THAT KIA RIO REALLY SHOULDN’T HAVE WORN ITS SKIRT SO HIGH UP: It’s all the cars’ fault! Progressive Seattle lawmaker who’s pro-defund the police and once condoned looting demands recall of Kias and Hyundais to tackle soaring vehicle theft in city — but refuses to concede soft-on-crime policies are to blame.
A Seattle councilor who backed calls to defund the police has a new idea to cut car thefts – ban the cars.
Tammy Morales is among a group of progressive lawmakers from Democrat cities who have blamed car makers Kia and Hyundai for soaring rates of auto crime, demanding they make their products harder to steal.
The Washington State capital launched a lawsuit against the manufacturers last year after videos of car thefts trended on TikTok, and is now calling for federal regulators to enforce a nationwide recall.
But the socialist leader had little to say about the city’s soft-on-crime policies that have seen car thefts more than double in the last five years.
‘I won’t speak to the motivations of young people, except to say that they are young people and when issued a challenge, especially on something like social media, they like to take it up,’ she said.
The Seattle police department has lost around 600 police officers since the City Council began defunding the department in 2020.
In that time car thefts have jumped from fewer than 4,000 to the record 8,379 recorded last year.
The funding cuts began with the riots that rampaged across the city in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis by a white police officer, riots that Morales was accused of defending.
‘What I don’t want to hear is our constituents told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told looting doesn’t solve anything,’ she told a council meeting at the time.
‘It does make me wonder why looting bothers people so much more than knowing that across the country, black people are being killed around the country.’
Flashback: The Fall of Seattle:
What happened to Seattle? The answer, of course, depends on your politics. In the news section of the Seattle Times, for instance, a reader is unlikely to see any consideration of a link between policing and public safety. “No single cause for 2021’s surge in gunfire in Seattle,” declared a typical recent headline over an article that points only to possibilities such as the pandemic or an unlucky cycle of “retaliatory violence”. But the majority view in Seattle appears to have shifted toward an acknowledgement that the unrest and destruction that occurred after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 marked a turning point and that the city’s policies toward its police force, whose ranks are now depleted, are relevant to understanding the story. What follows, based on interviews with a number of past and present police officers — five of whom are on the record in this article — is an attempt to offer an obvious but unheeded perspective. It is a cop’s-eye view of Seattle’s undoing.
QED: How it started: Seattle City Council approves plan to defund police department, slashes jobs and salaries.
—Fox News, August 10th, 2020.
How it’s going: Seattle police stopped investigating new adult sexual assaults this year, memo shows.
—The Seattle Times, today.