Seattle food festival shooting highlights the incompetence of city leadership

It may not surprise you that Seattle’s city government is one of the most incompetent in the country, but it may surprise you just how deep that incompetence goes.A shooting at the Seattle Center unfortunately put this incompetence on display. Seven people were shot, with two dying at the scene and another at the hospital, on the final day of the Bite of Seattle food festival. Seattle police and city officials were slow to release any details about the shooting despite the main suspect being on the loose. Seattle has an emergency alert system, but no alert was sent out during or after the shooting, and no information about whether the shooting was random or whether the suspect was on the loose was released for five hours after the shooting. The first big update came from the city’s socialist mayor, Katie Wilson. Wilson was the first to announce that police had two suspects in custody — information that turned out to be wrong and had to be corrected at the press conference held nearly two-and-a-half hours later, a full five hours after the shooting took place.Police officers keep watch after a mass shooting at the Bite of Seattle food festival on July 26 in Seattle. (Getty Images) Aside from the slow information flow, several problems with Seattle’s police department were also made clear. For one, the shooting is believed to be gang-related. Police chief Shon Barnes said that these gangs (or “small groups,” as he initially called them, lest “gangs” be considered a racially insensitive comment) were connected to 52% of shootings in the city despite gang members making up 0.01% of its population.And yet, despite gangs accounting for 52% of Seattle shootings, the police department dismantled its dedicated gang unit in 2020 (lest having a gang unit be considered racially insensitive). Gang response has now been watered down as Seattle pushed those responsibilities under the broader Gun Violence Reduction Unit.SEATTLE DEMOCRATS LEARN MINIMUM WAGE LAWS HAVE A COSTSecondly, there was the fact that Barnes was not in Seattle at the time of the shooting. Barnes said this was because he was at a conference in Dallas, but it raised the issue that Barnes may not even live in Seattle. According to Seattle public affairs blog PubliCola, Barnes was out of town for 13 of 18 weekends between February and May of this year. As it turns out, Barnes’s wife and children live in Chicago, over 1,700 miles away. (Barnes objects to the idea that this is why he is out of town so often.)Between the clueless socialist mayor, the weakened police department, and the absentee police chief, Seattle handled this shooting and the aftermath about as poorly as could be expected from a major American city. The Emerald City is the gold standard for how not to protect the public.