Quote of the day—Tammy Mutasa

Less than 120 people have caused more than 2,400 criminal cases throughout Seattle in five years.

These prolific offenders have been identified through the High Utilizer Initiative (HUI).

City Attorney Ann Davison announced the HUI launch Tuesday morning, a program made to identify those who repeatedly cause criminal activity throughout Seattle.

The program will then ensure these people will have the actual help they need, and their cases will be prioritized.

Tammy Mutasa
March 15, 2022
New initiative identifies hundreds who have caused thousands of crimes in Seattle
[These criminals were selected on this basis:

The people each has 12 or more referrals from SPD to the City Attorney’s office in the same time and at least one case in the last eight months.

That is an average of four crimes per year per person where the police did sufficient investigation to conclude there was a good chance of conviction. One has to wonder how many criminal acts were actually committed. What is the ratio? 2:1? 10:1?

That last sentence is a bit odd: “people will have the actual help they need”. I would have thought what they really need are “three hots and a cot”. But I guess they are going to try something else.

I remember in the 1960s and 1970s there was a lot of talk about “reform” rather than incarceration. My understanding is they tried a lot of things but there didn’t seem to be any real value. “Three strikes and you’re out” was the response to those failures. “Three strikes” has it’s own problems but there were indicators it was more effective at reducing crime than the previous decades of trying to reform the criminals.

While I would like to think the criminals can be reformed I’m skeptical the reform community of today has something new that wasn’t tried decades ago found to be nearly useless. I just hope whatever they do they make sure those known habitual offenders do not continue their criminal ways.

In the mean time, prepare appropriately if you visit Seattle.—Joe]

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23 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Tammy Mutasa

  1. You’ve got to wonder at the “mind” set of people who invent the term “high utilizer” rather than applying the perfectly good traditional term “career criminal” or “habitual offender”. The obvious reason is that they don’t want to use the remedy that is normally applied to career criminals.

  2. You beat me to it, Joe.

    Why are these habitual offenders in the hoo-skow? Clearly they are a danger to society. As its said, “Liberalism is a mental disorder”. More true than ever.

    Jeff B.

    • The habitual offenders aren’t a danger to society. The biggest danger to society is us “heavily-armed right-wing extremists”. (And to a somewhat lesser extent, the J6 “attempted right-wing coup” rioters.)

      The Biden Administration, the Small Wars Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc., all say it, ergo it must be true, right?

      [/sarcasm]

  3. I applaud the effort to identify the repeating criminals. I scratch my head at the implications of what is to be done about them.

    I’m all for punishment of criminals. People respond to incentives; we need to set up the correct incentives for the society we want, and if we don’t like crime in the streets, we need to disincentivize it.

    Having said that, there is also room for reform. People do wind up in prison who need help, and with the right help, they can become productive members of society. (Others cannot.)

    Personally, I’m in favor of an adversarial system. I want a justice system dedicated to locking up criminals, and a separate system dedicated to identifying those who can benefit from gentler methods. Let them duke it out with each other over individual cases.

    • Keep scratching your head, it won’t become clearer.

      The repeated reliance on “cause” and “causing crime” and “utilizer” is a persistent effort to displace responsibility from the offender.

      Words matter, and if this Mutasa is practically forced to concede that there is a crime problem, she will call on different words. She’s compelled to use the noun ‘crime’ but find other parts of speech, verbs like ’cause’ in this case, to continue to obscure.

      TL;DR, but I suspect Mutasa is the reporter, Davison is the author of the policy. What words did Davison use? If the initiative is labeled HUI, the ‘utilizer’ came from her.

    • It’s reasonable to assume that first time offenders are capable of reform. On the other hand, once you’ve been convicted three times, or a dozen times, that assumption has clearly been invalidated by reality, and the right answer is to lock the person up forever. This is why “three strikes” is the right law. (Although for certain offenses, I would argue “two strikes” is better — major violence and especially murder should clearly have at most two strikes.)

  4. Mr. Huffman:

    I saw that Amazon is pulling something on the order of 1,800 workers out of an area in Seattle to either work from home or from some different facility in a “safer” part of town. Were they located anywhere near what Barb calls “mug-me” street?

    Just wondering how many of these “high utilizers” have been active in those areas, and whether or not simply identifying them (as opposed to incarcerating) will actually reduce crime. But given that crime reduction is NOT their actual goal, I’m pretty sure what the answer will be.

    • I saw that too. I believe that Amazon facility was in fact adjacent to or on Mugme Street.

    • From what I’ve seen reported, it was their 3rd and Pine offices.

      Wonder if Seattle’s Naughty List is secured any better than other city data? Be a shame if it leaked and the citizenry could start watching for specific “people needing help” instead of just watching the downtown shitbird population in general…

      The latter is a good idea anyway, of course. (I work in downtown Spokane, nowhere near Seattle’s hive-of-scum-and-villany levels, but you can generally pick out the actual unfortunates from the predators; now that the weather is getting nicer, it’ll be ever easier, as the openly-carrier-hatchets-and-machetes will reappear. (I *wish* I was exaggerating. 🙁 ))

      • I wonder if any of the high utilizers needing help would benefit from lead therapy? Applied early and often.

    • One side of the Amazon (formerly Macy’s) building is on 3rd Street. That side of building is between Pine and Stewart/Olive. Ground zero of Mug Me Street is 3rd Street between Pike and Pine. The southern corner of the Amazon building is a few dozen feet from ground zero.

  5. Well obviously the velvet glove doesn’t work. But will the heavy hand? One of the problems is the disconnect in these people to the system.
    If the liberals would study the problem. They would find in short order that certain people have no impulse control. They simply do what feels good at the time. Regardless of consequences.
    These people will not be reformed. And they will never quit doing whatever feels good at the time. Including murder, rape, robbery, and drugs. They just don’t or won’t think about the logic chain of their actions. ( Basically what your momma called a sense of right and wrong. Whatever it is, they ain’t got one.)
    What we refuse to recognize is that it’s the same mentality the communists have. And the criminals at the top are using the criminals at the bottom to force the silent majority into accepting the communist program.
    That’s why they need to, “get them the help they need”. So we accept the continuation of the game. The longer it goes on. The more problem childs they’ll breed. (Like orcs.)
    The help they need. Is using a backhoe to dig the ditch. Rather than making them dig it themselves. Thats how the communists treat us and them.

    • In another space, I proposed a State requirement that any post-secondary student in political science, psychology, sociology, or the grievance studies conduct a field study of one semester in a crime-infested downtown, living, eating, dressing, recreating just as the homeless do. The student will submit and defend a thesis on ‘what doesn’t work.’

  6. Reform is possible but only if the person wants to be reformed. It’s no different than AA for alcoholics…it works if they want it to work. If they have no desire to change, they won’t.

    The problem is that most addicts and career criminals are master manipulators and are utterly bereft of conscience. They’ll convincingly make all the right noises indicating that they want to reform, take everything they can take from the reformers, and then merrily return to their criminal ways at their earliest opportunity, that having been their plan all along.

    The only way a reform program could have any kind of appreciable success is with both a carrot and a stick. You want to reform? Great, we’ll provide you the tools to do that, but you mess up one time and you go straight to jail and your sentence is doubled.

    With the bleeding hearts in charge, these people know that there are very few consequences to their actions, so they play the game, take as much as they can from the system and then turn their backs as soon as it’s convenient to do so.

    And leave the bleeding hearts scratching their heads and vowing to try the failed policies over and over again…but harder this time.

  7. Some forty years ago I also recall reading about the urge for reform of the criminal [catch and release] system. One author observed that if you trained a mugger in prison to cut wood, you wound up with a mugger who could cut wood.

    The Leftist urge for prison and crime reform occurred because “our nice youths from good homes” were finding themselves arrested for Marijuana possession offenses, and those offenses were no longer being committed only by the minority “lowlifes” who were the original targets of the various drug laws.

    • Good point. Just as the original “gun laws” were aimed at minorities and “undesirable” immigrants, the same was the motivation for drug laws. That, and continued employment of Prohibition enforcement parasites.

  8. One suspects that the offer of help for the one’s in need is not a veiled reference to providing target acquisition data to the general populace, but hope springs eternal they say.

  9. Repeat offenders are by definition beyond help. They don’t subscribe to the same
    societal norms that most people do. The only thing they fear is having to face painful personal consequences. Absent that they simply don’t give a red rats ass
    WHAT any of us think, believe or want. Too repeat criminals the rest of us are simply a resource to be taken and used when they wish. They are in most ways no different from pedophiles…. a group for which there is NO effective treatment or cure short of a bullet to the head.

  10. Introducing new terms to describe the problem changes what, exactly?

    It doesn’t. What it does is show the intent of those responsible for solving the crime problem(or, any other issue-this is not specific to the justice system.) in this case, don’t expect things to change.

    Back in the day homeless was not a word used to describe a particular segment of society. Vagrant, panhandler, Bum, and, my personal favorite, Troll*.

    Then the term ‘homeless’ was coined to describe the same segment(s) of society. Homeless has a certain ‘feel good’ connotation the other terms lack.
    The last two years I have seen public officials and advocates using the term ‘unhoused’. Like changing names is going to solve anything.

    * I grew up in Santa Cruz, Ca

    In the seventies, it was rumored that the homeless would use an address for the Water St. bridge as an address to qualify for public assistance. So, your run of the mill vagrants were labeled as trolls.

    • Introducing new terms for an old problem is a way for the left to hide the fact they have aided and abetted this problem for decades.

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  12. They may lock some of these career criminals up to give them help – but remember, they want to “help” you too.

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