Liberal cities are slowly beginning to recognize that repeat criminals belong behind bars and should not be immediately released after every offense. As is the case for all of these cities, Seattle is late to the party.
Last November, Seattle elected Ann Davison to serve as city attorney. Davison, who left the Democratic Party for the GOP in 2020, defeated Democrat Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, who supported abolishing the police and called police officers “crybabies” and “serial killers.” The sentiment among Seattle voters was clear: The city needed to get tougher on crime.
Now Davison is starting that process. On Tuesday, she announced a new initiative that listed 118 repeat criminals in the city. According to prosecutors, those 118 people are accused of committing 2,400 crimes in the last five months, including more than 1,000 thefts and more than 400 assaults. The initiative will include aggregating cases as felonies, and Davison said that keeping these offenders in jail longer would be an option.
“It shouldn’t have gotten this bad for this long for that many individuals,” Davison said. That may seem like the understatement of the year, but Seattle has allowed its crime problem to fester. Amazon has temporarily relocated its employees out of downtown Seattle due to violent crime. Earlier this month, a homeless man with 22 convictions threw a 62-year-old woman down a set of stairs at a light rail station, breaking three of her ribs and a clavicle.
King County, Washington, home to Seattle, saw 69 gun homicides in 2020 as homicides surged nationwide. In 2021, the county passed that mark by September, with three months to spare. As violent crime surged in Seattle, a city that helped feed the anti-police sentiment of Black Lives Matter, the government had to deal with a police shortage. Downtown businesses have turned to private security, driving up their business costs in the process.
Just as in San Francisco, it looks like Seattle is starting to turn a corner. But it never should have reached this point. Pandering to Black Lives Matter, disparaging police and shrugging off crime in the process, was an easily recognizable mistake at the time. The city recognizing its problem is better late than never, but it will be worthless if residents don’t remember why they are in this situation in the first place.
