Aaaaand the pull quote that ties the whole thing together:
Headlines about a nightmare tenant and a homeless landlord get more attention than stories about a somewhat rudderless guy from a privileged background making a hash of managing his father’s property. Hunter said The Seattle Times didn’t even contact him before running Roth’s self-serving version of the story.
Seattle needs to -completely- separate the homeless dilemma from the hands of ALL government agencies. The money just goes down some rat-hole and/or to padding their worthless existence after they do some self-promoting hand-waving. FAIL FAIL FAIL.
Good things don’t happen, just more stalling. For decades. Take it away from the City of Stall.
Helsinki is the same size, and had its program going great guns 5-10 years ago … -big- reductions by then. It starts with a home. A stable place to get your life together.
Yeah the NPR weekend roundup talked about the city ending this program, and cited the costs as a reason for shutting it down- and strangely, there was zero mention of Seattle adding $20M to what it spends on police.
So, instead of dealing with homelessness by helping the homeless out of it, they’ve elected to re-org Seattle DOT back into SPD.
I was about shouting at the radio asking them when they’d consider funding homelessness outreach out of cuts to the police budget but noooo Seattle media people seem to think the answer to any problem is cops
Fucking hell. Who the fuck do I have to vote against to get this reinstated? Literally the best program we could have hoped for to have a permanent solution for the issue at hand
Seattle PD has been under a consent decree for the last decade for over-use of force and racist practices. The decree is about to end (and the PD is petitioning to end it early), and the problem has not improved. It's gotten worse.
There's all this talk here (I'm a Seattleite) of how the police is trying to regain trust or is frustrated at the lack of trust, but they don't take accountability for their actions.
10% of all homicides in Seattle are committed by the police. They don't show up when you report a shooting.
We need national licensing for police. And an overhaul of training (which should be much, much longer and much less violence-oriented). We need to take military equipment out of their hands. We need to largely disarm them (firearms, not other, "less lethal"methods, necessarily), except for certain specialized officers, such as they do in England. Training requirements should be the same throughout the entire country. Repeated training should be required. Training on the actual law should be required (before they get their license to become a cop). Some sort of organization that provides serious oversight, which is not comprised of politicians or anybody related to the justice system in any way, should be required.
It's so easy for them to commit a crime in one jurisdiction and then just move a town over on the off chance that they lose their job over the crime they committed. And they never go to prison for the things they should (well, rarely), so we also need to get rid of qualified immunity. Which is a made-up concept invented by SCOTUS to begin with.
I agree completely with everything you've said. The way it is now, the police are pretty much just a legally protected gang. It doesn't feel like they're here to protect civilians at all. I just have one question - does it make sense to take guns away from cops when the US has a gun problem? In England there are significantly fewer guns, which is just one of several reasons why it works for the police there. I feel we would need significant overhaul to be able to get to the same point, and only after we did so could they start to build trust with the public again.
Cops pull out guns on traffic stops. Talk about an escalation. I would be surprised if cops weren't much more likely to escalate to firearms than the suspect is.
They absolutely are. Hell, one of my most vivid memories is getting into my buddy's grandmother's jeep tracker at a hobby store parking lot, and a cop walked up and unholstered his gun to talk to a couple teenagers.
Our crime? Using a handicap stall while driving a car with a handicap placard in the license plate.
While I sympathize with those who don't have houses to sleep in, as a disabled person, I will point out that blocking the sidewalk at all makes it unusable for many disabled people. Not just "completely blocking" the sidewalk, as is mentioned in this article. It does constantly feel that the city and the country care more for the homeless than they do for the disabled. It sure would be nice if they really cared about either.
I mean, surely we all already knew that his saying the sweeps and clean up of the area were unrelated was a lie. He should have just been open about it.
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