SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Dori: Seattle’s false crime stats are propaganda to raise taxes

Feb 4, 2020, 7:44 AM

Seattle Police Chief Best...

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best. (KIRO 7)

(KIRO 7)

For the past two weeks, the City of Seattle’s leaders have been trying to peddle absolute nonsense about crime being down.

It is simply unbelievable, because the people who are out on the streets see what has happened with car smash-and-grabs, home invasions, shoplifting, drugs, and violence — especially after the downtown Seattle shooting.

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best got laughed at and booed when she tried to tell a packed house at a Seattle City Council Public Safety Committee meeting just days after the shooting that crime is not that bad in Seattle.

When that first happened, I said of course the politicians were lying. Of course things could not possibly be that rosy. How could there be a decrease in crime?

Dori: Residents rip council at first Public Safety Committee meeting after shooting

Our friend Brandi Kruse at Q13 News noticed something this past weekend on her weekly program, “The Divide.” The City of Seattle has a crime database that the public can access. There’s just one little problem with that database — the website has been unable to update due to May 2019 due to technical difficulties.

So for nine months, we have not been able to look at actual crime stats — yet city leaders have access to numbers that supposedly show that things are much better than we could believe.

I’ll tell you why. They don’t want people to have such bad feelings and such a connection between the drug vagrancy and crime that affects the good, honest, taxpaying citizens around here. City leaders want to use the drug vagrancy — the heroin addicts they have been recruiting from around the country with drug tolerance — to justify a billion-dollar tax increase. If you connect drug vagrants to your car window being smashed two weeks ago, you’re less likely to vote for that tax increase.

This is propaganda, plain and simple.

Tied to that, they did finally catch the two suspects in the downtown Seattle shooting. The guys were on the run for 10 days, but they were caught in Las Vegas on Saturday, where they will appear in court. They will be extradited back up here at some point.

I went on Twitter when I heard the news and wrote, “Can we just keep them there and charge them with card counting? The casinos would punish them much more severely for that than King Co will for [alleged] murder.”

Up here, we’ll apologize for the societal conditions that forced them into making bad choices in life. And then we’ll let them go and say, “Try not to kill anybody again … please?”

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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Dori: Seattle’s false crime stats are propaganda to raise taxes