In the south Everett (a northern suburb of Seattle) Fred Meyers supermarket I came upon two cashiers discussing a recent incident at the home of one. A homeless drug addict had walked into her home demanding money,. Somehow she got him to leave. The other said, I have been thinking about buying a gun. I never wanted one, but things are getting crazy and the police never come.
Then she mentioned that across from her house there was an abandoned house used by squatters and drug dealers and the police refuse to remove the squatters, because squatters have rights.
I mentioned that the house I sold in Seattle a few years ago, just as it closed, was invaded by a gang flash mob that trashed it, knocking out walls and ceilings, pissing everywhere and breaking beer bottles all around. And all the Seattle Police Department would say was “Gangs have rights too.” When I said gangs do not have rights, the police officer criticized my “attitude” and hung up on me.
On the way out of the store, I passed a police officer. I asked if there was so much crime here and he said, well, yes, shoplifting. The store loses a million dollars a year to shoplifting.
When I went to another nearby store and mentioned some of this, someone said, oh yeah, I used to work a second job at the Macy’s in the (South Everett) Everett Mall, and every evening a wave of homeless drug addicts would march in and we would have to follow them around, sometimes for hours. After they would get away with something, they would walk right back in to get the cash for the stuff they stole. Everyone said that the store would close down because of massive losses to shoplifting, and that is why it finally was closed. (It did close and it almost killed the mall, which now depends on a Sears with mainly empty shelves, and lots of Somali women employees in hijabs.)
South Everett is overrun by gangs and addicts and homeless and almost nightly ferocious murders and the famous tweaker-cam (which recently recorded a beating murder of one addict by another): Of course, the police just shrug and do nothing.
On the same day that Seattle Police announced that they had finally met the Obama-era policing guidelines on being nice to criminals of color, overseen by Judge Robart, who chants “Black Lives Matter” in court and who was the first judge to block Trump’s Muslim pause Executive Order, there were three gunfights in Seattle. When the news bothered to ask, the local people all said, yeah the police won’t do anything.
Homeless encampments are increasingly scenes of gunfights as gangs fight over the drug trade and the profits from kidnapped, underage (runaways?) drug-addicted slave prostitutes.
At the King County courthouse in downtown Seattle, violent gangs of addicts rob and beat people maneuvering around the piles of human excrement on the sidewalks, in order to show up for jury duty. Even a judge was beaten by the main entrance to the courthouse by homeless drug addicts. When the judges complained, Seattle Police observed it wan’t any worse there than in any other part of the city. The City Council even rejected a plea to hose off the sidewalks, because a Black councilman claimed his grandfather had been hosed down by racist cops in Alabama, sixty years earlier. Maybe seventy years ago. Or maybe he just saw it on the History Channel. So the excrement remains, because it would be racist to remove it.
A friend in a suburb of Portland, Oregon observes:
I was in the local Fred Meyer not long ago with a friend at about midnight, and there were tweaker women walking through filling up a shopping cart, which they would then walk out of the store with. They can’t do anything to stop them and the cops will do nothing, etc. The tweakers do this routinely. So we walked up to the tweakers and took the cart, just pushed the cart full of stuff with us and walked off to the front desk and parked it up there. The gals working there were grateful, and the tweakers outraged, but it happens all the time.