In a Guest Rant last week, democratic operatives Kamau Chege and Rian Watt asserted that Alexis Mercedes Rinck won her City Council race because she ran as a new kind of candidate—a progressive public safety candidate—and they encouraged others to replicate it. by Hannah Krieg In a Guest Rant last week, democratic operatives Kamau Chege and Rian Watt asserted that Alexis Mercedes Rinck won her City Council race because she ran as a new kind of candidate—a progressive public safety candidate—and they encouraged others to replicate it.  The article wants you to believe that the progressive left has reclaimed the public safety narrative in a new way. But a close read of their argument reveals their true message: They like moderate criminal punishment policies and think the left should promote them.  Laundering moderate policy positions about crime as “progressive” isn’t just misleading—it genuinely harms the left. To see that in action, we only need to look at the presidential election, where conservative philosophies of policing and crime were “rebranded”—driving the Democratic party’s failed turn to the right.  Rinck won for a variety of reasons. To claim, without evidence, that a pet moderate issue—defanging the left against the militarized arm of the state—carried her is opportunistic, revisionist, and unhelpful for landing future victories.  “Public Safety Candidate” To prove that Rinck won as a progressive public safety candidate, we would first have to prove that Rinck made public safety a centerpiece of her campaign. But that doesn’t reflect the message she consistently brought to the voters. During her campaign, she leaned far more heavily on appeals to working people. In her stump speech, Rinck billed herself as a renter and public transit user that went from waiting tables next to the Space Needle to writing policy in the UW tower. She typically buttoned with her line of choice: “I’m running for Seattle City Council to fight for a city that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few.”  She also positioned herself as the more politically savvy in the race in her stump speech. She would flex her experience bringing people together when she worked at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority or diving into the budget at UW.  Finally, Rinck would close her stump speech by promising to protect City services. Born to teenagers, she said she relied on her grandparents, good teachers, and the Boys and Girls Club. She called herself a testament to the fact that investing in young people, regardless of their starting point, can change generations. Then she would vow to increase progressive revenue to protect critical services. By contrast, her opponent Tanya Woo did run as a public safety candidate. Her stump speech usually included a mention of her Community Night Watch. She also listed public safety as “number one” in her top three priorities.  This opening message, one that brands Rinck as the candidate for working people and Woo as a “public safety” candidate, appeared on the Seattle Channel, at debates, and in interviews with the press to name a few concrete examples.  Rinck did mention “public safety” in the King County voter guide. In that case, to define her as a “public safety candidate,” we would have to prove that the mere mention of public safety in the voter guide outweighs the repetition of her stump speech. And why then other progressive candidates who mention public safety to a similar extent in their voter guide statement—Alex Hudson, Maren Costa, and Andrew Lewis—all lost their races.  Hello, Fellow Communists Even if the writers could establish Rinck branded herself as the “public safety” candidate, they’d also have to prove that she did so from a left perspective. It is 100% the case that public safety includes social services, housing, and other things besides cops, which Chege and Watt mentioned in their post. But I disagree with the framing that Rinck “reclaimed” public safety for the left when she actually took a more centrist approach when it comes to policing—the main lever our local government reaches for when they get scared of crime.  You may hear a deflection from the droning demands to hire more police when Rinck advocates to staff up all departments of first responders—“law enforcement to fire, emergency medical, but also behavioral health alternative response”—but that’s something candidates across the political spectrum say to voters including Council Member Rob Saka, a clear conservative who often emphasizes getting the “right” response.  Further, Rinck conceded the argument on growing the SPD’s footprint to conservatives, advocating for the City to pay for more cops and said she would support programs to encourage new hires in her appearance on the Seattle Channel.  Rinck also told KOMO that “one thing” that’s “not working” in terms of public safety in Seattle is that SPD does not respond fast enough, an argument that many of the more conservative candidates based their 2023 campaign on, namely Maritza Rivera. The opinion does not take into account that not all those calls need a five minute response or would be best served by police officers in general.  The article said that Rinck said she “wanted to hire police officers—paired with accountability measures”—a moderate approach, at best considering literally every single conservative on the City Council caveats their calls for more police with calls for more accountability measures. To advocate for more cops marks a concession to an unrealistic task of hiring in large numbers during a nationwide shortage and validates the shaky claim from the right that more cops makes communities more safe. A progressive public safety platform does not advocate for more cops, particularly as libraries and other public institutions face their own staffing shortage. A progressive council member should vote no anytime their conservative colleagues try to inflate the Seattle Police Department’s bloated budget and look for ways to shrink the department’s footprint. That stance is incompatible with one that seeks to hire more officers. Next, they said Rinck “supported enforcement of public drug use laws—paired with expanding diversion programs.” Conservatives always bring up, genuinely or not, that they want to pair enforcement with diversion, even Council President Sara Nelson. And I laugh at the insinuation that arresting people for using drugs is an “evidence-based” approach. Research repeatedly shows that jailing people for drug use can actually increase recidivism rates, increase overdose rates, and create barriers to accessing housing and jobs. An evidence-based, progressive platform would assert that the police and the criminal punishment system are not appropriate conduits through which to carry out a public-health approach to substance abuse disorder. And, a progressive who wants drug use to be safer and less visible would advocate to reignite the fight for safe consumption sites.   They button their argument, writing, “It wasn’t abolition—and it wasn’t enforcement-only, either.” Not a single candidate who made it through the primary in 2023 was an abolitionist – besides maybe Christiana ObeySumner would call themselves that—that’s just what the corporate donors wanted voters to think.  One Simple Trick To Win An Election The Right Doesn’t Want You To Know Finally, the article failed to argue that voter’s perception of Rinck as a “public safety candidate”  won her the race, but the public safety platform the authors claim she won with did not carry other, recent candidates to a victory. For example, Costa took up the same stance on hiring more cops while increasing accountability measures in 2023 and she lost by 9 percentage points. Lewis blames his loss on the fact that he supported the drug use ban, but voted no so the council could pair it with diversion programs, much like the point the op-ed amplified in Rinck’s platform. Rinck won for a variety of reasons—organized labor rallied behind her early, the Democratic LDs gave her their sole endorsement, progressive PACs fundraised competitively with the corporate donors, voters already rejected Woo once, and Seattle has a reactive, anti-incumbent streak. I already broke down the number of factors that may have led to her win, but I was not so arrogant as to say a single issue led to her landslide victory.  The “progressive public safety” narrative feels like little more than an excuse to dunk on abolitionists and other lefties who take hard stances against the bootlicking narrative. Chege and Watt try to compare Rinck to unspecified candidates before her. “Rinck, unlike other candidates from Seattle’s left wing in recent years, conceded to the obvious but difficult-to-navigate reality that Seattle voters view public safety as the single most important issue in local elections and, importantly, that those views actually reflect a material reality that bears serious public attention and public work,” they wrote. I do not know what candidate did not recognize “public safety” as an important issue. And if they mean that previous abolitionist candidates such as Nicole Thomas-Kennedy pretended crime does not happen, I question their recollection of the race. When candidates such as Thomas-Kennedy opposed charging and jailing people who commit nonviolent misdemeanors, she didn’t deny that these crimes occur; She rightly rejected that prosecution and jail time prevented or decreased crimes of poverty as she argued in many debates. Instead, she wanted to focus City resources on making victims whole—repairing broken windows, and paying the corner store for a stolen Snickers bar.   The article suggests other candidates campaign on public safety like Rinck; they want to change how progressives talk about public safety by constructing a narrative where a “public safety candidate from the left” is one that concedes to the right. Other candidates have won on public safety platforms that do no such thing. Shaun Scott just won his State House race by an even larger margin as an abolitionist. Last year, Council Member Tammy Morales also beat Tanya Woo all while holding a more lefty line on public safety.  In an age of disinformation, rampant rightwing propaganda, pundits have no excuse for revising history to market the political strategy that actually has no clear proof of concept. This “progressive public safety” narrative does not hold up to basic scrutiny, and it should not be allowed to shape future progressive campaigns. Additional reporting by Ashley Nerbovig.