Silent majority roars in Seattle: Massive pro-police rally held ahead of defund the police vote

The so-called "silent majority" spoke very loudly in Seattle on Sunday.

City residents turned out in droves for a "Back the Blue" rally outside city hall ahead of a major vote on Monday that would take funding away from the city's police department.

Videos and photographs posted to social media showed what appeared to be thousands of people outside Seattle City Hall, adorned in blue shirts and holding signs to show support for law enforcement.

Seattle resident John Balph, who said that police reforms are needed and called Black Lives Matter "a very worthy movement," said that defunding the police department is a "haphazard" prospect.

"There's bad enough news from the White House and Trump," Balph told the Seattle Times. "But it's depressing to live in Seattle right now."

"Is this the city the council wants to represent, a deserted city?" he continued. "It's not the Seattle I want to live in. But average citizens can't do anything about it. It's very frustrating."

The pro-police rally came ahead of a controversial vote by the Seattle City Council that will likely slash a significant portion of the Seattle Police Department's budget — although the cuts will not amount to 50%, a number that anti-police advocates had sought.

"We are going forward together on a grand social experiment. We will have a smaller police department than we did for 2019," attorney Scott Lindsay, a former city official, told KOMO-TV.

The vote comes after the city council has already made significant cuts to the police department, targeting the SWAT team, the mounted division, the harbor division, and the Navigation Team," a division of the police department dedicated to handling homeless people.

Pro-police demonstrators who protested the inevitable police budget cuts said that just because law enforcement reform is needed, that does not mean police budgets should be cut.

"Just because we need more social programs does not mean we need to defund the SPD. We can have both. We can fund the SPD, fund crime protection and fund law enforcement," a woman told KOMO.

Counterprotesters, including Antifa, showed up on Sunday, but the demonstration remained largely peaceful, according to the Times, with the exception of a small fight.