Troubled City: Sides of Seattle’s Crime Problem

One of the political footballs currently being tossed between the left and the right is “crime.” President Trump and the right refer to certain cities, usually those governed by Democrats as “lawless hell-holes” and “war zones.” This to justify deployment, or threats of deployment, of National Guard troops to such cities.

Democrats have responded not only by questioning the legitimacy of such use of the National Guard, but by pointing out that rates of violent crime have actually fallen, and fallen quite dramatically since their immediate post-Covid highs. They are correct. Violent crime rates have fallen. This is story about the other kind of crime, described as “non-violent crime.”

On a recent morning one of our neighbors came to our door, very distraught, really beside himself. Why? His two bikes were gone from his parking space in our building’s locked and secured garage. Since this fit and alert 92-year-old neighbor gave up driving a car years ago, he has relied on his E-bike to go to the store, to the gym, and whatever other local errands he needs to run.

I could relate. I’ve also had two bikes stolen in the time we’ve lived in our small, ten-unit condo building in Ballard. One of those bikes I’d had for a long time. I kind of loved that bike. We’d done a lot of miles and trips together: STP rides from Seattle to Portland, RSVP rides from Seattle to Vancouver, and countless day rides, solo and with friends. The bike carried more than me. It carried memories.

Nor is it the first time we’ve been broken into. Over the decade we’ve lived in our small, ten-unit Ballard condo we’ve had numerous break-ins. We’ve done a lot of what is called “hardening” of our building. “Break-in proof” locks. Steel plates on exterior doors. Video monitoring. A new magnetized garaged door that thieves can’t pry open. It’s costly stuff, yet break-ins persist.

Another, but also “non-violent” type of crime common here is what we’ve come to call “crashes.” Crashes rather than accidents because all of them are one car, always driven by a drunk or drugged driver, that plows into parked cars, roadside barriers, landscaping (we used to have four trees in front of our building, now we have none), or equipment related to a nearby railroad crossing. Recently someone high on drugs took out the roadside box that regulated the stoplight at the railroad crossing but managed — before disappearing — to steal the wiring, apparently for the copper it contained. (I took a photo of the last of our four street side trees, with crows enjoying the berries of the Mountain Ash. It was plowed down a week later.)

Trump is wrong. Seattle is not a “lawless hell-hole.” Nor is it a “war-zone.” It remains a beautiful city. But it is also a troubled city. Troubled, less now, thankfully, by violent crime, but troubled nonetheless by the other kind of crime, the kind that brought our 92-year-old neighbor to our door in a state of anger and grief. Not only because he had lost an E-bike he depended on (the second time this has happened), but for sense of violation and something like despair borne of living with a constant level of social disorder about which people like us and cities like ours seems powerless to do anything.

Recently the John Jay College criminologist David Kennedy contributed a guest op-ed to The New York Times titled, “What Both the Left and Right Get Wrong About Violent Crime.” Kennedy was also a recent guest on the Seattle-based podcast, “Blue City Blues,” hosted by David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik.

Kennedy described the left’s view as, “policing is the problem.” Progressives, he added, tend to say, “Crime either doesn’t matter or isn’t what we should be focusing on now because the violent crime rate is down.” Meanwhile, the right portrays cities, particularly those governed by Democrats, including Seattle, as lawless “hell-holes,” where conditions have never been worse. Kennedy describes both takes as “non-productive.”

The kind of crime I described above as bedeviling our neighborhood — property crime, thefts, break-ins, vandalism to homes and cars — isn’t considered “violent crime,” and so it commands less attention.

But it is still a problem. Such crime fuels a perception that our city, its residences, neighborhoods and streets, are “unsafe.” To judge from our experience and from neighborhood sites like “Next Door” a lot of people in Seattle experience a crime problem, one that has eroded the quality of life in a city once known for it.

People in a place like Seattle face a dilemma. Few if any Seattleites would support Trump’s deployment of the National Guard here. Most would question the wisdom, not to mention the legality, of such an action. And they know that, Trump ever the demagogue, plays on fears while playing loose with facts. But that doesn’t mean we’re happy with the current state of things or that high levels of crime and social disorder should simply be tolerated or accepted as “the way life is now” or as part of what it means to be liberal or progressive city.

Toward the end of the “Blue City Blues” podcast, Kaushik asked Kennedy about the “broken windows theory” of crime prevention. First articulated in the 1980s, “Broken Windows” is the idea that tolerating and ignoring low levels of social disorder — broken windows, graffiti, trash and debris buildups, camping in parks and on sidewalks, vandalized and unsanitary public restrooms, public use and sale of illegal lethal drugs, and shoplifting creates an atmosphere that makes other more serious crime more likely.

Kennedy responded to Kaushik by saying that “broken windows” had been so tainted by association with tactics like “stop and frisk” and racial profiling that it is effectively off the table. He regrets that. In its original form “Broken Windows,” said Kennedy, was really about strengthening local communities and was “humane.” But it got co-opted and tainted by politicos and police who used it as an excuse for aggressive tactics.

The basic impulse and original idea of “Broken Windows” theory was not wrong. It was about people feeling safe and having a sense of involvement and ownership in their neighborhoods and communities. It wasn’t only anti-crime, it was pro-social — neighbors taking care of neighbors, people working together to build community. It was about getting ahead of curve so that signs of neglect and decay didn’t invite worse problems.

People in Seattle don’t want the National Guard deployed here. Such troops wouldn’t help these issues and it would likely cause other problems. But Seattleites do want to be and feel more safe in their homes and neighborhoods and city than they do now. Even if the rate of “violent crime” is down, crime itself remains a serious matter. Just ask our broken-hearted, older and vulnerable neighbor who won’t so easily recover from what happened this week.