It’s beginning to look a lot like the political career of Seattle’s new Mayor, the “democratic socialist” Katie Wilson, is going to be a short one. Her remarks on the wealth flight that began approximately sixteen seconds after she won the election started her off on the wrong foot, and now she’s taking heat from both sides of the political spectrum over her vocal opposition to surveillance cameras, after one of the attackers of a 77-year-old man in downtown Seattle was identified thanks to CCTV footage.
Seattle’s socialist mayor Katie Wilson is facing fierce blowback on social media after a 77-year-old man was seen on video being beaten by two individuals in a crime that was captured by closed-circuit television cameras, a tool that Wilson has denounced in the past as something that makes the community feel unsafe and “vulnerable.”
The elderly man was walking down the street in downtown Seattle last month when two men walking by him stopped, without any provocation, shoved him to the ground and beat him, KOMO News reported .
Ahmed Abdullahi Osman, 29, was later arrested and charged with second-degree assault, and police are looking for the second suspect. Osman was reportedly booked into jail the night of the assault and then released back onto the streets before a bail hearing.
Now, this exposes another serious problem: This guy was picked up after CCTV footage showed him attacking a senior citizen, for no reason any sane person could detect, and he was released back to the street, before a bail hearing? That’s just crazy.
Back to the issue of cameras. During the campaign and since, Mayor Wilson was a vocal opponent of the notion of surveillance cameras in general, and now this incident has made her take several steps back.
Wilson’s office directed Fox News Digital to a March press release in which she outlined her position on the cameras, saying she is leaving the current cameras on but the “pausing expansion of the pilot” program until “we have completed a privacy and data governance audit, and taken significant steps to strengthen our policies.”
Wilson acknowledged there’s “no doubt that these cameras make it easier to solve some crimes” that include “serious ones like homicides, but also, cameras are not the one key to making our neighborhoods safe.”
That statement right there shows that Katie Wilson, or rather the staffer who writes her press releases, is good at one thing: Political doublespeak. That statement talks a lot without really saying anything, making it pretty typical for leftist politicians.
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Here’s the fun part: Katie Wilson is also taking heat from the left, over her moderation (these things are relative) on this and other issues.
Activist Castill Hightower said in part, “As someone impacted by both gun and police violence, I am deeply disturbed by Mayor Wilson continuing to use our trauma to support police surveillance, rather than relying on the facts that surveillance does not reduce violent crime.”
And:
Madison Zack-Wu, a member of Strippers Are Workers, said people were upset about the mayor’s position on surveillance. “Wilson was collectively better than Harrell,” Zack-Wu said, but added that the cameras have sex workers feeling “pretty pissed.”
This is modern Seattle, folks. It’s like that every day.
Mayor Wilson isn’t navigating this thing very well. She is poorly informed, her staff seems to have been chosen from the no-work-history wing of the Seattle nutcase left community, and she frankly doesn’t seem to understand the issues facing her city, at all. Now, she may be able to finish her term; who knows, she may win re-election. This is Seattle, after all. But she’ll never move into any other level of politics, and it will be, frankly, surprising if she gets anywhere past this first term.
It’s too bad that Seattle has driven Starbucks out of the city. Katie Wilson may have been able to handle being a barista without completely screwing it up, as she has screwed up being the Mayor of Seattle.
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