Seattle Starts Cracking Down On Shoplifters and Other Petty Criminals For First Time In 4 Years

Is there a huge backlash against wokism brewing in the United States?

Seattle has recently started throwing people in jail for committing shoplifting, vandalism, and other petty crimes after four years of lax criminal justice policies.

This change in policy went into effect earlier in November, which scraps Wuhan virus restrictions imposed by King County that barred Seattle police from booking all but the most serious misdemeanor offenders into the jail.

Officials in Seattle contended that the policy made it significantly more difficult for prosecutors and cops to do their jobs. However, criminals will face jail time if they break the law. 

The move is a win for local law enforcement, which has long called for more tools to combat the city’s recent crime wave.

 “We’ve had people tell us, ‘You can’t arrest me for that.’ Well, that was true but now we can. We’re hoping to get a little bit of accountability back,” the Seattle Times quoted Deputy Police Chief Eric Barden as declaring.

The booking restrictions started in 2020, when King County Jail reduced its capacity under the pretext of social distancing. The jail contracts with the Seattle city government. Following that, the county alluded to staffing concerns for the current set of restrictions. 

However, several Seattle officials began to grow uncomfortable with this soft-on-crime approach the city government was taking. City Attorney Ann Davison specifically pronounced that the restrictions hampered city law enforcement’s and municipal courts’ ability to crack down on crime. This led to many crimes going unpunished by Seattle authorities. Davison was first elected in 2021, campaigning on a law-and-order platform. 

There’s a clear vibe shift, taking place across cities nationwide that were previously dominated by progressive prosecutors and other elected officials that promoted decarceration and other soft-on-crime policies. The voters are fed up with these policies and want order on the streets. 

They should serve as a sign to many right wing populists that campaigning on tough-on-crime policies is an electoral no-brainer that can allow them to take power very quickly. As always, we should try to meet the electorate where they are and not where we think they should be.