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Trends vindicate former Seattle police chief who resigned over defund movement: ‘People want safety’

November 11, 2021 | | Print Article

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(Video: Fox News)

Seattle’s first-ever black police chief, Carmen Best, who voluntarily resigned last year in the face of the Seattle City Council voting to defund the police, isn’t surprised by the reversing trend surrounding the now-ailing defund movement.

Speaking on Fox News’ “Fox News Primetime” this Wednesday, she noted that it was inevitable because “people want safety,” period.

“I think that the pendulum is swinging a little bit more to a more moderate and centrist position. … You don’t hear as much about defunding the police department, because people want safety,” she said, adding that this applies to all races.

“It doesn’t matter what race they are. They want to be able to call 911 and know, if they’re a victim of a crime, that someone’s going to show up and try to resolve it,” she noted.

Indeed, polls have repeatedly shown that even black communities prefer more police funding and presence than less.

Yet the Seattle City Council, which currently is comprised primarily of far-left radicals (though last Tuesday’s election is poised to change this somewhat come January), have been relentlessly pursuing the defunding of the police.

Just this week, the council announced plans to cut an additional $10 million from the police’s budget.

Even the city’s Democrat mayor, Jenny Durkan, cried foul.

“City’s Council’s previous promise to defund SPD by 50%, their treatment of Chief Best and their previous layoff budget led to an exodus of 325 officers from SPD in the last two years. Multiple plans to address hiring and retention proposed by chief [Adrian] Diaz and I have been repeatedly rejected by a majority of council,” she reportedly said in a statement.

“And just yesterday, another council member proposed blocking my emergency hiring proposal that has already generated a tenfold increase in applications to 911 dispatch positions in Seattle. Continued cuts to SPD and underfunding the 911 center are not a plan for true public safety,” she added.

Seattle is currently facing an unprecedented crime wave as the city’s far-left council members keep doubling, tripling and quadrupling down against anti-crime, pro-police legislation.

Best isn’t surprised.

“The rise in crime and the things that have occurred subsequent to [her leaving] were totally predictable and foreseeable,” she said on Fox News.

She also explained why she’d left in the first place.

“I felt like it was a personal, you know, sort of attack on me personally, because I was disagreeing with the policy that they were putting out about defunding the department, laying off officers. And so arbitrarily just out of nowhere, there was a suggestion that they cut my salary,” she said.

“And while I didn’t like that suggestion, that’s not the reason I ultimately left. It was I just couldn’t stay there in an organization where they were going to, you know, strip so many officers of their jobs,” she added.

But it’s not that she’s a “police can do no wrong” type person. She recognizes that the police have their own flaws, and she believes solutions are needed. Just not defunding the police.

“Of course we need to work out some of the issues and make sure that there’s a fair and just response for everybody, but people do want to have a police response. So I think now we’re looking at how we can utilize other services to help augment maybe some of the issues that are happening. But certainly not defunding the police department,” she explained.

Nor mandating that police officers be vaccinated. While Best didn’t make this point, others have in recent days, ever since a vaccine mandate for all public workers went into effect last month as per an order issued by Gov. Jay Inslee, a far-left Democrat.

In response, droves of police officers — as well as other public workers — began resigning en masse, triggering a shortage of cops in the process.

But as noted by Jason Rantz of KTTH Radio, nobody in power — save the essentially powerless mayor — seems to care, including the majority of Seattle’s media, which according to Rantz is as biased as (if not more-so than) the national establishment press …

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Vivek Saxena
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