‘Defunding’ police isn’t the only thing Seattle voters should look at

Because the council elections loom, The Seattle Instances is specializing in the candidates’ positions on public security. I get it. I stay within the metropolis and am not blind to the rise within the variety of unhoused folks and the seen markers of substance use and crime. I’m positive {that a} tough-on-crime stance and opposition to cuts within the police funds is a litmus check for a lot of voters.

However on the identical day I learn a Instances endorsement, I sat at a espresso store flipping by way of a pale file folder I took with me after I left workplace in 2007, after two phrases as Seattle’s first Director of the Workplace of Police Accountability. Among the many papers was an electronic mail addressed to me from an account referred to as “depolicing,” with the topic line: “We Give up.” It learn: “As a person, you may have finished extra to advertise crime than any single particular person on this metropolis’s historical past. Face it, your cops don’t care anymore. They’ve been crushed down for thus lengthy, they really have given up. Depolicing is a actuality, not like the fabrication of racial profiling. Congratulations!” The creator referred to as himself “Sick N. Drained.” The date? July 25, 2002.

I’ve been away from the OPA for nearly 17 years now, and I’m now not fluent within the points I used to review and report on: SPD funds, staffing, additional time pay, off-duty work, coaching, self-discipline, and accountability. I keep in mind Chief Adrian Diaz as a really proficient and type officer.

But I’ve stayed shut sufficient to metropolis politics and the pursuit of police reform to know that what we’re experiencing isn’t new. Throughout every of the six years I served as OPA director, the Seattle Police Division lamented low officer morale. At every month-to-month assembly of the Public Security Civil Service Fee I served on from 2014-20, I heard stories in regards to the difficulties in recruiting and retaining officers. Whereas volunteering my time on hiring committees and activity forces, the recurring refrains from regulation enforcement have been completely unchanged from what I heard within the early 2000s: The general public doesn’t perceive the work that we do. We’re dropping good officers as a result of they’re uninterested in the abuse, they’re afraid of the investigations and the lawsuits. They simply need to go residence to their households on the finish of their shift. The video doesn’t inform the entire story. These feedback have been taken out of context.

Typical knowledge locations the blame for Seattle’s present woes on the toes of the “defund” motion and the Metropolis Council’s vote to scale back the police funds throughout the peak of the 2020 protests sparked by George Floyd’s homicide. I agree that the council’s vote was haphazard, too hasty and squandered a chance for a recent and rigorous examination of SPD deployment priorities, staffing and funds; a reimagination of what true public security would seem like.

However let’s not overcorrect. Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 2023-24 funds establishes a Group Assisted Response and Engagement division to deal with behavioral, substance abuse, and nonemergency requires service, crime sufferer help and intervention. That will have been a mouthful to chant throughout protests, but it surely’s in step with the spirit of reform and fairness that animated the defund motion and wouldn’t have come about in its absence.

So, do not forget that “defund” isn’t the boogeyman in 2024, any greater than “depolicing” was in 2002, and a candidate’s place on it’s irrelevant. Ask them as an alternative about what they’ll do to deal with the problems that really threaten our neighborhood’s security: lack of inexpensive housing, well being care, dependancy remedy, training and social companies.