Rantz: Seattle emphasis patrols offer only the illusion of safety

It would be a sad error in judgement to mistake Mayor Jenny Durkan’s emphasis patrols for actual safety. Neighborhood crime is up, police staffing is down, and there’s absolutely no meaningful plan to address the root causes of Seattle crime.

Mayor Durkan announced this week that she will continue the Seattle Police Department’s emphasis patrols, a day after a shooting that hit kids and a mom in South Seattle. A press release reads like a desperate infomercial desperate to sell a reality that doesn’t exist.

“We have a responsibility protect the safety of our neighborhoods and communities while also ensuring they are welcoming, vibrant and active places for people to live, work and play,” said Mayor Jenny Durkan in a statement so stilted, it doesn’t even sound like a human uttered the words.

Mayor Durkan says crime is up in certain neighborhoods

Durkan is sticking with focus-group style phrasing that Seattle is welcoming and vibrant. Um, OK. Tell that to the kids who were shot on Monday. After the recent KOMO TV special showing how bad homelessness has gotten, Durkan used similar phrasing. It rings hollow and out of touch. Stop trying to sell us on your image of Seattle, Mayor Durkan.

The press release continues:

The emphasis patrols are not reducing regular SPD and City of Seattle operations, including police patrols, criminal investigations, gun violence prevention efforts, and operations to combat gang violence throughout Seattle. For example, the City is continuing its work to prevent and respond to shots fired and gun violence in areas like the Central District and Rainier Beach. SPD has also done a series of recent operations in North Seattle, South Seattle, Northgate, and Pioneer Square and Chinatown International District.

They’re not reducing staff, they’re just moving bodies around, relying on overtime from overworked, underappreciated cops. This is a bad sales pitch to anyone who knows the staffing crisis the SPD is currently fighting.

The city tells me that staffing of the emphasis patrols comes from some specialty areas like the gang, SWAT, and traffic units. What they may not freely admit is that these same units already rely on borrowed officers, as the SPD leans heavily towards “on loan” officers to fill “dangerously low” staffing needs.

Emphasis patrols are symbolic but, as you can tell from Monday’s shooting, it’s a band aid on a gash that is need of sutures. The SPD is not well staffed, last year seeing historic separations with no sign of the numbers subsiding.

You don’t just need emphasis patrols. You need more cops engaged in the community. But it’s hard keeping staff members with so many either retiring due to age or resigning due to constant attacks by Councilmember Kshama Sawant. She calls cops racist murderers and Durkan doesn’t publicly rebuke the comments and support these officers. Where is her leadership? She goes to the mat on a failed fight for a Human Services Director, but barely utters a peep to defend cops.

“Our staffing numbers are still down and we’re barely making it,” Seattle Police Officers Guild president Officer Kevin Stuckey told the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH.

Beyond Durkan putting cops on emphasis patrols — without adding actual officers on patrol — and telling us our communities are vibrant, why would anyone think we’ll suddenly experience safer streets in the neighborhoods seeing an increase in crime?

Much of the crime we’re seeing comes from growing gang violence and out of control homelessness. Have you heard much coming from Durkan on going after the root cause of these problems? Have you heard public pressure on Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes and King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg to actually prosecute criminals preying on citizens?

Have you heard any concrete plans of substance at all? The most substantive plan Durkan announced was upgrading “streetlights to more reliable, energy efficient LED technology.” Yeah, that’ll address our crime problems; now it’ll be easier for people to see the cars they’re breaking into, I guess.

Durkan is more about selling you an illusion, than providing meaningful solutions. You get a shiny press release with buzzwords, a symbolic emphasis patrol that doesn’t add police staff and will likely lead to activists complaining that the city is over-policing, and city staffers working tirelessly behind the scenes imploring media outlets to prop up the disingenuous notion that crime is actually going down.

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