Thread by @Hex_M_Hell

I've lived in Capitol Hill and I've lived in South Seattle. The shootings at the #CHOP are not unique in their frequency or damage. They are unique in their location. Bringing police back will not stop them, at best it will move them south so CH folks can ignore them again...

I don't remember how long we were in South Seattle before hearing the gunfire. But not all the gunfire was from people shooting each other. Some of it was from police practicing....

See, there's a police range near the Rainier Beach/Dunlap area. You can occasionally hear the gunfire from Dunlap Elementary. Imagine being a kid growing up there and hearing people training to murder you.

We also heard drive-bys at night. They picked up a lot in the summer...

Police would bike through the neighborhood regularly and harass people. I almost never saw a cop on Capitol Hill. I never saw so many so regularly as when I moved south. Police never prevented shootings down there. That's not what they do...

And South Seattle didn't need the overwhelming police presence, the constant surveillance and harassment, to stop the shootings. They needed social workers. They needed people to work with the families and friends of victims to interrupt the cycle of violence...

Bootlickers say, "Bring back the cops! Make the city safe!" But it's not. It's not safe. It wasn't safe before. You just got to pretend it wasn't happening because it wasn't happening in your neighborhood...

Except is *has* happened in your neighborhood, while police were 5 minutes away at the east precinct. I remember hearing a man crying for help, for an hour, after being beaten. You did nothing. We all did nothing. Police did nothing...

A few days later a man started blowing a whistle at 2am. People yelled at him to shut the fuck up. I finally went outside. I had found out about the guy who'd been beaten and felt like shit about not helping. Outside this guy was yelling at a group of people who'd gathered around

"Why the fuck didn't you help me? I was screaming for hours for someone to please help me! Why the fuck didn't you help me?"

We didn't help him because we didn't think it was our job. We didn't help him because we expected the police to. Even me. Even an anarchist...

Calls to bring the cops back are calls to make a problem disappear. Not cease to exist, but cease to be something that has to be paid attention to. It's saying, "Let them die down there, instead of here."

It's bullshit...

"But what's your answer?"

Like I said, social workers. The *only* thing that stops this type of violence is interruption, and that has been shown to work over and over again. But we don't do that in Seattle because SPD used all the money for that on FUCKING TEAR GAS AND TANKS.