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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Perhaps you remember the summer of love in Seattle.
Some radicals in the Capital Hill neighborhood set up barricades in the streets, and declared a 6-squre block area a no-go zone for police. “We’ll handle our neighborhood,” they said. Of course, it was a utopian disaster. Sanitation workers couldn’t come in to collect the trash. If you became ill, the barricades blocked ambulances. Rapes, armed robberies and shootings were up, not down. Obviously… since there was no law enforcement presence. The summer of love was a disaster.
Something similar is happening in Seattle now, although its origins are different. The crazy-liberal city has decided to de-criminalize sex work. In one neighborhood, along Aurora Avenue, prostitutes openly solicit on the streets. Their pimps and drug dealers also work the area, leading to violent turf wars. Neighbors say police ignore what’s going on – so they’ve taken matters into their own hands, placing giant metal flower planters in the streets, blocking traffic. The hookers will stay out if their pimps can’t get in.
But this time Seattle’s girl-child mayor Katie Wilson is having none of it. A day later the barriers have been removed. Things immediately returned to normal. The open-air sex market returned.
Mayor Wilson explained that Seattle has on 900 police officers for a city of 800,000 people, so it’s difficult to “surge” officers into one neighborhood, especially at night.
What are the lessons here? Obviously liberal soft-on-crime policies are a disaster. We have laws, even solicitation laws, for a reason. Once the criminal element realizes that laws won’t be enforced, they are emboldened to do whatever they want.
Who suffers? The law abiding residents. They just want to live their lives, which becomes impossible when the social compact of basic law and order is frayed beyond recognition.
Chris Conley
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