The inevitable result of “Defund The Police” – coming soon to a city near you?

Seattle was one of the first cities to actively seek to rein in its police force following the George Floyd case and the countrywide riots that followed.  Not only that, but some of its “woke” city councillors openly denigrated its police force and promoted the cause of chaos and anarchy.  As a result, hundreds of officers left the force.

Now we see the inevitable result.

Seattle police’s sexual assault and child abuse unit staff has been so depleted that it stopped assigning to detectives this year new cases with adult victims, according to an internal memo sent to interim police Chief Adrian Diaz in April.

The unit’s sergeant put her staffing crisis in stark terms. 

“The community expects our agency to respond to reports of sexual violence,” Sgt. Pamela St. John wrote, “and at current staffing levels that objective is unattainable.”

. . .

In the memo, St. John went on to say that she was not “able to assign adult sexual assault cases” that came into her unit. Cases involving children and adult cases that had a suspect in custody — a fraction of adult sexual assaults reported to police — were being prioritized. The unit just had too few detectives.

Those concerns bear out in fewer referrals from the sexual assault unit to prosecutors. King County prosecutors say they’ve communicated with the sexual assault unit about understaffing concerns, but little has changed.

Assistant Chief Deanna Nollette in an interview with The Seattle Times and KUOW this week dismissed St. John’s portrayal of what was happening in her unit as “not accurate” and a “gross oversimplification.”

. . .

The staffing crisis at the Seattle Police Department is not new.

The department has been losing officers since the beginning of 2020, and staff levels plummeted to a new low at the end of 2021. Whereas 2020 began with 1,290 officers in service, by March 2022 those numbers dropped to 968 — well below the department’s own projections and what the city expected to spend on salaries.

There’s more at the link.

Of course, the police administrators and the politicians who administer their budget are adamantly denying that there’s a problem.  They ascribe it to poor allocation of resources and the like.  Well, of course they do – they’re the ones ultimately responsible for the problem, but they won’t accept that responsibility and live up to it.  They’d rather blame their subordinates.  They can fire them, after all, and thereby reduce the department’s budget even further.  As long as their positions and salaries are protected, that’s all that matters.

Meanwhile, if your daughter is raped or your son sexually abused in Seattle, good luck getting that crime investigated and the guilty party(ies) tried and convicted.  Isn’t it nice to live in such a “woke” city?

This is almost certainly only the tip of the iceberg in Seattle.  If one police department is so badly affected, what are the other departments like?  Given a 25% reduction in personnel strength, according to the figures cited above, I’m sure every aspect of policing in Seattle is suffering.  I fully expect other “blue” cities to be in similarly straitened circumstances.  The more “blue” the city, the worse it’s likely to be.

If you’re still living in such a city, I can only suggest you move to a safer environment as quickly as you can.  Even if you have to take a drop in salary to do so, I think it’ll be worth it, because what’s coming is going to be hard enough even without the “deep blue” handicap.

(Just don’t move to Uvalde, TX.  Their police department appears to have more than enough problems of its own.)

Peter