Some Seattle Police Leaving Over City’s Far Left Politics
“It’s just depressing to serve in a place where many City Council members who are coming out at times with negative comments about the police”
The city of Seattle is known for its progressive politics, and has drifted even further left in recent years. Some members of the city police force are saying that this has come into conflict with law enforcement and are even leaving the force as a result.
The FOX News Insider reports:
Seattle Police Union VP: Officers ‘Fed Up’ With City’s Politics Are Leaving the Force
A Seattle Police Officers Guild official says many officers are leaving the city’s police department because they’re “fed up” with Seattle’s politics.
Rich O’Neill, the group’s vice president, said Sunday on “Fox & Friends” that “a number of issues” are weighing down on the city’s officers, causing them to find work elsewhere.
According to Q13 FOX, 41 officers have left the city’s police department this year, many of whom frustrated by the city’s politics.
O’Neill said Sunday that Seattle Police Department officers have not received a pay raise in more than four years, even while the city is “booming.”
“The number of officers on the street [is] pretty much the same as the 1970s, which is just alarming,” he said.
O’Neill told Q13 FOX that local officials “are allowing certain crimes to go on without accountability.”…
O’Neill said that as many officers leave the department, it’s difficult to find people who want to join the force because of “all the anti-police rhetoric that’s out there.”
Anti-police sentiment has been a staple of the far left for years but reached new heights in recent years with the Black Lives Matter movement.
One member of the Seattle City Council, Kshama Sawant, is a socialist who rose to prominence during the Occupy Wall Street protests. She is mentioned in a recent report by Q13 FOX:
The union says Councilmembers Mike O’Brien and Kshama Sawant have been very critical of the police department. They say Sawant calling two officers murderers quickly after an officer-involved shooting was inappropriate.
Chris Enloe of The Blaze has more on this:
Report: Seattle police flee city in ‘mass exodus’ over city’s liberal, anti-police politics
Nearly four dozen police officers have resigned from the Seattle Police Department this year in what is being described as a “mass exodus” over the city’s increasingly liberal and progressive policies…
While many of those who have left this year retired, 20 or so left Seattle to work for other cities, states and law enforcement agencies. The reason for the “mass exodus?” O’Neill said officers are frustrated with the city’s liberal policies and lack of support from local officials.
“It’s just depressing to serve in a place where many City Council members who are coming out at times with negative comments about the police,” O’Neill said, explaining many officers are leaving Seattle for neighboring jurisdictions.
A source who spoke to KCPQ under the condition of anonymity confirmed O’Neill’s explanation.
“Worker bees on the street, they don’t feel appreciated. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” the source said.
Are the people of Seattle OK with this? And more importantly, what is the end game here? Is the city’s far left council prepared to operate with a limited police force?
Featured image via YouTube.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if the Leftists on the City Council consider any reduction in PD numbers to be a positive result.
The Blaze got this story from Q13 in Seattle. Q13 got this story from Jason Rantz at KTTH in Seattle, without attribution. Q13 told Jason they would credit him “next time”.
“I have never seen the number of officers who are leaving and the way they are leaving,” Seattle Police Guild Vice President Rich O’Neill said.
Here he is on television, saying it:
http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/07/01/seattle-police-officers-leaving-force-because-citys-politics
Police get treated badly in Prohibition regimes. They get blamed for the sins of the politicians. It happened during Alcohol Prohibition. That took 20 years to dissipate.
None of what is happening should be a surprise.
“Is the city’s far left council prepared to operate with a limited police force?”
Feature, not bug.
21st century socialist progressive utopia! Not content with the 20th century utopia of Detroit, they are gonna try again with Seattle. Amazon’s no conservative company by any imagination, but there’s a reason they were looking for a 2nd corporate campus…
I moved to Seattle back in ’74 after serving 6yrs in the military. The city was peaceful but heavily populated with ‘hippies’ (is that still a word?), bookstores and small restaurants. Perfect ‘potting soil’ for nascent socialists.
The last time I was there was in ’92 and the city had changed. People refused to look you in the eye and were basically rude. The faux joviality of the LGBTXYZ beta’s was found everywhere. The cops abandoning ship doesn’t surprise me in the least as the mayor’s office and city council will become more tyrannical.
Californicators ruined Seattle. They are a plague worse than any of the seven visited on Egypt.
They have ruined the culture, the air and water, even the ground I grew up on went from wholesome productive farms to sterile housing developments. They’re stacked together like sarcophagi in a tomb.
Once a barefoot country boy visiting his grand mother could walk safely from her house to her work without any fear or danger. Those days are gone. Are first slowly, then all at once, Californians ruined the state.
I would suggest a larger pattern…. Leftist movement to better climes and less of their incurred toxicity, East to West (think Pelosi) until their endemic blight moved them out to Oregon ,Washington …now Idaho etc. They carry a “dominant gene” that perpetuates social decline.
Washington state or Seattle better climes? Better than say northern California? They are an invasive species, the cane toads of human beings.
They let their state go to rot and ruin then stripped everywhere they spread turning it into the dysfunctional dystopia they fled. Now they spread their moral, political and social decay like a cancer.
Not REAL Californians. It is more like transplants from New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and socialist midwest states like Wisconsin and Minnesota who first wrecked California, and their first-born migrated north. Or, came to Seattle directly.
Looking at the conditions of these major cities like Seattle and San Francisco one can conclude that this is the vision of how the rest of the country will look if these radical resistors are allowed to continue.
Criminals are going to love Seattle in the coming years. If cops don’t arrest anyone then there isn’t any crime…right? eventually the populace will see increased crime as just a part of the social landscape. With decreased reporting of ignored crime the stats will look better and better….. Turning a collective blind eye will cover over what will be obvious to anyone outside looking at the resultant third world decline. Moral, social, institutional and property degradation is a sure bet.
I wonder how many Dems are turning a blind eye to the following as well? The cops may be picking a good time to leave. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
This is the reason for NIMBY [Not In My Back Yard]. Who cares if Seattle becomes the next Detroit? Only the people of Seattle. As long as it doesn’t cost the rest of the country money, this is a local matter. What the elected officials of Seattle are doing is simply the will of the majority of the voting citizens. And, if those citizens wish to live in a lawless enclave, that is their choice. When Boeing moves to Nebraska and Microsoft moves to Miami and Amazon moves to Indiana, because of crime, high taxes and other liberal boondoggles, the citizens might change their minds about what they want the city to look like.
What the elected officials are doing is simply the will of the majority of the voting citizens.
That’s the rub. Citizen turnout for local elections in Seattle is tiny, about 30% of registered voters. So 16% are sufficient to swamp Mayor and Council seats with ludicrous lefties.
Perhaps that could change. The recent ‘job tax’ passed by City government was hastily revoked by Council when a whole lot of ordinary blokes signed petitions to recall it. They’d planned to blame ‘big corporations’ for the resistance, but those thousands of signatures came from citizens who’ve had it up to here with incompetent creeps playing at government. Granted it’s a long shot, but were some articulate candidates to appear in opposition to the loonies, fortune’s more likely now to favor them than at any time in recent history.
Anti-police sentiment has been a staple of the far left for years, but reached new heights in recent years with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Objection, your honor, but without the anti-police activism of the Obama/Holder administration, BLM wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. One of the first police departments selected for Holder’s tender pro-crook mercies was Seattle – whose ultra-progressive City government was eager to join Holder’s legal lynch mob to scourge its own police department. BLM’s surfacing in the news came during the Ferguson riots, a year or two later.
Yes, well, the whole Ferguson thing was a put-up job. Michael Brown may have been a giant, but he was hardly “gentle”. He was a strong-arm low-life crook who would have likely graduated to worse brutality involving fatalities, if that officer hadn’t taken him out of the equation for trying to steal the officer’s gun and murder him with it.
Come to Texas. I’d walk through h3ll with a couple of buckets of sloshing gasoline If that was it was going to take to refuel your Chevy .
Which I would like to buy at auction,
But we do have our danger zones. Avoid certain danger zones. And I would feed you to cannibals to save my dog.
Those are the few rules. We back the badge in Texas,
Washington state is another example of how a city has grown to dominate the state level politics. A relatively narrow swath from Canada through Seattle down to about Olympia along the coast votes reliably Dem even though only the Seattle politicians are so hard core left. The remainder of perhaps 80% of the states area (but only approximately half the population) is more centrist and conservative and votes reliably GOP. But there is just enough of an edge for Dems that they seem to control almost every aspect of state politics.
I suspect this exodus will accelerate as the worst of the politically correct are promoted and then impose the attitudes of the political masters down the command chain. An example–recently a crazed bum stole an ice ax (very dangerous, for those unfamiliar with the tool) from a store and threatened people. Seattle police were called who then surrounded the bum as he walked out of the store and down the street (yeah, I know). At one point, an officer decided he could take the bum down without using deadly force and did so (grappling and dragging down). A hero, right? Taking down a bum with a deadly weapon seemingly willing to use it without deadly violence, right?
The officer’s sergeant, after reviewing the body cam footage, recommended that the officer be punished because he ‘…failed to properly de-escalate.’ As if that weren’t bad enough, the officer’s lieutenant agreed and forwarded the complaint on to the Office of Professional Accountability (the usual collection of anti-police nuts) who then recommended the officer be suspended. The interim police chief, amazingly, threw out the recommendation but the usual collection of anti-police nuts are screaming about this decision.
But don’t use a plastic straw or plastic bag. Seattle is safe for that!
Sh*thole cities are what we are seeing now in America
They are not “sh*thole cities”; they are Democrat Centers of Excellence.
The police who remain will be just as bent as the city government itself.
If you want to be a cop in Washington, your first department has to send you (paid) to the police academy. Small departments can’t afford that. So it’s common knowledge that you should apply to Seattle (where they have trouble filling their jobs), and let them send you to the academy. Then you “lateral” across to another department, who can put you on the street after a week or two of OJT. But NOBODY wants to be a cop in Seattle.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Seattle taking away their cops’ guns and/or Tasers before long. That’s when the really BIG police exodus will occur. Then they’ll have to start issuing badges and citation books to the homeless people that they’ve attracted to Seattle. There won’t be anyone else left to do it.
Let Seattle and Chicago and San Fran all sink back into the swamps from which they arose……….
Dont forget Boston (aka Walshistan, for Mayah Mahty Walsh).