Nightmare for Seattle residents as City Council overrides Mayor’s veto & pushes to defund police
It’s hard to believe that Seattle’s City Council overrode Mayor Jenny Durkan’s veto of a bill that would cut police funding by around $3 million. But to say we live in strange times would be an understatement.
The vote by the Council was 7-2 Tuesday evening and the results of its disastrous decisions will reverberate throughout the community for years to come.
“We cannot look away from this and we can no longer accept the status quo if we truly believe that Black lives matter,” said Council President Lorena Gonzalez.
Interestingly, Gonzalez didn’t mention former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, who retired Sept. 2 after the planned cuts to the department. At the time, Chief Best said that such policies would put her officers at risk and put her department in a “position destined to fail.”
She was Seattle’s first Black police chief and had worked in the Department for nearly three decades. Nobody bothered to listen to her. If the people who pushed for the defunding of the police department really cared about Black lives then the first person they should’ve consulted was Chief Best. They didn’t.
As reported by Fox News, during the hour of public comments on Tuesday, most speakers urged the council to override the veto as a measure of solidarity with the organization Black Lives Matter, The Seattle Times originally reported.
“Everyone deserves to feel safe … Countless videos of Black and brown lives lost here in Seattle and across the country shows us that not everyone feels safe,” González added, according to the Times.
“We need public safety that’s centered on harm reduction, not the status quo…When I look back in this moment of time, I want to be able to tell my daughter, who I’m currently holding in my arms, that I did the right thing and that I voted on the right side of history,” she said.
Maybe Gonzalez should talk to all the families who’ve lost their children in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore and throughout our nation who’ve been killed in drive by shootings.
Maybe the Seattle City Council should speak to women who’ve been lucky enough to have a police officer available to stop a domestic violence attack against them, or capture a burglar or stop a rapist from attacking them.
Maybe the Council should speak to people who’ve called police as their first line of defense, or as a first responder and had someone trained that could save their lives.
These unbelievable decisions by a so-called ‘woke’ council that they have politicized to show support to the black populations are going to only going to backfire.
It will hurt the communities who need law enforcement the most and usually that’s underprivileged communities with high crime rates.
I should know, I was a journalist covering some of the most underprivileged, gang-ridden communities during the beginning of my career. I also lived in one of those communities throughout high school and during the first decade of my older children’s lives.
Read my first major series of stories from the Daily Bulletin about the children raised in these neighborhoods and the law enforcement officials who protect them.
Jamie’s story was always one of the most important series of social justice stories I worked on because it revealed the community as a whole – not one person to blame, not one group of people to blame but it forced the residents of San Bernardino County and Pomona to take a deeper look and search for solutions to the violence.
Seattle is just a microcosm of what is happening across our nation. The push from the left and Democrats to vilify the police has harmed our nation immeasurably. It will not only lead to more officers leaving the force but it will leave communities vulnerable to crime and nefarious networks that already hold many underprivileged communities hostage.
Law and order exists in society for a reason. Police officers are the first line of defense for our communities and the Democrats who’ve pushed against law enforcement can’t make two sets of rules – one for them and the other for the community.
What I mean is, if regular citizens can’t get a police officer when they need them most, then the Democrats, along with the radical left who pushed to defund the police, should also be in the same boat.
There should be no privileges for those officials in the communities that have chosen to defund law enforcement.