Crime Growing, Not Slowing, Says Crime Prevention Council

When SPD reports came out earlier this month with the news that major crime in Seattle has gone down by some 11%, the Southeast Seattle Crime Prevention Council was skeptical. They crunched the numbers on their own neighborhood themselves, and found some startling results: assaults, homicides, and non-residential burglaries have all increased by huge numbers. Though even the police chief went on record this week to speak on Seattle's deepening gang violence problems, the police department is refuting the SSCPC's numbers, saying they aren't taking all the factors into account (precinct boundary changes and incidence of "actual crime" versus dispatch calls).

Statistics are frighteningly easy to manipulate. Our concern here is that despite a clearly marked uptick in gang violence this year and a disturbing, unchallenged increase in rape crime, the SPD focused on the 11% across the board major crime reduction in order to--as the SSCPC put it to King5--"paint a rosy picture of crime" in the city. It's nice to focus on the positive, but when it comes to addressing an entire city's worth of crime, harsh, open honesty is the best policy.

Maybe the police department does know internally exactly what's broken, but from their public interpretation of the numbers, things look a little bit prettier than they really are; the community has to be an important part of the solution to violence, and it's not a good look to start things off by pussyfooting around the problem.