Seattle is Dying
In March an video journalist (Eric Johnson) did an hour long Exposé on Seattle's homelessness problem, documenting facts about how Seattle's compassionate progressivism has resulted in an explosion of homelessness, squalor, disease, crime, and contempt (for government or the homeless). Naturally, he became the problem. If you can't admit the problem, then at least attack the person pointing out the emperors nakedness.
Some points:
- You get what you incentivize: and it's called "Free-attle" because people believe they will get free food, medical treatment, tents, clothes and be free of prosecution for just about everything; and they’re right
- Calling it a "homelessness crisis" is a distraction from the real problem, since it's a substance and mental illness problem. More housing doesn't solve a substance (or mental illness) problem. But the virtue signalers can't get their fix, if they admit their cures are making it worse.
- 100 homeless people in Seattle were responsible for 3,500 criminal cases (2015), of them, only 18 were convicted/punished
- Cops are impotent, because the city has legalized/decriminalized drugs in person quantities -- so they can use/abuse them freely and openly.
- Cops are impotent, because the city prosecutors don't want to address it, so everything is catch and release, even with folks who have 100+ instances of assault, attempted rape, theft, and so on. They're legalizing and normalizing criminality.
- The consequence is cops are quitting, moving or retiring. Why try?
- Then it champions the Rhode Island model as something that's working
Criticisms
The best complaints I found against it were:
- There are no interviews with city officials to get their side
- It dehumanizes people who are homeless
The former is true'ish.... he doesn't spend a lot of time on the city officials view, because we know that side. We've heard it in the papers, their Press conferences, on the radio and so on. So he doesn't repeat the mundane and well known. But he probably should have given them a few minutes total -- their stupidity would have driven his points home even more with how out-of-touch they are.
The latter, is sort of true -- you can't look at how badly some humans live and act, without losing compassion for them. When they start living and acting like animals, people associate them with lower life forms. The funky things is it also humanizes them -- you see moments of lucidity and them behaving well too. Admitting their flaws and sins. So the truth doesn't help as much as it hurts their cause, and the activists hate that truth. Otherwise they might have to re-think their positions on what is compassion.
But most of the complaints against it are just tripe:
- "it claims everywhere else does it better" -- but Seattle is worse than most places except SF, so even if it made that comment, it's more true than false
- "he criminalizes homelessness" -- actually vagrancy is already a crime, but he criminalizes the criminal behavior (the assaults, etc).
- "Johnson ignores the intersectional" causes -- e.g. it's all because of racism, sexism, and other snowflake excuses for individuals bad choices
- "he correlates cause and effect" -- noting that substance abuse or mental illness results in crime, is mean... because it's true.
- It's wrong because it was made by a corporation (Sinclair Broadcast Group) -- so it must be evil
Conclusion
There's a bias in the video. But it's what journalism used to look like: points are made and supported. So you don't have to agree with every point made, or the conclusion, but you get to see/hear why they made it, and there doesn't seem to be an overt effort to sell only one side of the problem. Though they could have done a little more to let the city leaders get their say -- that's redundant since they have 1,000 other outlets, and they're not exactly a stifled voice in this. So I do have a double standard in that if the Press is showing the less heard view, not being balanced isn't nearly as bad as when they're repeating the more heard view and ignoring the other side.
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