Rantz: Progressives try to silence homeless attack stories

A number of Progressive voices — some who work in the media, others who seem to live on social media — do not want me, and others, to report on stories where homeless individuals commit acts of assault or vandalism. They insist their homelessness status is irrelevant and that, by pointing it out, you’re manufacturing hate. These voices are getting loud, which is why it’s so important for us to be louder. Not only is accurately reporting these stories important for our city, it’s more important for our safety.

In his typical stream-of-consciousness musings in The Stranger, Charles Mudede claims covering the homeless attacks does nothing but generate “hate for the poor and indigent.”

Via Twitter, community activist and former Seattle City Council candidate Mac McGregor asked: “Would you be talking this if the attacker was not homeless? There are people who have bad intent in every sub-group of people, the thing that still stands true is that those people are a minority.”

Similarly, on KIRO Nights, co-hosts Zak Burns and Gee Scott took a similar tone.

“It’s not hard to create a culture of fear,” Burns noted. “And some people are very good at it.”

“If you just remove the word ‘homeless’…” Gee Scott said, “…let’s go back to the 60s and 70s, where you enter ‘African American’ in there, where it drove fear about persons of color. The saying used to be, ‘We gotta get them out of here!’ Can homeless people commit crimes? Yes. Can people that aren’t homeless commit crimes? Yes.”

And not to mention the constant attacks on community groups like Safe Seattle and SPEAK OUT Seattle for daring to show concern over their neighborhoods.

Some of these positions are motivated by sanctimony, others by ideology, and still others by, well, I’m not entirely sure what. But no matter the motive, they all have one thing in common: they ignore a reality in Seattle.

Since when did reporting pertinent facts manufacture hate or create a culture of fear? I don’t hear people fearful of their lives because we live in a city full of homeless people. I hear people concerned for their safety if the situation doesn’t get handled in some way. That’s a logical fear given, in the last month, we’ve seen a string of high-profile, violent attacks perpetrated by homeless people against passers-by: a rape in Ballard, a strangling in Seattle, and an assault with a baton in Belltown.

These crimes are occurring in the context of a worsening homelessness crisis where the City of Seattle, under Mayor Jenny Durkan and an ideologically blind and stubborn council, refuses to enforce public camping laws. Instead, they allow the homeless to live on sidewalks and encampments where they pose a clear risk to us and themselves. There is a clear public interest in knowing if an attacker is homeless, as we debate how to best handle the issue, yet some voices want to bully you into silence.

And how about some level of consistency? When an officer uses force against a suspect or victim, the races of both are identified because we’re having a national conversation about police interactions with communities of color. If a person is assaulted, and they’re transgender, we identify that person because of our national conversation about bigotry in this country. Literally, all four of the people mentioned above have participated in those conversations, offering up those pertinent details because it forwards a conversation.

The fear for some of these voices is that these news stories may lead to solutions they don’t like. Some folks are particularly married to subsidized, government-run housing to fix homelessness. Others want low-barrier Tiny Homes in densely populated residential neighborhoods. Some even want to fight the issue with ping-pong tables.

But many other folks, like me, realize not having a home is unlikely the reason you’re homeless to begin with; that, in many cases, there are root causes that should be addressed. I’d rather put tax dollars towards treatment-on-demand and job training programs, for example.

But these conversations can’t take place when you have folks bullying you for reporting on homeless attacks. Whether it’s claiming you’re creating hate or implying it’s as bad as being racist, the intent is to silence you.

But, for the first time in a while, thanks to the defeat of the job-killing head tax, it feels like the sane voices have the momentum to take Seattle back from the fringe elements who have been in control for too long.

This isn’t the time to withhold details about our city’s problems; it’s the time to shout them from the rooftops and then, finally, come together with solutions that don’t adhere to some Progressive checklist of dream projects.

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