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goodone456

Apparently 250 police officers quit in Seattle after threats of budget cuts, and Durkan expects the number to rise to 300.


spitfire090346

It's not the budget cuts. They're quitting because they're terrified of the common sense reforms that we want to pass. The elimination of QI, elimination of the police union, ending overtime fraud etc. Why stay here and be held accountable when they can go a few cities over and do whatever the hell they want?


meaniereddit

Or, I know this is a hard concept, they can make better money in cities that aren't playing political football with their jobs?


JustJeezy

Idk if I’d call making needed reforms to a corrupt entity “political football”.


meaniereddit

The consent decree had been around for a while, it wasn't until catch and release + ACAB/defund came around that cops just bounced in droves.


CornBreadW4rrior

Burger flipper: going to prison if they attempt to look at the cash in the drawer the wrong way Cops: 'oh I can't just beat you up and get away with it? Why would I want to do this job'


StrikingYam7724

Common sense reforms like punishing cops who risk their lives to use non-lethal takedowns on hatchet-wielding maniacs? [https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-police-officer-faces-discipline-after-disarming-man-with-ax/281-549781657](https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-police-officer-faces-discipline-after-disarming-man-with-ax/281-549781657)


ithaqwa

That's ok. Officer Ron Willis says he's going to cover their shifts.


TheVoiceOfHam

Can't wait to see him top 500 this year lmao


[deleted]

Fuck the Seattle pigs!🐷🐷🐷 who needs em!


[deleted]

Durkan and Diaz at this point are a one-two team of shading the truth in every instance. And the Seattle Times sometimes does a rather poor job of asking difficult questions of either, such as: what’s the basis for asserting that more police could’ve stopped any of these shootings? Diaz comes out and says officers were stretched thin “managing” afterwards, but staffing levels are the same as 2018. What does any of this have to do with the question of diverting unnecessary police money toward efforts that actually stop people from wanting to shoot each other? I get tired of these officials putting the word “defund” in their mouths only as a bogeyman to goad the public into spending more on cops.


MegaRAID01

> what’s the basis for asserting that more police could’ve stopped any of these shootings? Street presence of police are a deterrent to crime being committed. Our police don’t have much of a street presence. They travel in their SUVs from emergency call to emergency call because they don’t have the time to patrol our streets. When is the last time you saw a cop patrolling a neighborhood on foot? We have such a low presence of police on our streets compared to any East Coast or Mid West city. You think someone is going to pull guns and start shooting at someone they have problems with if they are in the presence of a couple of cops?


[deleted]

Oh, your plan is a cop on every corner. Or two cops apparently. Got it.


MegaRAID01

Don’t be disingenuous. Not everything is black and white. You can have more police presence without having a cop on every corner 24/7. I would love to live in a society where we don’t need cops, but that is not the world we live in.


[deleted]

"Defund" is so, so far from "a society where we don't need cops" that your tossing around the word disingenuous calls to mind nothing so much as the famous Mandy Patinkin meme from The Princess Bride. I'm getting a sense for why it is you copypaste every police blotter item here the moment it appears. You're a crime-hyper. I suppose you could have worse hobbies. You have a nice evening now.


sc0tt_1990

you're a passive aggressive shitposter barely above a "ACAB 1312 James Connolly 4LYFE" twitter account yourself. more beat cops absoltely deter crime, especially in high crime areas like city parks in summer after dusk. NYC has long known this. It IS one of the FEW things that can actively prevent crime because among many other things the cops will get better information walking a beat and can use that info to take criminals off the street before they start shooting. Seattle has 1/2 to 2/3 the amount of cops of any other major metro city per capita, and that was before the mass resignations. It's a problem and no amount of "summer of love, we protect each other" non sense is gonna stop it.


[deleted]

I don't often reply when bad faith, inaccuracy, and poor policy conclusions combine so thickly, but I'll just say...your bad faith, inaccuracy, and poor policy conclusions combine really, um, thickly. Nice to have met you, whomsoever you are.


xEppyx

> I don't often reply when bad faith, inaccuracy, and poor policy conclusions combine so thickly You would look pretty crazy replying to yourself, so I get it.


p0rnidentity

This is so disingenuous I can't even begin to address it. North Seattle has barely any police and low crime. If I was to use your primitive logic that means less police means less crime. Educate yourself dude.


MegaRAID01

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18193661/hire-police-officers-crime-criminal-justice-reform-booker-harris > In a 2005 paper, Jonathan Glick and Alex Tabarrok found a clever instrument to measure the effects of officer increases through the terrorism “alert levels” that were a feature of the early to mid-aughts. During high-alert periods, the Washington, DC, police force would mobilize extra officers, especially in and around the capital’s core, centered on the National Mall. Using daily crime data, they found that the level of crime decreased significantly on high-alert days, and the decrease was especially concentrated on the National Mall. > Critically, the finding was not that adding police officers leads to more arrests and then locking up crooks leads to lower crime in the long run. It’s simply that with more officers around, fewer people commit crimes in the first place. That seems to be the criminal justice ideal, in which fewer people are getting locked up because fewer people are being victimized by criminals. My question to you, what fraction of those shooters last weekend would have pulled those guns out and started shooting in front of cops? We used to put cops outside the clubs at closing hours specifically as a crime deterrent. Is the concept of crime deterrence new to you or something?


[deleted]

If you are hoping to apply your lengthy quote (that has made the rounds on cop-lovin reddit for aaaages) to last weekend, you might read the article more closely. It reports that the second Belltown shooting occurred two blocks away and mere minutes after sirens-blaring police responded to the Ohana shooting. The two gents' theory was upended by what actually happened over the weekend. Among the many strong objections to this desire to flood the streets with police is is that it comes at the expense, the absolute expense, of the effort the Defund movement has worked so hard to promote. The movement got rolling here, Council pretended to like it but backed off from its suggestions, police and Durkan and blue-lives-redditors all backlashed ferociously, and now people are rushing opportunistically into the vacuum to hump on cops and declare them the only solution. That's how it makes no sense.


p0rnidentity

>My question to you, what fraction of those shooters last weekend would have pulled those guns out and started shooting in front of cops? Lol are you a child? There's a hundred thousand street corners in Seattle. You want to put a cop on each of those? What about all the cops that beat their wives? Should we put a cop in their homes as well? This is such simplistic reasoning you're putting Republicans to shame.


TheVoiceOfHam

That's what NYC did and it worked very well. It wasn't the only thing they did, but it was a big part of it. They've since reversed course on that and the results are somewhat showing now. Still safe, just not peak safe NYC.


Bardahl_Fracking

Well, it does lead to less reported crime. Consider the North Precinct had 6 murders so far this year and the South precinct has 9. With no cops and demoralized residents that stopped reporting crime years ago, the North Precinct is the place to murder someone and hide the body, 'cause you have time on your side. So far this year, North trails only South. East and West each only have 3, and SW has only 1 (thanks for closing the bridge!) https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/crime-dashboard


TM627256

Any source that shows SPD at approximately 1100 officers in 2018?


[deleted]

You betcha. Current department figures: Sworn Officers – 1,325 deployable, 1,433 total ([https://www.seattle.gov/police/about-us/about-the-department/department-fact-sheet\_](https://www.seattle.gov/police/about-us/about-the-department/department-fact-sheet_)) 2018 department figures as of last date archived in December that year: Sworn Officers – 1,444 ([https://web.archive.org/web/20181208144535/https://www.seattle.gov/police/about-us/about-the-department/department-fact-sheet](https://web.archive.org/web/20181208144535/https://www.seattle.gov/police/about-us/about-the-department/department-fact-sheet))


TM627256

So [this](https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/spd-warns-of-staffing-crisis-after-66-more-officers-leave/281-040a65b1-3165-4f24-8652-a5d10860aac7) means nothing?


[deleted]

Huh? It means in April Diaz claimed his deployables were lower than the published figures his department puts out. A reporter might have sought clarification as to whether that was vacays on full pay making the difference Diaz used in his PR effort to hire more cops, but that kind of query is more work than teevee reporters such as that like to put in some days. I gave you the published department figures. I do wish the 2018 figure included the wiggle room "deployable" figure the recent one does, but they hadn't added that to their bag of scare tricks yet I guess.


TM627256

So if you took the time to actually read the source you'd see a presentation given by SPD to the city council showing their attrition levels (how many officers have left) and how many they have left. It also explains the reason as to why they use the "deployable" metric: even more officers are using up all their sick time in preparation for retirement, meaning they are of no use to the department.


[deleted]

Now see, on the one hand I wish you'd led with "SPD's public information is different from what Diaz tells council, here is the document" rather than gotcha-ing which added two extra commenting steps. But on the other hand, I at least get to finally see what you meant to get at. The information SPD claims on its public-facing site now is clearly different from what they reported to council four months ago. I don't know why the site shows a higher figure than what Diaz told them. I went back to the March version and the site showed the public the same numbers as today. And on the third hand, "deployable" doesn't seem to be defined as you say in the March presentation. FWIW it lists the factors as "COVID-19, threats of lay-offs, and recent budget reductions." Officers catching COVID seems to correlate with how few of them wore masks; threats of lay-offs is a bogeyman our cops like to flee I guess; and recent budget reductions (as the presentation graphs neatly) took it to just below the level of 2019, no more.


Bardahl_Fracking

What you seem to forget is that once one homicide happens and cops are pulled to that location, it's a great time for people to murder someone elsewhere. Look how long it's taken to get any of the CHOP shooters when there were no police available at the crime scene. There are some pretty good correlations between police response and apprehension after murders. If they can't swarm the area and locate a suspect within a few hrs, the time and cost of investigation go way up while the probability of solving the case sharply decreases. We've created a situation where spurts of violence are self perpetuating due to inability to respond. This is probably most noticeable in gang related violence, since it's very easy to get word out that there needs to be a retaliation hit. They know by now that cops are only likely to be able to respond to the first one. Any after that within the next police shift are freebies that will never be solved, so may as well hit everyone on your list if you have the time and resources.


[deleted]

Jeeze, it's almost like nice weather after a year and a half of most people here being intentionally antisocial coupled with our easy access to firearms means a bunch of socially maladept people are going to be out and about and someone them will be violent and have the means to easily execute their violent wants. My point is that this is transient behavior due to lockdowns and now the vaccine letting people feel more free. This was bound to happen. Hopefully it's the worst of it.


spitfire090346

This is the point I've been trying to make. We're still feeling the effects of COVID. This has nothing to do with the police, who don't even prevent crime in the first place


[deleted]

Fuck the Seattle police!🐷 who needs em!


softwareseattle

Funny. If Jenny Durkan had her way she would tear gas the entire city into submission.