SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Dori: Seattle is filled with crime, but bus passes are free
Jun 27, 2018, 8:25 AM | Updated: 10:05 am
One person is dead and another is fighting for their life this morning after a shooting in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood. (KIRO 7)
(KIRO 7)
It has been a crazy couple of days in Seattle. A 47-year-old guy was fatally stabbed in Pioneer Square early Monday morning. The suspect is still on the run. Doesn’t it seem that the unsolved crime rate is pretty high and that a lot of killers are running around free?
In Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood, a man was arrested last weekend for attempting to kidnap a child. He tried to pick the child up and run away in front of the kid’s father outside of their apartment building.
The Seattle Fire Department has now doubled the number of people who will respond to calls around Pioneer Square and nearby homeless encampments. In many cases, they’ve had to triple the number to six. We used to send two firefighters out on a call, and now the only way that they can ensure the safety of these firefighters is sending a crew of six. Think of the cost to taxpayers.
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This is what’s happening in our city and in our region. And then Jenny Durkan tells us that it’s a “safe place.” When she’s in town, she tells us, that is — since she feels the need to run around the country solving other regions’ problems. Yeah, because we have 40 million people who come to our city as tourists and only a few of them are violently attacked.
I just can’t believe how deep in the sand Jenny Durkan’s head is, when our own first responders are telling us that they can’t do medical response calls without six firefighters on the call. Jenny Durkan is not a leader. She can go be a leader down on the Texas-Mexico border, but not here in Seattle.
And then the solution to this has been to put in the heroin dens and the rolling heroin van. And if Sally Bagshaw gets her way, perhaps we can even give the heroin to the addicts.
There is a tremendous migration of homeless people from around the country to our city. It’s undeniable that many of these serious crimes and abductions are committed by people from out of the state. What we’re seeing is an epidemic — people are getting stabbed, raped, shot, and assaulted.
Oh, but the good news is, the city is providing free bus passes to every public high school student. That’s the one thing the Seattle City Council has accomplished lately. This is just the public school students — private school students must buy their own Orca cards. Everything is free; that is the message. Of course, none of it is free. What it is is making other people pay for these kids’ Orca cards. That starts to cultivate an attitude that “other people should pay for my stuff.”
We have the second-highest grocery prices because we have the most burdensome government. When you have burdensome government, you make other people — who maybe scrimped and saved and denied themselves to pay for their kids’ college — pay for free Orca cards, free community college, and free heroin. Everything is free in Seattle, but the only thing that really creates is a bunch of freeloaders.