‘Seattle is Dying’ Special Shows a City Gripped by Homelessness and Drug Abuse
“It’s about citizens who don’t feel safe taking their families into downtown Seattle.”
Seattle is in the midst of a crisis. Tent camps have become a common sight, along with homeless people, many of whom suffer from drug addiction, mental illness or both. We recently ran a post about the frustration of police officers in Seattle and how some of them are even resigning because they feel like they’re not being allowed to do their jobs.
A special program from KOMO News called “Seattle is Dying” examined these and other issues. The city’s leadership doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it and quite a few residents have had it.
The program contains images that are downright shocking. Parts of the city look like a permanent occupy encampment, complete with massive piles of garbage that contain hazardous waste like used hypodermic needles.
Here’s a description of the report from Eric Johnson of KOMO:
KOMO News Special: Seattle is Dying
Seattle Is Dying. It’s a harsh title. Someone on social media even called it a “hopeless” title. I’ll admit to you that I wrestled with the name for some time. Too dramatic, I wondered? Too dark? In the end I went with it because I believe it to be true. I believe that Seattle is dying. Rotting from within.
This show, that we’ve been working on for several months now, is really the third in a kind of trilogy.
The first was called “There But For the Grace of God…” It explored homelessness from the inside out in 2016.
The second was called, “Demon at the Door.” It was about the hellish existence of heroin addiction.
This one is about everyone else. It’s about citizens who don’t feel safe taking their families into downtown Seattle. It’s about parents who won’t take their children into the public parks they pay for. It’s about filth and degradation all around us. And theft and crime. It’s about people who don’t feel protected anymore, who don’t feel like their voices are being heard.
John Sexton of Hot Air adds this:
There’s a section featuring angry residents of one area of the city who are screaming at their representatives for action. They want the tent cities managed and they’re tired of calling the police only to find out the police can arrest people but those same people will be back on the street, sometimes within hours.
As I noted last month, just 100 homeless people in Seattle were responsible for 3,500 criminal cases. This special references that story. It also asked Seattle police officers to comment anonymously on what was happening and those responses are enlightening. One officer told KOMO, “People come here because it’s called Free-attle and they believe if they come here they will get free food, free medical treatment, free mental health treatment, a free tent, free clothes and will be free of prosecution for just about everything; and they’re right.”
The program is just under an hour long and worth your time:
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Isn’t this just a waypoint on the road to a Socialist Utopia? Predictable by some people, puzzling to others.
Detroit, Baltimore, D.C., San Francisco, Seattle, Caracas … what do they have in common?
Collectivism (either under Collectivism’s “Socialist” or “Progressive” subsets; ultimately the subset labels matter not).
People mock Detroit, Flint and Cleveland, but people living there don’t crap in the streets. The streets aren’t littered with needles and lined with tents filled with the homeless.
This is an objective, excellent video. It’s an hour long, but worth the time.
San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle have climates that won’t kill you. Pretty much the same reason that other types (I’ll leave it up to everyone’s imagination) also flock there. But as a farm kid I learned early on that if you don’t want rats, stop feeding them. SF, P, and S offer free everything to people and then wonder why there is a problem. I suspect that they all read “The Grapes of Wrath” in college and every homeless person is just like the people in the book, just as every criminal is Jean Valjean. Perhps we should replace Les Miserables with Helter Skelter to open their little snowflake eyes a bit.
Yet the clueless voters of Seattle continue to re-elect the same politicians who have brought this situation about.
Bingo!
I went to my Sympathy Cupboard (formerly owned by Mother Hubbard) and found it completely, utterly bare.
I’ll have a Coke please.
The documentary omits some other details. Tacoma, Puyallup, Lacey, Olympia all have similar issues. While the documentary places the blame on Seattle Dem’s, this doesn’t explain why the homeless squatters have invaded these other areas.
I think KOMO could and should have explored that. I do know that in Olympia, business owners sued the city for setting up a managed tent encampment right in the middle of downtown. I believe the city did this in response to a 9th circuit finding that you cant run them off unless you have a bed/facility.
Also these drugs are coming from a direction that does not have a wall.
They just need to implement UBI… that will surely fix everything.
But … but … but … Seattle has Microsoft, Starbucks, and Amazon. All great businesses that are liberal and caring, right?
How could this happen with Democrats in control?
Seattle, San Francisco and Denver have policies that draw homeless people and drug addicts.
I feel badly for the first responders who have to deal with this garbage every day. Their jobs are difficult enough.
For the rest of the fools in in SEA, I can only say that you get what you deserve.
Have a nice day.
Tax virtuous productivity to subsidize the decadence and squalor. Then blame the virtuous for what happens. Brilliant!!! Welcome to third world America! Let’s import more of this!
Mayor DeBlasio wants to bring the same to NYC. After all we need to be compassionate folks.
To every fool who voted for Marxist politicians and now laments what a shithole Seattle has become: you made your bed now lie in it. Don’t be spreading your mental disease around the country by moving elsewhere. And oh yeah, WTF? Anyone with a functional brain-stem could see this coming.
go thru the list… san francisco, la, Chicago, miami, new orleans, Chicago, Newark… who’d go there with their families… none of them are truly safe…
but go to the suburbs & what’ll you find? walls!
Some people are self destructive and there is nothing to be done to fix that. It is only a matter of time before they kill themselves.
The way to fix this problem is to make free potent drugs available to those addicts. Build a big pen, they want free drugs they go into the pen.
Then check once or twice a day for those who have died.
Crime will go way down. They will no longer be taking a dump on the streets.
I would go with Justice delivered, except non-metal drug amounts, and therapists on a one to one ratio with addicts. Many troubled people CAN be helped.
http://Www.MaleSurvivor.org
I was told a long time ago that 19 out of 20 sobriety dates are on tombstones. I have seen nothing which changes that observation.
That would certainly help the unemployment rate as there are over 11,000 in King county as of a 2017 “count” (and it is likely to be an undercount).
*non-lethal
I use bird seed. We had a homeless camp in the parking strip between my place and the local shops. So on each trip past I would spread a gatorade bottle’s worth of seeds around the area. Having birds (especially crows and if lucky, a seagull), rats, and squirrels show up at 5AM for breakfast gets the job done, AND, I bring wildlife back to the city. And the rats move on when the food runs out. The camp lasted a few days before they uprooted themselves for a more hospitable spot.
The shoplifting in the worst. Between officers quitting in disgust and antifa violence draining the budget, there are no longer any officers available to handle those calls. And corporate is terrified of a profiling lawsuit, so they do nothing and tell the employees to do nothing, which the homeless have now learned. We have had entire stores close simply due to shoplifting becoming a double-digit% of sales. And of course the same, or similar, people complain that they no longer have a market in their area and have to rely on convenience stores. Hmmm, some sort of lesson there about not defecating where you eat, I guess.
You sir, have changed the mind of Mr Banks on that whole feeding toppens to birds topic.
Drug use should be legal only on ones own property.
Drug use should be legal only on ones own property.
As a longtime Seattleite, I agree entirely with “Seattle is Dying.” Our politicians’ response to Seattle’s problems is to levy more taxes and add more bureaucracy. And, the problems keep on growing.
I have to think that these people would leave out saucers of milk to chase away the stray cats digging up their flower gardens.
The whole “..but by the grace of God…” meme is growing old. Most of these people’s problems are self-inflicted.It starts with dropping out of high school and then finding its hard to get a decent job; having kids without a means to provide for them; abusing drugs and alcohol until it does permanent physical and mental damage.
I have yet to see the proof of a family that just a paycheck or two ago they had a nice house or apartment and then the job went away and, presto! here they are on the street in a REI tent, sipping a Starbucks…. its a myth.
We all know where this goes.
People abandon Seattle and take the seeds of the problem elsewhere until it is universal.
Open borders, open city. It’s all the same mindset, thinking people have a right to live wherever they want, regardless of the impact on the people who were already there.
A lot of drug/alcohol users are trying to cope with childhood neglect/abuse. Many would be helped by therapy if they are ready to address their problems.
The endpoint is beyond “dying”, it is way past “dead”. Only when the elite are mired in the despair is there a change and that change is moving away or pushing the debris of society away from their cloistered redoubts (sight and smell tests). LA buses homeless to other SoCal cities to “share the wealth(less)”.
As for “The Emerald City”….this is not Seattle anymore.
I’ve been told (by someone who works the emergency room at Harborview Hospital) that part of the reason Bellevue is less plagued by this problem is that they give any “homeless” people they find a free ride to downtown Seattle.
I guess that’s an example of “You want ’em, you can have ’em.”
Bum exportation. Genius!
We have this in Olympia which is just south of there. For a long time I was very annoyed by it. However I stopped going to the downtown areas where this has become flagrant long before the homeless arrived because the people there hate me and everything I stand for. I support small business whenever I can, but I won’t support them in the corridors of these cities.
It’s not a coincidence that this is happening in spades in cities that have turned away from God and have embraced deviancy.
I will note that if you haven’t read the Elizabeth Smart book (the first one, not the more recent one)- you MUST to understand how dangerous these camps are. I thought I was being overly paranoid in wondering if that same thing was happening under our nose and POOF- a couple of underage girls were being passed around the Seattle camp in exchange for drugs. Apparently it’s rampant. These camps are also favored hiding spots for serial killers among them- as noted on SOFREP, because few really give a rip when a homeless turns up gone and those murders are seldom solved.
This will rot these places to their foundations.
The underlying cause of the homeless and drug abuse problems in liberal enclaves, such as Seattle, is simple: greed. A tremendous amount of money flows frm the federal and state governments to these cities and counties to address homelessness and drug abuse. Almost none of this money finds its way to the homeless of drug abusers. People are getting rich off providing these programs. It is big business, just as illegal immigration is big business. None of the people in a position of power care about the homeless, drug abusers or their problems. They only care about the Benjamins. The power structure is so invested in these money-making scams, that the electorate can do nothing to stop them, even if they want to. The courts have repeatedly ruled that people have the right to camp anywhere they want to, on public property, and this practice can not be denied.
Behold the fruits of liberalism. Seattle has become Los Angeles north, a woke SHITHOLE.
Seattle isn’t dying so much as being murdered.
If Trump and the other Repubs running in 2020 don’t point out that every big city in the US is a total failure of progressive/socialist policies then they do not deserve to win. In fact, every state that has been run by progressives for a few years is also a failure. Their pensions are bankrupt. Their school systems are broken and their infrastructure is crumbling. Why would anyone want to duplicate that on a federal level? Does anyone MOVE to a high tax progressive state if they can avoid it?
How does that old liberal saying go when socialism is found to be useless once again……oh yeah – it’s just that they didn’t have the right people in charge. Next time it’ll be different.
And they didn’t throw enough money at the problem too.
Pharmacutical companies sold Dr’s a bill of goods saying “Your patients no longer have to be in pain with of our new medications. Only 1% of patients will become addicted”.
LIES! Drug companies HAVE TO BE HELD RESPONSIBLE, forced to pay for environment clean up plus restoring peoples lives.
According to a relative living in the area the Seattle/King County drugs of choice are meth, crack and heroin. Not your average pharmaceutical company output.
Forgot to add the usual they did it to themselves and nobody else is responsible for their addiction or the condition in which they find themselves. Seattle allows up to three grams of drugs on a person as “legal” (without being actually legal). Even the drug dealers know this and only carry three grams with them at any given time. Three grams of heroin is 30 doses. The Socialist-Democrats are enabling the addiction. Suburbs have taken a stand against locations where drug use is permitted and monitored (the idea is when they OD someone will be there to save them). They have found that supporting drug use only encourages drug use (wow, what a novel idea!).
It is the drugs. Not homelessness, drugs. Calling homelessness part of it is diversionary. I drove public transit in Seattle-King County for 23 years. Believe me, it is the drugs.
But not the drugs addicts on the streets use. It is the drugs addicts in politics, government, banking, business, schools, churches, synagogues, and temples use. The street addicts are the result. The cause is the “respectable” addicts, the ones who have responsibility for affairs but whose minds and morals are home-fried with toxic chemicals.
There is the drug problem. It is not on the street.