While it would be just peachy if drinking and driving were, you know, enough to get someone on the police payroll suspended and sent to rehab’, or ditto being drunk and disorderly in multiple public places, it’s great to see the Stranger again complaining about a lack of SPD response to a domestic violence call. Just two years ago, the Stranger endorsed for City Attorney one NTK, who had promised never to prosecute any misdemeanor DV charge in Seattle. Why the police should do potentially dangerous work just so the City Attorney can throw it away has never been explained, or ever will be.

@5 the other poster (@2) was referencing the two cops not doing shit, not SPD as a whole. And I wholeheartedly agree with them - bad cops are worse than no cops (and if I was a fellow cop, I’d want these two gone).

@raindrop you’re an idiot

I'm not a fan of the Stranger in general but do commend Ms. Nerbovig for her coverage of bad cops and the OPA. It's difficult to imagine other occupations where you would not be fired for the conduct described above or, at a minimum, being told to get into rehab while being placed on double-secret probation. It's not credible that an abusive, entitled drunk is going to function as a professional when sober.

I invite you to visit any other major city in America of our size, those bigger than us and those slightly smaller. You will find similar crime statistics and also like see that Seattle overall isn’t that high.

Take your head out of your ass and stop clutching your pearls. You are a ridiculous troll commentator that needs to chill the fuck out.

@1: Yet in 1991 SPD handled 36% more serious crimes than in 2022 (65k vs 48k).

Why are officers slacking off or getting so dramatically less productive?

@14: LOL. Many words to say that you don't know.

(I actually do btw.)

“Good. Now we need them back on the beat before more of us get shot, stabbed, robbed, or killed.” is not a statement in support of Díaz and SPD dawg. It’s grandiose fucking bullshit.

And yes dude, you are the troll of trolls. Why do you even read the stranger if all you do is attack it?

You’ve said other idiotic things to the degree of ‘if you support Palestine you support Hamas’ which @1 also did, which is fucking ridiculous and makes literally no sense.

You clearly do not agree or enjoy anything on this site so why not move over to mynorthwest or whatever the fuck Brandi/Jonathan/Jason are doing these days. They are definitely more your speed.

Basically you suck and ruin the discourse of every comments area on this site. You’re not the only one of course but prob the most prominent. Not saying you need to leave, it’s a free and open forum, but honestly you don’t seem happy here, your shit you say isn’t constructive 90% of the time to this blog and it’s just not really needed.

@12: Because on a per-capital basis, SPD in 1991 was about twice the size it is now. The current shortage of officers means each one spends more time on patrol, and less on clearing cases.

@19 These are words "Because on a per-capital basis, SPD in 1991 was about twice the size it is now. The current shortage of officers means each one spends more time on patrol," but they don't actually make sense. Why would time spent on patrol correlate with size of population?

@20: Because a greater population means more 911 calls for the police to check:

‘“The number of staffing is alarming, and people should be concerned. Now, all the community policing officers are just on patrol being reactive to 911 calls, and still, our response times are too slow," said Councilmember Alex Pedersen.’

[…]

“With current staffing, Seattle has 1.3 officers per 1,000 residents.

“Denver has 1.9 officers per 1,000 residents, Phoenix has 1.6 officers per 1,000 residents, and San Francisco has 2.2 officers per 1,000 residents.

“The FBI estimates the average officer-to-resident ratio for large cities is 2.6 per 1,000 residents.”

So, again, SPD is at about half strength, this time when compared to other cities of similar size. You get what you pay for.

@21: " Because a greater population means more 911 calls for the police to check:"

You're soooo close...now put together the fact that we know SPD is getting fewer calls about crime than in 1991...so what calls are expensive armed officers with the power of arrest responding too?

(Hint: not crime. Things other roles could handle equally well or better for less money.)

@22: I am, so I know that "when you're a police department in a city where the population has gone up, but calls about crime have gone down, and you give those non-crime calls a higher priority than doing investigations and detective work" it makes you a...bad police police department.

@25-26: Google "FBI Crime Data Explorer" - "Serious Crime" = FBI UCR Part 1.

(SPD's SeaStat dashboard is approximately the same but the FBI tool has a much longer history available.)

@24: “…it makes you a...bad police police department.”

No, it makes for a police department which is handling calls it shouldn’t:

‘“70% of calls for services did not require a law enforcement response or were appropriate for a dual response by law enforcement and a community-based/non-law enforcement service provider,” the NICJR report read.‘

(https://mynorthwest.com/3479482/spd-report-discovers-80-of-911-calls-were-for-non-criminal-events/)

So, Seattle needs both more police officers and more police alternatives. How are these the fault of the police department?

"and the cops were saying they couldn't control the march or even reroute traffic because of being understaffed."

@28: you know what isn't needed to handle traffic direction? A gun and powers of arrest. NYC has employed thousands of civilian traffic agents for a long time.

"So, Seattle needs both more police officers and more police alternatives. How are these the fault of the police department?"

@29: Because the Chief of Police isn't paid to "mindlessly deploy expensive armed officers with the power of arrest when they aren't needed" until someone else tells them how to be more efficient but rather to deliver efficient, effective public safety services at good value for cost.

(And if the Chief can't do the job it's on the Mayor to fire them and find one who can.)

@31: So, police are simply not to respond to 911 calls? Given the City Council hasn’t appropriated much money for police alternatives to handle those 70% of calls which don’t need the police, what are the police supposed to do when someone calls 911?

@32: You have it exactly backwards. The City Council has said for years now they are ready and willing to fund alternative response. It is on the Mayor - the executive, who executes, and the Chief of Police, who the mayor hires and fires, to operationally stand up a plan...and they're 100% sandbagging, sometimes in absurdly stupid ways that make Seattle's PD and executive look like idiots compared to departments like Denver and NYC, among others.

@36: The Seattle Police Department has had a police chief every year for more than decade. He or she had the opportunity to smartly deploy different roles for different types of calls in order to deliver more value for cost...and they all failed to do that.

That's on the chiefs and mayors, not the Council.

Imagine you're a shareholder in a financial services company and the CEO is complaining that the firm's stockbrokers are so busy doing bank teller work that he needs more funding to hire more stockbrockers. You'd say the CEO should be fired.

Today you don't have to imagine that you're a taxpayer in Seattle where the police chief is saying the department's officers are so busy doing the work others can do equally well or better for less so he needs more tax dollars for more officers.

Good money after bad, and the Council has been the only voice on the right side this versus the Chief, mayor, and SPOG.

@38: Eugene OR has been doing alternative response for 30 years. Denver, Albuquerque, and NYC (among others) have handled north of 25,000 calls and climbing without hitch. Traffic agents have been around since before 1996. The use of police aides (or some flavor of community service type officer) was proven to work in 1973 and have been used by many departments for a long time.

Your post is not reality based.

@40: remind us who isn't reality based again?

sfstandard.com/2023/11/07/san-francisco-public-works-inspectors-plea-for-help/

Teresa McNamara, who identified herself as a senior street inspector who has worked for the city for 12 years, tearfully recounted how her illegal vending enforcement assignment “has broken my spirit and enthusiasm. … My mental health is suffering, and sadly, it’s affecting my family and friends, too, as they watch me cry and struggle with panic attacks that I never had before.”

McNamara then detailed the main issue with her work.

“The problem is the vendor enforcement assignment makes no distinction between legitimate street vendors and armed people with stolen goods,” she said, adding that she and her colleagues are often put in the position of impounding goods from people “under the influence of drugs or experiencing mental health issues.”

missionlocal.org/2023/07/city-workers-hit-harassed-street-vending/

Department of Public Works employees, facing threats and physical violence in nearly a year of a new effort to tackle unpermitted vending, say they want police to take over enforcement.

“We won’t even say anything yet — they’re already threatening our families, threatening to kill us, telling us, ‘Just wait ’til we see you without the police,’ ‘We’ll follow you to your home,’” said one worker named John at the Mission District police station’s latest monthly community meeting.

"“The problem is the vendor enforcement assignment makes no distinction between legitimate street vendors and armed people with stolen goods,"

So they should make a distinction. Problem solved. NBD.

@42: "@42, And how can that distinction be made prior to determining what type of investigator to send? LEO, NonLEO."

It's in the articled that they were doing it for years:

"Teresa McNamara, who identified herself as a senior street inspector who has worked for the city for 12 years,"

"street inspectors who were hired and trained to check on permits and the safety of sidewalks and ensure that the public right of way is maintained.”

The answer is not that she should have never gotten her job and police officers should have been checking on permits and the safety of sidewalks and ensuring that the public right of way is maintained...the answer is better protocols today that keep street inspectors in their safe lane and hand off problematic cases to the police.

Which is probably a trivial matter: she says "“I have personally been involved in tug-of-wars with unpermitted offenders,” they said, adding they “have been spat on and verbally threatened with violent racist language regularly and physically assaulted. "

So, when a street inspector first interacts with someone, they say your spiel about permits and such and ask if they will comply voluntarily...and if the answer is no, back off and refer to police.

@43: "So the alternative response isn't, as we play it here in Seattle's political/civic culture, a zero-sum-game where one is the enemy of the other, and if you get more of one, you get less of the other."

It absolutely is: Harrell's plan to hire 500 officers who aren't needed to handle serious crime will deprive us of on the order of 750 civilian roles who can handle the actual work that needs to be done as well or better for less.

@43: "So they call cops 30% of the time after responding."

Uh, no:

Last year, out of a total of roughly 24,000 CAHOOTS calls, police backup was requested only 150 times.

https://whitebirdclinic.org/what-is-cahoots/

@47 Eh yeah, which is exactly why we should invest in CAHOOTS style workers which we don't have rather than wasting the money on more sworn officer positions we don't need.