Finding the right place to start is challenging when so many of the things Andrea Suarez says are patently untrue, and there has certainly been no shortage of false information coming from her corner since she set her sights on joining the ranks of the Washington state legislature.
However, Suarez’s most recent blog post to her campaign website freed us from our choice paralysis by making what we needed to say next crystal clear.
The post contents
We didn’t want to give Suarez the SEO juice by linking to her site, so the blog entry contents is pasted below.
Defund has “fizzled to an end”, yet ideologues still hang onto the dream.
September 3rd, 2024
Recent editorials in the Seattle Times confirm my position as a community activist, and now candidate for public office — we must fund public safety.
The Defund ideology is past its pull date.
Danny Westneat writes about King County finally funding a juvenile detention facility. He states, “So, it’s over. Four years on, the progressive push to abolish jail and the police has, at least for now, fizzled to an end.”
The reality of carjacking, shootings, rampant shoplifting and other crimes is troubling to rational minds.
Jon Talton writes about crime affecting downtown, “Defunding the police became a temporary fad — although good policing costs more money, not less.”
2020: DEFUNDING’S MOMENT
2020 was when I became involved with creating We Heart Seattle. We started as volunteers helping clean downtown after riots left extensive property damage.
In June of that same year, my opponent Shaun Scott proclaimed in Crosscut, “The time to abolish Seattle police was yesterday.“
Scott’s 2020 Crosscut OpEd is his Abolitionist manifesto. Scott includes a history of racism within the Seattle Police Department (SPD). I am not discounting this account of a tragic history. My point is how Scott’s abolishment advocacy is out of touch, and, as we will see, destructive.
Scott’s OpEd derides support for funding a youth jail as “cheerleading” for militarism. Fast forward to reality: A unanimous King County Council just voted to fund a youth jail. Westneat’s article, cited above, captures current sentiment, “‘This is legislating in reality’, remarked council member Rod Dembowski, implying that the [defund] idea had been fantasy all along.”
FANTASY TO GRIM REALITY
Scott also wrote in his OpEd, and on social media, “During the past 35 years, racist laws like Seattle’s ‘drug-loitering’ and ‘prostitution-loitering’ ordinances were used as a pretext to badger transgender and cisgender Black women.”
In 2020, the Seattle City Council bought into this idealism to unanimously repeal laws protecting communities from the harms of prostitution. Today’s reality? Aurora avenue is a hotbed of street walking — trapping women, regardless of race, into sexual exploitation.
The Council also followed the Abolitionist narrative by repealing drug-loitering laws. Look at 3rd Avenue around Pine Street today — the area is so bad, it’s unsafe for anybody.
CHAOS REIGNS
On June 2 of 2020, Scott seemingly joked on social media, “Expecting Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best to fire Mayor Durkan any day now.” This may sound nonsensical, however, it’s very serious.
Scott’s post occurred only days before Seattle’s East Precinct was occupied during the CHOP/CHAZ. His PBS/Crosscut OpEd demanding abolishing police was published during the East Precinct takeover! Scott was in his element of fanning flames destabilizing public safety. He is a leader in radical politics and a play to further wreck law enforcement was in motion.
The Seattle City Council eventually followed suit with undermining police department leadership. In 2021, they jumped on the Defund bandwagon by slashing $3 million from the SPD, including a loss of 100 officers through a combination of layoffs and attrition. This led to the resignation of Carmen Best, who was the first African-American woman to ever serve as Seattle’s police chief.
YES TO PUBLIC SAFETY
I support approaches and ideas to actually improve public safety to meet the needs of our increasingly multi-cultural America.
Efforts like the 2012 Consent Decree between the City of Seattle and the United States Department of Justice are real progress. This is a settlement agreement which required Seattle to implement reforms, “with the goal of ensuring that police services are delivered to the people of Seattle in a manner that fully complies with the Constitution and laws of the United States, effectively ensures public trust and officer safety, and promotes public confidence…”
No thanks to Scott, we got our East Precinct back after the Mayor ordered officers, which included police from neighboring cities, to restore order.
Shaun Scott plans on taking his wrecking ball approach with public safety to Olympia. I am the only candidate in this race committed to funding public safety. Vote for me, Andrea Suarez on November 5th.
Following the primary election, Suarez wasted no time in going on the offensive with her campaign, slamming Shaun Scott at every opportunity. Her blog post attempts to illustrate that he won’t serve Washington well because he’s out of touch, and not unexpectedly because it’s par for the course with her, she asserts an abundance of false truths about police defunding and crime to support her narrative.
To provide a bit of context, Scott published the aforementioned article just twenty six days after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and the day after Juneteenth on the coat tails of SPD’s own violent retaliation against protesters of Floyd’s death that went on for weeks. In his piece, Scott details a long history of injustices committed against black people by Seattle police, and makes a call for the department’s reform as the city’s oldest and most endemically racist institution.
Suarez’s attempt to paint Scott’s article as some kind of willful erosion of public safety, and her accompanying failure to take into account the time at which it was published and its potential significance to Scott as a black American, serves only to prove that she is the one who’s woefully out of touch. Scott makes no utterances of seeking to destabilize anything, and the reach she makes here is so contrived that she really just ends up clubbing us over the head with the bluntness of her own cultural irrelevance.
Unfortunately, the issue is far more insidious than just being a matter of inaptness. Summarily dismissing Scott’s impassioned plea and the events surrounding its timing, while simultaneously calling for more funding to hold down the status quo as it pertains to Seattle law enforcement, is deeply and astoundingly racist. Knowing that members of Suarez’s immediate family take active part in white nationalist groups like the infamous Proud Boys, the saying could not be more apropos that apples do not fall far from the tree.
Furthermore, Suarez’s brazen distortion of a hopeful call for society to do and be better into something ugly paints a grim picture of how she relates to the world around her. In keeping with that, her political platform is built upon tearing others down, and as far as we can determine, the only thing she has committed to do while she’s in office thus far is take homes away from people who need them most.
Inviting Andrea Suarez to govern us only guarantees that she will do so with the same divisiveness she runs her campaign and non profit organization with, at a time when we need strength as a community more than ever. We cannot afford to ignore her proximity to white nationalism at the risk of losing years of hard-won progress towards racial equality.
The choice for Washington’s 43rd legislative district is clear, and it’s absolutely not Andrea Suarez.
Jim Crow-era racism has “fizzled to an end”, yet ideologues still hang onto the dream.