@1, you could have 10 times the amount and still not get them to respond to anything. It's not a staffing level issue. They've decided to throw a hissy fit since people are finally getting sick and tired of their unchecked abuse and are demanding accountability. They are completely abdicating their responsibilities to protect and serve because they feel they should be able to do whatever they want with impunity.

I miss Sydney Brown. One of the best journalists to pass through the Stranger. I hope she is happy over at the ST.

@1: Congratulations for taking cop dick out of your mouth long enough to tell us how 1980's values are the solution to all our problems.

Why are always criticizing Dan Satterberg? Look, no one took more personal pleasure over his 35 year career than Dan Satterberg in sending people to death. The guy would attend executions for until the image became so grotesque that even he had to pretend he was against it to maintain political power.

Dan Satterberg is doing the best he can under difficult condition, but before you criticize him unfairly, visit a court house when the media is not around and look at the way his prosecutors handle things.

You can be proud of Dan Satterberg for all the reasons you admire Bull Connor.

@2: ya, but think of all the parking and jay walking tickets we could get with 10 times the current police force!

In 1990, 1,271 SPD officers handled 65,053 serious (FBI Part 1) crimes and cleared (a proxy measure for “solved”) 13,425, equal to 51.1 crimes handled per officer and 10.6 cleared.

In 2019, 1,371 SPD officers handled 39,055 serious crimes and cleared 3,447, equal to 28.5 crimes handled per officer and 3.2 cleared.

The current clearance rate for rape for the SPD is 8%. Do you think if we double the size of the current police force and double their pay we can get it all the way down to 5%?

@2/4: I suggest that you two just consider SPD a necessary evil you love to hate and free yourselves (and spare us) from the silly superlatives, insults, and extrapolations.

@6: I provide data, @2 makes a valid point and you call it hate.

It sounds like you have an unhealthy relationship with authority.

The failure of every democracy is the willingness of some members to collaborate with their oppressor.

Thank you for always providing a shining example of that maxim.

the Stockholm Syndrome
is Strong in that one
@7.

@7: What oppression? No data you've ever provided shows that. And @2 just is bloviating.

Please be intellectually honest.

A low clearance rate does not indicate oppression. If anything, it shows a high bar for proof that must be met. If you had a very high rate, it would indicate that that due process is being ignored.

@5 it's a get out of jury duty free card, not sure what the problem is lol. Unless you get called all the way down to Kent, oof.

Missouri seems like one of the worst places, right up there with Kansas and Idaho. I have only ever stayed in St Louis for a Roger Waters show, but I was tripping real hard on gel tabs so that kind of clouds my memory...but I wasn't too impressed.

So Ann Davison will win over Pete Holmes because the Stranger endorsed the third person?

@10: You missed the lede chronically confused one, but thankfully you provided a perfect example of the oppression faction of the population I referred to in my post.

A falling clearance rate in the face of a much larger budget, greater surveillance, far less violent crime to investigate and more police to do the investigating is a sign of failed policing and supports @2 point that there is no correlation between more police and stopping crime. A point lost on you that you referred to as "bloviating."

If anything, the growth of things like plea deals and harmless error doctrine invented by judges has lowered the burden of proof needed for a conviction over the past 30 years, but clearance rate does not mean conviction. You can obtain a higher clearance rate by simply identifying a violent criminal and arresting them more often, which the SPD has only grown worse at over time.

Is Missouri even worse? Perhaps, in the same way Venezuela is a step up from Somalia in terms of drug lord related executions, but that doesn't make Venezuela Club Med and neither in Seattle.

Do you see the way you ignored the obvious implication of those failing policing numbers and instead spun it into a ridiculous copoganda "well that must mean more due process" bullshit that is entirely unsupported by, well, reality?

That's where the "some citizens supporting their oppressors" comes in. Apparently there are enough citizens like you who watch what happened to George Floyd and immediately write it off as the Minneapolis police offering a healing back rub to the fellow citizen in their community as a form of community outreach.

That's where the boot lickers collaborate with our oppressors to weaken democracy.

@13: That was a pretty nasty insult in paragraph six. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were just aggravated.

@14: Hyperbole is a tool used to make a point clearer, but let me give you the non-hyperbolic version:

The Police State is You

It’s your acquittal of peace officer’s homicides against civilians.

It’s your elected District Attorneys justifying 99%+ of all police shootings for unarmed civilians.

It’s you falling for contrived police justifications in civil rights cases.
It’s your elected District Attorneys criminally prosecuting any shooting survivors or other victims of false arrest and the use of unreasonable force, for contrived “resistance offences”

It’s you sitting on juries and voting “guilty” for some contrived criminal “resisting offense” (often for your fellow civilians not immediately, and without question, complying with police orders) that precludes the innocent victim of police abuse from suing his assailant.

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever”
George Orwell, 1984

@14: And in case you missed the George Floyd reference in paragraph 6, Internal Affairs in Minneapolis originally exonerated Derek Chauvin and called it a drug overdose that killed him. The DA did what DA's routinely do, which is give Derek Chauvin a free pass. The coroner wrote an autopsy supporting the internal review version that George Floyd died of a drug overdose. If it had reached a judge, they would have ruled that Derek Chavin is not only shielded from criminal liability, but civil liability too under qualified immunity.

Then the video hit Youtube and suddenly all the usual culprits in shielding the police from accountability were forced to handle Derek Chauvin the way they handle everyone who is not a cop, prosecutor or judge

But let's say there was no video and the coward who is the Minneapolis DA decided to do his fucking job and charge Derek Chauvin simply because that is what he would do to anyone outside law enforcement. Your on that jury. How do you rule?

I think we all know the answer to that question. Now go back and read 4 again. Maybe it will make more sense.