After budget cuts and months of Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioting, Seattle’s Police Chief indicated Wednesday that nearly 20 percent of the city’s police officers have left in the past year and a half.
“The support that we had in my generation of policing is no longer there,” veteran Officer Clayton Powell told CBS News, concurring with Interim Police Chief Adrian Diaz’s assessment. More than 260 officers have quit the force since the beginning of last year.
Following the death of George Floyd, protests and riots erupted in Seattle. Amid radicals looting and attacking police, Seattle’s homicide rate spiked to a 26-year high. Nonetheless, the Seattle council attempted to slash the police department’s budget once more, but to no avail. During the particular uptick in crime, the number of deployable officers in the left-wing stronghold was about 1,200. This is the lowest since 1990.
Jason Rantz, a Seattle-based talk show host on KTTH Radio and a frequent guest on Fox News, told The Federalist that “the numbers you’re getting only tell a small part of the picture.”
“You have dozens of officers who are burning their sick and vacation time and will exit the force afterward,” Rantz said. “You have officers who are applying elsewhere and booked to turn in their equipment and uniform, which means they will be gone but haven’t yet been reported as part of the separations yet.”
Diaz was asked by CBS whether the number of officers leaving the force is concerning, to which he said, “It does because we saw our shootings go up. We saw our homicides go up.” Indeed, there was a 61 percent spike in murders in 2020 from a year prior. In a memorandum on Jan. 11, Diaz acknowledged the tremendous spike.
Carmen Best, the former Police Chief, left the force after 28 years in March. She announced her decision in August 2020 as a protest against the $3 million worth of funding that the city slashed. 100 officers were either laid off or could not keep working at the department after the budget cut.
“We will hit close to or exceed 300 separations by the end of this month since the crisis accelerated last year. This is unheard of. Consequently, you have extremely low staffing numbers in this city, at times below minimal staffing numbers,” Rantz told The Federalist.
Cities across the U.S. have moved to defund the police and it has only exacerbated crime. From Minneapolis, New York City, Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles — far-left Democrats have stripped jobs from officers and harmed communities more susceptible to have rioting and looting.
