Bruce Harrell Said Something Cool And Right-Wingers Are Losing Their Minds

Mayor Bruce Harrell is getting absolutely slammed in the right-wing media because he didn’t express enough bloodlust for “repeat offenders” in his debate with progressive challenger Katie Wilson last week. The Post Millennial, Newsweek, the Joe Rogan Podcast, Libs of Tik Tok, even FOX News clutched their pearls at Harrell’s comments. It will comfort conservative pundits to know that while Harrell said he has “no desire” to jail repeat offenders, he’s built a strong case to the contrary during his time as Mayor. 

In the Thursday night debate hosted by FOX13, moderator Emily Parkhurst claimed it’s “no secret” that repeat offenders drive up Seattle’s crime rate. She asked, “Is the City too lax on repeat offenders?”

Harrell called the question “interesting” and said he did not know how to answer it. So he kinda just talked around it. Moderator Hana Kim of FOX13 didn’t let him off the hook, rephrasing the question to fish out a response. 

“If somebody has offended six, seven, eight times, even if it’s a minor offense, but they continue to fail to turn their life around, at what point do you balance public safety to giving this person some accountability?” Kim asked. 

And here’s where Harrell pissed off the right-wingers. 

“When this person is committing six or seven crimes, I don’t know his or her story,” Harrell said. “Maybe they were abused as a child. Maybe they’re hungry. But my remedy is to find their life story to see how we can help. First, I have no desire to put them in jail, but I need to protect you, and that’s the calibration that we have.”

He went on to advocate for a “health based” strategy. He said, “...whether they commit seven or eight crimes, to me, is not the issue. The issue is, why are they committing these crimes?”

And in that moment, years of dissing the movement to defund the police, cheerleading for the cops, prioritizing the Seattle Police Department (SPD) over all else in every budget proposal, it all vanished. Right-wingers locally and nationally were universally convinced that Harrell is soft on crime. 

Seattle Red commentator Jason Rantz asked on his blog if Harrell realizes how “insane” he sounds. 

“This is the problem with progressive mayors like Harrell: they treat criminals like victims and victims like collateral damage. They think crime is some social experiment, not a life-and-death reality for the rest of us,” Rantz wrote. 

Let’s get this out of the way: Harrell saying that he cares more about why someone is committing crimes than how many they commit is based as fuck. The right-wingers advocating to throw people in jail over and over again are advocating against research that shows that more incarceration does not equal more safety. And, he’s absolutely right to ask what in a repeat offender's background may cause them to commit crimes over and over again. That way, the City could better meet their needs in effort to prevent the undesired behaviors in the first place. 

A 2019 report by Prison Policy Initiative looked at “high utilizers” of the criminal punishment system, meaning people who have been jailed three times in a 12 month period. The report found the vast majority of repeat offenders made less than $25,000 a year, most reported having a substance abuse disorder, and they were much more likely to have chronic health conditions than those with no arrests. So yeah — they might be hungry. 

But what’s doubly frustrating about the heat Harrell’s getting from the right is that it’s not only misguided, it’s undeserved.

The conservatives are ignoring the big, glaring “but.” Harrell didn't end the sentence by proudly professing his lack of desire to jail repeat offenders with tragic backstories. He noted a “calibration,” a balancing act between his discomfort and the “need to protect” other Seattleites. In a way, he’s still avoiding proposing a specific balance between those two forces. 

And most importantly, the City of Seattle has not been “lax” on repeat offenders under Harrell’s watch. 

For one, City Attorney Ann Davison launched her “high utilizers” initiative in March of 2022 to target the repeat offenders everyone’s up in arms about. An analysis showed that  more than half of the 118 people on the 2022 list qualified as Trueblood class members, meaning they have a history of mental illness that makes them incompetent to stand trial. Additionally, almost 60% of the “high utilizers” were homeless, 10% lived in permanent supportive housing, and 3.5% lived in low-income housing. 

If Harrell were “lax” on repeat offenders he would have fought Davison on that initiative or at least spoken against it like then- director of the King County Department of Public Defense Anita Khandelwal did. 

Harrell also signed the Stay Out of Drug Area and Stay Out of Area Prostitute ordinances, designed to tamp down on reoffenses in areas where those activities commonly take place. The laws allow a judge to bar drug or prostitution law offenders from reentering the large swaths of the City for up to two years. Failure to comply with the order is punishable by up to 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine.

Anyway, those right-wingers can enjoy their crashout. They won’t find a more ferocious bootlicker in Wilson. In the Thursday debate, Wilson came off looking similarly compassionate. She advocated for more effective diversion programs, slamming the Mayor for slashing funds to the Law Enforcement Effective Diversion (LEAD) program, which connects them with intensive case managers instead of throwing them into jail. 

Wilson said LEAD is “exactly the kind of program that we need in order to address the problem of repeat offenders, especially for low level crime, without just giving people long jail sentences which, frankly, doesn't work either.”