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Animals > Human Detainees!

By David Packman

As promised earlier this week, we've analyzed the stories generated in the media stemming from the findings of inadequate care in King County's animal shelters and compared it to the number of stories generated a few months ago stemming from the Department of Justice's charges of inadequate care of human pre-trial detainees in the King County Jail. We wanted to use the media as a guage to determine whether people in Seattle cared more about human abuse or animal abuse, especially after the King County Council took such a hard line about the animal abuse findings while they were much more reserved about the detainee abuse findings.

The answer? If the media is a guage, King County residents care about animals being abused twice as much as they do about humans being abused on their behalf. The results break down as follows for a one week period following the story breaking for the report on King County Animal Shelter Conditions and the DOJ Report Of Constitutional Rights Abuses at The King County Jail:

Now, I was going to analyze the comment sections of the relevent reports to determine which stories generated the most positive responses, but the answer was pretty clear, people overwhelmingly thought abusing animals was bad, while most people appeared to think abusing potentially innocent pre-trial detainees was a good thing... so much for the right to due process and the idea of the punishment fitting the crime.

So, the results were pretty much as expected... PETA would be proud, and the results explain why the abuses at the jail are still ongoing and as a result there were 65 cases of MRSA infections at that jail within the last five months.

Full post as published by Injustice in Seattle on March 22, 2008 (boomark / email).