@1: the shitbag vandals chucking rocks through plate glass don't have $300 for 1 ticket, let alone glass repair.

I have no idea if they're teenagers or unhoused neighbors. they do it for revenge. they do it for fun. they do it because they're high. they do it because they won't/don't get caught.

More “both and” thinking please. This is a false choice. And ever growing Seattle has a low cop to citizen ratio compared with most large cities.

Tracking down vandals is hard, which is the punishment should be high when they are caught and convicted. Throwing a brick through a window should earn someone a year spent cleaning up and repairing damage around town. We need to bring back work gangs. If someone isn’t reliable enough to do that repair work then let them sit in King County jail.

Also, the owners of Life on Mars are good people. This backhanded besmirching of them is reprehensible.

In a city filled with lawless encampments and, as noted @4, a low number of police officers per capita, there seems to be a lot of petty theft and vandalism. What’s the explanation? Obviously, these claims simply must be questionable assertions by dodgy business owners.

@5: “Also, the owners of Life on Mars are good people. This backhanded besmirching of them is reprehensible.”

If you complain about crime in and around encampments, the Stranger will call you a NIMBY. If you protest against violence erupting from encampments, the Stranger will say you hate the poor. Now, the Stranger has gone from ignoring the crimes committed by homeless campers to attacking a business for complaining about these crimes. There seems to be no lengths the Stranger will not go to absolve encampments, and vilify everyone else.

"But no one can definitively claim that hiring more police results in lower crime rates and fewer break-ins."

Hiring more police and re-prioritizing their enforcement. New York City did that and it worked.

Now the Stranger is shitting on Life on Mars? Who the fuck is your readership anymore? What's next? DAVE MEINERT IS AWESOME coverage?

What @4 said. Why can’t it be a both/and?

@10: Look, the Stranger didn’t invent “dissent is treason,” they merely enforce it…

The Stranger used to be worth reading. Now it’s just pushing far left abolitionist policies that will harm our communities.

I like how the headline buries the lede, talking about apparently random vandalism, before admitting to well-organized thievery:

“She dealt with months of repeated break-ins at her family’s Maple Leaf store, Math ‘n’ Stuff, with people smashing the store’s skylight and drilling through its emergency door.”

That’s not random drunken 22-year-olds obnoxiously smashing stuff as they wander home after a night at the sports bar; those are exactly the types of planned, targeted crimes a police force can investigate to prevent repeats.

Why does is have to be either/or? It’s a lazy, self-righteous piece.
Homelessness, drugs, crime, inequality…. it’s a complex problem calling for multi-faceted policies. Sure, some help for the businesses, but also some consequences for the criminals (yeah, using cops), and some help for the down-and-out.

We once considered moving to Maple Leaf. Walking the neighborhood, I noticed what a great little shop Math’n’Stuff would be for our young child. Sad to see either the Zombie Army itself, or just Seattle’s general lawlessness from an overwhelmed police department, causing such trouble for such a great little gem of an establishment. They, and Maple Leaf, deserve better.

The Stranger simply refuses to consider the many detrimental effects its rigidly ideological positions on homelessness and abolition cause both to real human beings, and the city in which they all reside.