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

The public is done with the drugs and crime in downtown Seattle — with the shootouts, the open drug dealing, the thefts, the attacks. People turned out in droves for the latest Seattle City Council Public Safety Committee meeting — the first meeting since the downtown shooting.

Imagine being so frustrated that you’re willing to sit through the ramblings of the city council for an entire meeting. (To view the meeting, click here.)

“The desire to be politically correct versus community correct is destroying our neighborhoods and undermining the safety of those who live, work, and visit the city,” one business owner told the council.

But understand, reality has nothing to do with politics in the Puget Sound area. Political correctness and identity politics are everything. Make everybody feel like a victim, but don’t try to make things better.

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The council has carefully cultivated and created this atmosphere of crime and unsafe streets. The politicians love it, even though they won’t admit it. A new study said that King County needs up to another $1 billion per year to fix the problems in the county. You know that makes the politicians drool with greed.

I can picture the reaction of people reading this now. “Dori, are you really that cynical? Do you really think their motives are that dark?” The answer is yes, I do.

The city council will not deal with reality. They aren’t going to get tougher on crime. They aren’t going to tell the criminals that either they need to go to rehab or jail. The prosecutor, city council, and mayor do not believe in it.

They, along with powerful leftist movements like the No Youth Jail movement, have this bizarre notion that jail creates criminals. No, life choices create criminals. Jail is the natural extension of that. But our politicians do not accept that at all.

When you elect people because they check a certain social justice box or for any reason other than their leadership ability, you will end up with a disaster. That’s just a fact. As long as we keep putting incompetent people in charge, our innocent neighbors are going to die in random acts of violence.

Here are some other highlights from public commentators at the Public Safety Committee meeting who absolutely had the right idea:

“We have to decide whether we want to spend our money on new streetcars or on new facilities to treat mental health issues. We have to decide whether we want to ‘protect everybody’ by keeping everybody out of jail, or by allowing for the fact that some people commit crimes 30 and 40 times [and locking those people up].” 

“Why can I go to Bellevue and not see the same thing? It’s simply because their police are allowed to do their job.” 

“We need to attack the drug epidemic at its core. We need to empower the police to do arrests, but we also need to have mandatory rehabilitation. We need to take aggressive action.” 

“We have to, as a culture, as a community, say no to bad behavior. The people who are addicted to drugs, we need to take them off the streets. This is a failed experiment, trying to deal with drug addiction on the streets.”

The public gets it. I told King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg this practice of not prosecuting personal possession amounts of drugs would be a failure. But they’ve got their social justice causes, and if people have to die in pursuit of them, then people will die. Right, Dow? Right, Jenny? Right, Dan? Right, Jay? At least you can get your inner circle to pat you on the back and tell you how socially conscious you are. Bravo.

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