Recently, some big names, on up to the president, have been hailing the news that the hideous crime wave that surged with the pandemic in 2020 has begun to subside.
In some places around the country, violent crime rates are plummeting.
“Last year, the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history,” President Joe Biden said during his State of the Union speech last month. “Violent crime fell to one of its lowest levels in more than 50 years.”
This is largely true. The story of how the pandemic coincided with one of the biggest crime waves in decades is still mostly not understood. But the hope was that as the dislocation of the pandemic subsided, so would the crime. And that’s starting to happen.
Except not here, in Seattle.
I’m reluctant to write about crime these days because it’s turned into such an irrational, polarizing political topic. But Seattle’s a bad outlier on this story, so here goes.
The crime data analyst Jeff Asher was recently reviewing how gun violence is starting to fall rapidly. For the start of 2024, the news is great.
In 20 of 25 cities, gun crime is down — often way down. In Baltimore, shootings are down 18% compared to the first quarter of last year. Detroit is down 22%. In New Orleans, which was the most violent city in America last year, it’s off an unheard of 44%.
These are shifts you don’t typically see unless something big is happening.
Asher concluded: “Most of the cities experienced gun violence at roughly the same level as they did before 2020 threw a wrench in everything.”
Except: “Two cities — Seattle and DC — stand out for having not experienced declining gun violence yet.”
That’s an understatement. In Seattle, through the first three months of 2024, shots-fired incidents are up 26% compared to the first quarter last year. Shootings that have hit someone are up 55%. (Though, fortunately, the number killed by gunfire is flat, and total homicides are down from last year’s near-record pace.)
Three months of data isn’t much, so Asher took a deeper dive into the pandemic effect. He compared shootings for the 12 months before the pandemic — March 2019 through February 2020 — with the same 12-month stretch ending this year.
Most cities are getting back to “normal,” he found. The two biggest outliers though are Portland (shootings up 171% since 2019) and Seattle (shootings up 104%). Other cities that saw big gun violence surges, such as Boston, Baltimore and Nashville, Tenn., have now ebbed all the way back to pre-2020 levels.
Gun violence is no longer soaring here as it did in 2020 and 2021, but it is “sticking at an alarmingly high rate,” summed up Rafael Serrano, the analyst supervisor in the King County prosecutor’s Crime Strategies Unit.
Countywide, shootings peaked in 2021, then declined a bit before stubbornly going back on the rise. There were 93 gunfire victims in the first quarter of this year, up sharply from last year’s 74 by this point. Gun crime tends to rise in the summer.
Big picture: The county has settled into about four or five shots-fired incidents per day. Before the pandemic, in 2019, it was about two per day. With the population only growing about 2% in that time, it means the gun violence rate has roughly doubled.
Serrano said the profile of the shootings is changing. Gun deaths in homeless encampments have dropped, possibly due to Seattle’s major efforts to clear them. But the “worrying sign is we are seeing an almost doubling in juvenile victims.”
In Renton last week, a 16-year-old who was on electronic home monitoring from an alleged drive-by shooting attempt somehow got a Glock-style “ghost gun,” made from a kit with no serial numbers, and allegedly used it to shoot and kill a 15-year-old. After this, he is being held in the youth jail — the jail county leaders are trying to close in a social justice drive to end youth detention.
A lot of the area’s challenges are on display in that case. Kids with few mentors or counselors. Unregulated, easy-to-get guns. Inconsistent or soft accountability from the justice system. Renton, like Seattle, is down cops on its force, to the point the city is now offering a $40,000 bonus for experienced cops to transfer there.
Serrano said the pandemic disruption in institutions and social norms hasn’t ended: “I don’t know what is back to being what it was pre-pandemic.”
He also said the rash of car thefts might be leading to more shootings. Car theft is considered a “keystone” or gateway crime, in that whoever swipes the car often becomes emboldened.
But why Seattle? Why are so many other places seeing more of a return to normal?
The Council on Criminal Justice, a crime think tank, has been studying the pandemic spikes. It offers a half-dozen unproven theories for why crime went up: the loss of police legitimacy and staff after the George Floyd protests, the standing down of the police (i.e. “de-policing”), changing drug markets due to fentanyl, unregulated guns, the “critical loss” of school and counseling networks, and movements for “progressive prosecution.” Add the struggles since to rebuild key institutions, and there’s a sense that things out there remain broken or off-track.
One theory for why Seattle and Portland in particular might lag is because guns sit at a progressive blind spot. Liberals want the strictest possible gun laws but paradoxically don’t trust the police or the criminal justice system to enforce them. So we end up in limbo, on our heels with few tools to combat a scourge like ghost guns.
At a town meeting held by Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, the moderator, Enrique Cerna, noted how after two recent shootings, one resident had labeled it “just another day in the Central District.” The implication being: “This is going to happen, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Beyond the clear danger and shattered lives, that’s a real threat here. Seattle just got reset to a higher level of gun violence. While other cities are going back, here we’re not even really grappling with what happened.
It feels like we’re choosing instead to get acclimated to a terrible new normal.
The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.