From the Wallyhood Crime Desk…
The recent report on apparently random gun violence here in Wallingford (and I consider neighborhood discharges to be gun violence whether they hit anything or not) led me to consider crime in our area. The editors here at Wallyhood suggested a story idea to our stable of writers on crime near Gasworks Park, as we’ve noted an infrequent, but fairly steady, reporting of primarily property crime (break-ins and thefts) around that location. But what about for the neighborhood as a whole? How do we compare to the rest of the city?
First of all: comparing ourselves to the rest of the city immediately skews interpretation of the results. That is, our benchmark, the city of Seattle, is bad. According to the Neighborhood Scout website, which self-lauds itself as providing “investor-grade analytics” about neighborhoods nationwide, Seattle is one of the least safe cities in the country. This truly surprised me; for years, I’ve told friends, relatives, and complete strangers, “Oh, sure, ten people were just randomly stabbed on the streets, my cars have been stolen and broken into multiple times, and a person was murdered a half block away from where I live…but it’s not like we’re Chicago or anything.” But the numbers, if Neighborhood Scout is to be believed, do not lie. They rank safety of cities from 1-100, with 100 being the safest. Seattle’s rank? It’s 1. That’s uno, un, ichi, yi, isa. That means that Seattle is safer than 1% of U.S. cities (!).
Lest you think that the analysis includes or excludes certain flavors of crime, it breaks things out by violent and non-violent crimes (Neighborhood Scout says it updates rates annually). Seattle’s crime rate scores: per 1000 residents, violent crime rate is 8.19; property crime rate is 57.53. How do these compare to the rest of the country? The national median for violent crime is 4; and for property crime is 20. The chances of becoming a victim of violent crime in Seattle are 1 in 122; of property crime, 1 in 17. For reference purposes, the chances of being killed by lightning are 1 in 186,978, and the chances of dying in a car crash are 1 in 93 (National Safety Council).
What about Wallingford? The Neighborhood Scout website is, as you might expect, a subscription-based data source. Because the Wallyhood annual operating budget ($0, in fiscal 2024) has been depleted, I am unable to provide more detailed metrics than what can be gleaned from the Seattle overview page. Here is what I can tell you, without contributing to our Wallyhood deficit spending: Higher crime rates are portrayed on the city map by darker shading. As might be expected, the darkest colors (highest crime rates) run through the central part of Seattle from Georgetown, through downtown, and north through Capitol Hill (see the map below). The Wallingford neighborhood (which I’ve highlighted in the second map) is subdivided into five polygons and reflect lower (mostly medium) crime rates…but do not approach the lowest for the city.
Returning to our original question of whether the Gasworks Park area is, if not a hotbed, a warmish bed for crime in Wallingford…it appears from these aggregated data that it is not—at least, no more so than the I-5 corridor to the east. The darkest, or highest crime rate area, is shown as the area south of Green Lake and bordering Aurora Avenue.
I would encourage you to examine the Neighborhood Scout website for yourself. Perhaps you, if you’re inclined to subscribe…or our friends in the real estate business who have access to the underlying data…can help to fill in some of the real numbers for Wallingford below in the comments.
As we at the Wallyhood Crime Desk like to counsel: stay safe out there!