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Seattle City Council overrides mayor’s veto of police cuts: ‘We owe our black and indigenous community members’

September 23, 2020 | | Print Article

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Despite objections from city Mayor Jenny Durkan, Seattle’s radically far-left city council has succeeded in defunding local law enforcement by $3 million.

Last month Durkan vetoed a Black Lives Matter-inspired bill proposed by the Seattle City Council that would cut the Seattle Police Department’s staff by 100 officers, eliminate an outreach program for the homeless and reduce officer pay.

Durkan vetoed the bill days later.

Known as Navigation, the outreach program for the homeless was focused on connecting “unsheltered people to housing and critical resources, while helping address pervasive challenges around the issue of homelessness in Seattle.”

On Tuesday the council overrode Durkan’s veto in honor of all the criminal suspects who’ve been killed — most of them arguably justifiably — by Seattle police officers in the past decade, and as an “investment” in “black and indigenous community members.”

“In my mind, the choice is clear. We owe our black and indigenous community members about 400 years of investments,” councilmember Tammy Morales reportedly said during Tuesday’s virtual council meeting.

She then read “names of all of the men and women killed by Seattle police officers over the last decade,” according to local station KOMO.

“When I look back in this moment in time, I want to be able to tell my daughter, who I’m currently holding in my arms, that I did the right thing, and that I voted on the right side of history,” council president Lorena Gonzalez reportedly added.

It’s not clear how pushing policies that betray the interests of local residents places Gonzales and her peers “on the right side of history.”

The override occurred on the same day that KOMO ran a story warning that “Recent protests, crime may be taking toll on downtown Seattle businesses.”

It likewise happened a day after the Department of Justice panned Seattle for being one of several cities that have been “permitting violence and destruction of property.”

BLM riots in Seattle that erupted in late May led to the formation of a city-sanctioned “autonomous zone” that, though now disbanded, engendered a 525 percent spike in crime and the murder of at least three people.

Despite the zone, “CHOP,”  being disbanded earlier this summer, the riots have continued apace in part because of the city’s lax enforcement of criminal justice laws.

See some recent footage below (*Graphic content):

“Defund the police” efforts are also being pursued on a county level.

“As King County and Seattle crime surges, Executive Dow Constantine hopes to end felony incarceration while embracing a move to defund police. As this happens, Constantine seeks a budget cut to the sheriff’s department that will cut up to 30 deputies,” local journalist Jason Rantz reported Monday.

Like his peers in the Seattle City Council, King County executive Dow Constantine sincerely believes that weakening local law enforcement is necessary to make the area less racist toward black and ingenuous people.

“We have a system that is wildly racially disproportionate, and it’s disproportionate despite what Fox News will tell you, because black and brown people are treated differently throughout our society, including by every element of the criminal and legal system,” he reportedly said last week.

And so with this in mind, he’s hoping to reduce the local jail population by funneling criminals into “community-based services” versus sending them to jail. He claims this tactic will only be applied to nonviolent offenders, though Rantz disputes this.

“Don’t fall for this nonsense. Violent offenders seldom see serious jail time. It’s why so many violent offenders keep recommitting crimes in Seattle,” the Seattle journalist wrote.

Constantine’s race-based policy decisions echo the same backwards mindset that’s driving the Seattle City Council.

“Everyone deserves to feel safe. … Countless videos of black and brown lives lost here in Seattle and across the country shows us that not everyone feels safe,” council president Gonzales reportedly added during Tuesday’s meeting.

But the liberal notion that defunding the police and weakening law enforcement will make black and brown Americans feel safer isn’t backed by the facts.

A gallup poll conducted in late June and early July found that an 81 percent majority of all black Americans aren’t comfortable with local policing being reduced.

Among those black Americans who presumably shared this perspective was former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, who resigned from her post last month immediately after the council proposed its “defund the police” bill.

But facts like this don’t seem to matter to anyone on the Seattle City Council or King County executive Dow Constantine, who’s white. It appears that all that matters to them is the narrative that cops are bad.

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Vivek Saxena
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