Let Seattle businesses fend for themselves? Privatizing some law enforcement is a way-out-there proposal

A few years ago when I was a new reporter in Washington, then State Representative Ross Hunter, D-Medina, jumped out of his Olympia office to teach a lesson on dark side politics.

I had come to ask about a bill that the majority of both parties opposed, but which had passed the Senate with sponsorship and political momentum from both sides of the aisle. Hunter, who later joined Governor Jay Inslee’s cabinet, was a critic. The support for the bill is easy to explain:

“You get the one on the far right and the one on the far left that go around the bend,” said Hunter, pointing two fingers at an imaginary sphere, “and somewhere back on the dark side of the moon they connect.”

Check out this ideological backcountry today, and you can find some liberal legal minds in Seattle who subscribed to a historically libertarian idea: to put some city law enforcement in private hands. A few generations later, after the Pinkerton National Detective Agency brutally crushed unions, the idea of ​​not only encouraging companies but expecting them to hire their own badges has fans in two left-wing candidates for the Seattle Attorney, one Office prosecuting offense.

In a referral interview with the Times editors in July, incumbent Pete Holmes, widely criticized for his indulgence, and left-wing challenger Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, a former public defender, spoke out in favor of private sector police, at least in the Downtown. Retailers, both candidates said, need to look for sources alongside the police, prosecutors and the public trial to deal with theft and hostile customers.

After that interview, the editors endorsed another candidate, Ann Davison, on grounds including her belief that public safety is a public responsibility.

I asked if each candidate was concerned that downtown shoplifting was affecting business viability. Thomas-Kennedy and Holmes each said these companies should better monitor their own businesses and not call public law enforcement agencies. This is how far the left-wing “police abolition” goes the discourse.

“When I found out that Goodwill wanted to prosecute any theft by an unprotected person who stole socks or someone’s coat in the winter, I stopped giving Goodwill my belongings,” said Thomas-Kennedy, “because I did don’t do. I don’t think they should outsource their security and outsource all of these costs to the city of Seattle. “

Considering “outsourcing” the public police force is a curious idea for those of us who believe that law enforcement policy and oversight are public responsibilities where decisions are in dire need of transparency. But Holmes agreed with his challenger. The three-year-old prosecutor said that dealing with theft is mostly due to companies using better security – not an issue that can be effectively contained by better police or well-thought-out law enforcement in a public court. You know, the things that his office is in charge of.

“For example, we’ve spoken to loss prevention officers who are compensated for the amount of items they retrieve outside of the store,” Holmes anecdotally claimed. “So instead of interfering with the store, it is in their economic interest to allow someone to continue shoplifting.”

Stop right there. Take a minute to estimate the reverse of the guidelines. Coarse-grained independence should be the thing of the right. If relying on public resources for law enforcement is “outsourcing”, what about public transport and schools? What’s next on this journey to connect the far right and left sides – anti-tax Hucksters Tim Eyman runs an election initiative to disappoint cops?

These two liberal lawyers discussed retail theft as a problem that mostly corporations – Target – shouted into their sales reports. The theory seemed that if Amazon can use its own security guards to keep people moving on the busy streets of South Lake Union, then other companies should step up too.

But there are small businesses too, and any decent city benefits from cultivating them. A world where every tax-paying candy store, restaurant, fishmonger, and grocer must also take on the cost of their own safety increases the cost of keeping a retail startup viable. This also creates human costs, not just business – and not just for employees who are attacked when they intervene with a problem in the workshop. Employees and customers lose when a business needs to raise prices or fail to raise wages, and can plausibly cite inventory as the reason going out the door.

Overzealous and unfair police and law enforcement have harmed people in countless ways. But also the idea that we should toss the idea of ​​law enforcement as a public concern. Justice must be just and merciful. You can do this by holding public authorities accountable for everyone doing the right thing, rather than fleeing into a world where we cede the police in retail neighborhoods to the modern day Pinkertons.

Just because some left-wing extremists and arch-conservatives are on the same side doesn’t make it a reasonable middle ground. It can take you to the dark side of the moon. It’s hard to thrive there.