OPINION:
Long before Ruth Dalton was killed in a carjacking attempt, it was clear that Seattle’s urban decay was turning the once-vibrant city into a dangerous place. Yet it took the death of an 80-year-old dog-walker to wake up residents who remained in denial.
How did this happen?
It doesn’t take much investigation to identify the culprit: a decade of “progressive” governance that has essentially handed control of city streets to criminals.
The suspect in the Dalton case, Jahmed Haynes, was a repeat offender. According to Seattle police, Haynes had eight prior felonies and a history of mental health issues. Court records show that he was imprisoned for crimes including vehicular homicide to first-degree robbery. During one prison stint, Haynes reportedly stabbed a corrections officer with a 12-inch metal shank.
Given Haynes’ criminal record, this atrocity should never have happened. The most likely reason it did is that previous city officials decided to abandon common sense about crime and public order over the last decade.
I grew up in the Seattle area, and I hope the city returns to its former prosperity. To do so, however, city leaders can never again forget this simple lesson: Fix a window as soon as it’s broken.
George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson offered this hypothesis in their 1982 article “Broken Windows.” Namely, “if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.”
As Kelling and Wilson argued, untended broken windows signal to others that nobody cares. The bonds of community and the sense of lawfulness begin to erode, and with that, more windows are likely to be broken.
The window metaphor captures the intuition that there is both a vicious and virtuous cycle to law and order. Failing to enforce the law on low-level offenses leads to more and greater offenses. Inversely, punishing such offenses reduces the frequency of those crimes and worse ones.
The broken windows hypothesis has inspired scholarly debates and a decades-long search for empirical confirmation. Seattle’s decline over the last decade looks like just such a confirmation.
Rather than enforcing the laws and protecting institutions of civil society, previous prosecutors and City Council members took a soft approach to crime, loosened drug laws and adopted purportedly compassionate solutions to homelessness under the banner of “Housing First” and harm reduction.
Repeat offenders, including the suspect in Dalton’s death, cycled through the criminal justice system with little accountability or change in behavior. Previous council members voted to cut the police force in the name of equity and social justice. City leaders discouraged law enforcement from going after small things such as loitering and petty theft.
The broken windows theorist would predict that such policies would result in a downward spiral of lawlessness. That’s just what happened.
Current city leaders are trying to pick up the pieces. Mayor Bruce Harrell acknowledged upon taking office in 2022 that he “inherited a mess,” and he has made efforts at curbing rampant crime in the city.
Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison recently introduced Stay Out of Drug Areas legislation, which would prohibit defendants with previous drug-related charges or convictions from entering certain crime and overdose hotspots.
New City Councilmember Rob Saka, echoing the sentiments of other leaders, said that “the public safety challenges that we are facing today are a shameful legacy of the defund the police movement.”
Unfortunately, it’s hard to reverse the downward spiral these untended “broken windows” set in motion. Homicides in Seattle are still far higher than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. Police staffing remains critically low. Key businesses continue to close or relocate.
This summer, a Starbucks a few blocks from Pike Place Market announced an abrupt though apparently temporary closing during peak tourism season. Two Seattle Goodwill stores are set to close because of the crime and homelessness crisis downtown.
Other corporate leaders are staying away from the city altogether. Starbucks’ new CEO, Brian Niccol, is “supercommuting” 1,000 miles via corporate jet from his home in Newport Beach, California, to the company’s headquarters in Seattle, rather than relocating to the city. Can you blame him?
The killing of Ruth Dalton should not have to be the catalyst for revamping public safety. As a former Seattleite, I hope the city leadership has learned a permanent lesson. To return Seattle to its former prosperity, leaders must learn to fix the broken windows as soon as cracks appear.
• Gillian Richards Augros is a research associate at the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
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