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ACAB and defund the police caused this. I have several friends who work in the area.

Tacoma is now being called Tacompton. It’s that bad.

Confirmation bias. Look at the historical numbers, 2004-2006 was worse. This is Seattle, you're not going to find any simple answers, and any solutions won't be friendly to either side of the political isle. You're going to have to put yourselves in the shoes of someone whom would commit violent crimes if you want to know why and real solutions to resolve it.

Just as a note, small government also means less police, and less money in policing. Chiefs in California and many major cities make over 1 million a year.

Police are largely responders to violent crime. Theyre not there to prevent it. The various laws and beliefs prevent individuals from defending themselves.

Police in major cities are a big political token. The city depends on policing to make money and retain power. They're not acab, or defund the police. Those are typically what you see on Twitter profiles not on city councils.

The solution is to imprison criminals. The incarceration rate had been increasing for decades, and crime had been dropping for decades. It's not a difficult concept: some people are bad and should be removed from society; there's no "fixing" them.

Actually, you skipped the stage where they came about. How come American cities have so many more violent criminals than other Western cities. The US already has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

We have a culture of violence for various historical reasons. And we have a enablers that continue it.

Sounds like the sane idea would be to identify these enablers and getting rid of them instead of perpetuating the problem.

Because they might raise difficult questions. Also, for example, how would one suppress the Wild West mythos in Texas if you figured out it contributed to a small% increase in crime?

Because we had more 30 years ago and people are still alive who were born then. It's not necessarily important what we're doing right now, but you need to start by acknowledging how much better it is now than in 1990.

It's also good to compare to our neighbors south of us rather than across the ocean - we have a lot in common with them too and too often forget that.

That's how we get big government, by throwing away freedoms for safety. The people whom get to decide the law are also those whom decide to "defund the police". Some people are bad, many of them much higher up the ladder of society and get to make the law. That's why we are careful in deciding what crimes result in what outcomes and if those outcomes actually achieve what we want.

Prisons overwhelmingly are not a punishment, they're a hiring event. An expectation of life even. That doesn't stop the crime. A good way to stop a violent crime is for us to bring power back to the individual with strong self defense protections.

There are people on the Seattle city council who explicitly support defunding the police and they have done so in some instances. This article[1] describes a measure to cut the police budget for the third year in a row. The vote was 8-1 with the sole dissenting vote from the (self-described) socialist Kshama Sawant who wanted significantly larger cuts. In the past they've defunded specific teams and cut a former police chief's salary to the point she resigned. It's far from accurate to say that "defund the police" types aren't on the city council. In Seattle the city council is composed of nobody but "defund the police" types.

Police prevent crimes, violent and not, by two mechanisms. First, by increasing the probability that offenders will be punished. A potential offender who thinks they are going to be caught and punished will be less likely to offend - and the police are a part of that system. Second, by imprisoning people who have offended the police limit the extent to which those people can commit subsequent crimes against the general population by incarcerating the offender for a substantial length of time.

Small government may, in some cases, mean less policing. That seems like a non-sequitur though. People who think Seattle has a crime problem (I am one) aren't calling for smaller government. We are calling for law enforcement.

1 - https://www.wsj.com/articles/seattle-city-council-defunds-th...

Note that the defunding in that vote simply comes from the SPD being unable to hire enough people (they are allowed to hire, but can’t find enough people qualified and willing to take the job). So the SPD is spending less money because they are understaffed. What the council voted for was not feeding back that money not spent due to labor shortages into hiring bonuses and other incentives. The city council is mainly guilty of not throwing some money at fixing that staffing problem, though I bet they will eventually relent on allowing overtime again (which did get out of control, but what choice do we have?).

Here is a better article that doesn’t require a subscription to read:

https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-police-budget-shrink...

According to the article you've cited the SPD budget was 401, 363, and 355 for the years 2020, 2021, and 2022 respectively. That seems like three years of successive cuts to me.

Your article mentions that the council says "there are no cuts functionally for SPD". So, on the one hand, we have the steadily declining raw number, and, on the other hand, we have the preferred phrasing of some politicians. To me, the number seems more significant.

Again, the number arises based on how many police the SPD was able to hire and their realistic hiring targets for 2022 (that they could still fail to meet). If the council allowed for more incentives with the money they aren’t spending on people they haven’t been able to hire (the real gist of this bill), then they could probably hire more.

That they’ve been losing people for three years is the problem.

It's possible that what you're saying is true, but that doesn't change the basic facts from my original comment. Members of the Seattle City Council espouse the "Defund the police" idea and they are acting on it - to wit, they have decreased the SPD budget at least three years in a row. They have caused the dissolution of the Navigation team and caused a recent police chief to resign by cutting her salary.

I suspect a contributing reason to SPD losing and not being able to recruit people is the openly hostile attitude of city leadership towards law enforcement. Ineffective criminal justice in the city likely contributes as well.

First, when it was proposed to eliminate some of the open head count for the police, it was soundly defeated by a SCC vote. They aren’t going to defund the police so explicitly, even if their support has a lacking.

Second, if you haven’t noticed, everyone is having trouble hiring right now. The negative vibes for the job are definitely significant, but this is also part of a more broad labor shortage.

Seattle City Council members explicitly defunded the police by reducing the funding of the police for three years in a row. Some Seattle City Council members explicitly advocate for things like "Defund the police" - e.g. Kshama Sawant.

https://twitter.com/search?q=defund%20(from%3Acmkshama)&src=...

I wouldn't trust anything Sawant says, she has issues.

I don’t know if this is true in Seattle, but in Portland we’re having a huge problem hiring police officers despite having the budget to do it. The reason is the police culture. It’s well known that our police force tolerates a lot of bad behavior, including open racism, and nobody wants to work there because of it. It also doesn’t help that because of that behavior, lots of people in the city hate the police.

People have called Tacoma Tacompton for a long time. Tacoma has come a long way over the last couple decades and is now one of the fastest moving real estate markets in the country.

For those who have never heard of the Hilltop shootout:

https://www.military.com/history/time-army-rangers-got-gunfi...

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