KOMO News
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2020–2021
1:30:01 · 3.6M views · Dec 13, 2020
A KOMO News documentary about Seattle's homelessness, addiction and street crime. It examines the City Council's policies, shows conditions on the streets and the impact on local businesses, and explores possible solutions.
HN commenters link it as an overview of Seattle's deterioration when discussing homelessness and crime in West Coast cities.
5 comments from Hacker News
The same thing has happened in Portland and Seattle, both cities with increasing amounts of property crime, increasing amounts of homeless campers taking up public spaces, increasing amounts of harassment from vagrants, widespread open drug-abuse, increasing amounts of blight as pristine greenbelts are trashed, and a revolving door of criminals who are released into the public without consequence by a permissive city leadership. Calls for "restorative justice" always mean being soft on crime, which removes deterrents for crime, and therefore enable increased crime. It's all so obvious and predictable, but these cities are such extreme political echo chambers that no other perspective is really represented or considered at all. In Seattle, these policies were spurred on by motivated progressive activists who aggressively shouted down all dissent in protests, council meetings, and in social media. The rush of transplants from outside Washington state changed local politics significantly over the last decade, importing a lot of SF's policies as the voting constituency changed. As a result, Seattle experiences all the same blight SF does, but with a time delay of a few years. There have been a couple great documentaries about the deterioration in Seattle such as "Seattle is Dying" ( [LINK] ) and "The Fight for the Soul of Seattle" ( this video ) that provide a great overview of the issues. The business community also wrote two comprehensive reports about the failure of restorative j
I don't have any experience with the housing issue in California, but got involved a while back trying to find pragmatic solutions in Seattle. The situation is a mess and there is an entire "homeless industrial complex" complicating matters here, rife with fraud, misspending and cronyism. Every year it seems like many millions of dollars more are spent on this issue but it keeps getting visibly worse. At first I was in the "Housing First" crowd, but after my experiences I would say I more firmly believe in "Rehab First". A local news station released a great documentary called "Seattle is Dying". It has 10 million views since released a couple of years ago. [LINK] The sequel is "The Fight For the Soul of Seattle". this video
Some jurisdictions do, particularly in smaller cities like suburbs, where police staff aren't fully occupied with higher priority calls. However, many bigger cities are simply too understaffed compared to the past, and ignore property crimes as you say. This is especially true in West Coast cities like SF, Portland, and Seattle. For example Seattle has lost hundreds of police officers in the last year due to the push for defunding, hostile attitudes towards police from activists/local politicians, and the opportunity to have a less stressful/better paying job elsewhere after a very rough year dealing with near-daily rioting. At present, the city has only around 1000 officers and it is expected to lose some more due to the vaccine mandate. This is around half of what the average city has per capita, and in the last decade the effects of a lenient city attorney, crime-friendly local government focused on "restorative justice", and falling per capita officer counts has led to a massive increase in crimes. Just like in SF, people have given up on even reporting them since even if someone is arrested, the city attorney will just release them anyways, and insurance claims require a deductible. Even businesses have given up on crime reporting (example: [LINK] ). A good overview of the Seattle situation can be found in a couple documentaries, "Seattle is Dying" ( [LINK] ) and "The Fight for the Soul of Seattle" ( this video ). The city's transformation from a safe clean city to what it
If the majority of them weren't addicted to hardcore drugs and could make intelligent, rational decisions, I might agree that giving them money directly could be a good thing. Drug addicts tend to not make good monetary choices. See this recent documentary by KOMO News in Seattle about their problems, which are pretty similar to Portland's, SF's, LA's and a lot of other major cities with larger homeless populations. Crime is soaring. Most are homeless due to drug addiction. Until that part is solved and they can think clearly and rationalize normally again, giving them cash will likely only fuel the problem and keep them right where they're at. And with everyone walking around with $50k cash in their pocket, because they don't have bank accounts, crime would be even more rampant as they steal it from each other. this video
well part of the problem, in Seattle at least, is that even when they do catch the people responsible, the DA is pressured by the city council and mayors office to generally release people who go on to re-offend. I have friends on the police force in Seattle and they lament that there is no point in arresting certain people for property crime because they just get released. It just becomes a waste of their time with the paperwork and showing up to court for nothing to come of it. [LINK] this video