The last time that the public saw Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant inside of a police station, she was in handcuffs, as Shift reported almost two years ago. This time she returned with numbers, and is in the news for taking a few of her ultra-Left – and somewhat confused – friends to tour the North Precinct headquarters that the city plans on replacing.
Sawant evidently went to see the existing station because she is among those council members who are concerned that the replacement station will be too big, too expensive, and well, to police-like. In keeping with the times, community activists have a hashtag to express their feelings, #BlocktheBunker.
Their was a fair bit of ignorance on display from the posse that Sawant was rolling with, as according the Seattle blog Crosscut one “wondered why a 21st century police force needs firearms at all.”
Clearly Sawant and her fellow travelers were from a different planet than the police officers showing them around. As Crosscut described, “Police and city officials wanted to discuss what they viewed as a capital project, the proposed $149 million facility to the north. Sawant and her company wanted to talk about the nature of modern policing. Why all the riot gear? Why do the officers need to participate in such long-range firearms training? Do they even need guns? How does the size of a building relate to the sort of training an officer receives?”
In other words, it was a nice photo op for Sawant, even “holding up gun heavy magazines for her staff to photograph”, and complete waste of time for the police. According to Crosscut, “By the end of the tour, it was clear that minds were not being changed on the need for a new facility. The new building ‘almost feels like a reward’ for police,” said one of Sawant’s buddies.
And the last thing a liberal community activist in Seattle would want is for the police to be rewarded for keeping our communities safe.
