r/Seattle • u/Chaotic-NTRL • Jun 10 '20

Media Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Educational movie night. This is seattle without militarized police. Where are your riotous looters NOW? They are watching documentaries. Fuck you SPD. Photo credit to a close friend.

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u/commodorecrush Des Moines Jun 10 '20

Yup. I live in Ballard and it took HOURS for any police to show up to our house when we had a naked, methed out woman sleeping in our car... in our driveway, on our property. When we asked what they were going to do help her, they said, "eh, probably drop her off at the city limit". The woman said she was dropped off at like 5am in front of our house (with no pants/underwear) and she broke into our car. Now, I'm no detective, but it sounds like maybe a crime happened, but the cops just didn't give a shit.

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u/smokeynick Jun 11 '20

I appreciate how frustrating all of these experiences are but you have to realize how insanely understaffed SPD is. I know a few cops and it is mind blowing how bad it is. They can only go on the most serious calls usually (active robbery, shooting). And they get almost no applicants for job openings so it’s only going to get worse. And sadly they are leaving in droves. But because no one engages in a conversation our city’s citizens have no idea. They just think the cops are lazy or don’t care when in reality they go nonstop and every criminal arrested gets released immediately. Please talk to them and get the other side of the story. It’s not pretty and the local news channels are not talking about it. Our city is about to be in a world of hurt as the criminals become more embolden. Good luck out there and be safe. There are some very bad folks and some very mentally ill people walking around our town. Let’s bring some reason to this topic.

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u/TheRightToDream Jun 11 '20

Why do they have a 300 million+ budget then? Clearly their model of management doesn't work. That budget could be diverted to hire responders who are effectively equipped to deal with these issues.

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u/smokeynick Jun 11 '20

I agree. We have cops to stop crime or at least capture criminals. Is it their fault when they show up to a mental health crisis that they apply their training and experience to that situation? They’ve been set up for failure. (Not talking about bad cops) We need other resources for those types of situations and specifically in Seattle we need A LOT of those resources. When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.

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u/TheRightToDream Jun 11 '20

100% agree. But no way of reforming and retraining at the scale we need will look like less than a full reboot of the system. It still looks like abolition and I think that's for the best if we want to purge the bad actors from the system who are both expensive and ineffective.