Seattle police stopped investigating new adult sexual assaults this year | Hacker News Reader

Seattle police stopped investigating new adult sexual assaults this year

seattletimes.com

43 pointsfnordpiglet63 comments

Open articleView on HN

Here's the article: https://archive.ph/5JDms

Here's the memo the article is based on: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22047229-st-john-mem...

Here's some facts I learned from reading the memo.

-----------------------

Staffing level pre-2019:

Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit (SAU): 1 Lieutenant, 2 Sergeants, 1 Administrative Assistant, 10 Detectives.

Sex Offender Detail (SOD): 1 Administrative Assistant, 4 Detectives.

-----------------------

Staffing level post-2019:

Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit (SAU): 1 Sergeant, 1 Administrative Assistant, 4 Detectives.

Sex Offender Detail (SOD): 1 Administrative Assistant, 3 Detectives.

(with 1 detective on "HR" (home-rest?) and 1 detective expected to retire)

-----------------------

Call-out duties: This year, the SAU has received 27 "off-duty" calls, and responded to 10.

-----------------------

"The Sex Offender Detail is currently responsible for 1206 sex offenders living in Seattle"

One of the big points of the “defund the police” movement is that, quite simply, the police are responsible for way too many things and a) make poor resource allocation decisions and b) don’t really have the skills to do some of the things they’re tasked with so replacing them with smaller bodies that take some of their workload would make sense. Sadly, investigating crime seems to be one of those things.

Maybe it was a notable point in some sanewashed version of the protest, but you'll note that the slogan was "defund the police", not "fund social workers". Acknowleding that the issue is that social services are underfunded and police end up having to pick up the slack would lead to a different slogan.

I like the word sanewashed but this article is not an example of underfunded social services

If you don't want to, or can't read the article, it's because of staffing issues.

And it's not a money or budget thing or defund the police, they just simply cannot find sufficient staff.

The article then goes into a whole thing about priorities, discussing where various people think they should reassign staff.

It's staffing, but it's a little more complex than just COVID/defund the police. This has been a long time coming. The Seattle City Council and previous mayors have spent many years prior fucking around with public safety. Sawant was calling the police "murderers" well before COVID. If you're a police officer, why would you bother with a city council that is hostile to you and citizens that go along with that enable that? Police officers were already fleeing to the suburbs where they have been paid as well, safer, and governments are slightly more sane.

It finally took homeless camps everywhere and random violence/theft to move into the whiter areas of the city for people to take notice.

I would take their position with a grain of salt. Even when they had budget and staff in recent years, they never prioritized it.

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/why-are-arrest-rates-fo...

Cops in Chicago make six figures before over time + pension and the department is still losing several hundred per year net. Just doesn't seem to be a career people want to go into anymore.

It just means six figures is not enough. Make the base salary $500k per year, and I am sure it will miraculously become a career people want to go into again.

That is not sustainable for the city budget.

Exactly. That brings us to the real issue. The city cannot afford to incentivize the desired people to go into that career.

It really just proves that people just don't want to do it anymore. If you have to pay half a million dollars to find someone to fill a position that requires no education or specialization, that means it's an unpopular job.

That could work if productivity could be increased via technology. Like face recognition for property crime policing. However, the civil liberties crowd doesn’t like many of those ideas.

Defund the police was a stupid idea. Nobody wants to do a job where they could get shot in the face during a traffic stop and still be demonized by society for it. So you're stuck with only the bad cops until they retire. After those cops retire, you're screwed and only have yourselves to blame. People warned about this happening and were dismissed.

Like "bus drivers"? You must drive at 3a.m. and pick strangers and sometimes go through isolated areas. A few years ago here in Argentina they had the money in a big box in a manual or automated machine, so it was an easy jackpot. Now we pay with an special card, so the profit of the thieve is stealing money/cellphones from the passengers. We hate most of them, because they drive not very carefully and pass red light and other stuff.

> Nobody wants to do a job where they could get shot in the face during a traffic stop and still be demonized by society for it.

I heavily doubt that's what they're being "demonized" for.

While I agree with you high level, I heard an argument on a podcast yesterday which resonated with me, which is that we don’t really talk about public safety solutions outside of the police. No problem has ever been solved by taking money away from it, but maybe we should look at the list of jobs covered by police and figure out which of those jobs could be handled by a different/new department. Not everything the police does require guns. Instead of defund the police let’s fund public safety solutions that don’t involve law enforcement.

The idea that mental health will get properly funded is (sadly) laughable. And I live someone where public healthcare is supposedly a thing.

I never know how to conceptualize my feelings about these things, do you sort of try to talk about and spread ideas about what should happen or what's realistic. Part of what is embedded in the idea that police is the only public safety effort we talk about is that it's the only solution that's politically feasible. shrug?

> Instead of defund the police let’s fund public safety solutions that don’t involve law enforcement.

This is literally what "defund the police" meant, just that the unfortunate naming caused people to do that thing where you read the headline and not the body. The initial push for "defund police" was to remove their responsibility for mental health calls and things of that nature and send specially-trained personnel to deal with that who had training to de-escalate and help those folks, without needing guns and such.

It is not 'literally' what it means, because it's missing the important distinction of _not defunding the police_. Any definition of defund the police involves something along the lines of "divesting funds from police departments"(wikipedia) Yes I get your point about how defund the police was misinterpreted, by everyone and how really it's a great policy meant to do all the things I mentioned. But we should fund public safety without touching police budgets.

It is named unfortunately because there are people who are absolutely literal about wanting what the name clearly says, and then maybe people who maybe aren't 100% on board with it but are okay with using piggy-backing off it to achieve their goals and aren't going to get in the way of it as long as their own goals are also achieved. To pretend otherwise is naive at best.

Your point touches on the crux of the problem. How to achieve safe and peaceful communities is not a mystery. Humans have been doing the civilization thing for thousands of years.

The problem is people who think that we have been doing it wrong and should stop what we have done for thousands of years, and wave their hands at mysterious other solutions.

What you're saying we've 'solved' safety? What does this even mean? Scale changes things. What works for 10 people doesn't work for 1000, 10,000, 100,000. Also - You're saying there's nothing new to learn? Also, how to achieve safe and peaceful communities seems like a huge mystery. I'm bewildered by your comment but look forward to being educated.

This just looks like more conflation and a bad faith interpretation of what most people meant when they said “defund the police”.

CampaignZero.org is a good example of the policies desired to reduce violence caused by police on the population they police. Obviously not everyone agrees on what defund means, but that is why there are so many bad faith interpretations.

I personally have a really difficult time seeing US police as an institution that has justice as their highest priority:

(1) There are several departments that depend on civil asset forfeiture for more than 50% of their department revenue.

(2) NYPD kept arguing that Stop and Frisk took guns off the streets despite the dismal percentage of stops yielding an arrest and a complete ignorance of the trust damage caused in the communities where any young male could be interpreted to make “furtive movements”.

(3) The instructors for police use of force teach officers to assume the worst of every contact with any person, causing predictable lack of trust with non police. These instructors are generally pretty suspect.

(4) Police repeatedly interfere with people filming them while in public and in uniform. I haven’t heard any argument for this position that withstands scrutiny. It just looks like “we don’t like oversight” and “we fear a situation that causes accountability”.

(5) Police unions and systems that protect officers from accountability for their own actions. Beat cops tend to look at Internal Affairs cops with disdain. They push legislators for LEOBoR laws that give police additional protections from investigations that they don’t want to give to non-police. Cops scream about political prosecutions when a cop is arrested (and almost none are convicted) but are quiet when they arrest people on tenuous evidence.

(6) It doesn’t matter if 95% of those in uniform are strict law abiding, boring, non-corrupt, courteous, etc (I estimate that percentage is only accurate during training but the percentage falls off quickly the longer they are on the job) the rest are defended and kept on the job. Those corrupt officers and the “chain of command” and the culture of “cops versus civilians” means that lots of otherwise “good” cops end up being corrupted by the actions they choose to take to look away from extralegal/illegal actions. I have seen how this works in my family.

(7) Tolerance and normalization of violence on the riot lines. Usually when police have a large presence in riot gear, there are multiple departments contributing personnel and their id badges aren’t visible. Individual officers are almost never prosecuted for excessive force on the riot lines.

(8) Police almost exclusively get to set the publicly disclosed narrative after an act of violence. The police PR officer is trained to exclusively release information that helps the officers involved and the department. They purposefully will elide information that may incriminate or increase legal liability for the department.

(9) Asymmetric accountability. Officers have a department, a union, and a government jurisdiction to be accountable for them. Police aren’t willing to let the same court system they contribute to dole out their personal accountability. They like to see themselves as deserving more protection than the civilians they arrest.

(10) Cops wives/families are ridiculously entitled and corrupt when it comes to avoiding citations, tickets, and arrests. They trade in reputation and avoid using the legal paperwork. Arrests for the, not for me.

Source: I have a cop in my family so I both care about his well being and I am a citizen and tax payer so I care about my fellow citizens losing trust in the institution.

The police have to be put in their place. It’s a low skilled job— get rid of the union, make bodycams mandatory and heavily background check prospective candidates.

Or perhaps the solution should be to make it a high skilled job. Require all police to have advanced degrees in criminology and/or social work. Cultivate a guardian mindset and drive out anyone with a warrior mindset.

This really needs to come with gun control, though. Police can't truly escape the warrior mindset until they can stop worrying that every person they encounter might be carrying a gun.

> Require all police to have advanced degrees in ... social work

Social workers with arrest powers would be creating a whole new set of problems.

How about requiring a law degree? At least then they'd have no excuse for their blatant civil rights violations.

I didn't say they should be social workers, I suggested they have a degree in social work. Police encounters with those in mental distress (either temporary due to a crisis or a deeper mental illness such as schizophrenia) frequently end in tragedy. I want to believe that a police officer trained as a social worker would have a much better chance of de-escalation a personal than current police do.

The alternative is to have unarmed social workers, untrained in police work, accompany police officers to mental distress calls. This brings with it a host of other problems including, but not limited to, the possibility of the social worker being injured or killed in an altercation with an armed person in distress.

A police officer trained as a social worker is going to bring with them a whole new set of preconceptions and biases. Giving social workers arrest powers does not seem like an improvement to me.

No it isn’t. There’s no reason to turn a low skill job into a high skilled one just for the sake of it. The solution is to implement a quick exit for shit cops and train the rest on the job.

You think determining the existence of probable cause under the law — and enacting arrests accordingly — is a low-skilled job task?

Do you really think the process of determining probable cause amounts to anything but a "vibe check" and maybe planted evidence and parallel construction for cops in the US?

Currently? No, I don't. They're not competent or qualified to be making that call. The last thing I'd want to do is employ anyone even less qualified than they currently are.

Yes, the cops have very little comprehensive knowledge about the law as they are not required to know. Enacting an arrest, the way American cops do it, is probably as low skilled as it gets.

Why is this desirable? You want a low-skilled officer to be the person who decides, on the spot, whether or not you're going to have an arrest record, face arraignment, and spend tens of thousands on your own legal defense?

Because making this high skilled would leave most American rural areas devoid of cops and that’s a terrible situation.

Yikes.

Maybe if we didn't "defund the police" and treat them like guilty criminals, we wouldn't be in this problem.

Boy have you got cause and effect backwards. Hell, you've even got simple temporal event ordering backwards!

Proper policing actually requires quite some skill. In fact, perhaps US police training is a bit short compared to other countries. Especially given the somewhat more dangerous environment they work in.

I think a union might be beneficial. I think few unions would be against investments in more training.

The police union in the USA is arguably a big part of the problem though.

The police union is the biggest problem. It’s the only union that needs busting.

Fwiw and totally unrelated but, starting pay for SPD is $98k and goes up over $100k after first year of experience. Plus OT.

According to their website (https://www.seattle.gov/police/police-jobs/salary-and-benefi...) the starting pay is about 84k, but does go up to six figures after a few years. Alternatively, you could go to a nearby town like Bellevue and make a few thousand less, but the job would be much safer and more pleasant https://bellevuewa.gov/city-government/departments/police/ab...

Also, the work involves evenings, nights, weekends, holidays, and dealing with mentally ill, drunk, and high people. And you have to sit around a lot in a car and drive.

Personally, I would want at least double. Especially because of the shitty work schedule.

Can't read the article, paywall. Begs the question; what good are the Seattle police if they aren't going to investigate crime?

They’re good at tear-gassing journalists https://mobile.twitter.com/ericacbarnett/status/127111378801...

A valid question anywhere because investigating crimes is never really one of their priorities. Even their inflated, self-reported stats show they don't consider it a high priority or their main role.

Deterrence

Deterrence only works if people actually believe they might be punished, which this demonstrates they won't.

And that is why we actually need some prosecution and jail sentences. It might not deter those who don't have anything left, but at least others it is likely to make evaluate somewhat what they will do.

I see a lot of "funding" and "resources stretched thin" comments here, but I am surprised that no one has mentioned the role of the local district attorney (+judge) in this. In my opinion, his role is comparably important of a factor in the current situation. And among people living here, the involvement of our district attorney has definitely been been mentioned as a significant factor during discussion on the topic.

Tl;dr on it is that the DA refuses to prosecute a lot of crimes that should be, and the judge lets out a giant amount of violent offenders on bail (as well as heavy majority of people who are in for a non-violent offense, like stealing a car or brandishing a stolen firearm, not even talking about robberies). Yes, even for those who had history of not showing up to court hearings. It basically started being discussed as a revolving door system. Which is why cops don't bother much with "minor" crimes like robberies anymore. Why waste such needed resources, if the person will just be released the day after anyway, at least with more hardcore crimes there will be a chance that something will come out of it maybe.

Case in point, here are two lengthy articles from two major local publications, Seattle Times[0] and King5[1], discussing the issue. A lot of good information there, but I quoted a couple specific examples that were pretty illustrative.

> In a 2019 domestic violence case, a Seattle man was charged with assaulting his girlfriend. Police said he was punishing her for leaving their apartment and leaving behind their crying infant. The NCBF paid $2,000 to bail him out of jail. Three weeks later he was charged with a new crime: allegedly returning to his girlfriend’s house and killing the baby.

> [...] the defendant, 50-year-old Michael Sedejo, was originally charged with assaulting and robbing a 65-year-old man in Seattle’s City Hall Park on April 13, 2021. The King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office asked the court to set bail at $20,000. The prosecutor argued the bail was necessary “based on the likelihood that the defendant may commit a violent offense…The state is concerned about the safety of the community if the defendant is released from custody.” The judge lowered the bail to $5,000, and public records show the NCBF paid it in cash. Two months later, Sedejo was charged with murdering Bradley Arabie in City Hall Park with a pocketknife.

This became such an issue, the recently elected prosecutor was literally running on a campaign that promises she will actually do the prosecution[2].

0. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/hard-o...

1. https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle-charity-gro...

2. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-...

Thank you. This is pretty much the comment that I was going to write but you saved me the time.

There are judges in Seattle that appear to disagree with the notion that serious violent criminals should be punished with serious jail time. However, what I can't figure out is, why doesn't the Seattle Times name the judges that are releasing violent criminals? It's just a nameless "judiciary" or "the judge". Why no interest in holding them accountable?

City Prosecutor Pete Holmes was voted out for not prosecuting but the judges are getting a pass because nobody knows who they are. (Yes I should look this up myself - I've resolved to do something - but the journalists could help.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com