by DCG
The progressive utopia of Seattle has some serious problems. The liberal bureaucrats in that city do not hold the homeless accountable for the crimes they commit. The Seattle Police and City Council have a contentious relationship which is so bad that a historical number of police are leaving the department.
Criminals are free to rob and steal without having to worry about the police arriving in time to catch them.
Last Friday a convenience store in Magnolia was robbed. Two criminals busted into the store at 3:05 a.m. Seattle Police arrived at 4:22 a.m.
On top of that, as of Tuesday morning Seattle Police still hadn’t assigned a detective to the case. The owner is so frustrated that he’s doing his own investigation.
As MyNorthwest reports:
“The owner, who goes by Sam, got a call from his alarm company about the break-in but was out of town. He instructed the company to call 911 but had to watch it happen, live, on his phone. “It was torture, because I couldn’t do anything,” he said.
The two thieves broke through the bottom, glass part of the door with a chunk of cement, and then set off some kind of smoke bomb as they ransacked the store. They stole cash, lottery tickets, cigarettes, and beer.
They took off in a red pickup truck, but then returned just minutes later, parking nearby and coming in once again to steal more.
“We basically lost about $15,000 worth of product and most of that was cigarettes,” Sam’s business partner, Brian Burns, said. He received a worried call from Sam the morning of the burglary. Sam asked him to go down to the store, make sure it was secure, and wait for police.
“The store was wide open,” he said, “and there wasn’t anybody coming out to help or what have you. It was just a real weird, eerie feeling.”
Police finally arrived more an hour after the first burglary, a move Burns called “ridiculous.”
Burns says he tried to tell police about their lead from the surveillance video and explain that they needed to get the video before it was erased, he said they acted like it wasn’t a big deal. “He said, ‘Well, a detective hasn’t been assigned to the case yet,” Burns said. “He said, ‘We can’t do anything until a detective’s been assigned to the case, that’s the way it works. I said, ‘Well, is there a way to get a detective assigned to a case? Because time is of the essence.’”
As for why it took so long for the police to respond?
“Police said the call was classified the wrong way — not as an emergency. Sgt. Sean Whitcomb said the call initially came in as a simple alarm call, not as a crime in progress. When it was upgraded to a verified break-in, it became a priority two call. But it should have been a priority one, or emergency, call.
“A crime in progress will always get a faster response than a crime that has happened in the past,” Whitcomb said. “We’re not sure why this wasn’t classified as a priority one call.”
Police also blamed the slow response time on lower staffing and call volume.
KIRO 7 obtained data from June of 2016, 2017, and 2018. It shows median Seattle police response times to priority three calls have increased by 14 minutes from 2016 to 2018.
Priority two call responses increased by five minutes over the same time period, and priority one, known as emergency calls, slightly increased from 6.05 minutes in June of 2016 to 6.34 minutes in June of 2018.