Liberalism is destroying Seattle and the reckoning is here. Robert Merry writes:
Seattle is not a high-crime city, at least in terms of violent crime. But it is grappling with a homelessness crisis that is sapping civic stability and fostering a large increase in petty lawbreaking. Meanwhile, city officials such as Durkan and Best seem incapable of addressing this erosion in any serious way.
In his searing documentary of last year, “Seattle is Dying,” KOMO-TV’s Eric Johnson painted a dire picture by citing police officers who say the city’s lax enforcement regimen has tied their hands, quoting citizens saying they’re fed up with growing theft, and showing the frustrations of local business owners whose livelihoods are threatened by what they consider official inertia in the face of these problems.
Writing on KOMO’s website, Johnson said his documentary was “about citizens who don’t feel safe taking their families into downtown Seattle….about parents who won’t take their children into public parks they pay for. It’s about filth and degradation all around us. And theft and crime. It’s about people who don’t feel protected anymore, who don’t feel like their voices are being heard.”
Johnson’s documentary was aired in March of last year, some seven months before the Seattle City Council elections. It touched a nerve among many Seattleites and kicked up gale-force winds of controversy throughout the city and beyond. In the end, though, it didn’t have much impact. It will take a lot more civic chaos, dysfunction, and violence for this city to make the connection between that decay and the kind of leadership it so avidly favors. Seattle may or may not be dying, but it is in a far more ominous state of civic health than most of its citizens realize.
[Robert Merry, "Seattle’s Liberal Reckoning," The American Conservative, February 6]
