Despite cheery statements from City Hall, last year violent crime went up 8% and property crime went up 9% for an overall crime increase of 9%.
In fact, last year was the single largest annual increase in 25 years, defying the decades long trend of falling crime rates.
The trend in 2015 is similarly disturbing. While the property crime rate shows some improvement, crimes against people, otherwise known as violent crimes, are holding steady at the elevated 2014 rate.
If those statistics aren’t telling enough, this one should give us pause. In 2014 shots fired went up 22% over 2013.
This year is even worse. To date there have 171 shots fired, compared to 146 during the same period in 2014.
From our elected officials we have heard mostly silence regarding this increase in crime. The Seattle Times Danny Westneat said it “equaled a ‘gone fishing’ sign up at the station house.” They must be waiting for more data.
Monitoring crime trends and taking action are duties that fall first to the Mayor’s office, but in our system the City Council is also critically important. Their first responsibility is oversight - to provide a check and balance to the executive branch and to not let issues slide just because they might be politically embarrassing or uncomfortable. An equally important job is to respond to neighborhood voices and focus on developing programs and approaches to help get at the root causes of crime. In both areas, the council is falling short.
If elected, here is what I will work on:
1. Return to Effective Community and Hot Spot Policing Citywide
Getting officers out of their cars and on foot and bike in crime hotspots is a tried and true method of ensuring public safety. Crime tends to be very persistent by location, but it can be disrupted by continual police presence coupled with community partnership. The key part of the strategy is using officers ‘uncommitted time’, which means time not spent responding to 911 calls, to directly patrol hot spots, talk to business owners, and get to know residents. This strategy led in 2013 to an astonishing 80% reduction in crime at 23rd and Union, and led to a proposed expansion of the program citywide. That expansion never happened.
The recent 9 1/2 blocks strategy is a partial version of the hotspot plan, and it would be a great program if the city was only 9 1/2 blocks long. Focusing resources on such a small area of the city is good for photo-ops, but we’ve been pursuing similar strategies for decades. We push the crime a few blocks over where it fires back up again.
As an at-large council member, I’ll advocate for SPD deployment of resources across the city. For example, Rainier Valley residents deserve the same attention to the recent dramatic increase in shots fired in their neighborhood as downtown business owners get for the low-level drug dealing that happens there. As a council member, I will work to hold the executive branch accountable to all neighborhoods, without regard to politics.
2. Learn the lessons of LEAD and End the Failed War on Drugs
Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) is a program that’s been shown to work, empowering officers to direct low-level and persistent offenders straight to treatment instead of jail. A recent study shows that LEAD participants are 60% less likely to be arrested and 39% less likely to be charged with a felony after the program. LEAD depends on officer and neighborhood engagement, facilitating the building of trust between all the players: the shelter operators, nonprofits, bar owners, police, social workers, and addicts. It isn’t driven just by data, it depends as much on forged relationships, familiarity and empathy. It’s not a program that can be exported cookie-cutter around the city, but it’s a method of policing that can and should be applied to a wide variety of situations and neighborhoods. It’s much easier, and sexier, to tout new surveillance technology and real-time data monitoring than it is to cultivate a police culture that gets addicts into treatment, or abuse victims into shelters. But the video game approach to public safety can’t produce lasting results without the support programs and quality training to back it up.
3. Hold Executive Branch to Hiring Goals
Mayor Ed Murray has committed to hiring 100 new officers, but his goal of 1364 officers is only 3 officers more than the 1361 officers authorized before he was elected. No city council member has raised this discrepancy and no hearings have been held in the last year on whether SPD is meeting its hiring goals. Let’s make sure we are providing SPD the resources it needs for effective community policing.
4. Consider Funding Automatic Gunshot Locator System
The dramatic increase in shots fired justifies investigating the merits of an automatic gunfire locator system. This new technology allows officers to definitively distinguish gunshots from similar noises and pinpoint the location for an immediate response. Rainier Beach has been plagued by gunfire for a decade, and has seen four drive-bys in recent weeks. Shot location systems are already in use in cities around the nation like Washington, Denver, and New York. The council rejected this proposal in 2012 but the technology has improved and costs have gone down, although concerns about privacy remain. I will look seriously at this system to see if it’s right for Seattle.
5. Invest in Felon Re-entry
When it comes to the arrest, prosecution and incarceration of young black and latino men, our system has a demonstrable bias. Just considering the thousands of people locked up for low-level marijuana crimes--crimes we wouldn’t prosecute today--there’s a desperate need for a way to reintegrate these populations into civic life. When a felon returns from prison without housing, peer support, or a chance to earn an income there is a 30-50% chance they will return to jail within three years (Figure taken from Investing for No Return, 2012). I’ll strengthen our commitment to the city’s successful “Career Bridge” program, implement the recommendations of the 2013 Reentry Summit, and work to replicate the amazing success of Richmond, California which has seen recidivism and murders plummet by focusing resources on smoothing the reentry to society of those most likely to reoffend.
6. End the School to Prison Pipeline
The King County Council recently voted to approve a contract for a new Youth Detention Center in Seattle. While I agree the old youth detention center was a disgrace, constructing an enlarged facility is a move in the wrong direction. Incarceration of young people should be an option of last resort, not a matter of course. Seattle needs to fund programs that intercept troubled kids before they offend. Most kids just need an after school program, or access to an arts education, but the ones who are truly troubled should get counseling and family services protection instead of a jail cell. The Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Program works well, but ends when kids turn 18. We should extend the program to age 21.
In addition to giving youth at risk of violence access to intensive case management that works, we also need to create jobs directly applicable to them. I would work to expand arts related jobs as well as increase support for the successful Seattle Conservation Corps program. Working to improve our public parks and facilities while receiving valuable training and a city income will invest young people in civic life while instilling pride in themselves and their city. The successful Rainier Beach International Baccalaureate program is another example of a program that gives kids a chance to deliver on their promise, but we need to commit to these programs with funding, and to getting arts education through Creative Advantage into all our schools.
CONCLUSION
Those programs can take years to make a difference. We need to deal with the very real and present dangers to public safety now, but we must always have our sights set on the future. The spike in crime we’re seeing now is the product of a failure on the part of our leaders to invest in real and lasting solutions. This may be a long, hot summer, full of unrest. I’d like to ensure that, come next summer, we’ve got a plan in place to reduce crime across the board that will produce lasting results.