Seattle on track to elect wokest mayor ever who wants to slash police budget in crime-plagued city

Daily Mail​

3 days ago

Seattle is on track to elect one of the farthest left candidates in its history as the city suffers severe homelessness, violent crime waves and budget crises.
Katie Wilson, 43, a former union leader who has pledged to 'Trump-proof' the Democrat-led city in Washington state, holds a narrow lead in her primary showdown with incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell.
With the final results of the primary expected to take days to calibrate, Wilson holds 46.21 percent of the vote to Harrell's 44.85 percent. The final two in the race will face each other in November's general election. No other candidate broke five percent.
Wilson launched her campaign for Seattle Mayor in March, and held her announcement at one of the homelessness-ravaged city's shelters.
If elected, she has pledged to fight Donald Trump 's crackdown on illegal immigration by refusing federal orders targeting immigrants and demanding the Seattle Police Department don't 'assist in arrests for civil immigration violations', her website states.
She has also vowed to establish an 'Asylum Seeker Rapid Rehousing voucher program' that would provide migrants with two years of free housing subsidies, and instate a number of climate change policies.
Wilson previously called to defund the Seattle Police Department, a policy that has seemingly not hurt her candidacy despite Seattle suffering through one of the worst crime waves in the nation in recent years.
The city's residents have a shocking one-in-129 chance of being a victim of a violent crime, and was determined to be safer than just one percent of all US cities, according to crime statistics outlet Neighborhood Scout.
Wilson appeared surprised on Wednesday as the primary results tilted her way, telling KOMO that 'we were not expecting to be ahead on the first drop, right?'
As an activist and general secretary of the Seattle-based Transit Riders Union, Wilson called for the defunding of Seattle's Police Department during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots.
In an article she penned for PBS titled 'What defunding Seattle Police could look like, Wilson celebrated the fact that calls to 'shrink or even abolish police departments have gained a foothold remarkably quickly.'
She wrote that while calls to take away anti-riot gear such as rubber bullets, water cannons and flash-bangs was a good start, these make up a far smaller part of the police budget than personnel costs.
Rather, she said that Seattle should significantly reduce the number of police officers, even as the city remains in the grips of a crimewave.
'Let's take a moment to appreciate just how remarkable it is that shrinking the police force is even on the table,' she wrote.
Like New York City mayoral socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani, Wilson said she wants to replace cops with social workers.
'It may sound alarming, until you realize that U.S. police perform numerous functions for which armed personnel, trained for violent conflict, are unnecessary or unsuited — and often, unsurprisingly, cause harm,' she wrote.
'There's a strong argument for simply disbanding police departments and starting over: Institutional culture change is hard.'
Wilson's support for defunding Seattle's police department comes as the city struggles with rampant violent crime, and it has one of the highest crime rates in America.
From pre-pandemic levels, Seattle has seen a 20 percent surge in aggravated assaults.
And so far in 2025, the city has seen almost 2,900 violent crimes including 212 rapes, 21 homicides and 814 robberies - an average of 13.1 violent crimes every day throughout this year.
Much of this crime surge has been attributed to Seattle's issues with homelessness, with the city becoming a hotbed of vagrancy and open-air drug taking in recent years.
In the 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment, a report to Congress released in January 2025, analysts found that city leaders are failing to provide even basic shelter to homeless people.
Over 57 percent of the city's homeless population live without any shelter, compared to just three percent in New York City. Seattle also has six times as many homeless people as Chicago and ten times as many as Philadelphia.
Washington state also had over 16,200 homeless people in the recent survey, compared to just 5,600 in New York, a state with over two-and-a-half times more people in total.
Seattle leaders declared a state of emergency in 2015 over its homelessness crisis, but in the time since the city's homeless population has surged a staggering 88 percent.
In Washington state at-large, only the much more populated state of California has a higher homeless population, per the Seattle Times.
In her plans to tackle Seattle's homelessness, Wilson has pledged to step up the city's funding of shelters and open 4,000 new units of emergency housing in four years.
She cites many of the city's horrific homelessness statistics on her policy platform as she vowed to also 'treat debilitating drug use as the public health crisis it plainly is.'
As she celebrated her lead over Harrell this week, Wilson said that she attributes her success to the fact that 'people want a mayor who is going to tackle the problems that they're facing every day.'
However, Wilson is not elected yet and will still face a general election vote in November, with both Wilson and Harrell expected to remain in the race.
KOMO News Political analyst Ron Dotzauer said after Wilson took the lead that the general election voters are likely to be far broader than primary voters.
'You certainly had a constituency that was very, very liberal that turned out in this primary,' he said.
'August 5th is not November 5th.'