Then we need to pressure lawmakers to reform the police..they're cowards and won't do it unless they have overwhelming support and aren't afraid of backlash from the police and their supporters
If you want police reform in Seattle, you either need to start with changing state laws surrounding how police labor contract negotiations are handled, or build a big enough local coalition of supportive voters for lawmakers to feel confident enough to drag the police union, kicking and screaming the entire way, through a probably 5-10 year long effort to force them to sign a new labor contract that isn't so disgustingly in their favor. Current state laws HEAVILY favors the police union in negotiations, and easily allows them to completely stall out any negotiations for literal years until a more friendly admin is voted into office and they can reset the clock to 0 with a new contract. They have been doing this for literal decades in Seattle.
The mayors hands are basically tied by the current contract. She can't throw it out. We can't pass city laws to change it. We effectively signed a deal to pay a police force that doesn't even really have to listen to us, and our methods for getting out of that deal are extremely limited, because, well, we did, as a city and a legal entity, sign the contract.
Guess that’s why we aren’t witnessing any recent
SPD reform despite the new Public Safety Commission and Office of Accountability.
SPD union is too influential and they need to be reformed.
Yeah it’s incredible how much political power police chiefs have in this country. Even the most popular mayor in America (Mamdani) had to basically give up on police reform to protect his political capital
The SPD basically needs to be stripped down to brass tacks and rebuilt; it is thoroughly corrupt and rot at the core spreads outward. No one has the will to do it, so we're stuck with a legal mafia instead.
Are people willfully ignorant? Seattle has 900 sworn officers. Similar sized cities like Denver and Boston have 1,300 and 2,000 respectively. Yet people wonder why Seattle police have to triage calls for service. Budgets? Denver is $281 million a year, and Boston is at $484 million. Seattle? $470 million.
Have you ever thought that maybe both are true? We are understaffed for hiring metrics, while at the same time the officers we do have are not doing their jobs
We don't have plenty of cops, we are indeed understaffed. However the reason is the police union doesn't want to have more cops hired so they can continue to feast on the overtime they are getting at double pay. At which they hang out and not respond to calls for police assistance. Easy money to stuff your bank accounts
We have a lot of spend on cops though. Either way they aren't getting stuff done. A lot of cops are basically glorified parking enforcement. We should have moderately paid traffic cops (unarmed or nonlethal), which would save a ton of money. Also people would actually show up when there were parking and traffic issues.
My point is the cops that are here basically refuse to do their job so why hire more? So we can have more idiots standing around doing absolutely nothing collecting $250k a year with overtime?
Compare how many police are in San Francisco compared to Seattle and how large a service area SPD has compared to SFPD. And SFPD is needing to hire more. Our police are woefully understaffed.
I don't know how you can honestly defend this idea that we have "plenty" of cops. This is just not the case. I'm not necessarily saying the cops we have are effective, either, that can also be a problem. But we can both be understaffed and our existing staff be ineffective.
They are indeed steeply understaffed What they are not is underfunded, at all. But even years before the George Floyd protests, after which (as public opinion fell over several major fuck-ups) officers began jumping ship in numbers, SPD was "quiet quitting."
When is the last time you’ve seen any bike patrol downtown?
I stroll weekly to Pike Place since I live in LQA-Belltown and zero bike patrols or any SPD presence from our largest precinct.
The recent Denny/Clay intersection takeover with fatal shooting has zero SPD presence despite being 2 blocks away from the precinct garage.
That decision was one of the best in 2026.
This dude in Chi-town on 3-day weekends!
Guess his deputies displayed their resentment.
I live across the Needle that Bite Day. I wanted to “to go out” and never an update by SPD on the perpetrators.
“The letter cites data provided by Nordstrom’s downtown flagship store, which it says received an officer response to only 29% of its 911 calls. The company’s Southcenter and Bellevue stores, the letter says, received an officer response to all of their 911 calls.”
Seattle apologists will swear up and down that this is a countywide problem or that we need a nationwide response, or that crime levels rise and fall because of factors outside of our control.
Your statement isn't something I've seen in regards to this issue, which is police response times. You seem to be talking about responses to crime statistics, a completely different thing.
It all ties together though. Seattle has too much crime for police to respond quickly. We have too much crime because KC prosecutors and judges won’t get tough on crime. We have too much crime because other towns dump their problem residents on us. Blah blah blah.
This is… not true at all. Seattle police budget is massive, and has grown significantly in past 5 years. Only an idiot would see this as a funding problem. In actuality, the police are “protesting” the rising negative public sentiment by refusing to do their jobs. Did you know JUST overtime spending for Seattle Police Dept was a larger expenditure than Dept of Neighborhoods, Office of Labor Standards, Office for Civil Rights, and most everything else in our city? SPD is the plurality of our spending. Get a grip — seriously. Spending will not fix police self-sabotage
Does the story or available data say how many calls were placed at Southcenter and Bellevue stores? I mean if they have say 20 calls compared to 250 it's not the same. If they called 5 times and 5 of 5 came, great, but quantity of scale and all of that, eh?
Imagine if paramedics or firefighters decided to just not respond to calls like Seattle cops choose to selectively discard the responsibilities they chose to take on. The helpers are choosing to refuse to help. Mr Rogers would be ashamed of their decisions.
FIFY: A young woman's life and $27M of your tax money is a small price to pay to allow cops to shoot your dog, rape DV victims, shoot our children, traffic fentanyl, and steal even more tax dollars in OT fraud.
SPD has GPS speed monitoring on all of their vehicles so they could easily enforce a good safe driving policy. We're paying $27M because SPD doesn't want to tell their special boys not to have fun driving fast
I know. It is $29M + $11,000 for that remark. Kevin Dane was a troubled LEO in Tucson. 2 patrol crashes. He didn’t even posses a Valid WA Driver’s License! If you cannot qualify for WA license, you shouldn’t be on car patrol! This SPOG.
I agree, but they can also be helpful sometimes. A few days ago, I was walking through my neighborhood with a very heavy load of groceries from the food bank, after a few blocks I was really struggling. I saw some officers doing a sweep of the homeless people corner, so I stopped and talked to one. "Excuse me officer, I know you're busy, but I can't carry all of these groceries myself. Can you help me get these down the street to my building?" He couldn't say no, or it would mess with the whole "good guys/community policing" thing. So I got a little bit of free labor out of him, and got his boot of the neck of my neighbors for at least a few minutes. Sure it's risky letting them know where I live, but they're on my street every day, it's not like I'm hard to find.
Decided not to, or have too few cops to respond timely to all calls? SPD staffing is dramatically lower than peer cities and about half the national average:
> As of mid-2026, Seattle has approximately 1.31 sworn officers per 1,000 residents about 40% fewer than Denver, 43% fewer than San Francisco, and 58% fewer than Boston.
The data on response times is that they’ve shot up dramatically since ~30% of the police force quit in 2020/2021, and currently is 25% smaller than in 2020, when the population of the city is lower than it is today.
The former deputy city attorney Scott Lindsay was on the Seattle Nice podcast earlier this year talking about staffing figures he’s seen, and discussed how the North Precinct, all of North Seattle north of Montlake cut, has 8-9 officers on duty on the overnight shift. That area, if it was its own city, would be the third largest city in the state and has 8-9 officers on duty. SPD thankfully prioritizes responses to violent crimes over property crimes, but that is too few officers to respond to all the calls. In that situation, are they choosing not to respond to calls, in your view?
SPD remains understaffed by design. Hiring more cops means less overtime pay for current cops. The people who get to decide who gets to be a cop and how much of the budget goes to hiring new cops, are cops who don't want to lose overtime. As a bonus they have the convenient excuse of "sorry we're understaffed" every time someone asks why they're ignoring ~71% of 911 calls.
Ever look into how many Seattle cops even live in Seattle? Way too many don't live in the community they've chosen to be responsible for. They simply do not care about the city that employs them. They do not care about the taxpayers that literally fund their paychecks. Think about how many taxpayer dollars from citizens of Seattle end up going to local businesses outside of Seattle when Seattle cops go home. Spiteful cops fully commit to being spiteful, and based on the reaction to CHOP it would be foolish to believe there are no spiteful Seattle cops.
A better metric would be how many calls does your average SPD officer handle in an hour (or shift) compared to other urban police departments. If it's below average, and I'm willing to bet it is, then that needs to be fixed before we just throw more cops onto the force.
I've had to call 911 like 5 times for work in the last seven years and cops got there within 30 minutes 0 times, an hour twice, and didn't show for three
When they were fixing the west seattle viaduct I came across a spd office asleep in his truck. Head hanging out the window deadass asleep. I called the west precinct non emergency to let them know there was an in-uniform cop asleep on 1st Ave s at 3 in the afternoon. The desk sergeant berated me for 45 seconds with a myriad of excuses as to why this was ok, and his tone changed greatly when I said I could go back for pictures and send the to the seattle times.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a deliberate tactic devised by the police union to make the system seem so broken that citizens pressure the city into drastically increasing the police budget.
Maybe I should be using Hanlon’s Razor here but it would be the first time a police union decided to use policing tactics to manipulate a city….
I mean SPD did this same shit during George Floyd. In fact, during CHOP/CHAZ they just straight up abandoned all policing in the surrounding area. People were murdered and they still didn’t respond. There are lots of studies out there. Of course they rely heavily on correlation.
No I believe you, just wanted examples for my own reference. I remember SPOG and general policing community throwing a fit when i-940 was passed. Was curious if you had anything on that
Even longer than that. It was the federal consent decree that found racial bias in their traffic enforcement, so SPD decided rather than not being racist they’d just stop enforcing traffic laws altogether.
I love how they blame it on "defund the police era" even though it's actually because it coincided with "SPD being hijacked for political violence and ordered to attack people for expressing political views era". Any cop with a brain quit in a hurry, it's their best bet in Nuremberg 2.0
Also, the cops were not defunded. The city council pulled back from any measures like it years ago before they were implemented. It's six figures starting salary for a cop. They are not, and were not, defunded.
The original mass exodus was due to vaccine mandates as well, which, no matter where you fall on the spectrum of vaccines, simply cannot be reasonably tied to a defunding.
A lot of the exodus was that SPD worked a ton of overtime during the protests and police pensions include overtime in the payout calc. So a bunch of cops figured they had a good pension bump and retired.
There were a lot of cops who left because of the vaccines too, which honestly, good riddance.
I like to joke to my friends that we defunded the police by hurting their feelings so badly they refuse to do their jobs, but we still pay them anyway.
And for the record - this is the same story in any big city across the country. They’ve been quiet quitting ever since summer 2020. Their budgets have gone up ever since, not down.
That's not true. They had their budget cut by like 5%, one year.
It was increased by 10% the next year, and the cuts were to some of the open positions the SPD keeps open by consistently rejecting nearly all candidates (97%), so they can get bigger pay raises by whining about how they're defunded.
Still a reduction in their budget, which they can point at and technically be truthful when they whine about how they were defunded, so they need even more money.
It's how they can defend that effective lie in court.
..when parking enforcement was moved out of their budget? Or are you referring to some other budget cut? Can you provide some numbers and links for us?
In reality, after budget adjustments (you'll need to go look up the yearly revised spd budgets, as news sources ignore that part), it was around a 5% reduction. Where they just didn't keep as many positions open (as the SPD keeps rejecting 97% of applicants, despite them utilizing tests that 60-90% of applicants keep passing).
FWIW, even if they were never really defunded, I think the argument is that the defund movement created an unattractive work environment that no one wanted to sign up for.
SPD completely did that to themselves starting with their tear-gas happy response to the WTO protests in the 90s.
They were ALMOST past that consent degree when they got caught pretending on the radio that there were violent protesters during the George Floyd protests so they could use, yes, more tear gas.
“Beating the Mexican piss” out of handcuffed suspects and “gunning down a Native American woodcarver for whittling” and “beating an elderly man for using a golf club for a walking stick” contributed as well.
I would argue hiring known sex pest and truant Adrian Diaz as chief probably contributed quite a bit to the unattractive work environment that no one wanted to sign up for. Also notable that hiring turned around pretty sharply as soon as he was finally fired.
Fuck. I might apply. Why bother with working a shit corporate gig that pays less with no pension when I can get that kind of money and a sweet retirement guaranteed.
Pfft. I’m contracted to support a tech company. So by your logic, my morals are already compromised. At least they’ll be compromised with a sweet pension and the chance to maybe occasionally actually help someone as a cop.
You know, instead of actively contributing to the downfall of civil society as we know it.
This is self-fulfilling rhetoric. I suspect most people here would have rather negative views of a friend that said they were going to become a cop. No one on the left will want to become a cop if they're going to be judged for it and if they're being told ACAB.
As a result, people that would make better cops don't becomes cops. And we need to pay more to attract enough cops given that most people in the city do not want to become one. And we end up needing to hire a bunch of people from outside Seattle. Thus ensuring the problems people have with police won't go away.
People need to push back on rhetoric like "ACAB" and statements like yours, which are basically admitting defeat before even trying to make things better. Instead, push for more accountability and consequences for bad cops, rather than just trying to convince people that by definition all cops are bad.
You hit the nail on the head. I'm a gay minority that has lived in Capitol Hill for a while and have considered becoming one, but I don't even feel like I can discuss it with a lot of people I know for fear of judgement. I'm pretty progressive but also believe that police are necessary, and that not all are bad.
I like to think I'm a kind and empathetic person that could do a lot of good for the community but I don't know that I want to be in a position where I would be hated by so many.
Old Danny gets defensive if you email him and tell him he ignores police misconduct since, you know, he’s a journalist. Still can’t believe he talks about his fucking stolen phone.
If you don’t pay them they don’t show up. If they don’t like you - they don’t show up.
Until we fund a second independent police force that’s sole job is to investigate and prosecute other cops AND have their funding directly tied to the amount of successful convictions, there won’t be change
There is a link in the article to a report city council prepared in June which provided the data. Danny skipped the bit about sworn staffing. They have a major bottleneck in training. There isn’t enough instructors so the officers we hire are delayed in joining the force. It makes me mad that we always get articles like this presenting the problem as related to defund movement 5 years ago while ignoring other issues that could be addressed directly. We should have 10 officers joining the force monthly, instead it’s 6 due to instructor availability.
Whole piece is worth reading, which dives into SPD’s staffing crisis and response times:
On the number of officers being down 25% since 2020 despite budget increases. 489 patrol officers for a city that’s about to surpass San Francisco in population. Yikes:
> Despite a boost in police hiring, the department is 25% smaller than it was six years ago — before so many officers left during the “defund the police” protest era.
> There were 694 patrol officers in 2020, but only 489 today. Overall the department is down about 350 positions total, from 1,339 in 2020 to 985 today, according to a report to the City Council in June.
> At the same time, the police budget is about 20% higher — from $409 million in 2020 to $488 million now. This reflects higher pay for cops and other escalating costs. It’s the story across local governments. (See Seattle schools, which have record revenues but are also said to be “broke.”)
How bad the response times are as a result of this understaffing:
> But recently a crime data analyst compiled police response times in 14 U.S. cities, and Seattle finished last.
> New York City police get there in half the time, on average, as they do in Seattle, according to Jeff Asher of AH Datalytics.
> Seattle’s goal for the most serious 911 calls, involving life-threatening incidents like the one in Westlake Park, is seven minutes or less. For Priority 2 calls — where there’s a threat of violence or damage to property — the goal is 15 minutes.
> So far this year, they’re averaging 9.6 minutes for the Priority 1 calls, with a median of seven minutes, meaning half the calls met the goal but half did not. Priority 2 calls are averaging 56 minutes. Both are improvements over a few years ago, when police staffing was so low the department announced it wouldn’t be able to answer some lower-priority calls at all.
Just spitballing here, but maybe SPD’s response to the protests were a factor.
Also, there are accusations that Adrian Diaz slow rolled hiring. The department has published growing applications numbers for quite some time but the hiring did not follow for a while there.
On Diaz, I think that is the danger of promoting an insider to be Police Chief. They’re incentivized to slow hiring to protect overtime opportunities for their buddies. I hope the next police chief that is hired is an outsider to the department.
As soon as Shon Barnes was hired from the outside, hiring improved dramatically. That also coincided with raises, but I think leadership prioritizing hiring plays a role. The current bottleneck is with field training, we have hired a lot of rookie cops that have gone through academy and department training, but haven’t been able to complete their 4.5 month field training requirements due to a shortage of qualified officers teach the rookies during their 1:1 field training.
Especially in a department with as much historical and contemporary fuckery as Seattle, you can never fix things with an internal promotion. Even the most well-meaning internal candidate will still have normalized the culture. And the ones who don't normalize it don't stick around long enough to get that promotion.
At the end of the day, they’re like every other CEO. More money coming in + less people = more salary. Nobody cares about the results any more, it’s all about how much you can grift from the public
Overtime opportunities will always be there. It’s the nature of the job. The problem was the fraudulent overtime. Diaz slow rolled because he was a part of the problem. He didn’t want the general culture of the department to change and he definitely didn’t want fraudulent overtime stopped.
Something like 80% of SPD overtime goes to meeting minimum staffing standards for Precincts. Overtime for patrol has been dropping this year due to recent hiring. I’ll see if I can find a recent Overtime report.
A fully staffed department would have reduced overtime opportunities.
Where they’re at now is unsustainable though. Yes the overtime is plentiful but it’s an unreasonable amount for people to do without completely burning themselves out.
That’s true as well. Research also indicates that officers on overtime are more likely to use excessive use of force.
There’s perverse incentives in some states where public union pension calculations are based on the average of your 3 highest earning years. So firefighters and officers will rack up huge amounts overtime for a few years to massively increase their pension.
The solution to all these problems are to increase hiring to reduce their leverage, and utilize technology to be able to maximize the utility of a smaller force than peer cities.
Again though, SPD’s problem is the fraudulent overtime. When scrutinized, some of those biggest OT earners are working hours that they physically could not work.
And yes, pensions work that way. Many state roles take your highest earning years, though the number can vary. Fire is also 3 years, but you don’t hear about the same issues.
As far as solutions, the piece doesn’t get into them as much, but the big bottleneck now is not getting new recruits into the door after basic academy, it is through field training, which is 1 on 1 training in the field new officers get with experienced officers that lasts 4.5 months or so, before the new hire can start to patrol. There are too few experienced officers so the bottleneck in training exists. Mayor Wilson says she is working with the interim chief on solutions there.
Hiring has picked up dramatically in the last year or so, but it takes a long time for new hires to be deployable officers.
One solution other cities have used is to use vendors for various tasks. New Orleans, for example, uses 3rd party accident investigators to respond to motor vehicle accidents that don’t involve bodily injury.
Another way other departments are responding to low staffing is to deploy Drones as First Responders. They sit on top of a police precinct and are dispatched for only 911 calls, they have cameras and sensors on them and respond in a median of 90 seconds to a call, way faster than cops in cars can get to calls. They are used to follow suspects fleeing a crime, increasing the likelihood of an arrest. They reduce the number of dangerous vehicle pursuits needed. Redmond has them and has used them to clear 18% of their low priority calls due to the drone finding the call has already been resolved or was not accurate as the 911 caller described. That’s frees up cops for responding to other calls, which is a multiplying effect on reducing response times to lower priority calls.
Seattle has been making slow starts on the “vendors” solution. CARE and Park Rangers both play a role in this. I think letting SDOT investigate traffic incidents would make a lot of sense too.
Cops complained they were not social workers and shouldn’t respond to such calls. City creates a team for that. SPD stops referring said team when it was trying to leverage their latest contract. They’re bad community members.
City of Seattle has ~.75m people. City of New York has ~9m. Your quoting the total number of officers and not patrol. Seattle has about 1 police offer per 750 residents. NYC has about 1 per 250 residents. Its unclear exactly how the various counts are as in different cities different jobs are assigned to different departments and different roles within those departments.
I will say, Seattle Police department has remained mainly the same as the number of residents have swelled significantly. 25 years ago, I think the ratio ~ 1/400.
Seattle is really lucky that no one’s taken advantage of the incredibly slow response times and gone on a robbery spree. You know, like a professional one taking jewels and the like.
Sadly as usual the messaging for ''defund the police' was poor at best. No one wanted to get rid of the police. The goal was to offload more of the social work to actual trained social workers who could better deescalate and deal with mental health issues, some drug addiction issues, homeless issues. Police officers are used like a multi tool which is okay when that's all you have but you're only patching problems, not building things. Seattle started to go that route but then quickly defunded programs like the Navigation Team that were meant to take on that role. We were left with less police officers and the people who were supposed to fill in for the less police got removed.
I think there was a broad range of positions under the “defund” banner. There absolutely were/are police abolitionists who want to eliminate policing, even if that isn’t commonly held.
You're correct, I over stated it by saying "no one wanted to get rid of the police" I'm sure a small fraction did want to get rid of the police but the majority just wanted accountability, transparency, and for citizens to be treated with respect. I don't feel we have advanced on any of that. I don't trust the police department any more than before the whole George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and frankly to many names to recite.
Sadly as usual the messaging for ''defund the police' was poor at best. No one wanted to get rid of the police.
This is a post-facto rewrite of the sentiment during Covid. People were fucking mad at the world and acting irrationally. Abolitionists and anarchists took advantage of that with the defund call—eg: the CHOP. When tempers simmered down, the general public realized how dumb abolitionism is.
You missed the point of the anger. There were a number of black people murdered at the hands of cops and were getting away with it. Yes people were angry and I'm sure yes there were some who wanted cops to die, protests happened, police beat people and things escalated. I remember watching one protester get beat down and left in the street and a bicycle cop ran over the guys head on purpose. I'm not saying the protesters were blameless but the police took an oath and are paid by the people. They need to be held to a higher standard.
Oh yeah definitely. Those protests we had here for weeks were def about just George Floyd. There was no connection to the Seattle Police Department. It was purely nationwide vibes.
How many officers respond to each call? How long do they spend at each call? How many officers do 1 call a day and then sleep in their car the rest of the shift? And so on
People just whine “we’re understaffed” and quote raw officer numbers without explaining what the current lazy police force does with the officers they have.
People love to bitch about SPD being lazy or bad at their jobs, but never seem all that interested in debating how to make SPD effective. The sentiment is always “fuck SPD, we want less of them anyways”.
When I go to those touch a truck event with my kid the fire truck has like a 45 minute lineup. The ambulance has like a 40 minute lineup hell the porta potty truck as of 20 minute lineup. And the cop car is just empty with cops trying to get people’s attention as they walk by.
Less about the specific store and more about two different police departments getting calls from the same type of business and how many of those calls are ignored by each department.
A lot of people in this sub seem to believe they don't respond to average citizens but bootlick to the corporations.
There is no reason why this would be true and this data shows it isn't.
Usually when someone from the Nordstroms family is making a public statement like this, they're not doing so for the sake of their store. They do so for the sake of the other stores in the neighboring area who've complained but were never heard or had their complaints taken seriously by the cops.
Considering a Seattle homegrown department store that has been here for over a century and has seen this city/region at its highs and lows, when they make a statement and request like this, they're basically saying the city's leaders aren't doing enough for the city and the majority of its residents in general.
From the article
In the letter, Nordstrom CEO Erik Nordstrom revealed an astonishing figure. The letter said that when Nordstrom employees at the flagship downtown Seattle store call police, “only 29% of their 911 calls yield a police officer response.”
At the company’s Southcenter mall location — which also has some history of retail theft and other crime problems — 911 calls get a 100% police response, Nordstrom said.
Two different police departments. The smaller one takes retail theft more seriously than the larger one. That sends a message to thieves. Come to Seattle to avoid being caught.
Now one could argue that a fancy company like Nordstrom should primarily take care of its own security. Some also argue the police have more urgent work to do than helping stores with retail theft or disruptive people.
The police have also expressed frustration that when they do book someone for crimes like these, the suspect is back out the next day and often not prosecuted.
But criminologists say police response does matter. It won’t typically prevent or stop crime. But research suggests more crimes do get solved, as suspects are more likely to be identified by victims or witnesses the faster the cops get there.
Where is our city prosecutor at and what plans does she have regarding holding thieves accountable?
Really need to shut down the SPOG and fire the worst officers (aka the traitors who participated in the insurrection on J6th). Then we can rebuild the force with the expectation that they do their goddamn jobs. Bunch of lazy jackasses.
You all get, and deserve what you've voted for. Everyone's all ACAB until they need rescuing from the outcomes of soft on crime policy you supported. No wonder the police don't show up, this city has spent the better part of a decade dumping all over them while building a legal system that refuses to meaningfully penalize these offenders. How much effort would a custodian make if every single time they cleaned up a spill, someone immediately dumped another one at their feet before the mop was even back in its bucket. Let the downvotes flow in, but I'm not wrong here. All this city does is dump on the police. The good ones have left, the remaining don't give a shit and frankly it's not hard to see why. At this point, you might want to prepare to defend yourselves. Time to go buy a gun and learn how to use it. Then, you can see first hand how ridiculously stupid all our states firearms laws are too.
Why would I want to work in such a toxic environment where the city doesn't support them, the citizens hate them, and judges undo any policing work within 24 hours. Besides, it would be a 150-200k pay cut.
Unless we can compare response time to when we were “fully staffed” then Danny’s premise built off Nordstrom shouldn’t go forward - the Tukwila comparison is weak. That mall is all that city has.
Also, despite all the cops, and on-site mini-precinct, and the quick response times, Southcenter is notorious for violent crime, especially shootings. I’d sooner leave a bag in my car parked near Westlake than I would at Southcenter. (Not that I would want to in either location.)
Slight threadnap: Do you happen to know how far out from the mall itself the problem region goes? I have a pretty good handle on the best and worst parts of Aurora, but my job is relocating south to Bryn Mawr-Skyway, and now those of us who aren't quitting are trying to figure out where we can afford that won't be notably less safe.
Tukwila is awesome and quiet outside of Southcenter and International Blvd ime! I have friends who live in SeaTac just half mile up the hill from the light rail station and even that close to Intl Blvd it’s super quiet and good neighbors. The top of the hill above Southcenter is super chill too.
I can’t remember a single story of police misconduct in Seattle from my 12 years here. I can vividly remember, however, getting hit by a drunk driver in 2016 and having to wait for the cops for 5 hours.
We need more police, and we need better police. We need police who look like us, rather than chuds. We will have neither is we choose to believe the system is rotten to the core and not worth fixing.
Polic who look some other color or creed are demonstrably and observably as awful abusive and tyrannical as all but the worst (nazi and klan infiltrators, of which there are PLENTY {i have faced them at my peril}) of the liverwurst Whitey ones. 🐷🐽🐖are pigs, Peace officers are honourable, and most are some lazy slob government suits. At least in post 2001 eh post 1995 America.
I wonder if part of the problem is not as many entrances and exits? I get they SAY they want to stop crime, but I have not been inside the downtown store in about 4-5 years because I often come downtown via light rail and they closed those internal doors. Their loss, I guess.
They closed it because of how easy it was for thieves to walk in, grab something, and walk out during the pandemic when that entrance wasn't well staffed as it was prior to the pandemic. But that was also at a time when SPD did make arrests when security notified them and when there was always a Nordstrom's employee doing some type of work but there to greet and assist shoppers.
I appreciate your suggestions, I miss going in the store and more so since my friend quit due to some job reassignments and hour changes that did not work with him moving down to Tacoma.
lol Officer Involved Shootings is actually incredibly low for a city our size and always has been. This is like the one metric that hasn’t gotten any worse
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u/Buckchamp Sep 12 '26
Two bike cops circling westlake / Nordstroms area. Boom solved