Rantz: Seattle council enabling homeless addicts to break into your car

The relative silence from the Seattle City Council on attacking the root causes of homelessness is especially deafening. Rather than treat the cause, they’re helping enable people to stay on the streets. Many of these folks, fueled by drug addiction, are committing property crimes and instead of going after the problem, the council wants to enable them with heroin injection sites.

In a Seattle Times piece this week, Gene Balk notes that nearly half of the roughly 38,000 incidents of area-property crime involves vehicles, making it the number one most reported crime in Seattle. Unsurprisingly, many of the neighborhoods most impacted by the crime, have the highest populations of homeless people and drug addicts in desperate need of help.

Is there a connection with the homeless and addicts with these crimes, particularly car prowls? While not all the crimes are being committed by homeless addicts, a huge chunk are — cops will tell you. When you’re in need of money to fuel a drug addiction that’s not being treated, you break into cars, steal items, then sell or trade them for drugs.

Rather than attack this problem and protect taxpayers from having their cars broken into, Seattle officials are, in some cases, doing nothing. In other cases, enabling the behavior.

Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes won’t prosecute most of these car prowls, according to cops, who say, as much as they’d like to act, they know the thieves won’t get charged. They frequently see the same criminals committing the same acts, fueled by their addiction. At the county level, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg won’t prosecute most drug crimes, either.

On the Seattle City Council side, rather than help offer treatment for addicts, they’re hoping to enable the behavior with heroin injection sites, including a mobile heroin-van that will go to you so you can shoot up, under supervision.

Many of these addicts are homeless and do not work. The city knows this. Where does Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, a heroin injection site proponent, think these addicts are getting the money to pay for the drugs she’s helping them shoot up?

So not only is the city letting drug addicts continue their deadly behavior, they’re willingly offering our vehicles to them to break into so they can pay for their addiction.

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