Brutal Seattle Crime Exposes the Cost of Socialist Mayor’s Hostility to Public Safety

Seattle’s new socialist mayor, Katie Wilson, has been going viral quite a bit in the last few weeks and for all the wrong reasons.

I know violent crime videos proliferate on social media these days, but this one is especially hard to watch.

In a clip captured by a closed-circuit television camera in Seattle, two young men can be seen senselessly beating a 77-year-old man and leaving him face down in the street.

Fortunately, the man survived his injuries, but he had to be hospitalized for a week.

One of the alleged attackers, 29-year-old Ahmed Abdullahi Osman, was quickly detained by police after he tried to evade them. In the police body camera video of his arrest, Osman said that he worked for the “state,” for “Katie, the mayor.”

According to David Rose at FOX 13opens in a new tab, Osman was released “on $5,000 bail for a separate fire alarm tampering charge two days after the attack,” as Seattle police conducted their investigation. They are now unable to find him after they put out a warrant for his arrest.

The whole thing is infuriating to say the least, as Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts indicated on X.

We can only hope justice will be done here, as it so often isn’t in America’s big, blue cities. But it’s important to note that if “Katie, the mayor,” had her way, the two suspects in this case would likely have never even been identified.

Let’s rewind to last year.

Here’s Wilson’s thoughts on those closed-circuit cameras before she got elected.

“Turning on more cameras won’t magically make our neighborhoods safer, but it will certainly make our neighborhoods more vulnerable,” she said in responseopens in a new tab to Seattle’s City Council expandingopens in a new tab the CCTV program in 2025, according to KOMO News.

It gets better.

Wilson further said that she opposed addingopens in a new tab more cameras because “[President Donald] Trump” could get the videos and they could be used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“We are deeply concerned that the expansion of these tools will create an infrastructure where federal agencies can more readily target vulnerable communities, including immigrants and refugees,” she said.

That’s the person who now runs the city.

It’s actually impressive how poorly Wilson has performed during her short time in office. Businesses are fleeing Seattle and her response was to say “bye” and laugh despite needing their money to fund all her government programs.

The self-avowed socialist, whose meager job qualifications amounted to little more than a few odd jobs and community organizing, seems to be totally in over her head to the point where her handlers frequently intervene when she’s asked mildly difficult questionsopens in a new tab in interviews.

She’s been so hapless that even one of her big local backers is already bailing.

Radio’s John Curley said Wilson’s socialist ideals were an “experiment” that’s going badly.

“We’re really getting a chance to experience it. We’re driving out the job creators—they’re leaving. You have high vacancy rates. This city is now struggling to find money,” he said on KIRO Newsradioopens in a new tab. “They haven’t had to start cutting yet. They still continue to promise a lot of stuff to people, and this is what you get.”

Curley said he was willing to give it a shot, but if “it bombs, we can dig a nice little 6-foot grave. We can stick socialism in there. We can cover it with dirt. We can put the gravestone on top of it and say, ‘We tried it. We didn’t kill anybody, but apparently, taking from one group of people and giving to another group of people fails as it always does.’”

Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking.

Socialism, for all its failures, has a remarkable knack for being pulled out of the ground, ambling around like a zombie, then eating the brains (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) of both the people who dug it up and innocent victims who had nothing to do with it.

I will give a quick tip here for America’s crop of newly elected leftists.

If you don’t want to immediately end up with approval ratings like Chicago’s feckless Mayor Brandon Johnsonopens in a new tab, don’t make lawlessness your priority. The clever ones would be wise to lead with all the other terrible stuff first before abandoning basic public safety. But they often don’t even understand that. Maybe that’s why they are socialists.

I think we already have enough evidence to figure out that Wilson isn’t one of the clever ones.

It’s hard to top the line by Ari Hoffman at The Post Millennialopens in a new tab, who said of Wilson on Newsmax that she’s an “empty vessel” and that “if she had an original thought in her head, it would die of loneliness.”

Tough, but fair, I’d say.

Unfortunately, there will be very real, deadly consequences for the people of Seattle due to having such poor leadership.

I feel like I keep writing this line over and over, but it must be said: Seattle really is getting what it voted for here. It’s going to be a long four years in Emerald City.

Reprinted with permission from the Daily Signal.

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Pastopens in a new tab.”

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.