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As is well known, crime follows economic poverty, not the other way around. Do you think that this is more about the massive economic downturn we are experienci

• throwawaysea 6y ago
  It’s been an issue in Seattle and these other cities well before COVID, so my instinct is it doesn’t have to do with economic downturns. These cities had strong economies for the last decade but my take is that their permissive criminal justice policies induced a large population of drug addicted vagrants and other homeless cohorts to migrate here, since they know they’ll be left alone to do whatever they want. Thus far the city has not even collected strong data on who the homeless are and where they come from, and instead they tout self reported data from an annual “point in time” survey. Homeless advocacy groups coach survey respondents to claim they are from here so that they’ll garner more sympathy and political support. It’s hard to characterize the problem in provable ways when the authorities are not interested in the truth. As for policing: Seattle’s police force was too small even before the calls for defunding. It severely lagged the median police officer counts among cities in America. That, combined with an ideologically driven city attorney’s office, has led to a revolving door of criminals that signals to other criminals that they’ll face no consequences for their actions. That in turn has induced more and more criminality.