I read the budget, and @SeattlePD spends $845.15 for each batch of "Demonstration Equipment" it buys officers. This equates to more than the cost of 363 mean-priced WA school lunches. PER OFFICER **JUST** for the cost of the armor they wear to counter political demonstrations.

SPD plans to spend $67,477.87 on around 80 sets of this military body armor in 2020. This comes out to the cost of 28,714 school lunches.

But this doesn't include money spent on "crowd control" (this is the euphemism for the various chemical and so-called "less than lethal" weapons they use on Seattle communities despite their having been banned by the Geneva convention and internationally deemed a war crime).

Averaging the cost of the last three years, we can ballpark it at $38,413.

(2017 - $27,538
2018 - $56,529
2019 - $31,172)

Not including the many exorbitant one-time purchases of tanks and other various war vehicles, this brings the cost of *JUST* the equipment SPD explicitly admits is allocated for suppressing protests to $105,890.87, enough to provide school lunches for 45,060 hungry WA school kids

This is just from reallocating the money SPD spends on weapons and armor it expects to deploy against the people of Seattle who exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed right to demonstrate.

Let me restate that another way: By deciding to stop paying SPD to go to war with the community it purports to serve, we can invest in the children of our communities to the tune of 45,060 lunches they don't have to worry about while trying to learn.

Imagine what else we could stop paying people equipped for war to do. What other situations are escalated by sending people dressed as soldiers with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence?

Why is that the same checklist we use to determine who should be deployed to addressing the struggles of our neighbors in crisis over lack of shelter AND mental illness AND school discipline AND youth unemployment AND immigration AND youth violence AND sex work AND drugs?

This is precisely what defunding the police is about.

SPD budget source: http://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=8601306&GUID=19F4768F-4BAF-4914-A0A1-D103DB870C71

Here's some relevant history from an earlier post on the origin of using police to counter political demonstrations:

During the two decades from 1880 to 1900—a period that saw 5,090 documented labor strikes in U.S. cities involving over a million(!) people—the practice of using police force to suppress protests began for the first time in history.

Though they were publicly-funded, these colloquial "delegated vigilantes," worked explicitly on behalf of the white upper class business owners, the only members of society who were even allowed to call the police.

This practice originated as an effort to quell the campaign for an 8 hour workday (the standard at this time was 10 hrs/day 6 days/wk).

By characterizing peaceful strikes—even many against individual companies—as "riots" and brutally attacking and arresting protestors with ambiguous "public order" charges. A full 80% of *all* arrests during this time were of workers for "public order."

By criminalizing striking workers, worker's rights were conflated with crime in the public eye. This was a strategy that successfully mitigated public sympathy for their cause and with it public opposition to their suppression, brutalization, and imprisonment.

history source: https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-history-of-policing-in-us.pdf