Seattle mayor begs for more cops after six weekend shootings, 250 officers gone in 17 months

Democrat Seattle Mayor Jenny Durken is calling for more police after six shootings over the weekend and a loss of 250 officers within the last 17 months has left her city in chaos.

Five of the six weekend shootings occurred within blocks of one another and left four people dead and seven injured in their wake.

“As a city, we cannot continue on this current trajectory of losing police officers,” Mayor Durkan said at a press conference. “Over the past 17 months, the Seattle Police Department has lost 250 police officers which is the equivalent of over 300,000 service hours. We’re on path to losing 300 police officers.”

Like other Democrat-run metropolitan cities across America, Seattle has seen a drastic reduction in the size of their police force, losing 20 percent of its officers who cite an “anti-police climate” in the city as the prime mover for quitting or retiring early.

She added that her city’s woes are part of a national epidemic that produced more than 900 shootings last week alone.

The total number of people shot this year in Seattle has increased 61% (thus far), significantly more than the already-alarming increase of 33% nationally as compared to the same 7-month time period between 2017 and 2020, according to a Fox News report.

Last year, Durken and the Seattle City Council butted heads over the council’s attempts to defund the police department, with Durken ultimately vetoing the asinine resolution.

But that hasn’t stopped the cops from getting the hell out of Dodge, as it were.

“Not unexpected,” the mayor remarked, “losing these number of officers, when city leaders talk about cutting the department by 50%. You will lose employees. Families need security. Workers, even police officers, need working conditions that support them.”

She continued, “We cannot just cut. We need a plan.”

Tensions heightened last year between police and city officials over the anarchistic “autonomous zone” set up by misguided and mentally deficient liberals who had recently ventured out of their respective mothers’ basements for the first time.

Their attempt to live outside the law resulted in weeks of looting, vandalism and violence, to no one’s surprise but theirs, and forced Mayor Durken to issue an executive order for police to clear the zone after the petulant squatters refused to comply.

Many officers revealed in exit interviews their dismay with conditions in the city, citing a “lack of support” from the government, including Police Chief Carmen Best, who said a “lack of respect” from city leadership was her motivation in retiring early.

The current police chief, Adrian Diaz, is also urging the city to hire new officers to mitigate the scourge communities are suffering.

“I need more officers,” Diaz said, adding that he requires support from the city “making it clear to officers, current and prospective…that they will have our support, financially and otherwise, to do this job well and know they will not be laid off due to budget cuts.”

Recent national polling show unsurprising results, with 90 percent of Americans in Detroit, for instance, saying they want more cops, not less, according to a USA Today poll.

And in Chicago, a city famous for its stupidly optimistic gun restrictions, 79 percent of citizens say they feel much safer when there is a police presence in their neighborhoods, a MacArthur Foundation poll found.

Mayor Durkan said she intends to submit a new plan to hire more police officers and restore the force’s numbers.

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