By Steve Pomper
I’ll concede that some people are unable to get it due to diminished cognitive abilities or some other non-preventable condition. Everyone else has no excuse and can get it—if they want to.
By get it, I mean understanding the cause and effect of your choices. For example, why will a city’s residents repeatedly choose leaders who behave contrary to their own best interests?
Is it because, like a sports team, people will support leaders who are on “their team” no matter what they do, even if it’s contrary to their best interests, just because—well, the leader is not the “other team.”
It’s natural to support your sports teams, win or lose, right or wrong, but not life or death. The consequences aren’t life or death for a sports team (although being a Boston sports fan, sometimes it seems so), but they are for government leaders.
Also, while your team may affect your emotional state (some of us more often than others), it won’t affect your general well-being or your finances, unless you’ve made a bad bet. Your sports team will not raise your taxes, make decisions affecting your daily life, or enact legislation or policies that increase crime.
But isn’t that how some people look at the people they choose for public office? Even when “your team” no longer represents your values, do they browbeat, intimidate, or even frighten you into remaining loyal to “the team,” but you still choose them for leadership positions?
I spent my cop career listening to people lament increasing crime. They said this with a backdrop of signs and bumper stickers in their yards, on their houses, and affixed to their cars, supporting anti-police folks for various offices.
It’s a strange dichotomy because, often, these residents are smart, decent people, but they’re co-conspirators in their own brainwashing. They’d even criticize the police to me and justify it by saying they didn’t mean me. “You’re one of the good ones,” they’d assure me. They’d have changed their minds if they were on the wrong end of my ticket book. They play games in their minds to justify who they support, even if they’re not anti-cop but the person they support is.
Media recently reported that public safety is the primary concern of Seattle residents. Surprise, surprise. Residents commented as if they had nothing to do with the city’s public safety deterioration. This doesn’t describe every resident. Even in Seattle, some folks haven’t supported the anti-police, anti-law-and-order officials for which Seattle has become infamous—though it has improved a bit.
However, I am referring to most residents because the proof is in the anti-police people they’ve been selecting for office over recent decades, which has brought them the public safety crisis they are now so concerned about. Now, some of these “leaders” are still acting to chase good cops out the door and slam it before any new cops can enter.
For example, I recently wrote about a retired Seattle Police Department (SPD) assistant chief who pointed out in a Seattle Times Op-Ed that even as the city attempts to retain officers and lure others to join with bonuses of $50,000, some officials are still doing things that provoke officers to leave and repel others from applying.
KTTH 770 Radio host Jason Rantz recently addressed an example of this phenomenon. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, a perennial political weed, who’s long portrayed himself as a liberal moderate and has feigned support for law enforcement when it’s politically expedient.
As Rantz points out, “Instead of letting the police handle recruitment, his [Harrell’s] office is clumsily leading the effort, and the results have been predictably disastrous.” How could the results be anything else? How can people outside a profession choose who’s best to perform the duties of that profession?
What were some of Harrell & Company’s initial brainstorms? Well, for one, the mayor’s office reportedly “demanded” fewer white men or images of “military bearing…” appear “in recruitment materials.”
Aside from requiring fewer men of any specific race being racist, when I was an FTO, the best students, male and female, black and white or other, tended to be those with a military background. Of course, I had non-military student officers who were also excellent, but I don’t recall one student with “military bearing” who didn’t excel. Oh, and even most of my white male student officers were pretty good, too.
But it gets worse. While saying he supports the police and law and order, Mayor Harrell, according to Rantz, has apparently endorsed an uber-cop-hating police abolitionist (socialist/Marxist) for the state legislature. Is that true? Suspiciously, while Harrell won’t confirm the endorsement, reportedly, he also won’t deny it.
Seattle extremist activist Shaun Scott, who has a PhD in cop-hating, said Mayor Harrell endorsed him for the state legislature. As Rantz described Scott, “In 2020, amid the so-called ‘Summer of Love,’ Scott was all-in on the Defund the Police campaign, even calling for the abolition of the SPD.”
Why is Seattle’s public safety crisis so dire? Look at anti-cop extremists like Scott, whose “team” many city residents believe they are on despite their wanting better public safety while Scott’s stated goal is to eradicate it, locally and statewide.
Nothing Scott supports concerning criminal justice will result in enhanced public safety. How do we know? Because it hasn’t yet—anywhere, and there’s no evidence it ever will. Wanting to abolish the police isn’t just community activism; it’s delusional and dangerous extremism.
During former Mayor Jenny Durkan’s “Summer of Love,” Scott wrote, “Should Seattle’s political leadership not make use of the mandate to defund and dismantle racist policing once and for all, the results could be catastrophic for the populations most likely to be subject to racist policing in the first place.”
Cop-haters like him come to power because city and state residents continue to support “their guy” because they believe he or she is on “their team” regardless of the self-harm that results. There are still too many people in cities like Seattle who see supporting the police as a detriment to running for office.
Here’s an example: Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison, city government’s lone Republican, was criticized on the campaign trail simply for being photographed with Seattle Police Guild President Mike Solan.
Finally, here are two additional examples of how Seattle encourages current officers to leave the job and works against recruiting efforts by repelling qualified lateral and recruit candidates for the police department.
There’s the stunningly effective, pro-law enforcement national political watchdog from Seattle, Christopher Rufo, who has leveled education establishment elites (people who also hate cops) for their cultural Marxism, anti-Semitism, anti-law and order, and general hypocrisy. In 2018, he attempted a run for the Seattle City Council as a commonsense, pro-criminal justice system candidate.
As Rufo confirmed to me in a phone conversation when I attempted to convince him to stay in the race, he said his decision wasn’t just about him. He said he was forced from the race by an onslaught of intolerant leftist, cop-hating activist thugs who were harassing and threatening violence (including sexual) not only against him but also targeting his wife and their then-eight-year-old child. KUOW-NPR also reported the story.
And, more recently, with an even greater direct effect on keeping and attracting cops, reportedly, officers are not getting paid. Rantz also reported on this story. “Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office push[ed] forward… a new payroll system, despite years of warnings that it couldn’t handle police payroll.”
The police union is now threatening legal action. Problems include officers receiving only half their pay, overtime pay “vanishing,” “paid off” deferred comp loans still being deducted, and city retirement contributions missing or inaccurate. Just what the current cops needed to happen, and any prospective recruits wanted to hear, right? Not! Sadly, all of this was preventable.
In another spot-on example that just popped onto my radar screen, Natalie Fertig at Politico just reported that residents in Seattle’s neighbor to the south, similarly besieged Portland, wants a change. Portlanders voted to toss out their government structure and recreate it. Politico says the impetus for a massive crime spike was passing Measure 110, in 2020, which decriminalized all drugs.
But here’s a perfect example of people who don’t “get it.” This law that helped create the crime spike, according to Fertig, “was backed by 74 percent of Multnomah County’s residents.” And she further emphasizes my point. “Voters couldn’t — or at least didn’t — anticipate how this policy change would reshape a city already strapped for money, dealing with a public health crisis and confronting rising rates of homelessness and fentanyl abuse.
Back in Seattle, residents have expressed that public safety is their primary concern, meaning they want more cops, their laws to be enforced equally, and to see vigorous and fair prosecutions. But city leaders continue doing things that make both retaining and attracting cops nearly impossible. And both retaining experienced veteran cops and attracting qualified lateral transfers and new recruits are necessary for public safety to thrive.
We must ask what kind of people do that to a community? It seems to me, people who don’t like their constituents very much—or, at least, don’t respect them.
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