Christopher F. Rufo @realchrisrufo
The Seattle City Council will consider legislation to provide blanket immunity to misdemeanor crimes to any person who suffers from poverty, homelessness, addiction, or mental illness.
Here's how the legislation would work.
As a pretext, the councilmembers claim that "income inequality," "local law enforcement's killing of Black, Indigenous, and people of color," and "poverty, institutional racism, and systemic oppression" are the root causes of crime.
The legislation would exempt anyone with an addiction or mental health disorder from a wide range of crimes, including theft, assault, harassment, drug possession, property destruction, and indecent exposure.
The results would be disastrous. In 2019, the Seattle Police Department reported 50,609 thefts, assaults, property offenses, frauds, trespasses, and narcotic violations. If the ordinance passes, nearly all of these crimes could be permitted under law.
1:44 PM · Dec 4, 2020·
TwitterThe New Untouchables
Seattle policymakers want to provide the city’s underclass with blanket immunity for misdemeanor crime.
Christopher F. Rufo
December 3, 2020
In October, the Seattle City Council floated legislation to provide an exemption from prosecution for misdemeanor crimes for any citizen who suffers from poverty, homelessness, addiction, or mental illness. Under the proposed ordinance, courts would have to dismiss all so-called “crimes of povertyâ€â€”which, according to the city’s former public-safety advisor, would cover more than 90 percent of all misdemeanor cases citywide. In effect, the legislation would create a new class of “untouchables,†protected from consequences by the city’s powerbrokers.
This is the latest and most brazen effort in the city’s campaign to establish what might be called a “reverse hierarchy of oppression.†The underlying theory is that society has condemned the lower class to a life of poverty and stigma, which leads to addiction, madness, and indigence. The poor, in the logic of Seattle’s progressive elites, are thus forced to commit crimes—including violent crimes—to secure their very existence. Therefore, as society is the perpetrator of this inequality, the crimes of the poor must be forgiven. The crimes are transformed into an expression of social justice. ...
City Journal1:44 PM · Dec 4, 2020·
