The Seattle City Council, and Councilman Peter Steinbrueck in particular, deserve high praise and support for ignoring the mayor's budget proposal and voting to add 30 more police officers to a department that hasn't had an significant increase in the number of officers in 35 years.

When we heard some of Steinbrueck's numbers on what the police face in our city, we asked him to lay out the problem for our readers. See his Op-Ed on the subject below and also see reporter Rebekah Schilperoort's report on Page One.

Councilman Steinbrueck quotes Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske on the fact Seattle "ranks second only to Memphis, Tenn." when it comes burglary, auto theft and theft of property. The council member says we have only 2.22 officers for every 1,000 city residents. He tells us that there are as few as 80 officers on acitive patrol in any given day across the city, then askes if we feel safe in our neighborhoods.

In Ballard there may be only three or four officers on a shift to cover everything from the crme along Aurora to the rowdism in summer at Golden Gardens and everthing in between.

Let us emphasize, these police officers are working as hard as they can and doing everything in their power to stem the tide, but most of them are unable to simply patrol the streets, but forced to run from one 911 call to the next.

While we applaud Steinbruek and the council for the added officers, it is only a tiny drop in the bucket of police need. One person told reporter Schilperoort that the added people, "spread over three shfts will not significantly decrease 911 response times.

The mayor wanted to spend more on general transportation needs and that is needed, too, but the first duty of a city government - any government - is to see to the general welfare and security of its people. We don't feel the mayor's scrimping on police services did that, do you?

It must not stop here. Crime is not rampant here, but we don't want it to be.

Thanks, Councilman Steinbrueck and those who supported his move to add to our "thin blue line."