Sherman Frederick/Properly Subversive
Well, that didn’t take long. Inside of eight months on the job, socialist Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson faces a recall effort from citizens who think she’s failed in making the city safe.
Sherman Frederick
But what did Seattle expect?
Unlike Nevada, where we actually have a lifelong cop as governor, Mayor Katie has never been someone you’d label “pro-cop.”
If injected with truth serum, you can bet she’d call the police more of a necessary evil.
In 2020, after the death of George Floyd, she supported the “defund the police” movement. But to get elected in 2024, she modified her public statements to say the police should be “adequately” funded, whatever the hell that means.
Seattle residents found out a bit of where her public safety instincts lie during the World Cup when she delayed turning on newly installed surveillance cameras in the Stadium district because of privacy concerns. But after the FBI identified “general but credible threats” surrounding the World Cup, she allowed the cameras to be activated, only to order them turned off after the event ended.
Unfortunately for the mayor, a mass gang shooting took place in July at the Bite of Seattle food festival in the Stadium District, leaving three people dead and four wounded, including a 2-year-old child. Only one arrest so far. The cameras the mayor ordered turned off absolutely hindered the ID of the shooters, allowing the gang-bangers to escape unidentified.
I’m not trying to weigh in on the merits of the recall. In fact, if I were to predict the outcome, I’d say it will fail.
I’m just saying that Seattle residents are getting pretty much what they voted for. Mayor Katie is an inexperienced ideologue hopelessly lost in the “Dirty Harry” world of public safety.
Good luck, Seattle. You will need it.
Housing Ends Homelessness?
As a young man looking to help my fellow man, I volunteered at a church soup kitchen. My task was to set up, help serve the food as needed, and sit with the largely homeless population to get to know them and see how we could help.
Of the people I sat with, I only ran into one person who called for tangible, real help. A woman and three young boys fled her abusive husband. They were living out of a car.
I reported it to the powers that be, and we got her and the kids into a stable, safe environment from which she should take the next steps back into “normal” life.
Everyone else I sat and talked with in those years lived the homeless lifestyle by choice. By that I mean addiction or mental illness pushed them into homelessness, or they just liked living on the streets.
That life experience was reinforced in reading a piece by Kevin Dahlgren entitled “The Lie Behind ‘Housing Ends Homelessness.”
He takes issue with the “housing first” idea to end homelessness. He says:
We do not need less compassion. We need a more honest form of compassion—one that listens to what people are actually saying, confronts addiction and mental illness when necessary, establishes boundaries, provides multiple paths forward, and never confuses handing someone a key with solving everything that brought them to the streets.
That where I land on the issue, too.
(Sherman R. Frederick is a longtime Nevada journalist. You can find more of his work on Substack at shermanfrederick.substack.com)
