After Black Lives Matter protesters were urging us all to ‘defund the police’ for nearly 2 years now in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the city of Seattle’s Police force is so understaffed that it hasn’t appointed an investigator to work a single case of sexual assault on an adult in over a month, according to a report.
Thanks to BLM the utterly exhausted department is down to only four investigators on the sexual assault group, almost all committed to child abuse cases, regional NPR station KUOW exposed.
The outlet performed an extensive investigative report and discovered that the Seattle Police Department’s operations and capabilities to mount investigations and enforcement actions of sex crimes have fallen considerably from 2019 to 2022.
The drop has occurred as mass demonstrations over calls to cut financing to police have actually gained traction amongst city authorities.
The Seattle Council in 2020 voted to cut the Police budget and cut officer jobs as the city saw a few of the most violent Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the United States, consisting of a deadly ‘autonomous zone’ without police.
The 1,281 deployable officers the force had at the conclusion of 2019 were decreased to a mere 958 at the end of 2021 after the cuts, KUOW stated.
The city’s brand-new mayor, Bruce Harrell, in February advised the city to hire more police, partially blaming early financing and scaling down for a distressing increase in criminal offenses there.
KUOW’s confidential sources likewise implicated the moderate mayor in pressing the currently over-extended force to meet his campaign pledge to cut down on ‘visible crime’.
The city claimed that an alternative response team that mainly assists in dismantling homeless encampments has 7 officers, almost double the variety of investigators in the sex crimes system.
“A general funding and personnel crisis for the SPD is exacerbated by politics,” a Seattle police employee wrote anonymously on social media, according to KUOW, which said it confirmed its authenticity.
According to the documents supplied to the news outlet, no sexual assault cases including an adult victim have actually been appointed to an investigator for an examination in March.
One source inside the Seattle Police Department informed KUOW:
“The Seattle Police Department sexual assault unit is not at all investigating adult sexual assault reports or cases unless there was an arrest.”
Any lack of urgency around sexual assault investigations or arrests is wholly unacceptable. Sexual assault cases must be exhaustively investigated, and offenders must be held accountable – period. When we assumed office, the SPD Sexual Assault Unit had a depleted number of deployable staff and our evaluation of these limited resources underscore the need for increasing SPD staffing to ensure justice for survivors. Chief Diaz is already in the process of providing our office with detailed and data-based information on the status of sexual assault investigations and what immediate improvements can be made in this area, including additional staff. Our administration’s proposed budget will reflect this priority by increasing detectives, resources, and specific training for investigations.
Sources: Dailywire, KUOW, Komonews
