Why 260 Cops Have Fled Seattle :: 05/25/2021

There hasn’t been a police department more brutalized in recent memory. In Seattle, cops have been pummeled by a psycho city council. It’s not shocking. Seattle is left-wing. The residents are left-wing. They’re all nuts. The mayor allowed armed leftists to seize portions of the city. The ‘summer of love’ came crashing down when—shocker—people started to get shot and killed inside the autonomous zone. They have hamstrung the police and spit in their faces. After a summer of riots and not being allowed to restore order, along with an overall anti-police atmosphere, are we shocked that scores of cops have fled Seattle? Around 20 percent of the police force has left (via CBS News):

The Seattle Police Department is struggling under the backlash of recent police reforms. The state of Washington has just enacted a dozen police reform laws, following nearly a year of protests over police brutality.

According to one social justice group, more than $840 million were cut from U.S. police budgets in 2020.

This has caused a shortage of police in Seattle. The police chief tells CBS News that 260 officers, which is almost 20 percent of the force, have left in the past year and a half.

Officer Clayton Powell has served nearly 27 years on the streets of Seattle. He said it was his goal to stay on the force for 30 years, but even though he is three years away from that goal, he's retiring early.

"The support that we had in my generation of policing is no longer there," Powell told CBS News' Carter Evans.

Last summer's protests over the killing of George Floyd led to violent clashes with Seattle police. Powell said the stress on officers was compounded by city leaders' decisions to abandon a police precinct and letting demonstrators, some armed, occupy an entire neighborhood for a whole month. As a result, Powell said he and other officers had rocks, bottles, and in some cases, cinder blocks thrown at them, and they had to "stand there and take it."

"When you see businesses get destroyed and families lose their livelihood because of that destruction and we can't do anything about it. We're not allowed to intercede," he said.

The city had a black female police chief, Carmen Best, and she couldn’t handle the nonsense. She left last year. Granted, not everything she said I agreed with, like calling 9-1-1 to report racist incidents, but she was committed to stopping mayhem in the streets. There were vans with weapons in them, folks. Best presented this and still, the council decided to side with the terrorists. I think what’s more ironic is that while the progressive Left is obsessed with diversity, they did everything they could to undermine the city’s first female black police chief. It’s not about Black Lives Matter. It’s about shredding law enforcement. It’s about declaring a left-wing activist war on cops. They started months ago, and the fallout is going to be more crime, more death, and more mayhem. It’s already happening. And if Democrats don't think this will be a 2022 issue, they didn't read their 2020 autopsies regarding this 'defund the police' nonsense. It caused scores of black and Hispanic voters to back Republicans.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/05/25/why-260-cops-have-fled-seattle-n2589922