Seattle City Councilmember Rob Saka thinks now is the time for the city to acknowledge the “failure of defund movement.”
The West Seattle representative’s symbolic resolution that “reiterates support for first responders, acknowledges failure of defund movement and embraces focus on underserved communities” will come in front of the council’s public safety committee Tuesday.
“This Council, in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office has made improving public safety an absolute priority,” Saka said in the announcement of the proposed resolution. “This is finally the time to acknowledge the lessons of the past and pivot decisively toward a better, future-focused public safety model. We are committed to making everyone in our community feel safe and to enhancing our accountability system.”
Mayor Bruce Harrell is also ready to declare a new pro-police era in Seattle.
“I join the City Council in celebrating the dedication and hard work of our public safety professionals and in recognizing the importance of a diversified emergency response system,” the mayor said about the proposed resolution. “I look forward to working with our police department, accountability partners, and Council members as we move to finalize requirements under the consent decree.”
The push from two Black leaders of one of the most progressive major cities in the country comes as Seattle City Hall attempts to walk a fine line standing up for civil rights while also staying out of the MAGA crosshairs.
The uneasy balance will be on display Tuesday. After the public safety committee discusses Saka’s new anti-defund resolution in the morning, the full council Tuesday afternoon will include a vote “reaffirming The City of Seattle as a Welcoming City; supporting access to reproductive health care services and gender-affirming treatment in Seattle; extending the responsibility of City employees to protect the provision of reproductive health care services and gender-affirming treatment.”
Saka’s proposed resolution focuses on how Seattle spends on public safety:
A RESOLUTION acknowledging that Seattle residents, workers, students, and visitors deserve to be safe and feel safe; recognizing and appreciating first responders from the Seattle Police Department, Seattle Fire Department, and the Community Assisted Response and Engagement Department; affirming the City’s obligations to fully support, train, and equip first responders; committing to a diversified public safety response system; acknowledging the City’s actions to reform the Police Department under the federal Consent Decree; committing to resolve the remaining issues of the Consent Decree; and affirming the essential services provided by the Police Department.
While much has been made of Seattle’s defund movement and the Seattle City Council’s efforts to move public safety spending away from SPD, many of the efforts shaped at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement protests and marches were either quickly reversed or never implemented. Today, the longest lasting outcomes from 2020 have been the move of 911 dispatch out of the department and the creation of the new CARE Department and its “community crisis responders” teams. The CARE Department has a budget around $30 million — SPD’s is nearing $400 million.
The message from Saka and the council arrives as the Seattle Police Department has new leadership under interim Chief Shon Barnes who has made recruitment and retention his primary focus. SPD is forecasting the department to climb over 1,000 officers in service by 2026 — up 13% from 2024. The department reports it made 84 successful hires in 2024 — one more officer than it lost — barely reversing a long term trend.
Paying cops more is helping. Seattle ranked 29th in the region to start 2024 for base pay for its new recruits an issue the bonus program won’t address. The city and the Seattle Police Officers Guild arrived at a new contract last spring that boosted pay 23%.
A federal consent decree was also lifted from the Seattle Police Department in 2023, ending 12 years of controls and oversight after a civil rights investigation found evidence of excessive force and biased policing.
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No one forced the police to abandon their precinct in Capitol Hill…blue flu was just as contagious as COVID in some parts of the city over the past 5 years, yet we like to ignore that entire dynamic and choose to focus on the bizarre canard of an “understaffed” department. No one believes that bs–as if there’s a magic number of cops that will fix everything. No, unfortunately the police have just realized they can’t solve the problems that greedy landlords created and the mayor and council have OK’d, and instead are relying on their organized labor union (i use that word “union” here very lightly, as they are only a union in technicality not class solidarity) to neglect parts of the city with the most inequality-based crime and strife. Things that will continue until inequality is dealt with at a grassroots level.
The failure of the “defund movement” was that it failed to actually defund the police. They are an overpaid, bloated, corrupt department of the city that big business relies on to maintain the mass outrage over the growing inequality we all see everyday.
Demilitarize the police and bring back beat cops on foot if you want to inspire community trust and foster positive engagement.
What defund movement?
Seattle Police didn’t even get defunded. They just had some meter maids move from under police to some other department.
Saka is an idiot.
Now we’re in the OVERfunding portion of Seattle city government as demanded by our current council of Republicrats.
Yup…and they stole 309 million from housing and clean energy for ghost cops not even here. Back pay and raises for those that sat out during Covid. And of course. Pet causes of the alt right council.
Exactly this. I am so sick of listening to this garment-rending wailing about a supposed “police defunding,” when all that happened was a ledger move of parking enforcement, which last I heard had been reversed because it was mismanaged so badly.
Sounds like the resolution to defund SPD was poorly conceived and its followthrough was unsuccessful at making even superficial changes
And this is what the every commenter is being defensive and protective about. It would be a lot more compelling if it were some form of success instead of different grades of embarrassment
Rob Saka is the biggest tool in all of city council history
Seattle City Councilmember Rob Saka thinks now is the time for the city to acknowledge the “failure of defund movement.”
It was a campaign slogan! George Floyds was the “movement”
We just fixed the cops. Federal watch and raises and it’s working. We DO NOT NEED TO DO MORE YET! Let this new ‘fix’ take effect as designed?
This is business owners doing everything they can to instantly fix their problem and nobody else’s. Stealing 309 million from housing is the opposite of stopping crime and homelessness.
Cops simply went on quiet quit mode. Someone got killed over it at CHBP. Yet when CHAZ was a thing? They gassed and used force to break up what they said was a mob. Hoax played saying MAGA was headed toward the CHAZ. They WANT people to suffer. Retaliate for the bad attitudes towards cops that can’t police themselves.
It’s coming down to the cost of high paid cops and the cost of housing. They picked the cops. Everyone remember this at the ballot box. Harrel Kowed to Trump.
Police were never defunded.
My god, why is this lie and gaslight constantly happening in Seattle?
There was no defunding. The police budget went up during this so-called movement. What a silly resolution.
“embraces focus on underserved communities”
Please tell me that he’s actually talking about underserved communities, which is the majority of Seattle. Not the tiny percentage of so-called underserved communities who have been getting more funds directed towards them than anybody else for my entire life? In my lifetime “underserved communities” is a racial code phrase for communities that actually get more than everybody else and have for many many decades.
“In my lifetime “underserved communities” is a racial code phrase for communities that actually get more than everybody else and have for many many decades.”
Yup..Trickle down reaganomics is why.
Yes it’s definitely the fault of somebody who hasn’t been in power for 40 years. It couldn’t be the entitlement to be given favoritism on a systemic basis that is behind this.
look at taxes before and after Reagan. Then come back. He decimated revenue. Crashed the economy.
Packing this resolution full of progressive buzzwords is like trying to disavow the Cultural Revolution while simultaneously insisting that Mao was right about everything. The defund movement is the natural result of people who actually believe these slogans, if you don’t support it then maybe rethink your sloganeering.
“Mayor Bruce Harrell is also ready to declare a new pro-police era”
Well of course he is.
the strategy is boost the cops to overinflated. Then when progressives come in? Anything will be “defund” again because the lemmings respond to that with anger. Anger creates votes.
Seems like a lot of people in this comment section forgot that the city council pledged to cut police funding by 50%, even though the actual cuts were only ~17%. Between 2020-2022 nearly 25% of SPD officers left their jobs. Crime increased and response times increased. The political winds shifted as a result. The budget was restored and now exceeds what it was in 2020, but to say nothing was defunded is disingenuous.
Ummm…It was given huge pay increases for cops who did nothing. Sat at home.
“Between 2020-2022 nearly 25% of SPD officers left their jobs“
I dare you to tell us that they left because of defunding and not because a bunch of Trumpsters didn’t want to get the COVID vaccine.
The defund movement resulted in a lot of police leaving the force in Seattle. It was an attitude as much as something financial. So, you can look at the money spent, or you can look at the level of staffing compared to a few years before, as well as decades before. Whether or not it’s better to have more or fewer police is a different argument. There is a correlation between staffing levels and certain types of crime
Police having their feelings hurt are cops we do not need.
Walk around downtown or little Saigon and you will see how wrong you are.
O300 Marines go everywhere as hated. Only they want us dead. We arrest people and such. We provide food and security. Shovel out money to them. And they want to kill us all for allah.
So sitting at home protesting Covid shots and getting a pay raise retroactively?
Explain what it’s called then if it’s not spoiled.Do we need approval to arrest people now? They are blind until someone apologises? You do not get it.
By the way?
The entire nation is not a cop fan during George Floyd. When have cops been revered by the public they serve? The MAGA is all snuggly with cops. Then kills them in a violent coup attempt.
There’s a tough circle to square there.
Wait…did the police defund themselves by leaving the force because they didn’t want to get a COVID vaccination?
This is a performative waste of time, like all resolutions that don’t have the effect of law, such as the one in 2020 where the progressive city council committed to defunding SPD by 50%
Yeah, no shit it failed because there wasn’t much of anything to it but ‘Please for the love of the city, stop throwing money at police and throw it at anything else remotely good’, and that should have been a conscience check by the seated, but they have none. None of America has one, and all these local moderates and centrists got exactly what they wanted out of the country going on 5 years even though they say they haven’t.
Instead of throwing money at the police we threw money at organizations that exploited social justice in order to get money in power. The CEO of Community Passageways works one hour a week and makes $150k a year according to tax returns. The CEO of Africa town makes two and a half times the average salary ($250k). We allowed organizations to take over who claimed they do not blame criminals for their behavior but instead blame society. It wasn’t even saying that the criminal was not entirely responsible. But saying that the criminal was not responsible at all. This was not the step up for anybody except for those who made a very good living doing nothing But spreading their self-serving, nonsensical and very racist ideology.
Poverty…That’s the issue. Not some dude getting a salary. It’s the people who are uber wealthy that are the problem.
I’m sure this will be a controversial take on this site but whether any money was actually removed from SPD is irrelevant because the end goal was still accomplished. The goal of defund was to reduce the size of the force. In 2020, the council committed to cutting the force by 50%. When they realized it was against the city charter and probably illegal because they wanted to do it based on race they backed away. However the damage was done and many officers retired or left leaving us with a drastically undersized agency today. Seattle has one of the lowest per capita police forces in the country (right now it sits around 1.3 officers per 1000 residents whereas the national average is 2.3) and that is directly a result of the toxicity and rhetoric from the defund movement. In 2022, when SPD was unable to fill open positions the council abrogated the funding for those positions which is essentially defunding. Feel free to argue semantics but don’t gaslight people into thinking the defund movement had no impact on public safety in Seattle.
Political slogans are not laws or actions. They are slogans.
“The goal of defund was to reduce the size of the force.”
If cops had their feelings hurt? We do not want them.
We work our whole lives with nothing to show for it. Putting up with assholes all day everyday. But we are not wealthy enough to quit when we do not want to take a Covid shot? Then get back pay, retroactive raises.
Yeah…Only cops get that pampering for their feelings. The rest suffer.
I’d say it was a bit more than having their feelings hurt. If the executive of your work place stated openly that their goal is to eliminate your job and put you out of work (for idealogical reasons no less) would you sit around and wait for the other shoe to drop or take action and proactively start looking for work? Good officers with options took the latter route. Officer with poor records had to stay put. The net result is that we have a reduced force with a lower quality of officer. Great job!
right..”lower quality officers”
Sooo? The cops we had were “lower quality” due to low pay and being criticised?
It is absolutely incredible how you and me, posters on a community blog, should just grin and bare it at all times, but those softies with weapons? District13Tribute has one shoulder under the palanquin already.
I don’t think saying that they had their feelings hurt accurately describes what happened. Nobody wants to work in an environment where they are openly maligned and disparaged. Reading the comments here is a reflection of the environment in which they are being asked to do their jobs. Unfortunately, the best ones left because they could get paid more and appreciated
Naw…”The best ones” did not leave. They sat at home protesting Covid shots. They left because the dept. was under federal investigation.
Now? We got cops all over the nation “bonus hopping”. Spend two years. Then move on. That’s become a thing. I guess those “best” cops are really just scammers with no real connection to the community.
The “best” cops? They stayed here. They want to be a part of the change. They are committed to the long haul. Not fly by night cops who collect money and do little else.
We mostly do work in those conditions.
I’m OK with any City Hall resolution which gets us enough SPD to re-start patrols for the whole city, not just hot spot emphasis patrols. Patrols prevent crime. Only enough cops to respond when called only documents crime.
Including stealing 309 million from housing and clean energy to pay for them?