Home Cartoon budget It’s amateur time on the Seattle City Council

It’s amateur time on the Seattle City Council

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A mechanic who bikes to work and learns his limited repair skills from a YouTube video wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice to perform an auto repair.

It’s a metaphor for Seattle City Council members who, in response to the summer 2020 protests, clearly displayed their amateurism and ideology as they rushed to tinker with the police department. As customers of city services, we are paying for it now.

Trying to appease activists calling for cops to be defunded, the nine council members and Mayor Jenny Durkan approved a plan to remove parking enforcement officers, along with 911 dispatchers and other emergency services , from the police department. Through bureaucratic errors, this unnecessary performative wake-up call forced the city to overturn more than 200,000 parking tickets, resulting in a $5 million cut to the city budget.

The council’s unguided legislative and rhetorical missiles aimed at police can also be blamed for the exodus of cops from the city, leading to longer emergency response times, a suspension of sexual assault investigations by adults and a blockage of community outreach programs.

Making the police less inclined to use violent tactics and more nimble in their encounters with marginal communities is a very laudable goal, but, so far, too many council members seem more interested in showing their contempt for men and women we ask to do the toughest job in town.

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