Stacey Lennox for "PJMedia"
You would think after the insanity that was CHAZ/CHOP, Seattle might have taken a hard look at their relationship with law and order. You would be wrong.
Seattle is in King County, and the County Executive’s Office is moving ahead with plans to “abolish prisons.” A leaked email published by Christopher F. Rufo, contributing editor at City Journal, shows active plans to reduce both adult and juvenile detention and close the county jail in Seattle. The juvenile detention center would be converted to house other programs by 2025. According to Rufo, this plan will eliminate 60% of the county’s jail capacity.
Meanwhile, Seattle’s City Council has majority support—at least seven of the nine members—to slash the police department budget by 50%. Mayor Jenny Durkan has said she would veto this drastic cut, supporting Police Chief Carmen Best. Durkan has committed to cutting $76 million of the $400 million budget,” however. Oddly, the “Summer of Love” mayor may be the only bulwark against complete insanity.
Rolfe has posted more documents from the County Executive’s office. They appear to be for training or other meetings to discuss dismantling the criminal justice system. The woke county leaders would probably call it “reimagining” criminal justice. Others may call it managing a descent into chaos.
The ideas In the document are based on the same horrible ideas as the City of Seattle’s new employee training. The systemic racism, white supremacy, and critical race theory that permeated training, given only to white employees, scream through these plans as well.
The premise of the entire presentation is that white people need to oppress and confine those who do not share their white culture. White culture is described in the same language used in the documents from the Institute for Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. That “teaching tool” has since been removed by the museum. But King County is forging ahead with the concepts.
It is always stunning to note that woke anti-racists speak in a language that white identitarians like Richard Spencer would nod in agreement with. People who actually claim to be white supremacists would gladly claim the majority of items on the list. The problem is that woke anti-racists ascribe the racist beliefs of people like Spencer to all whites using the garbage concept of “Cultural Racism”:
This entire philosophy is a dangerous way to explain disparities and attempt to hang all differences between the races on discrimination. It is pretty apparent that the woke left would like to make these words synonyms. That would make their preferred policies easier to implement. The joining of these ideas has already spawned horrific public policies. The Obama era restorative justice policy on school discipline is just one example.
This wordplay ends all conversations on the root causes of the racial disparities that do exist in wealth, education, and career. Instead, woke leftists just want to be able to look at any institution or policy that does not perfectly mirror the population or have equal outcomes and scream discrimination. This attribution is lazy, ignorant, and not remotely based on reality.
So basically, the King County Executives Office is lazy, ignorant, and living on another planet. They admit in the materials that equity of outcome is the goal. Too many black youths end up in juvenile detention, according to the document. Therefore, the criminal justice system is racist and must be torn down. Without accounting for the behavior that leads to incarceration, they simply declare it discriminatory and rooted in white culture. And shut up, racist.
This next-level insanity is displayed in a single chart. The presentation used the old analogy about the forest and trees to assert that criminal justice needs to be governed by feelings and not data. All that quantitative data is the forest covering profound individual suffering rooted solely in white oppression of minorities.
All of this will lead to suffering and collapse. However, folks in positions of power around Seattle see this as a way to force accountability by ensuring “internal discrimination and racism come to the surface.” They should be very wary of those feelings coming to the surface in extremely dangerous ways. They might want to take an early 20th-century history class. Scapegoating based on immutable characteristics has resulted in genocide more than once.
They also may want to listen to the mayor of San Francisco. In an interview with Vogue, Mayor London Breed bluntly said woke progressive policies don’t work for minority communities. Seattle and King County leaders are woke on steroids. “Abolish Prisons” as a goal will lead to chaos.
However, until it is in the rearview mirror, the rest of us will watch in horror as communities like Seattle circle the drain.
