Shocking, but it’s what they voted for. What’s troubling is that many of the middle class, ‘educated’ whites who voted for this will leave Seattle because of the problems their voting created, and then vote for the same policies in the places they move to. Wokeness is truly a cancer of values and morality.
Last edited 2 years ago by David McDowell
Samir Iker
2 years ago
What seems very apparent is that the very woke, liberal crowd are the real racists.
What was neatly covered up in the Floyd case was the initial minutes of his arrest – where the police interaction showed there was no racism in their conduct. And every statistic shows that that while there are many issues in policing, the only reason arrests or wrongful deaths are proportionally higher for blacks is because the % of crimes committed by their group (and hence hostile interactions with police) is proportionately higher.
But, who are the innocent people caught up in the grinder in the cities, subject to higher rates of murder, robbery, etc, suffering when stores shut down due to shoplifting? Who would actually be massively net beneficiaries of strict policing?
Predominantly black populated inner city people.
The woke whites who call for scrapping police, going soft on crime, don’t suffer as they invariably stay in “nice” areas that are upper class, and entirely white / Asian (which doesn’t seem to bother them). They are indifferent to the impact on blacks of the policies they force on society, because they are utter racists.
I, too, have watched a lot of the footage leading up to the fatal moment, and felt that the worldwide effect was far, far in excess of the gravity of the actual events.
70%+ of violent crime in the US is committed by blacks (see FBI statistics until they are ordered hidden) who are only 12% of the population. But Seattle and its fellow-failed city, Portland, are overwhelmingly white and as left wing as AOC. White guilt, I guess. Here’s hoping they choke on it.
And look how the “deep-pocketed Dem donors and Hollywood grandees” jumped on the Gascon recall campaign after home invasions and murder finally came, as they inevitably and predictably would, to their gated enclaves.
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago
I have been to Southern California. Northern California and the Pacific North West used to be on my bucket list as I have friends and family there and it was going to be one of the extended trips I would make after retirement. Not even the promise of friends and family can entice me there now.
I have a friend who lives in Seattle – she returned home last year to find her house ransacked. The police didn’t take the call out as there were not enough officers. She still votes Democrat (I think!). I can’t figure it out – it is a mystery.
Twenty and more years ago I used to go on Black Bear shooting holidays in the Cascade Mountains, a few hours east of Seattle. Even then the city was regarded as pathetically liberal, or to use the vernacular of some of my party, decidedly spastic.
Perhaps the affluence of having the huge Boeing Corporation providing well paid jobs for thousands proved just too much, and decadence is the result?
The politics changed. Even Seattle was fairly conservative for a city back in the early 90s. The tech boom brought a bunch of Californians here who settled in from Bellingham down to Olympia. Completely took over state politics. It is still a nice state you just have to stay out of the liberal cesspool areas
Why? Just avoid Seattle. Its a big state and most of the counties are Republican and believe in law enforcememt. I live in Mason County and its been normal here even through covid.
I can recommend the Olympic Peninsula just west of Seattle. Especially the west coast with its tiny population and amazing temperate rain forests. Like my two years in Detroit. Just twenty miles separated downtown Detroit with its astronomical murder rate from Bloomfield Hills, reportedly the wealthiest suburb in North America.
Marie Morton
2 years ago
what made things worse was the focus on George Floyd’s killing as purely racism by all media rather than inadequate policing. Especially as it had happened before in Dallas to a white guy Tony Timpa in 2016 – but that was not covered by the media anywhere- a genuine examination about length of training etc should have been the outcome of the sad case, which could have improved the lives of ordinary poorer workers both black and white.
The fact that most people protesting about Floyd would have no clue about Tony Timpa (worse behaviour by police, not a criminal, no punishment) says a lot about how vile and two faced are our “betters”
Actually in both cases the drug addicts stopped breathing because that’s what opiate OD does. Having weight on you probably doesn’t help, but the opiates are the root cause.
I pity the poor policemen who have to deal with crazed drug addicts on a daily basis. How many journalists have to get up in the morning and deal with fraught situations like that?
The most heinous miscarriage of justice that I have ever witnessed.
Mo Brown
2 years ago
Wow. No really shocking revelations here for me, but the up-close-and-personal from these officers is very revealing and drives home some critical lessons. Importantly, there are real costs to grandstanding and posturing for feel-good points.
What are the costs of which you speak?
Electors get the policies they and their neighbours vote for while Democrat political leaders get the benefits of elected office.
Sure there are losers who didn’t vote for these policies here and there, but not many to speak of numerically. And those who do lose out can mostly move to locations which reject Woke.
The ‘costs’ are pretty obviously the physical and economic destruction of a city and the demoralisation and disintegration of the police force etc, and lots of people losing their jobs.
I very much doubt that the majority support what has happened, and also that most of the population can just up and leave – though the wealthy hypocrites are able to, or are otherwise protected from the consequences of their politics for example by living in gated communities. And why should they have to anyway?
Unfortunately a small number of determined, unrepresentative activists who are obsessed with politics (and race) are the people who get on the committees etc. They can cause untold damage. I once volunteered to be a union rep in the UK. A similar phenomenon applied to a much lesser degree – the officials were completely unrepresentative of the members!
But, yes, I agree that the public will have to start punishing the administration politically if there is to be any hope of Seattle’s recovery, which because of the damage done will be a long drawn out and painful process.
The trouble is that the rest of us get something we don’t deserve, and just because a certain type of person gets to be politician or journalist.
Insufficiently Sensitive
2 years ago
And this morning, 3/26/22, in Seattle? The sniveling Seattle Times front-pages yet another Evil Police article, doing its best to politically keep the department underfunded, unsupported and presumed guilty without any more evidence than its decades-long series of Evil Police articles. That’s how we’ve been saddled with the most despicable City Council imaginable – public opinion is ‘progressive’, and the Times owns it, and the Council is elected to support homeless camps, not citizens. Defend all those burned-out and looted shopowners? Not the Seattle Times, nor the Council either.
Many thanks for the TA Frank article.
Doubtless the Seattle Times is everything you say but who is buying it and how come those why aren’t have failed to exercise more influence on the city’s politics?
Good question. But it’s the only daily newspaper here, and enjoys single-source dominance (NPR and lefties rule the radio and TV waves) – in a town which fashionable ‘progressive’ groupthink still rules. And Council elections enjoy very small turnouts, allowing special-interest groupings much better chances at rule by minorities.
A small sign of change emerged last November, when an ‘enforce-laws’ candidate won the election for City Attorney (the Council immediately erected some legal barricades to that heresy), and one small-business owner won a Council seat. If this signals a trend, more power to it – but the heavy artillery is still emplaced on the ‘progressive’ side, and we’ll have to see.
As a fellow Seattleite, I’d suggest much of the problem coincides with its changing population over the last couple of decades to one dominated by the tech industry and its cohort of mostly young idealistic and ungrounded support workers, who live in an artificial world of IT rather than the nitty gritty of reality. They seem to aspire to the heights of wokeness, virtue-signalling and castigating those who fail to share their concerns. Here,”keeping up with the Joneses” means displaying prominent signs in one’s front garden assuring everyone of one’s “correct” attitude. “Black Lives Matter” signs appear in the most plush upscale residences, along with others stating “Science is Real” ,”No Human is Illegal”, “Love is Love”, presumably to confirm one’s acceptability to society. At the same time, their houses continue to be burgled with no police follow-up, their cars stolen, street shootings escalate, whilst the ineffective city council ponders not prosecuting any criminal offense based on “material need”, such as shoplifting, burglary of less than $1000 of goods, DUI. etc. and then wonder why the crime rate is escalating….
Genuine question, what would you like to see done with the homeless camps? Moving them on seems rather pointless as by their very definition of being homeless they have nowhere else to go, they’d simply have to set themselves up somewhere else in the city.
To me it seems to be a problem of Americas own making. Their hyper capitalist mindset that has a private healthcare system pushing vast amount of drugs out into society because it’s profitable, along with regarding worker protections and a functioning welfare state (which are common throughout the rest of the first world) as being borderline communism means you have vast amounts of people who are left destitute and homeless at the slightest setback.
Without a change to the American psyche I don’t really see a solution. They don’t want the homeless, but they are also ideologically opposed to the controls and support systems that would prevent large numbers finding themselves in that situation in the first place
Stop indulging these people they may have a small shot at sorting their lives out. Continuing to pander to their victim mentality condemns them to no escape from addiction etc.
With the City of Seattle, and King County ‘investing’ hundreds of millions of dollars annually into the Homeless Industrial Complex, it’s clear that the whole country knows that enough dollars will leak through the clutches of our very prosperous ‘non-profit’ executives to enable the extensive clusters of bums living in free tents under freeway rain-deflectors, and enjoying other handouts too numerous to mention.
Most of the homeless I’ve ever dealt with were either alcoholics, addicts, happy to live free as they wanted or blaming everyone but themselves for their predicament.
I’ll agree that many homeless have an array of issues, though it can be a chicken and egg scenario as to which came first. Did the alcoholism and dependency come about due to living rough, or was it the cause of them ending up in that situation. However my point is that you simply don’t see these vast tent shanty towns in other first world countries except the States. The almost total lack of state support, and the Americans seeming opposition to it, means many are left destitute at the drop of a hat or slight change of circumstance. I think a few more structures in place to help those who fall ill or lose jobs etc would massively reduce the amount of people who end up living rough and becoming a nuisance
It is surely more complex. For starters the US now has to all intents and purposes a vast open border in the South. The US high level policies have been in place for decades and it is only fairly recently that it seems to have lurched completely out of control in largely Democratic run cities. Progressives coupled with ridiculously ludicrous Covid policies have changed the landscape.
Those vast tent cities predate Covid by quite a long time. You can argue that the economic cost has added to the problem (though that goes back to my argument about lack of support) but those tents were around a long time before the virus
Problems with homelessness exploded approaching and then during lockdown. Then add the huge numbers of people pouring over the borders. Where do you think they are going? Republican states? Certain first world cities have become well nigh third world. Most if not all are Democratic. That is well reported.
I tend to think it’s really just that they wish to blame others for their bad choices. I have similar attitudes in my own family. There is help regardless of what you may have heard.
No there isn’t help. A family member of mine was addicted in Seattle and I called around the whole city trying to get treatment in 2015. Couldn’t find a single place unless you’re a millionaire. I finally drove up and picked him up and tapered him off heroin myself
They are indulged. I’ve followed the west coast ‘homelessness’ crisis for years. Most of them are drug addicts who want to stay outside because it gives them easier access to their fix. They rarely are criminalised despite their tendency to commit petty crime.
Every country in the world has homeless and drug addicts. I’m asking what is it in Americas approach to the problem that has let it happen in such vast numbers, and that has left it so visible on the streets? The problems of drugs are universal amongst developed nations, yet the outcomes we see are unique to America
That sounds reasonable on it’s face, but if you DO implement the controls and support systems, then the question becomes, what happens next? Answer, the sink estates of Europe, where huge numbers of one parent families made up of half siblings and step brothers and sisters, live for generation after mouldering generation of unemployment and social welfare, anesthesised by drink, drugs and sex, all the while increasing in number and area, and slowly destabilising the society which carries them.
Ignoring of course that America has the highest percentage of single parent families in the developed world. They also have the trailer parks and vast homeless problem, with the accompanying crime, gang and gun violence and drug dependency that’s far worse than you’ll find in the council estates of the UK and Europe
Well we are a country of 300+ million…but please consider that what you are observing might be viewed through the lense of who is doing the reporting and their agenda…
I live in Canada with free health care and very generous social benefits and we have the same problems. It is caused by mental illness and progressive policies in large cities that celebrate drug addiction as a legitimate lifestyle.
I could be wrong but I don’t recall seeing vast numbers of drug addicts and homeless living in tent shanty towns in Canada relieving themselves all over the pavement? It seems uniquely an American issue to me
Ah I’ve read through your comments and now you’re showing your bias Billy Bob, maybe because you don’t like the idea that so called progressive countries have big problems with the homeless too. All over Europe it’s a big problem.
So if your agenda is to blame American society or lack of social support, then you’re wrong.
I don’t know what the answer to drug addiction and the resulting homelessness and crime is. Housing would at least get them off the street but doesn’t solve the addiction and crime aspect.
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
This made uncomfortable reading. As a non-federal nation geographically far smaller and more homogeneous than the USA, circumstances in the United Kingdom are very different. For a start, firearms are rare, and few police are armed with them, but I have steadily seen things change. There is more and more ‘diversity’, which clearly makes policing harder, and I don’t think increased diversity within the police is going to help.
It seems that in every society, a some people are prepared to plunder or assault others, and those who suffer are mainly the weak, or those who simply lack the aggressiveness to oppose them.
This has always been so, and everywhere, but civilisation has in the main created laws, and enforced them, most successfully in ‘the West’. It’s one of the reasons such countries attract massive immigration.
And yet this way of life is failing, and I see in the Seattle situation echoes of what may happen here. There are some who, for various reasons, have acquired a hate for authority and are keen to destroy it, which is welcomed by those who only wish to take advantage.
Even worse, well-educated people, paid well above average salaries and living in good properties, are assisting this, by conforming to fashionable attitudes and supporting grievances, old and new, real and imagined.
For example, I have noticed that at every opportunity, almost all of the media, but especially the BBC which dominates British news and current affairs coverage, has been critical of the police, and especially ‘the Met’. It implies all police are evil. For example, the Everard murder was committed by a ‘serving policeman’, which is emphasised, but what I have hardly ever heard is that the police investigated it, and caught him within days.
And I keep hearing the phrase ‘the public’s lost confidence in the police’. On what evidence? I’ll bet there’s more confidence in the police than in journalists, but of course the statement is intended to cause that loss in confidence.
As it happens, it has been reduced, because unsurprisingly, the police are spending more time on things like ‘hate crime’, or tolerating law-breaking if it is for a fashionable cause, or on additional procedures invented by politicians and lawyers and intended to hobble them. The state even pays for legal aid for anyone opposing the state; fine, but it far more generous than in other respected countries, and is even paid for non-citizens (and lawyers want yet more).
No wonder people like Putin can point to the increasing chaos in the West to support authoritarian rule.
The Police are sent around to threaten people who write mean tweets, but when a father calls the police to say his under-age daughter is being drugged and sexually assaulted by Asian men they arrest both him and the girl child, without even taking the names of the Asian men committing the crimes. [Rotherham, at least two different occasions.]
Failing to simply apply the law in a colour-blind fashion is what has caused many of us to abandon our otherwise long-standing support of the Police.
John Barclay
2 years ago
Shocking story. No decent human could justify what happened in America following the death of George Floyd.
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
2 years ago
I made a list of the political villains in this article. Jenny Durkan, Teresa Mosqueda, Tammy Morales, Kshama Sawant, Lorena Gonzáles and Denise Juneau.
I assume I cannot be the only to notice the common denominator
If they were great mothers the children would have been stopped in their tracks; great mamas don’t put up with crap.
Billy Bob
2 years ago
There seems to be no middle ground in the States. It’s either all stick and no carrot, handing out life sentences for minor crimes or executing simpletons, or ultra progressive and making no attempt to uphold the law at all. Like everything else over there policing seems to part of the heavily politicised culture war
It’s from the outside looking in, my opinion is merely based on the impression America gives off to the outside world. It comes across as a basket case quite frankly, incredibly insular and an undeserved confidence that their approach is always the correct one. However saying that I’ve known plenty of yanks over the years and they’re some of the most friendly and hospitable people in the world, they just know nothing outside their own borders
I look at some British news online and even the conservative ones get it wrong. But most are liberal so that will skew reality.
Tom Watson
2 years ago
I have to ask:
“The knee to the neck also surprised J.D. Smith…“That’s not even a proper technique,” says Smith. “We put a knee in between the shoulder blades, and it never chokes anybody out.”
In literally all the shots I’ve seen of Chauvin, it’s looked to me like that’s exactly where his knee was. Is there something I’m missing, as someone with no relevant experience of such things? Is there a particular way of putting pressure through the knee that constricts the neck even with a small contact area? Have I seen the wrong photos?
There is of course all sorts of stories floating around post the incident, so take this with a pinch of salt.
But there are versions I read which said that the position of the knee was fine, there wasn’t much bruising (and the reason the police disbelieved Floyd was because he was resisting arrest and screaming too much for someone facing breathing difficulty)
And his lungs were full of fluid and way too heavy. Nothing to do with the knee but all due to the drugs in his system.
The problem is the above wouldn’t be collaborated by the “mainstream” media – not that says anything.
I know a few coppers in NZ, and none of them had much sympathy for the officer charged with killing Floyd. Whilst it isn’t a technique that’s used to restrain people here, their biggest problem with the arrest was how long it went on for. They all seem to be if the opinion that there was simply no need to still be kneeling on him long after they’d got the cuffs on, especially with other officers present.
If three blokes can’t control a man in handcuffs without piling on top of him for 8 minutes they are truly incompetent and probably shouldn’t be police in the first place
The officer was clearly a thug, with lots of complaints against him previously. The reason he knelt so long was possibly because it was an ego trip for him.
But that’s the problem with attaching the racist tag to everything, genuine issues with how the police force oversees officers get dusted under the carpet.
I agree I don’t believe it was race related, my point was that even though Floyd was a horrible man the officer deserves his murder charge in my opinion
Floyd was a huge muscular bloke on drugs. The long restraint with that context appeared acceptable to me. It’s highly worth watching the original footage if you’ve not seen it.
The courts disagreed, as do people in the force I’ve spoken to. They reckon size is largely irrelevant, if you’re hands are cuffed behind your back a couple blokes can control you very easily even if you are a big lump
William Hickey
2 years ago
Isn’t it telling that when this country’s left-wingers (like the policeman in this article or Bernie Sanders) describe their ideal alternative to racist America, they always pick Scandinavia, where all the nations are far whiter than the US?
Deep down, they all know the real reason why they can’t have nice things anymore.
If it wasn’t for blacks, the typical nightly local news program in America would be five minutes long and consist of covering church bingo games, kitchen grease fires and the occasional traffic accident.
In other news, the Oscars, which a few years ago were criticized as being “too white,” last night featured African-American Will Smith, the Best Actor winner, assaulting the show’s host, African-American Chris Rock, during the telecast for “disrespecting”Smith’s wife.
The award program is now definitively black.
Last edited 2 years ago by William Hickey
Mike Bell
2 years ago
Thank you A real eye-opener. Not only into the riots there, but also into the way they were reported in the UK.
I hope de Santis gets it. He’s trump without the bombast and thin skin. Trump should be an elder and influencer but let someone else bring down the temperature.
John Murray
2 years ago
I am glad that the article made to sure to cover the most important detail that Pele is now a fat and happy pet. As for Seattle? You reap what you sow.
Jerry Carroll
2 years ago
Everything the left touches turns to shit.
Jesse Porter
2 years ago
What is certain is that civilization is tenuous at best. “Katherine Kelaidis, resident scholar at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, said, ‘The Greeks very much had this sense … that civilization is a very thin veneer and that under even slight amounts of pressure, that social contract starts to break down, and [when] people lose that veneer … that can be very dangerous.'” ‘Civilization is a very thin veneer’: What the plague of Athens can teach us about dealing with COVID-19 | CBC Radio.
That veneer is easily pierced. Outrage at the incompetence of leadership, whether spontaneously acquired by observation or enflamed by rabble-rousers, can very quickly sweep through a crowd as we have seen over and over again. America’s founders knew this very well and sought to guard against our becoming a democracy. They knew that no democracy had ever in history survived for that very tendency of men.
For the same reasons that warfare by drones or remote control can result in far more cruel and inhumane destruction of property and mass killings, remote news production can easily work to enflame passions. Hand to hand combat makes eye to eye contact, and more likely empathy to modify hatred and bloodlust on the part of soldiers. When one can watch fear and pain come over an enemy’s face as the inevitability of death becomes obvious to him, who can resist the horror of what he is doing to a fellow man?
And it is inevitable that a commentator, reacting only to the limited information available from images of activity happening outside the cocoon and in the safety of his newsroom, that his reportage be less than in tune with what is happening. For that matter, a politician, in his comfortable and safe office is likely, to make decisions and issue commands untempered by the experiences of his or her underlings facing the tensions and dangers of the situation.
And those in direct command of overworked and overstressed, underpaid while facing immediate danger, personnel on the street, having withdrawn from those dangers, cannot, often, make the correct decisions necessary to the situations. In very similar conditions, any of those in control of or influencing rabble-rousers stirring the passions of the crowd, are not fully aware of what they might be causing, whether intentional or not. And there are always unintended consequences of actions.
Society is only ever a few missed meals away from anarchy
DA Johnson
2 years ago
The astonishing thing is that this article was by a writer for Vanity Fair–a magazine that used to cover folly and/or corruption on both sides of the political aisle. It changed about 10 years ago to being rabidly partisan, ignoring Democratic malfeasance, demonizing Republicans and, of course, hating Donald Trump. To criticize a progressive city like Seattle in VF would have been unthinkable in the recent past–here’s hoping that Mr. Frank can retain his job after such heresy.
2A Solution
2 years ago
To hell with all the blue cities.
Andrew Lale
2 years ago
Meh. I believe I speak for millions when I say ‘whatever’. Seattle and Portland will reap what they have sown. It’s about 9,000 miles from where I live and thank GOD for that.
Rose D
2 years ago
We have arrived at the place where the entirely predictable consequences of the high-falutin Left’s luxury beliefs have become so obvious no sane person can deny them.
From Seattle’s devolution to lawless anarchy to “Lia” Thomas “winning” an NCAA women’s title to Biden’s inability to get any decision maker in Saudi on the phone to US fossil fuel producers’ unwillingness to grow production faster to the race and “gender” (really sex) requirements for positions that (as it turns out) require basic competency, the only people continuing to advocate for the responsible policies are the fascist Twitter tyrants of the Regressive Left (oh and The Squad and the Biden administration).
Seattle-aside, voters increasingly are coming to their senses.
This is a one sided treatise on the problems in Seattle. Police haven’t done anything about crime or drugs for a long time, not just after George Floyd. There have been homeless camps and people shooting up drugs on the street openly for at least a decade. And Seattle cops aren’t angels. They shoot and kill people too. Yes they need police in Seattle and law and order but this article is ridiculously simplistic
Shocking, but it’s what they voted for. What’s troubling is that many of the middle class, ‘educated’ whites who voted for this will leave Seattle because of the problems their voting created, and then vote for the same policies in the places they move to. Wokeness is truly a cancer of values and morality.
What seems very apparent is that the very woke, liberal crowd are the real racists.
What was neatly covered up in the Floyd case was the initial minutes of his arrest – where the police interaction showed there was no racism in their conduct. And every statistic shows that that while there are many issues in policing, the only reason arrests or wrongful deaths are proportionally higher for blacks is because the % of crimes committed by their group (and hence hostile interactions with police) is proportionately higher.
But, who are the innocent people caught up in the grinder in the cities, subject to higher rates of murder, robbery, etc, suffering when stores shut down due to shoplifting? Who would actually be massively net beneficiaries of strict policing?
Predominantly black populated inner city people.
The woke whites who call for scrapping police, going soft on crime, don’t suffer as they invariably stay in “nice” areas that are upper class, and entirely white / Asian (which doesn’t seem to bother them). They are indifferent to the impact on blacks of the policies they force on society, because they are utter racists.
I, too, have watched a lot of the footage leading up to the fatal moment, and felt that the worldwide effect was far, far in excess of the gravity of the actual events.
The plain unvarnished truth.
Spot on.
70%+ of violent crime in the US is committed by blacks (see FBI statistics until they are ordered hidden) who are only 12% of the population. But Seattle and its fellow-failed city, Portland, are overwhelmingly white and as left wing as AOC. White guilt, I guess. Here’s hoping they choke on it.
And look how the “deep-pocketed Dem donors and Hollywood grandees” jumped on the Gascon recall campaign after home invasions and murder finally came, as they inevitably and predictably would, to their gated enclaves.
I have been to Southern California. Northern California and the Pacific North West used to be on my bucket list as I have friends and family there and it was going to be one of the extended trips I would make after retirement. Not even the promise of friends and family can entice me there now.
I have a friend who lives in Seattle – she returned home last year to find her house ransacked. The police didn’t take the call out as there were not enough officers. She still votes Democrat (I think!). I can’t figure it out – it is a mystery.
Twenty and more years ago I used to go on Black Bear shooting holidays in the Cascade Mountains, a few hours east of Seattle. Even then the city was regarded as pathetically liberal, or to use the vernacular of some of my party, decidedly spastic.
Perhaps the affluence of having the huge Boeing Corporation providing well paid jobs for thousands proved just too much, and decadence is the result?
The politics changed. Even Seattle was fairly conservative for a city back in the early 90s. The tech boom brought a bunch of Californians here who settled in from Bellingham down to Olympia. Completely took over state politics. It is still a nice state you just have to stay out of the liberal cesspool areas
Many thanks. Next time I shall confine myself to the Wenatchee area.
Why? Just avoid Seattle. Its a big state and most of the counties are Republican and believe in law enforcememt. I live in Mason County and its been normal here even through covid.
I have family and friends in Seattle and Bellingham…
She’s a masochist. A lot of mentally ill people are on the left, maybe most of them.
I can recommend the Olympic Peninsula just west of Seattle. Especially the west coast with its tiny population and amazing temperate rain forests. Like my two years in Detroit. Just twenty miles separated downtown Detroit with its astronomical murder rate from Bloomfield Hills, reportedly the wealthiest suburb in North America.
what made things worse was the focus on George Floyd’s killing as purely racism by all media rather than inadequate policing. Especially as it had happened before in Dallas to a white guy Tony Timpa in 2016 – but that was not covered by the media anywhere- a genuine examination about length of training etc should have been the outcome of the sad case, which could have improved the lives of ordinary poorer workers both black and white.
The fact that most people protesting about Floyd would have no clue about Tony Timpa (worse behaviour by police, not a criminal, no punishment) says a lot about how vile and two faced are our “betters”
Actually in both cases the drug addicts stopped breathing because that’s what opiate OD does. Having weight on you probably doesn’t help, but the opiates are the root cause.
I pity the poor policemen who have to deal with crazed drug addicts on a daily basis. How many journalists have to get up in the morning and deal with fraught situations like that?
The most heinous miscarriage of justice that I have ever witnessed.
Wow. No really shocking revelations here for me, but the up-close-and-personal from these officers is very revealing and drives home some critical lessons. Importantly, there are real costs to grandstanding and posturing for feel-good points.
What are the costs of which you speak?
Electors get the policies they and their neighbours vote for while Democrat political leaders get the benefits of elected office.
Sure there are losers who didn’t vote for these policies here and there, but not many to speak of numerically. And those who do lose out can mostly move to locations which reject Woke.
The ‘costs’ are pretty obviously the physical and economic destruction of a city and the demoralisation and disintegration of the police force etc, and lots of people losing their jobs.
I very much doubt that the majority support what has happened, and also that most of the population can just up and leave – though the wealthy hypocrites are able to, or are otherwise protected from the consequences of their politics for example by living in gated communities. And why should they have to anyway?
Unfortunately a small number of determined, unrepresentative activists who are obsessed with politics (and race) are the people who get on the committees etc. They can cause untold damage. I once volunteered to be a union rep in the UK. A similar phenomenon applied to a much lesser degree – the officials were completely unrepresentative of the members!
But, yes, I agree that the public will have to start punishing the administration politically if there is to be any hope of Seattle’s recovery, which because of the damage done will be a long drawn out and painful process.
You get what you deserve….
The left always eats itself!
The trouble is that the rest of us get something we don’t deserve, and just because a certain type of person gets to be politician or journalist.
And this morning, 3/26/22, in Seattle? The sniveling Seattle Times front-pages yet another Evil Police article, doing its best to politically keep the department underfunded, unsupported and presumed guilty without any more evidence than its decades-long series of Evil Police articles. That’s how we’ve been saddled with the most despicable City Council imaginable – public opinion is ‘progressive’, and the Times owns it, and the Council is elected to support homeless camps, not citizens. Defend all those burned-out and looted shopowners? Not the Seattle Times, nor the Council either.
Many thanks for the TA Frank article.
Doubtless the Seattle Times is everything you say but who is buying it and how come those why aren’t have failed to exercise more influence on the city’s politics?
Good question. But it’s the only daily newspaper here, and enjoys single-source dominance (NPR and lefties rule the radio and TV waves) – in a town which fashionable ‘progressive’ groupthink still rules. And Council elections enjoy very small turnouts, allowing special-interest groupings much better chances at rule by minorities.
A small sign of change emerged last November, when an ‘enforce-laws’ candidate won the election for City Attorney (the Council immediately erected some legal barricades to that heresy), and one small-business owner won a Council seat. If this signals a trend, more power to it – but the heavy artillery is still emplaced on the ‘progressive’ side, and we’ll have to see.
Sounds to me like the people got what the people voted for. There’s no point in failing to vote and then complaining about the result.
As a fellow Seattleite, I’d suggest much of the problem coincides with its changing population over the last couple of decades to one dominated by the tech industry and its cohort of mostly young idealistic and ungrounded support workers, who live in an artificial world of IT rather than the nitty gritty of reality. They seem to aspire to the heights of wokeness, virtue-signalling and castigating those who fail to share their concerns. Here,”keeping up with the Joneses” means displaying prominent signs in one’s front garden assuring everyone of one’s “correct” attitude. “Black Lives Matter” signs appear in the most plush upscale residences, along with others stating “Science is Real” ,”No Human is Illegal”, “Love is Love”, presumably to confirm one’s acceptability to society. At the same time, their houses continue to be burgled with no police follow-up, their cars stolen, street shootings escalate, whilst the ineffective city council ponders not prosecuting any criminal offense based on “material need”, such as shoplifting, burglary of less than $1000 of goods, DUI. etc. and then wonder why the crime rate is escalating….
Genuine question, what would you like to see done with the homeless camps? Moving them on seems rather pointless as by their very definition of being homeless they have nowhere else to go, they’d simply have to set themselves up somewhere else in the city.
To me it seems to be a problem of Americas own making. Their hyper capitalist mindset that has a private healthcare system pushing vast amount of drugs out into society because it’s profitable, along with regarding worker protections and a functioning welfare state (which are common throughout the rest of the first world) as being borderline communism means you have vast amounts of people who are left destitute and homeless at the slightest setback.
Without a change to the American psyche I don’t really see a solution. They don’t want the homeless, but they are also ideologically opposed to the controls and support systems that would prevent large numbers finding themselves in that situation in the first place
Stop indulging these people they may have a small shot at sorting their lives out. Continuing to pander to their victim mentality condemns them to no escape from addiction etc.
I don’t see how they’ve been indulged to be honest, quite the opposite in fact. Most appear to have been thrown to the wolves
With the City of Seattle, and King County ‘investing’ hundreds of millions of dollars annually into the Homeless Industrial Complex, it’s clear that the whole country knows that enough dollars will leak through the clutches of our very prosperous ‘non-profit’ executives to enable the extensive clusters of bums living in free tents under freeway rain-deflectors, and enjoying other handouts too numerous to mention.
Most of the homeless I’ve ever dealt with were either alcoholics, addicts, happy to live free as they wanted or blaming everyone but themselves for their predicament.
I’ll agree that many homeless have an array of issues, though it can be a chicken and egg scenario as to which came first. Did the alcoholism and dependency come about due to living rough, or was it the cause of them ending up in that situation. However my point is that you simply don’t see these vast tent shanty towns in other first world countries except the States. The almost total lack of state support, and the Americans seeming opposition to it, means many are left destitute at the drop of a hat or slight change of circumstance. I think a few more structures in place to help those who fall ill or lose jobs etc would massively reduce the amount of people who end up living rough and becoming a nuisance
It is surely more complex. For starters the US now has to all intents and purposes a vast open border in the South. The US high level policies have been in place for decades and it is only fairly recently that it seems to have lurched completely out of control in largely Democratic run cities. Progressives coupled with ridiculously ludicrous Covid policies have changed the landscape.
Those vast tent cities predate Covid by quite a long time. You can argue that the economic cost has added to the problem (though that goes back to my argument about lack of support) but those tents were around a long time before the virus
Problems with homelessness exploded approaching and then during lockdown. Then add the huge numbers of people pouring over the borders. Where do you think they are going? Republican states? Certain first world cities have become well nigh third world. Most if not all are Democratic. That is well reported.
Great comment
I tend to think it’s really just that they wish to blame others for their bad choices. I have similar attitudes in my own family. There is help regardless of what you may have heard.
No there isn’t help. A family member of mine was addicted in Seattle and I called around the whole city trying to get treatment in 2015. Couldn’t find a single place unless you’re a millionaire. I finally drove up and picked him up and tapered him off heroin myself
They are indulged. I’ve followed the west coast ‘homelessness’ crisis for years. Most of them are drug addicts who want to stay outside because it gives them easier access to their fix. They rarely are criminalised despite their tendency to commit petty crime.
Every country in the world has homeless and drug addicts. I’m asking what is it in Americas approach to the problem that has let it happen in such vast numbers, and that has left it so visible on the streets? The problems of drugs are universal amongst developed nations, yet the outcomes we see are unique to America
That sounds reasonable on it’s face, but if you DO implement the controls and support systems, then the question becomes, what happens next? Answer, the sink estates of Europe, where huge numbers of one parent families made up of half siblings and step brothers and sisters, live for generation after mouldering generation of unemployment and social welfare, anesthesised by drink, drugs and sex, all the while increasing in number and area, and slowly destabilising the society which carries them.
Ignoring of course that America has the highest percentage of single parent families in the developed world. They also have the trailer parks and vast homeless problem, with the accompanying crime, gang and gun violence and drug dependency that’s far worse than you’ll find in the council estates of the UK and Europe
Well we are a country of 300+ million…but please consider that what you are observing might be viewed through the lense of who is doing the reporting and their agenda…
Ah Billy Bob you’re reporting bad stats here. My native country, Scotland, has the worst death rate from drug addiction in the world.
https://transformdrugs.org/blog/scotland-is-drug-death-capital-of-the-world-heres-how-we-can-shed-that-title
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-58024296
You seem to have a very rose tinted view of Europe and a contrastingly negative view of the USA. Tres chic!
I live in Canada with free health care and very generous social benefits and we have the same problems. It is caused by mental illness and progressive policies in large cities that celebrate drug addiction as a legitimate lifestyle.
I could be wrong but I don’t recall seeing vast numbers of drug addicts and homeless living in tent shanty towns in Canada relieving themselves all over the pavement? It seems uniquely an American issue to me
Go to downtown Vancouver.
Ah I’ve read through your comments and now you’re showing your bias Billy Bob, maybe because you don’t like the idea that so called progressive countries have big problems with the homeless too. All over Europe it’s a big problem.
So if your agenda is to blame American society or lack of social support, then you’re wrong.
I don’t know what the answer to drug addiction and the resulting homelessness and crime is. Housing would at least get them off the street but doesn’t solve the addiction and crime aspect.
This made uncomfortable reading. As a non-federal nation geographically far smaller and more homogeneous than the USA, circumstances in the United Kingdom are very different. For a start, firearms are rare, and few police are armed with them, but I have steadily seen things change. There is more and more ‘diversity’, which clearly makes policing harder, and I don’t think increased diversity within the police is going to help.
It seems that in every society, a some people are prepared to plunder or assault others, and those who suffer are mainly the weak, or those who simply lack the aggressiveness to oppose them.
This has always been so, and everywhere, but civilisation has in the main created laws, and enforced them, most successfully in ‘the West’. It’s one of the reasons such countries attract massive immigration.
And yet this way of life is failing, and I see in the Seattle situation echoes of what may happen here. There are some who, for various reasons, have acquired a hate for authority and are keen to destroy it, which is welcomed by those who only wish to take advantage.
Even worse, well-educated people, paid well above average salaries and living in good properties, are assisting this, by conforming to fashionable attitudes and supporting grievances, old and new, real and imagined.
For example, I have noticed that at every opportunity, almost all of the media, but especially the BBC which dominates British news and current affairs coverage, has been critical of the police, and especially ‘the Met’. It implies all police are evil. For example, the Everard murder was committed by a ‘serving policeman’, which is emphasised, but what I have hardly ever heard is that the police investigated it, and caught him within days.
And I keep hearing the phrase ‘the public’s lost confidence in the police’. On what evidence? I’ll bet there’s more confidence in the police than in journalists, but of course the statement is intended to cause that loss in confidence.
As it happens, it has been reduced, because unsurprisingly, the police are spending more time on things like ‘hate crime’, or tolerating law-breaking if it is for a fashionable cause, or on additional procedures invented by politicians and lawyers and intended to hobble them. The state even pays for legal aid for anyone opposing the state; fine, but it far more generous than in other respected countries, and is even paid for non-citizens (and lawyers want yet more).
No wonder people like Putin can point to the increasing chaos in the West to support authoritarian rule.
The Police are sent around to threaten people who write mean tweets, but when a father calls the police to say his under-age daughter is being drugged and sexually assaulted by Asian men they arrest both him and the girl child, without even taking the names of the Asian men committing the crimes. [Rotherham, at least two different occasions.]
Failing to simply apply the law in a colour-blind fashion is what has caused many of us to abandon our otherwise long-standing support of the Police.
Shocking story. No decent human could justify what happened in America following the death of George Floyd.
I made a list of the political villains in this article. Jenny Durkan, Teresa Mosqueda, Tammy Morales, Kshama Sawant, Lorena Gonzáles and Denise Juneau.
I assume I cannot be the only to notice the common denominator
You assume correctly – they may make great mothers but by this account, poor strategists.
If they were great mothers the children would have been stopped in their tracks; great mamas don’t put up with crap.
There seems to be no middle ground in the States. It’s either all stick and no carrot, handing out life sentences for minor crimes or executing simpletons, or ultra progressive and making no attempt to uphold the law at all. Like everything else over there policing seems to part of the heavily politicised culture war
I have to ask if you live here or just visited because your view seems quite skewed unrealistically.
It’s from the outside looking in, my opinion is merely based on the impression America gives off to the outside world. It comes across as a basket case quite frankly, incredibly insular and an undeserved confidence that their approach is always the correct one. However saying that I’ve known plenty of yanks over the years and they’re some of the most friendly and hospitable people in the world, they just know nothing outside their own borders
They are not homogeneous – there is no one approach.
I look at some British news online and even the conservative ones get it wrong. But most are liberal so that will skew reality.
I have to ask:
“The knee to the neck also surprised J.D. Smith…“That’s not even a proper technique,” says Smith. “We put a knee in between the shoulder blades, and it never chokes anybody out.”
In literally all the shots I’ve seen of Chauvin, it’s looked to me like that’s exactly where his knee was. Is there something I’m missing, as someone with no relevant experience of such things? Is there a particular way of putting pressure through the knee that constricts the neck even with a small contact area? Have I seen the wrong photos?
There is of course all sorts of stories floating around post the incident, so take this with a pinch of salt.
But there are versions I read which said that the position of the knee was fine, there wasn’t much bruising (and the reason the police disbelieved Floyd was because he was resisting arrest and screaming too much for someone facing breathing difficulty)
And his lungs were full of fluid and way too heavy. Nothing to do with the knee but all due to the drugs in his system.
The problem is the above wouldn’t be collaborated by the “mainstream” media – not that says anything.
And it has been reported he actually died of a heart attack.
I know a few coppers in NZ, and none of them had much sympathy for the officer charged with killing Floyd. Whilst it isn’t a technique that’s used to restrain people here, their biggest problem with the arrest was how long it went on for. They all seem to be if the opinion that there was simply no need to still be kneeling on him long after they’d got the cuffs on, especially with other officers present.
If three blokes can’t control a man in handcuffs without piling on top of him for 8 minutes they are truly incompetent and probably shouldn’t be police in the first place
The officer was clearly a thug, with lots of complaints against him previously. The reason he knelt so long was possibly because it was an ego trip for him.
But that’s the problem with attaching the racist tag to everything, genuine issues with how the police force oversees officers get dusted under the carpet.
I agree I don’t believe it was race related, my point was that even though Floyd was a horrible man the officer deserves his murder charge in my opinion
Floyd was a huge muscular bloke on drugs. The long restraint with that context appeared acceptable to me. It’s highly worth watching the original footage if you’ve not seen it.
The courts disagreed, as do people in the force I’ve spoken to. They reckon size is largely irrelevant, if you’re hands are cuffed behind your back a couple blokes can control you very easily even if you are a big lump
Isn’t it telling that when this country’s left-wingers (like the policeman in this article or Bernie Sanders) describe their ideal alternative to racist America, they always pick Scandinavia, where all the nations are far whiter than the US?
Deep down, they all know the real reason why they can’t have nice things anymore.
So you’re blaming the blacks for Americas problems?
If it wasn’t for blacks, the typical nightly local news program in America would be five minutes long and consist of covering church bingo games, kitchen grease fires and the occasional traffic accident.
In other news, the Oscars, which a few years ago were criticized as being “too white,” last night featured African-American Will Smith, the Best Actor winner, assaulting the show’s host, African-American Chris Rock, during the telecast for “disrespecting”Smith’s wife.
The award program is now definitively black.
Thank you A real eye-opener. Not only into the riots there, but also into the way they were reported in the UK.
OK Dems: see why Trump won? (And may win again.)
I hope de Santis gets it. He’s trump without the bombast and thin skin. Trump should be an elder and influencer but let someone else bring down the temperature.
I am glad that the article made to sure to cover the most important detail that Pele is now a fat and happy pet. As for Seattle? You reap what you sow.
Everything the left touches turns to shit.
What is certain is that civilization is tenuous at best. “Katherine Kelaidis, resident scholar at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, said, ‘The Greeks very much had this sense … that civilization is a very thin veneer and that under even slight amounts of pressure, that social contract starts to break down, and [when] people lose that veneer … that can be very dangerous.'” ‘Civilization is a very thin veneer’: What the plague of Athens can teach us about dealing with COVID-19 | CBC Radio.
That veneer is easily pierced. Outrage at the incompetence of leadership, whether spontaneously acquired by observation or enflamed by rabble-rousers, can very quickly sweep through a crowd as we have seen over and over again. America’s founders knew this very well and sought to guard against our becoming a democracy. They knew that no democracy had ever in history survived for that very tendency of men.
For the same reasons that warfare by drones or remote control can result in far more cruel and inhumane destruction of property and mass killings, remote news production can easily work to enflame passions. Hand to hand combat makes eye to eye contact, and more likely empathy to modify hatred and bloodlust on the part of soldiers. When one can watch fear and pain come over an enemy’s face as the inevitability of death becomes obvious to him, who can resist the horror of what he is doing to a fellow man?
And it is inevitable that a commentator, reacting only to the limited information available from images of activity happening outside the cocoon and in the safety of his newsroom, that his reportage be less than in tune with what is happening. For that matter, a politician, in his comfortable and safe office is likely, to make decisions and issue commands untempered by the experiences of his or her underlings facing the tensions and dangers of the situation.
And those in direct command of overworked and overstressed, underpaid while facing immediate danger, personnel on the street, having withdrawn from those dangers, cannot, often, make the correct decisions necessary to the situations. In very similar conditions, any of those in control of or influencing rabble-rousers stirring the passions of the crowd, are not fully aware of what they might be causing, whether intentional or not. And there are always unintended consequences of actions.
Society is only ever a few missed meals away from anarchy
The astonishing thing is that this article was by a writer for Vanity Fair–a magazine that used to cover folly and/or corruption on both sides of the political aisle. It changed about 10 years ago to being rabidly partisan, ignoring Democratic malfeasance, demonizing Republicans and, of course, hating Donald Trump. To criticize a progressive city like Seattle in VF would have been unthinkable in the recent past–here’s hoping that Mr. Frank can retain his job after such heresy.
To hell with all the blue cities.
Meh. I believe I speak for millions when I say ‘whatever’. Seattle and Portland will reap what they have sown. It’s about 9,000 miles from where I live and thank GOD for that.
We have arrived at the place where the entirely predictable consequences of the high-falutin Left’s luxury beliefs have become so obvious no sane person can deny them.
From Seattle’s devolution to lawless anarchy to “Lia” Thomas “winning” an NCAA women’s title to Biden’s inability to get any decision maker in Saudi on the phone to US fossil fuel producers’ unwillingness to grow production faster to the race and “gender” (really sex) requirements for positions that (as it turns out) require basic competency, the only people continuing to advocate for the responsible policies are the fascist Twitter tyrants of the Regressive Left (oh and The Squad and the Biden administration).
Seattle-aside, voters increasingly are coming to their senses.
[forget the whole DEI/equity/racist maths stuffs]
https://youtu.be/g5N09K55ums
They voted for it.
This is a one sided treatise on the problems in Seattle. Police haven’t done anything about crime or drugs for a long time, not just after George Floyd. There have been homeless camps and people shooting up drugs on the street openly for at least a decade. And Seattle cops aren’t angels. They shoot and kill people too. Yes they need police in Seattle and law and order but this article is ridiculously simplistic