Seven out of ten times Nordstrom's flagship Seattle store calls 911, nobody comes. The response rate — total, across all calls — is just 29%. Three calls in ten produce an officer. The other seven produce nothing.

The downtown vacancy rate is 35%.

On September 10, more than 30 of Seattle's largest companies — Microsoft, Costco, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Alaska Air Group, T-Mobile, Zillow, and the Seattle Mariners among them — signed an open letter begging socialist Mayor Katie Wilson to do something about the crime devouring the city. These aren't small business owners who can be brushed off as complainers. These are the corporations that fund Seattle's tax base, and they put their names on a letter that amounts to a public distress signal.

The letter included a specific 100-day action plan: end open-air drug markets, hire more police officers, reactivate the city's surveillance cameras, ban homeless encampments near public parks, and recommit to seven-minute 911 response times. They also demanded the city eliminate the LEAD program — Seattle's policy of diverting "low-level" offenders away from prosecution and into case management, which in practice means the people victimizing Nordstrom's flagship store face no criminal consequences for doing it.

The letter landed two months after a deadly shooting at a Seattle food festival in July — a shooting that cost the previous police chief his job. His replacement, Interim Chief Andre Sayles, has taken to calling shooters "trigger pullers," which is a creative way to avoid the word "criminals" in a city where that term apparently offends the leadership class.

Mayor Wilson's response to the corporate SOS has been instructive. Her approval rating sits at 37%. Confidence among residents that City Hall has a workable crime plan: 34%. Wilson's signature public safety move so far has been turning off the city's surveillance cameras — because she was afraid the Trump administration might use the footage to locate illegal aliens downtown.

Read that sequence again. Businesses are begging for help. Shootings are happening at food festivals. Nordstrom can't get a cop to show up seven out of ten times it calls. And the mayor's priority has been making sure federal immigration enforcement can't see who's walking around downtown.

City Council President Joy Hollingsworth offered her own assessment: "There have been too many people in this city that have workshopped their public safety dissertations on communities, right now." Translated from Seattle bureaucratic into English: the city spent years holding meetings about crime instead of stopping it. She's right about the diagnosis. Whether the council that sat through all those workshops plans to do anything different is the question she didn't answer.

Police union leader Kent Loux was more direct. "We need to be business friendly. We need to be attracting businesses, and part of that is enforcing low-level misdemeanor crime," he said. Enforcing low-level crime. In most American cities, that's just called policing. In Seattle, it's a controversial position.

The business letter noted that Seattle is scheduled to host FIFA World Cup matches. The city is preparing to welcome an international audience to a downtown where a third of the storefronts are empty, the police response rate at the most famous retailer in town is under 30%, the mayor has voluntarily blinded her own surveillance network, and the official response to crime is to divert offenders away from prosecution rather than toward it.

Wilson ran as a socialist. She governs as one. The companies that bankroll Seattle's budget are writing open letters because private conversations didn't work. Seventy-five percent of residents say they'd support bipartisan public safety recommendations — a number that suggests the political will exists everywhere except inside the mayor's office.

The surveillance cameras are still off. The vacancy rate is still 35%. The FIFA delegations are still coming.

Nordstrom calls. Nobody answers.