SEATTLE, WA– Despite the rise in crime, and the mass exodus of Seattle Police Department officers, members of the Seattle City Council are still in discussion to further defund the police department.
Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz joined the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH to discuss what to expect and his plan for managing it.
He said:
“I’m trying to do everything we can to keep all of our officers. We trained them well, they’re doing excellent work day in and day out … I have to make sure that I have the right personnel as we enter into 2021 that’s able to keep this city safe,”
With Seattle facing approximately 1,200 deployable officers, Diaz does not believe he has enough officers to keep the city safe, saying:
“No. Even when I was pushing out our budget for next year with the city council, I was explaining the need for us to have people that are going through the academy, that are going through our FTO [Field Training Officer] phase, and then being able to deploy them out,
“You have to have close to about 1,400 to then have a reasonable number, which puts us to about 1,250, 1,275 that are deployable. So you really need about 1,400 people to have a much more reasonable staffing when it comes to having enough in patrol investigations and special operations.”
Seattle Police Chief Diaz: City lacks enough officers to maintain safety https://t.co/JilEtLW9ei
— Ron Sims (@simsron) October 22, 2020
With all of the struggles the department is facing, including rising crime, protests, and COVID, Diaz said it is sometimes hard to trace crimes.
He said:
“This year in relation to COVID obviously to me is an anomaly year. It’s not that all of our homicides related to gun violence; about 60% of our homicides are actually gun violence. We’ve had homicides related to arson, homicides related to vehicular homicide — vehicle collisions where one was a stolen vehicle — and we have a lot of homicides related to the usage of a knife,
“We’re trying to track all aspects of it to see what correlation there is. Is it related to domestic violence? Is it related to homelessness? And so these are all things that we’re trying to pay attention to. When you do see low staffing numbers, it does impact our ability to be visible, to go out and prevent a lot of the homicides from occurring.”
At the end of the day, it is the responsibility of the Police Department to keep the citizens safe, and that is becoming increasingly more difficulty as the Council continues to turn against them.
ICYMI: Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz spoke with @JasonRantz on latest efforts to defund police and the “new” Navigation Team
LISTEN: https://t.co/xoEaVWUc7Z
— AM 770 KTTH 🎙 (@770KTTH) October 20, 2020
“Our big piece is just trying to make sure that we educate everyone involved. We educate the city council about what our needs are for maintaining public safety throughout the city of Seattle, that we educate the community about the experiences that our officers have to go through,”
He continued:
“I also need officers that we can routinely kind of rotate out when you have officers that had to deal with demonstrations on a nightly basis with very little time off … We just have to make sure people are aware of that, and the communities are aware, and the city council is aware that this is a difficult job. And the more stress we put on those officers, it can create some adverse effects. And so we try to make sure that we’re taking care of our personnel.”
Now, one might think that the city is just defunding the police due to pressure from the loud, relentless rioters that have taken to the streets since the death of George Floyd in May, however, city county members have also eliminated a $30 million investment to combat displacement of minorities from the proposed 2021 city budget.
King County Equity Now, a coalition of Black-led organizations is attempting to hold Mayor Jenny Durkan accountable for the cut.
According to King5, the Strategic Investment Fund was created last year. The money would be used to purchase properties with the intention of equitable development, such as creating affordable housing, focusing on Seattle’s historically Black communities like the Central District.
King County Equity Now took to Twitter to express their frustration, calling the move to take the funding out of the budget an example of “anti-Blackness.”
They said:
“In a national uprising against anti-Black policing & anti-Black inequity, facing only worsening gentrification, what does (Mayor Jenny Durkan) put on the chopping block? The $30M Equity Fund intended to support affordable housing & equitable land development,”
9/ These are the policy decisions that create the Jim Crow, Apart-heid state we see in Martin Luther King Jr. County. @mayorjenny, your budget is a moral statement. This is white supremacist policy. This is white supremacist decision-making. We see you.
— King County Equity Now (Official) (@KCEquityNow) October 18, 2020
Durkans’s office told King5 that the intent of the funds, which came from the sale of the “Mercer Mega Block,” which brought the city more than $140 million in profits, was to invest in areas that were experiencing displacement:
“in areas of low access to opportunity that present unique opportunities for transformational equitable development.”
The original stipulations of the funds were that they could only be spent on real estate purchases over time. However, according to a statement, when the pandemic hit, Durkan’s office stopped looking for opportunities for where the money would go, and instead, used the funds to rebalance their budget.
The statement said:
“Seeing as the $30 million had not yet been spent – and investment areas had not yet been identified – the City used the money to help rebalance the budget and address our $300 million revenue shortfall,”
King County Equity Now has been asking the city for four properties in the Central District that they would like to see turned into equitable development for Black communities.
K. Wyking Garrett, president and CEO of Africatown Community Land Trust, one of the organizations in King County Equity Now, says he doesn’t know why the money wasn’t spent on those.
He said:
“The opportunities are in front of us and we really need the city to stay the course towards what we’ve heard about equitable development,”
Mayor Durkan’s 2021 budget still maintains some funding for social initiatives.
According to King5, Durkan has set aside $100 million for The Equitable Communities Initiative (ECI) which is investment into BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) communities in the budget. Her office says this money is “to address the harms caused by centuries of systemic racism and oppression.”
The money will be split up into four focus areas: Building Opportunity and an Inclusive Economy; Community Wealth Building and Preserving Cultural Spaces; Community Wellness; and Climate Justice and Green New Deal.
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