Seattle Police Department staff numbers dropped to a 30-year low this summer, in part because of a defunding effort led by City Council member Kshama Sawant, a self-described socialist.
Crime, meanwhile, reached its highest levels in almost a decade and a half in the Pacific Northwest metropolis, according to The Center Square.
Now, as Seattle tries to cope with more lawlessness using less law enforcement, Sawant insists the police force expend precious resources finding out who’s leaving bags of feces on her lawn.
According to KCPQ-TV, Sawant wrote a letter to city officials saying the Seattle Police Department is “failing to investigate” several incidents of vandalism involving thrown bags of excrement and a reported email that might be connected to them.
KCPQ reported on Friday that the councilwoman claimed “bags of human feces have been thrown into her yard six times, most recently on Oct. 13. One of these instances was followed by a threatening email sent to Sawant’s city council office, she says, calling her ‘the queen of s***’ and saying ‘you can sit on your throne of human excrement.’”
Sawant said that after the fourth incident, an officer asked her husband, “What do you expect us to do?”
“The events seem likely to be politically motivated, given their targeted nature and repetition,” her letter read.
“Most concerning is the very high likelihood that this extreme and hostile behavior is politically motivated, and could turn into more serious and dangerous harassment,” Sawant wrote. “Unfortunately, it does not appear that the Seattle Police Department agrees that this is in any way a serious matter. I was informed yesterday, just five days after an investigation was opened on October 13th, that the case is being inactivated and no longer pursued at this time.”
“There is obviously a glaring inconsistency between this approach and the way in which former Mayor [Jenny] Durkan, after a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest was held a short distance from her mansion, was provided with a 24-hour stakeout for a full year,” she said.
“As a socialist City Councilmember who has participated in Black Lives Matter protests, I am being told that my case of six threatening incidents involving human excrement doesn’t merit even a serious investigation, let alone protection.”
On one hand, there’s probably something to be said for the fact that Durkan didn’t deserve around-the-clock protection from the protesting rabblement that she enabled, so there’s that. (Although it’s worth noting that, according to The Seattle Times, Sawant was the most prominent member of the protesters who marched to Durkan’s house from the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a six-block lawless compound set up in the middle of Seattle during 2020’s George Floyd protests.)
On the other hand, there’s also something to be said from the officer who asked what, exactly, Sawant expects from Seattle’s terminally stretched police force.
“Sawant’s request comes as the department is dangerously understaffed, thanks to her efforts to defund and dismantle the department since 2020,” said Jason Rantz, a conservative talk radio host on Seattle’s KTTH-AM.
“The SPD has lost at least 135 officers this year — nearly 500 since 2020 — and cannot meet staffing minimums across any precinct and watch,” he said. “Concurrently, the city is experiencing a crime surge that’s resulted in a number of emphasis patrols — when they can spare the staff — in various neighborhoods.”
Sources told Rantz that the councilwoman is demanding police officers be stationed outside her house between the hours of 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. until the individual behind this is caught, although neither Sawant nor the police would confirm this.
While it’s always a good day, as a writer, when one doesn’t need to descend into scatological matters, literally or figuratively, this apparently isn’t going to be that day for me — so it’s worth noting, for starters, that fecal matter doesn’t necessarily have a political origin, whether it be human or not.
Furthermore, if there’s any evidence the feces-bagger knew he was leaving organic matter at the house of a Seattle council member and was doing it because he wanted to target a socialist, neither Sawant nor the Seattle police has produced anything aside from the alleged email sent to her office.
Given that there’s no shortage of property crime or unaddressed mental health issues in the Pacific Northwest city, intent is somewhat germane here.
Should police work overtime to help Sawant?
If Sawant wants special coverage from an understaffed police department she helped defund, the councilwoman should be able to at least clear a bar of proving it’s not garden-variety vandalism.
A statement from the department indicated it had “not found any evidence this case would meet the city or state standards for hate crime laws, but SPD will follow available leads should new information arise. The department encourages anyone with additional information about this case to contact police.”
There’s also no proof to substantiate Sawant’s claim that since this incident has been covered by several conservative publications, it means information “was apparently leaked to the right-wing media by Seattle Police.”
“Needless to say, it is disturbing that right-wing media, including a police-run website named [Law Officer], portrays these attacks on my home as justified against an elected representative who has the temerity to criticize the police or attempt to hold them accountable,” the councilwoman said in her letter.
“That is certainly a dangerous direction, especially if it is embraced by police and de facto supported by SPD leadership and the city’s Democratic Party establishment.”
However, about two minutes of reading puts the lie to this: Law Officer’s article on Sawant’s allegations and police-protection demands are based on a report by The Post Millennial, and neither “portrays these attacks on my home as justified against an elected representative who has the temerity to criticize the police or attempt to hold them accountable,” although both outlets certainly note the grim irony.
There’s obviously nothing that could justify these alleged attacks — which is why, of course, most Americans support law enforcement power commensurate with the needs of their locales. During the febrile summer of 2020, few elected officials induced more otherwise-sensible people to downgrade their estimates of what constituted appropriate policing levels than Kshama Sawant.
Now, as Seattle’s crime rate has surged and its capacity to deal with criminality has plummeted, she wants whoever left these nauseating packages for her to be treated by SPD as if he or she is public enemy No. 1.
The reason this individual constitutes a threat, the councilwoman posits, is that an alleged email to her office may be related to the incidents and thus this is politically motivated intimidation on par with large protests outside the former mayor’s home.
(Protests that Sawant helped lead, it must be noted, even as Durkan was employing similarly dire rhetoric in which she chastised Sawant for aiding and abetting intimidation tactics that “put families and children at risk,” according to KING-TV.)
Heaven forfend that Sawant think this member of the right-wing media is portraying these acts of vandalism as justified. She shouldn’t expect anyone to be unduly alarmed, however — particularly considering her role in normalizing criminality in Seattle.
