land for street space could/should we take back? Combine it with all of the pointless (code mandated) front yards, we're talking about real money.

When I lived in Queens in the mid 2000's there were still places in NYC that were lively at night. In Manhattan we'd go to the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, pretty much all of Houston St. Astoria in Queens had activity at all hours. The south end of Brooklyn had a bunch of Russian and Polish bars and clubs. There were places open if you knew where to go.

The really touristy places were usually quiet late night though.

@19 Are you serious? "A few weeks ago it was positively dystopian. Eerie, even. The upper west side has been dead for a decade."

FFS A few weeks ago? THE PANDEMIC. RING A BELL? I mean are you talking about NYC or are you talking about PANDEMIC NYC?

And it's hardly a newsflash that the upper west side (or east side) is not where the people are up all night going out (there are on both sides, though more so on the east side, 24/7 diners and bars and restaurants). And no, the area by the Whitney is not going to be open after hours. I don't know anything about Boerum Hill so I did a quick search and the first result that came up in my search was this:

https://foursquare.com/top-places/boerum-hill-brooklyn/best-places-good-for-a-late-night

My friends who live, work, and play in NYC right now: own businesses, they are artists, musicians, they work for publishers, they work for advertising agencies, they do sound mixing and editing, they work in the film and television industries, etc. and their lives, even as people nearing 50, are vibrant and they spend a lot of time out late in NYC (though not quite as late as when we were young).

Some people I worked for in the music industry have lived in NYC their ENTIRE lives. People I know own their homes there, are raising their families there, and will probably live there entire lives there.

NYC is a vibrant, thriving, interesting, and always up to something. Always has been, always will be.

I am not talking about the NYC that was when I played, worked, and lived there.

I am not talking about PANDEMIC NYC either. Pandemic NYC was decimated by death and destruction. The subway JUST returned to 24/7 service a few days ago.

@21 Let's go with your assertion that reducing the police further will have no net effect on rates of crime in the city. You are still going to have less resources to investigate these shootings. There is no alternative plan. Are you ready to tell the families of these victims tough shit?

@20:

Traditionally, law enforcement in this country has an absolutely dismal track-record when it comes to solving crimes, including violent crimes involving the use of firearms, where the "clearance rate", that is, the number of investigations leading to arrest of a suspect, is somewhere around 60% - and even less in terms of securing convictions. So, there's already a huge disincentive for perps to "think twice", because the odds of them being identified, let alone arrested and convicted, is shockingly low. Given that, it would be a safe bet to suggest literally ANY other system would be better than the current one, because it's been long established that depending on the police as a deterrent to violent crime is already a failure - and always has been.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/

https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes-143878

https://www.vox.com/2018/9/24/17896034/murder-crime-clearance-fbi-report

@26 Police don't prevent crime. (They do commit it). They show up after the fact. They rarely solve it.

And you can have people investigating crime who are not armed. Plenty of other countries do it. Investigating a crime does not require being armed. Solving a crime does not require being armed.

@21 - Neither of your statements is true.

I've personally seen the deployment of additional cops lower crime over and over. Anytime we had an area experiencing greater than usual crime, we hit it with what some call "saturation patrol." The crime would get shut down. Some of it moved elsewhere, of course, but many of those in engaged in criminality just holed up. Of course, we couldn't maintain that level of resources forever, but it did work. Once deployment dropped to normal levels, area crime usually returned to normal levels...although that still marked a reduction in, or even elimination of, the spike that prompted increased attention in the first place.

Still, I'm all for defunding. In fact, I'm all for complete abolition. I say totally abolish the cops altogether, and we'll see what comes of it. I'm quite certain the result would shut up defunders/abolitionists once and for all.

As to not being required to respond to a crime in progress, we would have been fired had we been caught doing that. Hell, we were required to respond to crimes in progress off-duty! Of course, we would get our job back on appeal, but still...

This story is like the refusing to hire someone "too smart" story out of New York. It's one outlier agency, and the anti-police forces take it as applying to all 18,000 LE agencies nationwide. It doesn't.

Morty - you usually provide factual information so I am surprised you believe the one case is an outlier. Facts show otherwise. People have sued for being denied being allowed to be a cop for being "too smart" in states beyond Connecticut and New York, including even, unbelievably, Florida. California, too, but these are only the states where the people denied the jobs sued. Who knows how many applicants are denied because they score too high the test?

The Police Are not Stupid
But they are not smart either.
https://swedock.medium.com/the-police-are-not-stupid-d1ddc2ea09fd

As for your belief that abolishing the police would shut up the defunders/abolitionists once and for all - you are leaving out a key component in what defunders/abolitionists want and how they want it - to take the over one TRILLION dollars spent on cops in this country every year and spend it on communities - communities ravaged by poverty, crime, and violence - communities left to rot by our society and about which cops do nothing to protect or serve - only harass, terrorize, shoot, and kill.

The people who cry out the loudest about how this society cannot NOT have police are the people who rarely, if ever, have to interact with them and they certainly aren't the ones being murdered by them.

@30:

"The crime would get shut down. Some of it moved elsewhere, of course, but many of those in engaged in criminality just holed up."

Based on your own anecdotal account one would be forced to draw the conclusion that increasing neighborhood patrols only resulted in shifting criminal behavior out of the patrolled neighborhood and into unpatrolled neighborhoods; and while temporarily delaying (reducing) criminal activity in that neighborhood it simultaneously increased criminal activity in those other neighborhoods. In other words, it didn't do anything significant to reduce overall criminal activity in a metropolitan area, it just moved the stats around, TARDIS-like, to different places and/or times. Saying it "marked a reduction in, or even elimination of, the spike that prompted increased attention in the first place" would only seem to pertain to the specific neighborhood being patrolled and fails to take into account that, while the spike may have dropped there, another spike appeared in one or more other neighborhoods. So, from this l presume the policy of "saturation patrols" involves the concept of "lather, rinse, repeat" ad infinitum.

It's just statistical "whack-a-mole" and still doesn't address the issue-at-hand, namely, why the police are so lousy at successfully performing one of their core functions: the solving of crimes.

@13: no, she is most decidedly real. we worked together on a temp assignment many decades ago. her folks owned the Ballard Smoke Shop.

@31: So if somebody murders your mother xina, you wouldn't call the cops?

@31 - I meant the Connecticut case; I was relying on memory and turned New Haven into New York. A quick Google search did not turn up other cases for me. Still, I'll take your word for it that there a very few others. Out of 18,000 agencies, that would still make them outliers. About 8% of those agencies require some college with 1% requiring a college degree, and about 1/3 of officers nationwide have a 4-year degree anyway, required or not. Another 50ish percent have 2 years of college. 5% have graduate degrees. My agency required the latter for promotion above Lieutenant.

Don't be so quick to assume that POC communities wish to rid themselves of the cops. I've seen a few articles lately calling that into question, at least in terms of majority opinions there. Again from my own city, Dallas, we had a police pay hike referendum in 1979-80, a time when cops were allowed by law and policy to use force significantly more often and more harshly than anytime in the last 20 years or so. It passed...but not in white neighborhoods. In white neighborhoods, it failed. Black and Latino neighborhoods passed it by a wide margin, and gave us a pay raise.

It may be easy to dismiss that given that it was a long time ago. But there were 2 mayoral races in Texas just this past week in cities Republicans haven't won since the mid-90's, including the 85% Latino McAllen, Texas. Republicans won them handily. The issue they ran on? Tough on crime. I believe I saw that some U.S House study of the 2020 election found that one of the things that hurt down-ballot Democrats was the "Defund" movement. That Texas race should scare the shit out of Democrats. It scares me. Don't forget Trump did far better than expectations in the majority-Latino Rio Grande Valley of Texas, what we just call The Valley. If we start losing Latinos to the Trumpistan faction, we're dead.

@32 - No, I said "some" of the criminality moves; most of it hunkered down...and calmed down. We may have seen very slight upticks in adjoining sectors, but nothing appreciable. Most criminals engage in criminality in or very near their own communities. Once the added resources left for other hot spots in the city, the targeted area almost always returned to normal levels of crime, not the spike levels that drew added attention in the first place.

It works especially well with gang violence; it clamps down hard enough and long enough on them for whatever their violence-spiking beef is to calm down to plain ol' normal violence. That's the question one must ask, isn't it? If there is a belief that police do nothing to reduce crime, what would having no police mean for crime levels?

I mean we act as if the U.S. is the only country on Earth that has cops. Every country but failed states have a police force. And we have some of the highest violent crime rates in the developed world, which argues for a robust police force...unless the entire world operating under a misapprehension?

@33 - Right, the court has ruled cops are not obligated to intervene...by law. But I'm not aware of any individual agency in which you wouldn't be in a serious jam if you violated departmental policy that you intervene. I'm sure there are some; all 18,000 agencies are independent of one another in this country, and some can have wildly varying policies from the norm. But I doubt there are many.

Unfortunately, you are absolutely right about them often getting their jobs back.

I would have replied to all this sooner, but I was unavailable to do so until now.

@37:

I didn't mean to imply the increases in criminal activity in other neighborhoods exactly corresponded to the decrease in activity in the patrolled neighborhood, only that increases occurred, which you yourself indicated. And while you state " Once deployment dropped to normal levels, area crime usually returned to normal levels...although that still marked a reduction in, or even elimination of, the spike that prompted increased attention in the first place", one has to ask: for how long? Are you suggesting there were never any future spikes in that same neighborhood or only that it took some time for another spike to occur in the same area?

Either way it still smacks of moving numbers around in a way that deliberately downplays what you seem to infer, namely that spikes in criminal activity continued to occur in other neighborhoods whereupon the same tactic would then be implemented, and whether cumulatively this ongoing pattern of spikes/emphasis patrols/reduction actually resulted in an overall flattening or reduction of criminal activity over an entire city/metropolitan area?

@38 - You're taking what I wrote and applying "facts" to it I did not entirely convey or mean to convey anyway. I said there would be very minor, almost inconsequential upticks in neighboring sectors while focusing what we called "directed patrol" on the problem sector, so minor they in no way even approached the level of increase within the sector that prompted directed patrol, which typically included horse-mounted units (surprisingly effective at crime reduction!), tactical units (our Tac officers were used in this way when not responding to hostage/barricaded person/high-risk warrant call-outs) and some added patrol division elements. I planned and commanded a few of these.

The more common response of habitual offenders and gang members/wannabe members was to hunker down and ride it out, emerging after the fact back to basically normal level criminal offenses. The attention took many of them off the street for a while and caused most of the remainder to calm down, for lack of a better descriptor. Sometimes it would last a long time, sometimes not.

You may think the police do not prevent crime. They do, although to what extent is highly debatable, of course. But what I'm convinced of is that while they may not be able to lower crime much in their current form, they do keep the simmering pot from boiling over into something no one would want to see.

@39 & 40 - Exactly.
I wasn't trying to suggest anything contrary to what you wrote, just that calls for defunding by huge and arbitrary numbers and abolition are stupid. And there are more calls for outright abolition now, one in the NYT recently and I saw a couple on CNN a while back. Obviously, that is some seriously delusional and incredibly naive stupidity there.

I'm cool with reallocating resources to some social service entities, as they are better suited to some calls than armed police response. Most cop administrators are; hell, most cops in general probably are. And it is true that many police departments are bloated and could use some trimming of the fat...although Seattle PD is not one of those.

But that is done by carefully analyzing what functions in particular could be handled by social service agencies and developing a plan to reallocate those responses to the extent that currently understaffed social service agencies can respond to. As social service agencies expand with increased funding, their share of reallocated responses can increase apace.

But knee-jerk reactions to cut 50%, 75%, 35% or whatever without any idea of what that means or where those cuts will come from are irresponsible, dangerously so for many people. That's my objection So, the "fuck it" side of me thinks, fuck it, let's abolish the cops and see where the chips fall; pretty sure (just kidding; absolutely sure) the knee-jerk defund and abolition forces will have bloody egg on their faces.

There's also the fact that the Trumpikans are giddy at the prospect of running against Defund, and my own read is they're right to be. I literally tremble just a wee smidge, just imperceptibly, when I think about where another year or two of this (well, this in part) will lead. I hate to say it, but if current trends continue or increase, I say we lose the House and Senate and even the Presidency in 2024. Not all due to LE issues obviously, but partly...