Comment by JumpCrisscross
2 years ago
> ignored it until enough kids were killed
From overdoses, right? Sort of different from terrorism in many meaningful ways.
2 years ago
> ignored it until enough kids were killed
From overdoses, right? Sort of different from terrorism in many meaningful ways.
No, shooting. I don’t think it was a meaningfully different rate than other weeks in Capitol Hill, but firefighters failing to render first aid certainly didn’t help that one kid who was dying a couple hundred yards from a fire station. (The crowd wouldn’t let a police car through, and it turns out the firefighters wouldn’t approach until the police were there and said it was safe).
Well, that's the official story given by the police. According to the protest medics who treated the shooting victim on the scene, the cops took so much time getting ready to respond - and this was independently verified by a local journalist, using hospital intake records and police scanner timestamps - that the medics gave up on the ambulance and drove the man to the ER themselves. When the police finally showed up, they were in fact told to leave, but it was not out of some political objection to emergency services: they were simply far too late to be of any use to someone who was already in the hospital at that point.
(I live just up the street from the police station at the center of the whole thing, so I paid close attention to all this stuff while it was happening.)
> firefighters failing to render first aid certainly didn’t help that one kid who was dying a couple hundred yards from a fire station
Still not terrorism. Left-wing militias are a problem in some parts of the world. They aren’t in America.
Our domestic terrorism comes almost exclusively from radical Islam and right-wing nutjobs. (Who, somewhat hilariously, see eye to eye on more than they realise.)
I suspect you're classifying the Trump assassins as right-wing nutjobs though (they weren't Islamists), which dilutes the position somewhat. What does right-wing even mean to you if it covers people trying to gun Trump down?
11 replies →
There were 5 shootings resulting in 3 deaths over a period of 9 days (20-29 June). CHAZ/CHOP existed for a period of 23 days (8 June - 1 July). There were 33 homicides in the entire city of Seattle in 2019. No matter how you slice it, there was definitely an increase in the murder rate around the protests, potentially much higher.
And a piece with the increase in homicides, Mayor Durkan reported that SPD had received a 525% increase in reported crimes in the area when compared to the previous June. Obviously not all of the crime was committed by protestors, but the protestors were the ones that drove out the police presence and the city tolerated the situation created by the protestors for nearly a month. Regardless of whether the situation is best described as domestic terrorism or not, it's clear that public officials were willing to tolerate violence enabled by left wing protestors "letting off steam" too.