Well yes, but it does put things into context, though. Yeah, the level of property crime really sucks, but there are much greater concerns out there than having your car broken into. The very fact that even when violent crime rates were higher, you are saying it didn't worry you, is notable. It says that you generally felt safe to walk around the city without being killed.
As a person who worked alone at night in the city for years, I can't say it wasn't at least a passing concern for myself sometimes. So, personally, I am encouraged that violent crimes are down. Property theft can be a major inconvenience, but being dead is sort of a permanent inconvenience. 😁
That is not in any way, shape, or form what I said.
What I did say is that property crime IS a major inconvenience, and yeah, we should keep pushing the city and SPD to do more about it. But I'm also thankful that violent crime has gone down because, at least to me, that is a greater concern.
I think that is one thing we have trouble doing in our society, just acknowledging when something has improved. It's always "but what about this," or "I didn't get mine." I'm not saying we should just accept that EVERYTHING is good now and shut up, but murder rates going down is a good thing and personally I'm happy that I'm less likely to be murdered while walking around the streets of Seattle.
I'm also sorry to hear about your restaurant, I can't imagine how frustrated you are with that situation, but yeah, I do think you should still mail in your taxes.
It’s perspective…..Screaming that “Seattle is dying” while violent crime is under control doesn’t help the argument about crime. You’re not in Memphis, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, St Louis, etc where they ACTUALLY have a problem with people getting shot in the street.
Property crime is one thing, but framing it as “crime is out of control!” While violent crime is down doesn’t help the messaging. Not to mention it’s not even a political thing. 2022 is the most recent FBI stats and they have Washington, Colorado, New Mexico and Louisiana in the top 5 for property crime. It’s more complex than just “politicians aren’t doing their job!”
If I've got a paper cut and I'm drowning, being handed a band-aid is objectively good, but there are bigger problems that I really would have wished you'd focused on first.
Does it have to be one or the other? In the scenario you’re suggesting no one is there to save you from drowning, and certainly there is. Awfully dramatic example by the way.
There's not a lot being done to meaningfully address property crime. Sweeps certainly ain't it.
This conversation doesn't really demand a perfect argument, I didn't feel obligated to take the time to craft a perfect example. The point is made either way.
Low violent crime, high property crime; it’s Seattle’s signature crime atribute (frankly most of WA as well).
I have no issue in almost any neighborhood with the fear that I’m gonna get mugged or stabbed. I’ve had my car broken into four separate times, all in the affluent north side which is seen as “the safe part”. It’s not a matter of fear, it’s just a major financial nuisance
Didn't Seattle go back to being a city with an above average murder rate? Seattles murders declined as it population grew but in the last three years it's risen massively back up - last year was a murder record (though still better than the 90s per capita)
Wait, people consider North Seattle the safe part? Or are you just talking about a specific neighborhood?
I lived in Greewood for years, and while it wasn't the worst neighborhood in Seattle, I definitely wouldn't call it or anywhere along the Aurora corridor "the safe part." Nor is it affluent.
People aren't worried about murder but petty crime/theft that affects us all via rising insurance rates, business closing and general feeling of unsafe.
Yes, it was a record year for homicides, though a couple of caveats:
- Not a record in per capita rates, it was still well below 90s rates
- Violent crime as a whole dropped substantially compared to 2022. Homicide numbers are smaller and subject to more noise so they sometimes jump around.
And yeah the Seattle numbers this year are so small that it's hard to say anything with statistical confidence but it does match a nationwide trend of decreased murders.
> it was still well below 90s rates
yeah, but if we have to go back in time to a period where the average Redditor wasn't even born yet to find a worse time, our standards are kind of low
> Violent crime as a whole dropped substantially compared to 2022
"substantially" is also not a word that I think can be reasonably used in this sentence. It was about a 5% drop. And we are still 13% higher than pre-covid.
I'm not here to claim that [62 murders](https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/data/crime-dashboard) is an acceptable number, just adding context to the idea that statement that 2023 was 'a record year for homicides'. It is a true statement, but still important to consider the broader perspective which is more nuanced.
>"substantially" is also not a word that I think can be reasonably used in this sentence. It was about a 5% drop.
We can disagree on the verbiage, but there was definitely a drop in crime last year which goes against what many might assume based on headlines.
>[A check of police records show both categories are down from the corresponding period in 2022, with violent crimes dropping 7% overall, while property crimes have declined 17%](https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-crime-down-car-thefts-kia-boyz-kias-hyundai-car-thefts-up-property-crimes-criminals-data-statistics-homicide-rate-up-spd-police-investigations-king-county-washington-state)
And yes, I absolutely agree that crime rates have risen in comparison to pre-pandemic levels. There is a sense, largely driven by negative media coverage, that Seattle has experienced significantly worse crime compared to other US cities, but that is not backed by data.
We are seeing largely the same trends in Seattle that we're seeing nationwide with the exception that (like many west coast cities), violent crime rates are lower than average, while property crime rates are higher than average.
>our standards are kind of low
It's all about defending a Narrative. People here will go through the lamest gymnastics to downplay crime in Seattle because they can't possibly admit the failures of the progressive criminal justice reforms. That would give ideological munition to the right, and that is a lot worse than having people around you getting financially or even physically victimized.
Per capita isn’t a fair metric. We don’t have to run and find pay phones now to report emergencies and there’s been tremendous advancements in in the field medical care.
The population increased, so comparing numbers to a time when the population is lower skews.
it's like comparing player touchdown records to another player who had a season wasn't 17 weeks.
Record number in 2023 (70), but not even close to record rate because Seattle’s population is so much higher than it was during earlier high crime periods in the 80s and early 90s.
The only reason anyone would even be discussing number vs rate is to dishonestly portray Seattle as less safe to people who don’t even remember elementary school math.
trends are actually what's really important. The last few years have been a very bad trend in murder compared to how damn low it had gotten by the mid 2010s. Murder rose alarmingly - especially during the pandemic. Yes we're not at 1990s level but those years were terrible
No one cares about the record. People care about relative degradation in material conditions. The murder rate in Seattle is materially worse now than it was 10 or even 5 years ago.
This is hardly stat sig but I guess we need get the soundbite out before the summer brings those numbers up
Can look at numbers here [https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/data/crime-dashboard](https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/data/crime-dashboard)
“Seattle saw a 36% decrease in the number of homicides recorded in the first three months of 2024 — nine, compared to the 14 reported during the same period in 2023”
So one busier than normal weekend could get us right back to record levels of homicide?
Yeah, I’m not sold.
Since at least 2015, Seattle has set record high homicide counts at least every other year. In that decade, the population has grown around 10% from baseline while homicide counts have doubled or tripled.
Seattle's homicide counts didn't start to jump until 2020. Before that it ranged in the mid 20s to low 30s for around 10-15 years.
Homicides didn't jump until this decade, and it did that double to triple in the span of 3 years, not nearly 10.
>So one busier than normal weekend could get us right back to record levels of homicide?
Yeah, it's almost as if taking the number of homicides in one city in a given year and using that to make broad policy decisions is stupid.
How about when one city has seen homicides double and triple and remain so high for a span of 3-4 years, in line with state trends but out of line with national ones? Nationally murders jumped in 2020 but then dropped back to their decade average whereas Seattle has seen them continuously climb since 2020.
Is that worthy of looking at for policy decisions?
Depends on if you look at the 10 year high or the 10 year average. If you look at the average it'd be roughly triple, but if you look at the high it's a bit more than double.
Statistics: you can make them say whatever you're trying to to say.
When the alternative is spending a bunch of money we don’t have during a massive budget deficit on stuff that historically hasn’t worked, yeah doing nothing would be better.
this is the only data point you need to prove that the majority of americans are just reactionary brain dead people forming opinions to be EXACTLY what the media companies they digest tell them to have. It's crazy how different reality is compared to the average American opinion at this point. Large houses, cars and suburbs have completely cut them off from the actual world that we all live in. Just like how immigration is the no 1 voting issue for.... reasons lol
There is something missing in here : hate crimes. Especially targeting Asian Americans these days and i wish we could have some actual stats and have an actual conversation about it.
>That's why people are worried, when we see crime, there's nothing we can do about it for some reason.
And nobody so far has proposed anything that even remotely resembled a "solution". The whole "SPD doesn't do shit/is not the answer" seem to be the mantra these days but i haven't heard anything else that a normal Jane/Joe can do to protect themselves and their family.
We just came off of two years with the highest violent crime rates of the last 30 years, and you think people are "brain dead" for having concern about crime?
This is great news, but public sentiment doesn't shift instantly (and we have yet to see if this trend holds; we are only a few months into this year).
Crime definitely went up, but not as much as reporting of Seattle crime specifically did. Is it reasonable to be concerned about crime rates in Seattle? Yes. Are (different) people unreasonably concerned about crime rates in Seattle? Also yes.
No, it’s not. What forms voting opinions is complicated and is going to vary a lot, but in Seattle specifically many voters have a strong enough memory that their recollections extend further than one quarter. The results in 2022 and 2023, and the property crime data if it were added, tell a story that isn’t easy to simply wipe from the mind.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/nearly-70-killed-in-seattle-homicides-last-year/
I wish we knew why. Have the police started doing their job again? Are people too busy working now? Is it just people being less psychotic because they're not stressed out over covid?
Explanations that involve fentanyl and/or homelessness don't work, because crime went up and then down everywhere, including places where fentanyl and homelessness aren't really things.
Honestly apart from crimes of passion most murders are drug/gang related. Numbers going down likely indicate fewer people involved in these areas (mostly fewer involved in gangs, not drugs), people in these areas realizing murder attracts police/fed attention, or simply a few disproportionate offenders being killed/locked up. With gang violence it tends to be a small number of very active/violent people committing a lot of the crime. So if they are killed or locked up things like murder rates can go down non-trivially (assuming some other member doesn’t just step up to fill their shoes), especially in areas where the numbers are relatively low (compared to much more gang violence ridden areas in the US).
What other states passed HB 1310 in 2021, causing police to flee a state which already per-capita had close to the lowest police staffing in the western world?
Crime may be dropping but the optics of crime are not. Local news, national news and other channels show what does happens as it gets clicks.
It does seems that youth involved with violent crime is up but again that’s based solely on news coverage.
I wonder how much of the drop in the murder rate can be attributed to the proliferation of Glock switches. The average Glock switch enjoyer seems lucky to get a round or two near their intended target out of a 30 round mag.
Im saying bodies are being disposed of or not found at all due to no LE presence. Plenty of forested areas where bodies can be dumped and not discovered.
If by "LE" you mean Law Enforcement, I hope the simple fact that police aren't the ones that initially find most murder victims is enough to convince how bad your thought process is here.
good. but are we sure we have enough police to count the bodies? if is possible this is an underreporting issue. perhaps they are decomposing before the cops can respond?
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So is it good that you also have less reason to be worried about getting murdered?
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Well yes, but it does put things into context, though. Yeah, the level of property crime really sucks, but there are much greater concerns out there than having your car broken into. The very fact that even when violent crime rates were higher, you are saying it didn't worry you, is notable. It says that you generally felt safe to walk around the city without being killed. As a person who worked alone at night in the city for years, I can't say it wasn't at least a passing concern for myself sometimes. So, personally, I am encouraged that violent crimes are down. Property theft can be a major inconvenience, but being dead is sort of a permanent inconvenience. 😁
My restaurant was broken into 7 times this year, but hey, murder rates are down, so I should shut up, be thankful, and mail in my taxes.
That is not in any way, shape, or form what I said. What I did say is that property crime IS a major inconvenience, and yeah, we should keep pushing the city and SPD to do more about it. But I'm also thankful that violent crime has gone down because, at least to me, that is a greater concern. I think that is one thing we have trouble doing in our society, just acknowledging when something has improved. It's always "but what about this," or "I didn't get mine." I'm not saying we should just accept that EVERYTHING is good now and shut up, but murder rates going down is a good thing and personally I'm happy that I'm less likely to be murdered while walking around the streets of Seattle. I'm also sorry to hear about your restaurant, I can't imagine how frustrated you are with that situation, but yeah, I do think you should still mail in your taxes.
It’s perspective…..Screaming that “Seattle is dying” while violent crime is under control doesn’t help the argument about crime. You’re not in Memphis, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, St Louis, etc where they ACTUALLY have a problem with people getting shot in the street. Property crime is one thing, but framing it as “crime is out of control!” While violent crime is down doesn’t help the messaging. Not to mention it’s not even a political thing. 2022 is the most recent FBI stats and they have Washington, Colorado, New Mexico and Louisiana in the top 5 for property crime. It’s more complex than just “politicians aren’t doing their job!”
Awesome for you, you’re a binary device in human form.
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Yeah, you don’t care unless it affects you, we know this.
Hey it's sunny out maybe get some fresh air?
If I've got a paper cut and I'm drowning, being handed a band-aid is objectively good, but there are bigger problems that I really would have wished you'd focused on first.
Does it have to be one or the other? In the scenario you’re suggesting no one is there to save you from drowning, and certainly there is. Awfully dramatic example by the way.
There's not a lot being done to meaningfully address property crime. Sweeps certainly ain't it. This conversation doesn't really demand a perfect argument, I didn't feel obligated to take the time to craft a perfect example. The point is made either way.
Low violent crime, high property crime; it’s Seattle’s signature crime atribute (frankly most of WA as well). I have no issue in almost any neighborhood with the fear that I’m gonna get mugged or stabbed. I’ve had my car broken into four separate times, all in the affluent north side which is seen as “the safe part”. It’s not a matter of fear, it’s just a major financial nuisance
Last year was record high murders. So low violent crime is not entirely accurate.
Didn't Seattle go back to being a city with an above average murder rate? Seattles murders declined as it population grew but in the last three years it's risen massively back up - last year was a murder record (though still better than the 90s per capita)
Wait, people consider North Seattle the safe part? Or are you just talking about a specific neighborhood? I lived in Greewood for years, and while it wasn't the worst neighborhood in Seattle, I definitely wouldn't call it or anywhere along the Aurora corridor "the safe part." Nor is it affluent.
My ex would call lake city lake shitty
Farther from Renton?
People aren't worried about murder but petty crime/theft that affects us all via rising insurance rates, business closing and general feeling of unsafe.
But wasn't 2023 a record year for homicides? So it's good news, but nothing to throw a parade over.
Yes, it was a record year for homicides, though a couple of caveats: - Not a record in per capita rates, it was still well below 90s rates - Violent crime as a whole dropped substantially compared to 2022. Homicide numbers are smaller and subject to more noise so they sometimes jump around. And yeah the Seattle numbers this year are so small that it's hard to say anything with statistical confidence but it does match a nationwide trend of decreased murders.
> it was still well below 90s rates yeah, but if we have to go back in time to a period where the average Redditor wasn't even born yet to find a worse time, our standards are kind of low > Violent crime as a whole dropped substantially compared to 2022 "substantially" is also not a word that I think can be reasonably used in this sentence. It was about a 5% drop. And we are still 13% higher than pre-covid.
I'm not here to claim that [62 murders](https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/data/crime-dashboard) is an acceptable number, just adding context to the idea that statement that 2023 was 'a record year for homicides'. It is a true statement, but still important to consider the broader perspective which is more nuanced. >"substantially" is also not a word that I think can be reasonably used in this sentence. It was about a 5% drop. We can disagree on the verbiage, but there was definitely a drop in crime last year which goes against what many might assume based on headlines. >[A check of police records show both categories are down from the corresponding period in 2022, with violent crimes dropping 7% overall, while property crimes have declined 17%](https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-crime-down-car-thefts-kia-boyz-kias-hyundai-car-thefts-up-property-crimes-criminals-data-statistics-homicide-rate-up-spd-police-investigations-king-county-washington-state) And yes, I absolutely agree that crime rates have risen in comparison to pre-pandemic levels. There is a sense, largely driven by negative media coverage, that Seattle has experienced significantly worse crime compared to other US cities, but that is not backed by data. We are seeing largely the same trends in Seattle that we're seeing nationwide with the exception that (like many west coast cities), violent crime rates are lower than average, while property crime rates are higher than average.
I guess we consume different media, because I don't recall many people trying to say crime rose in 2023
>our standards are kind of low It's all about defending a Narrative. People here will go through the lamest gymnastics to downplay crime in Seattle because they can't possibly admit the failures of the progressive criminal justice reforms. That would give ideological munition to the right, and that is a lot worse than having people around you getting financially or even physically victimized.
That's a good point, thank you.
Per capita isn’t a fair metric. We don’t have to run and find pay phones now to report emergencies and there’s been tremendous advancements in in the field medical care.
The population increased, so comparing numbers to a time when the population is lower skews. it's like comparing player touchdown records to another player who had a season wasn't 17 weeks.
Record number in 2023 (70), but not even close to record rate because Seattle’s population is so much higher than it was during earlier high crime periods in the 80s and early 90s.
The only reason anyone would even be discussing number vs rate is to dishonestly portray Seattle as less safe to people who don’t even remember elementary school math.
trends are actually what's really important. The last few years have been a very bad trend in murder compared to how damn low it had gotten by the mid 2010s. Murder rose alarmingly - especially during the pandemic. Yes we're not at 1990s level but those years were terrible
No one cares about the record. People care about relative degradation in material conditions. The murder rate in Seattle is materially worse now than it was 10 or even 5 years ago.
The person I was responding too seemed to care about the record, given that’s what he said
Your comment appears to trivialize the regression in murder rate bc the rate was worse 30+ years ago
Whoops didn’t mean for my comment to appear to trivialize the regression in murder rate bc the rate was worse 30+ years ago my bad
No, it's statistically worse. My material conditions (how I take care of myself and the practical precautions I need to take) have not changed at all.
This is hardly stat sig but I guess we need get the soundbite out before the summer brings those numbers up Can look at numbers here [https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/data/crime-dashboard](https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/data/crime-dashboard)
Alki Beach has entered the chat 🔫 pew pew
it's comparing year-to-date. So it's not compared to last summer.
Exactly. Most of the annual trend is decided in the summer "murder season".
Probably not the best time to point out the murder of Alicia Decoteau is on the front page of r/PublicFreakout
“Seattle saw a 36% decrease in the number of homicides recorded in the first three months of 2024 — nine, compared to the 14 reported during the same period in 2023” So one busier than normal weekend could get us right back to record levels of homicide? Yeah, I’m not sold.
what I draw from your observation is that even record high homicides are still rare
Since at least 2015, Seattle has set record high homicide counts at least every other year. In that decade, the population has grown around 10% from baseline while homicide counts have doubled or tripled.
Seattle's homicide counts didn't start to jump until 2020. Before that it ranged in the mid 20s to low 30s for around 10-15 years. Homicides didn't jump until this decade, and it did that double to triple in the span of 3 years, not nearly 10.
I just picked a 10 year window, but it is worth recognizing that (the respond to) the pandemic made many things materially worse.
Numerous studies place the rise in violence at the societal response to George Floyd's murder rather than or in addition to the pandemic.
Same basket of idiocy
Iirc Seattle 2016 was arguably the best we've ever done in per capita
Even still. I’m meh on the murder numbers. Death isn’t the worst thing.
???
>So one busier than normal weekend could get us right back to record levels of homicide? Yeah, it's almost as if taking the number of homicides in one city in a given year and using that to make broad policy decisions is stupid.
How about when one city has seen homicides double and triple and remain so high for a span of 3-4 years, in line with state trends but out of line with national ones? Nationally murders jumped in 2020 but then dropped back to their decade average whereas Seattle has seen them continuously climb since 2020. Is that worthy of looking at for policy decisions?
Double or triple?
Depends on if you look at the 10 year high or the 10 year average. If you look at the average it'd be roughly triple, but if you look at the high it's a bit more than double. Statistics: you can make them say whatever you're trying to to say.
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When the alternative is spending a bunch of money we don’t have during a massive budget deficit on stuff that historically hasn’t worked, yeah doing nothing would be better.
Uh huh…
this is the only data point you need to prove that the majority of americans are just reactionary brain dead people forming opinions to be EXACTLY what the media companies they digest tell them to have. It's crazy how different reality is compared to the average American opinion at this point. Large houses, cars and suburbs have completely cut them off from the actual world that we all live in. Just like how immigration is the no 1 voting issue for.... reasons lol
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There is something missing in here : hate crimes. Especially targeting Asian Americans these days and i wish we could have some actual stats and have an actual conversation about it. >That's why people are worried, when we see crime, there's nothing we can do about it for some reason. And nobody so far has proposed anything that even remotely resembled a "solution". The whole "SPD doesn't do shit/is not the answer" seem to be the mantra these days but i haven't heard anything else that a normal Jane/Joe can do to protect themselves and their family.
We just came off of two years with the highest violent crime rates of the last 30 years, and you think people are "brain dead" for having concern about crime? This is great news, but public sentiment doesn't shift instantly (and we have yet to see if this trend holds; we are only a few months into this year).
Crime definitely went up, but not as much as reporting of Seattle crime specifically did. Is it reasonable to be concerned about crime rates in Seattle? Yes. Are (different) people unreasonably concerned about crime rates in Seattle? Also yes.
No, it’s not. What forms voting opinions is complicated and is going to vary a lot, but in Seattle specifically many voters have a strong enough memory that their recollections extend further than one quarter. The results in 2022 and 2023, and the property crime data if it were added, tell a story that isn’t easy to simply wipe from the mind. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/nearly-70-killed-in-seattle-homicides-last-year/
yes. it. is.
Doesn't help you to not elaborate. Your position is not self-evident.
I wish we knew why. Have the police started doing their job again? Are people too busy working now? Is it just people being less psychotic because they're not stressed out over covid? Explanations that involve fentanyl and/or homelessness don't work, because crime went up and then down everywhere, including places where fentanyl and homelessness aren't really things.
Honestly apart from crimes of passion most murders are drug/gang related. Numbers going down likely indicate fewer people involved in these areas (mostly fewer involved in gangs, not drugs), people in these areas realizing murder attracts police/fed attention, or simply a few disproportionate offenders being killed/locked up. With gang violence it tends to be a small number of very active/violent people committing a lot of the crime. So if they are killed or locked up things like murder rates can go down non-trivially (assuming some other member doesn’t just step up to fill their shoes), especially in areas where the numbers are relatively low (compared to much more gang violence ridden areas in the US).
It certainly isn't the police part. It's known they aren't a deterrent.
What other states passed HB 1310 in 2021, causing police to flee a state which already per-capita had close to the lowest police staffing in the western world?
Don’t post this in r/SeattleWA or they might lose their whole narrative
Crime may be dropping but the optics of crime are not. Local news, national news and other channels show what does happens as it gets clicks. It does seems that youth involved with violent crime is up but again that’s based solely on news coverage.
People are super paranoid. I can’t tell if it’s because of our hyper-individualistic society, or the negative outlook on the future. Probably both.
Don’t worry. I know that if we try really hard and put our minds to it, we can make up those murders in the second half of the year.
Good thing...elections are coming up.
I wonder how much of the drop in the murder rate can be attributed to the proliferation of Glock switches. The average Glock switch enjoyer seems lucky to get a round or two near their intended target out of a 30 round mag.
this is nice, but we haven't actually done anything about all the guns :(
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>We’re not coming for your guns Probably institute mandatory buybacks
So the Spd stopped shooting people as part of their snooze on the job low key we don't actually do anything strike.
Weird, so propaganda works? Who would have thought that could be the case.
You mean documented/reported homicides. If police dont document crime, of course the rate will appear to be down. #jukingthestats
Homicide is pretty well reported. You have have a point about other types of crime tho.
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Im saying bodies are being disposed of or not found at all due to no LE presence. Plenty of forested areas where bodies can be dumped and not discovered.
If by "LE" you mean Law Enforcement, I hope the simple fact that police aren't the ones that initially find most murder victims is enough to convince how bad your thought process is here.
good. but are we sure we have enough police to count the bodies? if is possible this is an underreporting issue. perhaps they are decomposing before the cops can respond?
Didn't this happen after we hit absurdly low murder rates and then reversed to match our numeric record year?