Happy Fourth of July from Seattlest
Seattlest Pix: 09Jul04
Seattlest Pix: 09Jul05
Seattle Int'l Beer Festival Ends at 7 p.m.
Following the announcement that Seattle's crime rate is the lowest it's been in 40 years, Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur has an article about how it doesn't feel that way, given the the shooting at the party downtown, the shooting of DéChé Morrison, the stabbing of Shannon Harps, the schoolteacher who got beat into the pavement on East Pine, and the woman hit in the head with a hammer.
I was glad to hear about the strides police have made on the streets of Seattle. But really, all it did was remind me there have been no arrests in the three recent murders, or in the two attacks. Police have a "person of interest" in the Harps case, but to be honest, the police sketch looked like every other 30-something white guy in Seattle: wool cap, beard, earring. I think I dated him last summer."Wool cap, beard, earring." Is that Nicole's type? We realize we're a little off-topic here, but wow. We had no idea that Brodeur walked on the wool-cap wild side.
However, to return to the topic at hand, the Seattle Crime Blog finds the declining crime rate reasonable ("Locals who complain about the crime rates don't know how good they have it."), while Injustice In Seattle argues that the drop may be a response to "a crackdown on civil liberties by more aggressive police forces." The P-I's SoundOff-ers are largely dubious, except for gun nuts crowing that guns weren't banned and homicides are down or gloomily predicting guns will be banned despite this news -- and one commenter who pointed out the police have been working without a contract for a year, while the city and the police union work each other over.
SPD photo thanks to Seattlest Flickr pool member brightcandle.
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That's a pretty common phenomenon, isn't it? And not just with crime rates -- the safer things get, the more people freak out about edge cases and the incidents that do happen.
That's one side of it, I think, James. The fewer incidents, the more "countable" they are, rather than becoming "life in the big city" background noise. But, stay tuned for Jeremy's upcoming post, which examines that "why does it seem less safe?" topic.
You think it has to do with our population boom? Hrmmmmmm?
And what I mean by that is, the number of crimes has risen, but the percentage per 1,000 people has decreased.
We still hear about lots of crime, but forget we're being told with more people around us than we were 20 years ago... even 40 years ago.
Hey, that's perceptive, TroyJMorris. I was turning over the question of how these numbers were sliced statistically, and wondering if there was another way of looking at them. And so there is, as you point out -- the absolute number of crimes, as opposed to a per capita rate.
The book that sparked my comment yesterday: 2000's The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.