The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
It also is overblown fear-mongering, beginning with the title: “Seattle is dying.” That is the name of an hourlong special that aired recently on KOMO, the city’s ABC affiliate. You’ve probably run across it on your Facebook feed; the special has received much attention, as it should, and it has led to necessary questions about homelessness and drug addiction and the toll they take on our communities.
Important stuff. And yet an hour of breathless, alarmist narration tends to obscure the important journalism taking place.
There are phrases such as “a wretched soul” and “post-apocalyptic landscape” and “the rot and disgrace of it all.” And in case we are not quite sure whether to be fearful of homeless drug addicts, there is this: “They use deadly drugs, and they sell those drugs for 10 bucks a dose, and over and over they steal us blind to get the 10 bucks. And they pollute our streets and parks and neighborhoods, and they live in filth and despair like animals — and we allow it.”
Indeed, the homeless situation in Seattle is appalling — and Portland is not much better. The video that drives the narrative is difficult to watch, yet cannot be ignored, with scenes of fetid camps and body-cam video that shows what police have to deal with when encountering a drug addict.
Point of view
And the reporting is spectacular. Producers sent questionnaires to police, allowing officers to respond anonymously. And they scored an interview with the addict in the arrest video, somebody who says he tries to use meth at least once a day and who has been involved in 34 criminal cases since 2014. The narrator reminds us, in case we couldn’t tell, that the man is “outrageously unapologetic about his life and his world; he could care less about yours.”
Which brings up a shortcoming of the special. As Charles Mudede writes for The Stranger, an alternative weekly newspaper, KOMO firmly believes the problem is that police are prevented from cracking down on these vermin: “Seattle’s law enforcers are powerless, or, to use the sexually charged wording of a cop who’s interviewed in the special, impotent.”
Now, The Stranger has a particular political bent, so we can take that with a grain of salt. But so does KOMO. The station is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which holds nearly 200 local TV stations across the country (including KATU in Portland) and has been criticized for presenting more propaganda than news. Sinclair is the company that last year required local anchors to read messages decrying media outlets for “personal bias” and an “agenda” — messages that might or might not have ended up looking like hostage videos.
And so, the odds are that your thoughts about the KOMO special will be influenced by your personal outlook. Nothing wrong with that; we all have our own perspectives. But it seems there is plenty of middle ground that can be staked out, and it seems that would be easier to do without “we’ve turned over our city to those who would steal from us and addict our children.”
Oooh, scary.
Notable is how city leaders in Seattle have been ineffective in addressing the crisis. That issue brings up the Broken Windows Theory — the belief that ignoring small crimes such as public urination leads to larger crimes. You can find criminologists and sociologists on both sides of the broken-window argument, but it plays into the Seattle discussion. When people have been involved in 60 or 70 criminal cases with few consequences, civility is degraded.
And there is plenty of room for empathy toward business owners and customers who encounter drug-addled street people on a daily basis.
Despite all that, it is impossible to buy into the fatalism of the show. Seattle has a gross domestic product of $250 billion, was ranked last year by Business Insider as having the fourth-best economy among major U.S. cities, and sets new records for tourism every year.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Seattle’s death are an exaggeration.
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