Tag Archives: Seattle

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Replies Requested

8 Comments

Received a comment on my post entitled “Let’s Forgive Everyone” from a person who shows a link to his/her blog entitled, https://cafebedouin.org/. I visited the blog and all I can say is OMG, here’s another “one.” While I did reply with a few comments, I thought I’d post his comment so my followers could reply directly to him. Have at it folks, and as all of you do, please don’t hold back.

By Illinois, you must mean Chicago. The rest of the state shares your preferences. The idea that people poor enough to steal, with addiction problems, etc. might benefit from something other than jail time doesn’t sound as wrong-headed as you are desperately trying to paint it here.

Originally posted 2021-01-04 10:22:33.

Recent Posts

Let’s Forgive Everyone

16 Comments

You are probably not going to believe this story. Talk about putting the cart before the horse, or treating the symptom instead of the disease. This is absolutely insane. It’s so insane, it’s hilarious, and I wish the “Emerald City” all the luck in the world. There is an upside here. This action just may eliminate crime in nearby cities and states when the scum says, hell, let’s go to the Emerald City so we can pillage, steal, and rob from  all them rich folks and get away with it. I love it!! I do, however, have one question though. Who is going to pay for all this? And where do these derelicts go after they are released with no charges, back to their tents under the bridges? Does anyone know someone who still lives in that soon-to-be shit hole? Ha Ha!

Elected officials in a major U.S. city plan to pass a law that will allow thieves to sell items they steal if they do it to earn money for basic needs and trespassers to set up camp on private property when it is to obtain adequate shelter. Dozens of other crimes—including assault and harassment—will be excused under the preposterous measure if suspects are poor, mentally ill or addicted to drugs. It is being crafted as a poverty defense and will allow municipal court judges to dismiss a multitude of crimes if poverty, mental illness or a substance-abuse disorder drove the perpetrator to commit them.

Even for a famously liberal left coast city like Seattle it seems like a bit much. The proposal was first introduced during the Seattle City Council’s budget deliberations weeks ago, according to a local news report. It was put on hold over a budget process bureaucracy but has gained incredible steam and appears to have enough support to alter the city code early next year. “The idea could enormously impact the city — and set Seattle apart from the rest of the country in its approach to misdemeanor crimes,” according to the news story, which includes the concerns of frustrated public safety advocates who say the law will essentially legalize most crimes in Seattle. Not surprisingly, the idea came from a “wave of activism and historic protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota,” the Seattle newspaper story says. That motivated public defenders and community organizers to take advantage of the attention to police and court reforms to fix a “long-held frustration.”

The force behind the push for the new law is a leftist organization called Decriminalize Seattle that opposes policing and the criminal legal system. The group has called for defunding the Seattle Police Department by at least 50% and reallocating the funds to “community led health and safety systems.” It also demands the release of protestors arrested during recent violent uprising without charges. An organizer with Decriminalize Seattle, identified as one of the law’s catalysts in the media, says “what we’ve already known is that the misdemeanor system is basically a system of cycling people in poverty through municipal court over and over again without meeting their basic needs.” In late October Seattle City Councilwoman Lisa Herbold, who ironically chairs the public safety committee, introduced the measure to exempt low-level criminals. The lawmaker, who represents West Seattle and South Park, writes in her official city blog that it is important to make meeting an individual’s immediate basic need an affirmative defense to a crime.

The councilwoman includes a staff memo outlining the proposal, which is identified as “duress legislation” that will codify a defense against prosecution of crimes committed due to poverty or behavioral health issues. “The criminal legal system is ill-suited to address the root cause of ‘crimes of poverty’ and any involvement in the criminal legal system and incarceration causes harm,” the memo states. “As such, Central Staff understands that the intent of the proposal is to provide an exit from the system at trial and without further involvement in the system for those crimes committed because a person cannot otherwise afford to meet their immediate basic needs.” The lengthy document proceeds to reveal that the City Attorney already exercises his discretion to move away from prosecuting property crimes that appear to be committed out of “survival necessity.” The concern, however, is that future prosecutors may not continue the practice and a law must be enacted to assure individuals committing crimes to “fulfill their basic needs” have a way to “exit out of the criminal legal system.”

The proposed law comes as Seattle experiences a big spike in crime—including the highest homicide rate in over a decade—and police funding gets drastically cut to appease Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors. This is not a new problem for the Emerald City. In the summer of 2019, a business publication wrote a troubling piece on the negative impact of rising crime in downtown Seattle. “The increasing prevalence of crime, drugs and homelessness in the downtown core threatens the city’s thriving tourism and convention business, and worries retailers concerned that the city isn’t doing nearly enough to combat the crisis,” the story says. “Downtown crime is increasing at an alarming rate: City of Seattle crime data for downtown Seattle indicate a jump in “person crimes” (aggravated assault, robbery, rape and homicide) of 43 percent between 2016 and 2018. In the downtown commercial district, there was a total of 568 person crimes in 2018, up from 397 in 2016, Seattle Police Department records show.” That was more than a year ago.

Originally posted 2020-12-30 10:55:25.

Current Events

Critical Race Theory

4 Comments

A very well written piece, albeit there are some words the left may need a dictionary to understand what he saying. LOL. A mostly retired trial lawyer who began as a Marine JAG Officer 1975-1982.

He poses a great question we all should be asking today, and does a great job answering it. Worth the read! Thank you Michael for sending it to me.

“What is wrong with critical race theory?”

Once the exclusive domain of deep thinking university professors, critical race theory became a part of our national conversation when the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to stop conducting workplace training based on critical race theory and opened an inquiry into the City of Seattle’s use of it.  The training is in fact political indoctrination and the public ought to know what it is and why it should be resisted.

Critical theory sprung largely from the Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt School in 1930’s Germany.  In 1848 Karl Marx had introduced the world to an analysis of social relations characterized by oppression when he argued in The Communist Manifesto and Capital that working class laborers were oppressed by those in power, the owners of capital. He argued for class consciousness, and in advocating radical change, he famously argued the workers had nothing to lose but their chains.  The dilemma facing the Frankfurt School scholars was why after the Russian Revolution and the wide dissemination of Marx’s invitation to a workers’ paradise was it not being realized?  Industrial organization and mass communications seemed to divert the oppressed workers from their liberation.  Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School is credited with arguing a theory is “critical” if it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”, and critical theory was applied to interrogate how power was used to perpetuate oppression.

Critical race theory is a variant of what began in the 1970’s as critical legal studies.  Critical legal studies looked at our laws with the assumption that law oppresses people, especially minorities, and examined how power was used to create and enforce the law.  Restrictive racial covenants in property deeds was an example of the use of law to perpetuate racial oppression.  Denying women the right to vote and prosecuting women like Susan B. Anthony in 1872 when she defied the law and cast a vote was an example of the use of law to perpetuate gender oppression.

Women gained the right to vote in Washington in 1910, Wyoming before that, and the US Supreme Court declared restrictive racial covenants were illegal and unenforceable everywhere in 1948.  Nonetheless, and not withstanding adoption of the 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments and a web of state and federal legislation outlawing discrimination based solely on race or gender, critical legal theorists concluded that the power of the oppressors was  embedded in our political structures and infects our laws today to perpetuate bias and discrimination against minorities and other marginalized communities.  As Samuel Gregg puts it in “Liberalism’s Civilization Problem,” Law and Liberty, September 7, 2020, the left’s “insistence that most of the West’s achievements are primarily masks for endless oppression largely flows from the left’s generally negative view of Western civilization” (emphasis mine).  In this dystopia there is no arc of justice, instead, US history is irredeemably rotten to the core.

Critical race theory proceeds from the fallacy that a binary of white and black, or white and everybody else, is the only appropriate frame of reference for a discussion of race.  Applying Ockham’s Razor to inconvenient facts, this binary ignores the history of racial bias against the Irish, Italian, Jewish people and many others ordinarily thought of as white.  Starting with this assumed racial binary, the critical theorists contend racial bias is embedded not only in our laws, but also our language, media, political structures and culture, and they set out to look for it.  Ignoring all the steps we have taken to eliminate racial prejudice from our laws and institutions, practitioners of critical race theory rediscovered what Stokely Carmichael described as “institutional racism” in his 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation.

It’s called systemic racism today, and its corollary theory holds that implicit bias exists even among those who deny any bias at all.  Indeed, denial of bias is strong proof one is in fact sick with bias.  This demand to override a person’s reluctance to accept the fact that she is in fact racially biased is one of the most pernicious and dangerous features of critical race theory.  These are not mere thought crimes, they are unthought crimes.  And the unrepentant ominously resemble dissidents in the former Soviet Union or the unruly psychiatric patients in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The Trump administration’s recent Executive Order and inquiry into Seattle’s work place training alleges that only White employees are required to admit to and denounce their racist impulses.  At first blush the required training appears to violate state and federal laws prohibiting discrimination based solely on race.

Aside from the totalitarian impulse to control what people think and the words people speak, two fundamental issues should make us wary of the growth of this ideology.  First, it is no accident these theorists too often are White academics and legislators.  Robin Diangelo is a White academic whose popular 2018 book, “White Fragility,” is a lecture to White people about how they got race all wrong and ignorantly so.

White men legislated poverty programs in the 1960’s that in the end further impoverished Black communities.  So much so that White men led by President Bill Clinton and then Senator Joe Biden legislated welfare and criminal justice reform that was directed against the Black community.  The reform ended “welfare as we know it” as Clinton put it and incarcerated large numbers of Black men, “super-predators” who needed to be brought to heel as Ms. Clinton put it to an all White audience in New Hampshire.  White folks telling Black folks what they need is a not so subtle form of oppression. White folks telling White folks what they shouldn’t think or say is almost as bad.  Isn’t it time for White folk to stop telling Black folk what they need?

Second, the critical race ideology claims all White people are infected with the racism disease and need help regardless of who they are or where they grew up.  In Diangelos’ world there are no individuals, no person is unique; instead, as a “race” we produce and reproduce racism in lockstep in every aspect of our daily lives whether we know it or not.  All notions of freedom are illusory.  The chains that bind us are no longer mere economic shackles, they define our very being which is, not coincidentally, not capable of redemption.

It is by definition a racist ideology, it divides our communities, and gives cover to those who want to destroy our history and institutions.  No leap of imagination is required to draw a direct line from the claim that systemic racism infects our institutions and must be pulled out by its roots to the destruction of civic monuments, attacks on the police, looting of stores and burning buildings in our cities today.

As Galatians 6:7 taught us, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Michael J. Bond
Copyright 2020

Postscript: I’ll be off the net for a week, going fishing. Need a break. Meanwhile,let’s all pray for President Trump and his bride!!!

Originally posted 2020-10-03 15:51:40.

Current Events

Horse Hockey – All Lives Matter

6 Comments

Ouch! This, folks, is a must read, but I have to warn you of something. One can easily tell he is, in fact, a professor at Berkeley. I mean, I have a BA and an MA, and  consider myself able to read. LOL I had to stop and go to my dictionary so I could get the full grasp of his comments. LOL. So don’t feel bad if you have to as well. This professor — gender unknown — has his/her stuff all in one bag.  I received it as a link and I went to the website and read it and many of 100’s of comments, so it is legit. Should you want to read it yourself and see all the comments, mostly favorable and many from blacks, I have provided you with the link at the end. 

Anyway, another piece of truthful facts about the true BLM organization and surprisingly where the donated money goes to; you’ll be shocked, at least I was. Read and learn, and pass it on to friends and family who think this is a worthwhile organization to support. Many blacks themselves are finally seeing it for what it is and condemning it.

As always look fwd to hearing from you.

 

Open letter from a professor of history at the University of Berkeley (UBC) against BLM, police brutality, and cultural orthodoxy

Dear teachers X, Y, Z

I am one of your colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley. I have met you personally, but I do not know you closely and I am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I fear that writing this email publicly will cause me to lose my job and possibly all future jobs in my field.

In your recent ministerial emails, you mentioned our commitment to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the lack of diversity of opinion on the subject of recent protests and community reaction to their regard.

In the extensive links and resources you have provided, I have found no cases of substantial counter-arguments or alternative narratives to explain the under-representation of blacks in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. . The explanation provided in your documentation, to the virtual exclusion of all the others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by white people, or, when white people are not physically present, by white people. infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism in America brains, souls and institutions.

Many convincing objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or “Uncle Toms”. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative which strips blacks of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community to foreigners. Their point of view is completely absent from the departmental press releases and from the UCB.

The claim that the difficulties facing the black community can be explained entirely by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic assumption that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its deep faults, or its disturbing implication of total black helplessness. This assumption transforms our institution and our culture, with no space for dissent outside of a narrow and strictly controlled discourse.

A counter-narrative exists. If you have time, please consider reviewing some of the documents that I enclose at the end of this email. Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and its allies is either essentially anecdotal (as in the case of the essential of the undeniably moving article of Ta-Nehisi Coates) or if it is motivated in a transparent manner. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black Americans incarcerated. This proportion is often used to describe the criminal justice system as anti-black. however, if we use the same precise methodology, we should conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Could we qualify criminal justice as a systemic misandrist conspiracy against innocent Americans? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is imperfect and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Blacks Are Not Imprisoned at Higher Rates Than Their Implication in Violent Crimes Predicts. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly in several jurisdictions in several countries.

And yet, I see my department reproducing indiscriminately a narrative which diminishes the black agency in favor of an explanation centered on white which appeals to the ministry’s apparent desire to shoulder the “burden of the white man” and promote a white guilt tale.

If we pretend that the criminal justice system is white supremacist, Why are Asian Americans, Indian Americans and Nigerian Americans incarcerated at much lower rates than white Americans? It’s a funny white supremacy. Even American Jews are less incarcerated than Gentile whites. I think it is fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of the Jews. And yet these so-called white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at much higher rates than the Jews. None of this is discussed in your literature. None of this is explained, except waving the hand and ad hominems. “These are racist whistles”. “The model minority myth is the white supremacist”. “Only the fascists speak of black crime on black”, ad nauseam.

These types of statements are not counter arguments: they are just arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress speech. Any serious historian will recognize them for the orthodoxy tactics that silence them., common to suppressive regimes, doctrines and religions across time and space. They aim to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are called upon to comply with and subscribe to Problematic view of history by BLM and the ministry is presented as unified on the issue. In particular, ethnic minorities are actively brought together in a unique position. Any apparent unity is certainly a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly result in expulsion or cancellation for those of us who are in a precarious situation, which is not a small number.

Personally, I dare not speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of the alleged unity being mass produced by the administration, tenured professor, UC administration, US companies and the media, the punishment for dissent is an obvious danger in an era of widespread economic vulnerability. I am sure that if my name was attached to this email I would lose my job and all future jobs, even if I believe in and can justify every word I type.

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by blacks. There is practically no march for these invisible victims, no public silences, no sincere letters from UC regents, deans and heads of departments. The message is clear: black lives only count when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and requires a solution. Please look into your hearts and see how truly sectarian this formulation is.

No discussion is allowed for non-black victims of black violence, who are proportionally more numerous than black victims of non-black violence. This is particularly bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black attackers has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief advised Asians to stop hanging lucky charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of the invaders (overwhelmingly black). Invaders like George Floyd. For this real, lived and experienced reality of violence in the United States, there are no marches, no tearful emails from department heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History Department, our silence is not a simple abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

The claim that black intra-racial violence is the product of redlining, slavery and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is therefore up to historians to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jews did not lead to equivalent rates of dysfunction and poor SES performance among Japanese and American Jews respectively.. Arab Americans have been demonized since September 11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. however, both groups outperform white Americans on almost all SES indices – just like Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is the responsibility of historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. however, no real discussion is possible in the current climate of our department. The explanation is provided to us, the disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore the ways in which the explanation is also correct. This is a mockery of the historic profession.

The most disturbing, our ministry seems to have been entirely captured by the interests of the National Democratic Convention and the Democratic Party in general. To explain what I mean, think about what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization that UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the BLM official website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily engaged in funding the election campaigns of Democratic candidates. Donating to BLM today is making an indirect donation to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is preposterous considering the fact that American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police on black are overwhelmed by an overwhelming majority of Democrats. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for more than five decades; “systemic racism” was built there by successive democratic administrations.

The condescending and condescending attitudes of Democratic leaders towards the black community, illustrated by almost all of Biden’s statements about the black race, everything except guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty and the resulting grievance policy which destroy both American political discourse and black lives. And yet, Donating to BLM means funding the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who have seen their cities turn to violence. This is a grotesque capture of a bona fide movement for the necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there is practically no possibility of dissent in academia. I refuse to serve the Party, and so do you.

The total alliance of the big companies involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning signal to us, and yet this overwhelming evidence goes unnoticed, deliberately ignored or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the richest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other current, real and modern slavers. Starbucks, an organization using literal black slaves at its coffee plantation suppliers, supports BLM. Sony, an organization using cobalt from even more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, supports BLM. And apparently so do we. The absence of a counter narrative allows this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.

There is also a wide range of what can only be called “race scammers”: hawkers of all colors who take advantage of racial conflict fires for administrative jobs, charitable management positions, academic and advancement jobs, or personal political entrepreneurship.

Given the direction our history department seems to be moving away from any commitment to the truth, we can think of ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake oil sellers. Their activities are corrosive, destroying all hope of a harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are irrational segregationists.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he was talking on our campus today. We are training leaders who explicitly intend to destroy one of the only truly prosperous ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As a PRC, a national ethno-nationalist and aggressively racist chauvinist regime with zero immigration and without the concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the United States, I ask you: is this wise ? Are we really doing the right thing?

Finally, our university and our department have made several statements to celebrate and praise George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple criminal who had once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant belly. He terrorized the women of his community. He fathered and abandoned several children, playing no role in their support or education, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug addict and sometimes a drug dealer, a con artist who attacked his honest and hardworking neighbors.

And yet UC regents and historians from the UCB history department celebrate this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual holiness. A man who hurt women. A man who injured black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB History Department, American business, most mainstream media, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged elites who shape opinion in the United States. United, he became a hero of culture, buried in a golden coffin, his (recognized) family inundated with gifts and praise. Americans are under social pressure to kneel because of this violent and abusive misogynist. A generation of black men is forced to identify with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species.

I am ashamed of my department. I would say that I am ashamed of you two, but maybe you agree with me, and you are just afraid, like me, of the repercussions of telling the truth. It’s hard to know what it means to kneel down when you have to kneel down to keep your job.

This should not affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family has been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democratic Party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements for moving forward in life, is familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it would not be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be direct in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The soft bigotry always presents low expectations and the permanent assertion that the solutions to the fate of my people rest exclusively on the good will of the whites rather than on our own hard work are psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are taught that it is only by begging, crying and shouting that they receive documents from guilty whites.

No message will more surely devastate their future, especially if white people are short of guilt, or even if America is short of white people. If it had been done for Japanese Americans, Jewish Americans or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would certainly be no different from the more rugged parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The history department of UCB is now a full institutional promulgator of a destructive and disparaging error on the black race.

I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this post. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrats’ grievance program and the undisputed Party capture of our department. I do not argue that the Party co-ops my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, saying that voting for democracy and being black are isomorphic. I condemn the way George Floyd died and join you in calling for greater accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who had a predictable brutal end..

I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is not a rampant handmaid for politicians and businesses. Like us, she is free.

 

Here is the link:

https://dateway.net/anonymous-berkeley-professor-shreds-blms-tale-of-injustice-with-overwhelming-facts-and-logic/

Originally posted 2020-06-14 15:57:06.

Current Events

Welcome to Seattle – “The Emerald City”

3 Comments

Once a great city known as the Gateway to the Pacific. What a great place to live — NOT!

Shoplifting as Usual in Seattle

From the Wall Street Journal

Friday 6 May 2022

Lowe’s employees came to recognize William Piccone by his skinny jeans, distinctive gait and posture—and his prolific shoplifting, police say. Over a 97-day spree last year, he allegedly stole from the same store 27 times, walking away with more than $4,650 in merchandise. Welcome to Seattle, where impunity reigns.

That’s what Ann Davison, Seattle’s newly elected city attorney, is learning as she acts on a voter mandate to restore order. Her office ran the numbers and discovered that 118 individuals were responsible for more than 2,400 crimes in Seattle over the past five years. Her effort to crack down on the worst repeat offenders is facing progressive resistance.

At issue is Ms. Davison’s proposal to exclude prolific criminals from Seattle’s Community Court. In 2019 her predecessor signed an agreement with the Seattle Municipal Court and the Department of Public Defense. Some two dozen classes of misdemeanor cases now go straight to the Community Court, which releases the accused after referring them to support services and sometimes assigning them a life-skills class or community service.

Theft of up to $750 in a single incident in Seattle is a misdemeanor. Other crimes that go express to Community Court include residential trespassing, possession of tools for burglary or auto theft, and property destruction.

The 2019 agreement includes no eligibility restrictions, so those with serious criminal histories qualify. Seattle criminals get four tries in the Community Court before they flunk out. Each can encompass multiple charges. Repeat offenders see the lack of consequences as an invitation to commit more crimes.

Since 2017 Mr. Piccone has been charged in some 60 criminal cases across Washington, and police have referred him for prosecution to the Seattle city attorney 46 times, Ms. Davison’s office says. Twenty-two of his most recent cases were referred to the Seattle Community Court, where he was turned loose, the city attorney’s office says. The King County Prosecuting Attorney, which handles Seattle felonies, has three current cases against Mr. Piccone for organized retail theft and burglary. On a judge’s order Mr. Piccone was released into a halfway house after receiving detox treatment. On April 28, Mr. Piccone missed a hearing after he was arrested on multiple municipal warrants earlier that day.

Mr. Piccone has pleaded not guilty to a second- degree burglary charge and didn’t respond to a message left at a phone number listed for him in police records. His public defender didn’t respond to our inquiry by deadline.

“With regard to Mr. Piccone, court documents show significant mainstream criminal court involvement predating the creation of community court,” said Anita Khandelwal, the director of Department of Public Defense, in a written response to our inquiry.

She continued: “That involvement resulted, at times, in multiple months of incarceration, but it neither ended his involvement with the system nor addressed his unmet needs. Those same documents suggest that Mr. Piccone is experiencing housing instability. Providing him housing is much more likely to promote safety than continued court involvement.”

As Ms. Davison seeks to renegotiate the 2019 agreement, she sits across the table from Ms. Khandelwal and Judge Damon Shadid, a progressive who oversees the Seattle Community Court. On April 27, Ms. Davison told the Seattle Municipal Court that negotiations had reached an impasse. Is it any wonder?

Ms. Davison has now asked the Seattle Municipal Court to intervene. The court said in a statement that it was considering her proposal and would work “to identify how to move forward together and create a prioritized plan for people whose needs and issues are not being addressed, and have not been addressed historically, by our criminal justice system.”

Here’s hoping the court means the victims of crime, not the criminals. But I doubt it!