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Here We Go Again, Report from the Seattle Conflict Zone
Here are just a few of the headline stories to get the long July 4 weekend off to a bang-up start in the Seattle area. Before the hot weekend even starts, and very near my neighborhood, we have this explosive story: (courtesy of KOMO News)
Teenage Girl Fatally Shot During Altercation at Alderwood Mall. The young lady was caught in the crossfire of a gang “confrontation” at the food court of the local mall. Please note the photo of a beautiful teenager, whose life was cut short. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal described the newly-refurbished mall as one of the best of its owner, Brookfield. Seattle crime is moving north at a rapid clip. Reminder: Seattle has very restrictive gun laws, and basically outlawed gun stores within its city limits. It doesn’t seem like those restrictions are stopping shootings, does it?
Update: One of the black youth suspects, who lives in a pretty nice area, was turned in. By his Mother.
Suspect Sought After Man killed in Auburn Shooting. Auburn in a suburb south of Seattle. Shootings are common there.
Deputies Arrest Man After Carjacking Leads to Chase and Multiple Crashes.Carjackings are popular in many big cities across the country these days, and our area is no exception. Often they are perpetrated by gangs of teenagers. It is a fact that many of those gangs are black teenagers.
1 Million Dollar Bail Set for 4th Suspect in Violent Mountlake Terrace Home Invasion. In our area, many of these home invasion robberies are carried out by Asian gangs, who are almost as prolific as the black gangs. This gang seems to have been black, like the carjacking and mall-shooting group. It is also telling that, in none of the above crimes, was the race of the suspects mentioned in the articles about them. That’s normal for an area run by and reported on by Leftist media and government, who believe that blacks are oppressed groups and deserve special consideration and lighter sentences. In King County around Seattle, judges routinely let off violent offenders with light sentences and low bail, so they can offend again.
New body cam video shows Seattle police arrest armed man on scooter in South Lake Union. The South Lake Union neighborhood has been gentrifying, and is the home of Amazon.
Man who attempted to rob credit union in Tumwater with blowtorch sentenced to prison. Tumwater is a suburb adjacent to the state capitol in Olympia, which has its own share of violent crime.
Earlier, I mentioned that Seattle crime was moving rapidly north. This will be assisted by the opening later this year of the Sound Transit Link Light Rail (that few will ride) to Lynnwood. So far, that light rail has become an efficient conduit for homelessness and crime, with fare-jumpers common, and drug users riding the trains, overdosing in the cars and stations, and shootings and stabbings increasing. It’s not a rare headline, that mentions a light rail station being closed for an investigation of some kind of crime. We citizens are paying huge taxes on our homes and cars, to pay for this boondoggle that few are riding, and many are using as mobile drug dens.
Once again, welcome to the Seattle Dystopian War Zone.
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Of course, that’s just what they use to claim that guns need to be outlawed EVERYWHERE.
Good for her.
There are a few, but not nearly enough. IOW, the exception that proves the rule. Perhaps proven most of all by that it’s the mother doing it, not the father.
And as is usual around here, the kid is out on bail.
Glad I saw Pike Place when I did.
His mother better be careful . . .
My son and daughter in law live in Seattle. I worry about them and pray for them every day. They love the Pacific Northwest.
I think that you are drawing inaccurate conclusions. You present a small number of crimes, and infer that the crime rate in Seattle is very bad. This is not a reliable methodology.
Unfortunately, since Covid and the whole George Floyd mess, the crime statistics aren’t what they used to be. I can find some data.
Here is a Wikipedia page showing crime rates for the 100 largest US cities that reported to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports folks in 2019. It includes a table that allows you to sort by type of crime.
For murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, Seattle was #77 on the list. For total violent crime, Seattle was #51. To give a few examples, lower than Boston, Des Moines, Long Beach, Orlando, or Omaha.
I found a more recent story (here) reporting the 50 US cities with the highest murder rates, based on 2022 data. Seattle was not on the list.
The suggestion that the Seattle area is unusually violent does not seem to be supported by the facts.
I tried to look up more recent data on Seattle. Here is a local news report from December 2023, providing information for January-November. It states that overall violent crime declined from 2021 to 2022, and declined again from 2022 to 2023. The same was true for overall property crime. It reports an increase in homicides in 2023, to a record high, but does not report prior year data.
I found a “Crime Dashboard” for Seattle, linked by the article above. It shows that violent crime in Seattle was down a bit from 2019 to 2020, up in 2021, up a bit more in 2022, and then down a bit in 2023.
The figures for 2019 don’t precisely match the Wikipedia numbers referenced above, probably due to somewhat different definitions of “violent crime.” The Wikipedia entry, using FBI ECR data, reported a violent crime rate of 633 per 100,000 for Seattle in 2019. The Seattle crime dashboard shows a similar figure, 649 per 100,000.
In 2023, it was 683 per 100,000, up about 5% since 2019. Not great, but not Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, either.
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I don’t think 5 year old crime stats addresses the issue of growing crime in Seattle. Besides being old, you need a baseline to compare current crime levels.
And, first decrying the lack of accurate statistics – including lack of reporting when people don’t think anything will be done, etc – but then going ahead and relying on those statistics anyway… Why?
Oh, Rushbabe! Dammit, I wish I had remembered you are in Seattle. I just drove my son out there in may and had to hang around for five days or so before his apartment was ready and I could fly back home. I would have totally looked you up, I’d love to meet you.
I bought your spare iPad several years ago, just in case I might need it for something. And indeed I did – my German girlfriend came over to NYS a year and a half ago and has been using it with much happiness since then. We were married in February, and I didn’t have to spring for a new one; she is very happy with it. Thanks again!
Seattle is losing police rapidly. No officer wants to work with a city government that defunds and does not back them up. The police review board is very powerful and second-guesses their every move. Morale is in the toilet and the chief was just removed. Property crimes are skyrocketing, but not being reported since none are investigated anymore. Neighborhoods have to hire private security.
I lived in Seattle when it was perfect, including pike place. lol
Rats! I would have liked to meet you too, and I am sure we will at some point. Congrats on your marriage too!
Crime stats can be misleading. For example, Seattle does report their crime stats to the FBI. Auburn, WA does not.
Major cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York do not report their crime stats to the FBI. About 33% of police departments in the US do not report their crime stats to the FBI.
The reporting process is somewhat complicated and understaffed police departments don’t have the luxury of becoming an accountant for example, on a 10-hour shift. Unlike what you see on television one crime can take up to three hours or more hours to process from start to finish at booking for an officer on their shift.
Dumbing down the hiring process to ensure a city has a certain number of uniforms on the street leads to more problems.
Police officers are on the lowest rung of the ladder when it comes to public employees and some city governments despise their police officers.
Police are an actual public good. Public good has a definition. Look it up. Get your police right and then leave it alone. Don’t produce non-public goods.
I can’t tell for sure if cities “hate” their police first, and that starts the problems; or if they hire bad police for other reasons – leftism, etc – and then when the bad police cost them money in lawsuits etc, that leads to hate which is still fundamentally self-inflicted.
But I think a few things that would help in the hiring side would be 1) only clean-shaven, 2) no tatted-up freaks, and 3) frequent mandatory testing for steroids.
viz:
For what it’s worth, I live smack dab in the city. I was born and raised here. My in-laws live even further into town than we do. We feel safe and not in any more danger than we do in any other city and we have traveled extensively.
The city of Auburn is 30 miles south; the city of Lynnwood, where the mall shooting occurred is 15 miles north. Tumwater/Olympia are 65 miles south. Yes, we have had issues with loss of police and our last chief of police was incredibly ineffective, at best. His interim replacement is a seasoned officer – she is a former King County sheriff. We finally have some grown-ups on the city council and they are working hard with the new police chief to get staffing straightened out. The police union has a huge role in this and shouldn’t be overlooked. Morale is certainly down. I spent one night several months ago reading outgoing officers’ statements and their reasons for leaving. It was sad and disheartening but the majority of them complained of turmoil within the department itself and personality conflicts with superior officers.
I invite any Ricochet member who happens through to come have cocktails on my patio and see that it’s not all gloom and doom. Heck, I’ll even take you on a tour of the secret, beautiful places that we go to and enjoy.
The military has given up on banning tats. The services continue to drug test, and maintain grooming standards.
Tats have become so normal with the upcoming generation, negative judgements based on them will likely mean you are in error.
And police departments will have the same social pressures the military has when recruiting amongst the young, as they must.
I say this as someone who has never gotten a tatoo, and never will.
Have you seen any 70s-era tats lately? The fashion statements of today become the regrets of tomorrow. And tats are harder to remove than tie-dye tee shirts and pooka shell necklaces.
Whenever I hang around Seattle, I prefer crossing the Puget Sound by ferry and spending time in Bremerton and other towns in the Kitsap Peninsula and Bainbridge Island.
Driving the highways there are pretty, and the people there are more laid back than the nearby big city along the way.
The first time I came to Seattle was to meet my new Coast Guard cutter which was staying at the Seattle Coast Guard base for a few days before going to its homeport in Sitka, Alaska. For Coast Guard cutters transiting to Alaska, Seattle usually was a stop along the way.
It was a few days after the Mount Saint Helens eruption in March of 1980. Seattle was going through bad economic times then. There were people sleeping in the streets, and the alleys. Jimmy Carter would still be president for another 9 months.
Though there weren’t tent cities in those days. The police still had agency to tell people to move along if they were harassing a business or their customers.
I agree. But the upcoming generation will have to learn that on their own. They aren’t listening to us.
But at least with police, the tats seem to accompany steroid use etc, which maybe the military doesn’t test for (enough), or whatever I don’t know. For sure, in the police-misconduct videos I find it rare to see one who isn’t tatted up, and often there’s a large beard too. The Thin-Blue-Line Gang stuff in policing has gone way too far.
Keeping in mind too that one way of keeping non-tatted people from wanting to become police, is seeing that they would be surrounded by the tatted-up freaks. That makes it seem pretty clear that it was a mistake to relax the standards to start with.
Also military isn’t expected to interact with civilians on a daily basis.
Which is also one reason why that judge Glanville in Georgia shouldn’t be a civilian judge now. He was a military judge before and it’s very different. He doesn’t seem to have made the adjustment.
Maybe one way to help would be to say they can’t have certain jobs if they do that? Earlier consequences can help avoid later regret. And we do them no service by trying to “protect” them.
That was already the case 10 years ago. Now it’s not. There are too many normal people with tats to exclude them from polite society.
“Tattoos are self- mutualization, and therefore a sign of low self-esteem.”
–G. Gordon Liddy
You comfort me. I’ll have to see if Brian and Eliza are interested in chatting.
They don’t need to be excluded from every job. But retailers might want to keep them – and the nose rings, etc – out of prominent sales positions. Because of their public interaction. Same reasoning can apply to other situations, especially those where more respect is supposed to be afforded.
And I don’t even care that much about a rose on the ankle or whatever. But when I say tatted-up freaks, that means something. Have you seen some of them? As Hank Hill said on “King Of The Hill,” the nice thing about tattoos and piercings and such, is you can tell someone ain’t right just by looking at them.
We shouldn’t be having cops that ain’t right.
I also get tired of arguments like those who claim that the mortgage interest deduction can never be repealed, because too many people depend on it. Well, boo-hoo.
If you’re never willing to roll anything back, then society can only eventually collapse of its own weight. It’s the always-leftward ratchet.
http://financialrepressionauthority.com/2017/07/26/the-roundtable-insight-george-bragues-on-how-the-financial-markets-are-influenced-by-politics/