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!
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"The primary reason to be extraordinarily skeptical of a list like this is that the crime data comes from NeighborhoodScout and NeighborhoodScout’s data is made up."
https://jasher.substack.com/p/another-cautionary-crime-data-tale-50f
Ben, is there another source that would be reliable? Or another way to examine the question? I had hoped that the FBI crime stats would be a well-vetted source of information but the article you shared suggests that it isn’t “granular” enough. The Downtown Seattle Association certainly puts a different spin on things: “According to a Gallup poll conducted in July 2023 with a random sample of adults in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, respondents considered Seattle the third-safest city in the country.” But another site that claims to work through the FBI stats say, with respect to property crime: “San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, three of the largest cities on the West Coast, led the pack (among large cities) regarding property crime. Seattle had the dubious distinction of having the highest burglary rate two years in a row, while San Francisco passed Memphis with the highest larceny rate. A complex variety of factors drive property crime in these Northwestern metropolises. In the case of Portland, high housing costs and understaffed police agencies contributed to its property crime issues. However, the city recently hired more officers to help reduce crime. Though Seattle led the nation in burglary rates in 2022, the city police agency reported that property crimes declined in 2023 thanks to various new tactics.” So, what’s the best source for factual info on crime in cities like Seattle?
Garry, you asked, “Is there another source that would be reliable?”
I don’t know of any source with the granularity of neighborhoods or smaller. I suspect any such data would be unreliable because the number of crimes would be so low that it would be heavily influenced by random chance.
I don’t think data on crime levels matters much to people. People’s perception of crime levels in their neighborhood is based on their own experiences and feelings. Low levels of very public crimes, such as public drug use or car break-ins, can have a huge influence on people’s perception of the level of crime. If people feel unsafe but the data shows that crime is low, they will distrust the data.
I suggest you continue to write articles about how people feel about crime in the neighborhood. Your instincts about how people feel are probably accurate. But bad data is worse than no data, so be careful.
The city maintains a crime dashboard that has some neighborhood-specific data: https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/data/crime-dashboard
The underlying dataset goes back to 2008: https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/data/public-data-sets
Yeah, and the simple "per population" calculation is actually pretty stupid and projects the wrong picture. Seattle downtown for example have very low number of residents, but handles very high amount of visitors including tourists and people who work there during the day. The per capita number are therefore very seriously skewed like the examples in your link. Many suburban areas are skewed low for the opposite reason, since residents only spend half of their time in the neighborhood while there are limited visitors.
If we don't use "per resident", but "per amount of time spent", the Seattle number would suddenly look much much better since it got under-reported resident number and work/visiting hours to add to the formula. Lots of people commute from Kent to work in Seattle and are potential victims of the crime, so why aren't they part of the calculation?
To publish data like this is a conspiracy for suburban developers!!! Let's blame it on the evil developers on this again!
Yeah, and the simple "per population" calculation is actually pretty stupid and projects the wrong picture. Seattle downtown for example have very low number of residents, but handles very high amount of visitors including tourists and people who work there during the day. The per capita number are therefore very seriously skewed like the examples in your link. Many suburban areas are skewed low for the opposite reason, since residents only spend half of their time in the neighborhood while there are limited visitors.
If we don't use "per resident", but "per amount of time spent", the Seattle number would suddenly look much much better since it got under-reported resident number and work/visiting hours to add to the formula. Lots of people commute from Kent to work in Seattle and are potential victims of the crime, so why aren't they part of the calculation?
To publish data like this is a conspiracy for suburban developers!!! Let's blame it on the evil developers on this again!
One way to deal with the the unreliability of crime statistics is to stick to the two crimes that are most consistently reported: murder and vehicle theft. It's hard to hide a body and, in most cases, people need to report a stolen vehicle (though often simple break-ins may go unreported due to rate concerns). The rate of these two crimes may be indicative of general lawlessness when, say, huge parts of the city are being burned or occupied but no 'crimes' are being reported.
For context, I would also like to see a breakdown of the city's murders associated with the homeless and their encampments. I recall the SPD recently stated that a large percentage of calls for shots fired (~20%?) were associated with homeless encampments which are a tiny percentage of the city's population. I wouldn't be surprised if murders and car thefts are also disproportionately linked to this population (though the latter would be hard to determine).
For being what I like to call the Whitest big city (or the biggest White city), and affluent to boot, Seattle seems to have a pretty high crime rate. Doing a crude by-race-only analysis, Seattle should have ~38 murders per year (probably significantly less when you adjust for age and income). However, we've exceeded that number ever since the 'Summer of Love' and last year experienced a 30-year high of 73 murders. Many of Wallingford's 'outspoken lawn-sign' residents are able to insulate themselves from this reality with affluence and mental gymnastics. But some, of course, end up getting mugged by reality. Welcome to the party.
There are so few murders in Wallingford, fortunately, that it’s a useless measure of crime in the neighborhood. As for the citywide rate, it did go up dramatically after the pandemic, as it did all over the United States. The rate is starting to decline again. Almost all the victims were murdered by someone they knew. If you don’t live in a home with a gun, aren’t involved in gang activity, and aren’t homeless, you don’t need to worry about being murdered in Seattle. The rate of pedestrians being killed on our streets by motorists is horrendous. You should be a lot more worried about being killed by a driver in Seattle than by a homeless person.
“…it did go up dramatically after the pandemic…”
No, the crime rate spiked sharply immediately after the Floyd riots/uprising/whatever, not COVID. This was crystal clear from all reliable data; it was reported by precincts across the county and also reflected in national crime data. Even the Economist published a graph of the US crime rate showing a hockey stick spike at the end of May 2020. The crime rate went down after the pandemic, as it did in other Western countries that adopted similar lockdown policies. Because we need to social distance! Science! unless oh…whatever…
I don't think causation of this kind of thing is easy to identify. You know what also happened in that time frame:
1. Shortly after a big round of stimulus
2. 64% increase in gun purchase
3. 25% increase in alcohol consumption
I personally would guess gun purchase spikes and lost of confidence in government resulted in the crime increases. Gun is the thing that set the US apart.
It's still true the person most likely to kill you is yourself if you own a gun, and then your partner if they own a gun. And then your other friends and relatives.
Homeless violent crimes are often homeless on homeless for the same reason.
No, it's quite easy to identify. The hockey-stick spike in homicides does NOT occur in April, it does NOT occur in July, and it definitely does NOT occur after the lockdowns et al; it occurs sharply and immediately after the Floyd incident. No ' well ackchyually' here – causation is self evident. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/330bd0a91596140ecbb6cfd175d70676878a6d45075c26616559ee189de622c5.jpg
Ice-cream doesn’t cause drownings.
Talking to you people about race and crime statistics is like talking to Evangelical Christians about evolution. There's literally no amount or type of evidence. Just for fun, here's excess Black deaths. Congratulations.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c98d4ed146a25a601a5cf7205159cc75f1c7dc21cecf07c8f93bb48a3f1b9f94.png
Yeah, and the cash infuse by government and the rapid increase in gun ownership happened all in that narrow time frame, as the Economist article said.
Also if traffic death is in line with the homicide death, then wouldn't that tell you it's covid being the bigger factor?
It's always obvious if you want to believe, and nothing social science is ever obvious since there is never sufficient control for any of the data to generate any definitive conclusions.
No, gun purchases saw many increases, including a larger increase in March of 2020 with no corresponding hockey-stick spike in homicides. (This goes not just for the pandemic but throughout history). What hypothesis does the fact pattern best support? BTW, why do Utah and Idaho have such low homicide rates? Do you think they have less guns? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b8ee9374049a940435b8a36ebdf1344e3a458d9dbc75d88957253818f0d45eae.jpg
What is really going on here? What one factor could possibly reconcile the facts?
Idaho has the 4th highest gun ownership in the country (many multiples of the average US city), a median age just two years older than Seattle, and an almost Northern European homicide rate of…wait for it…2
Utah has a higher gun ownership rate than Washington (keep in mind that, nationwide, cities have significantly lower rates of gun ownership), a lower median age than Seattle, and a murder rate of 2.5
Seattle reached a murder rate of 9.7 last year, over double that of its pre-Floyd…sorry, 'pre-pandemic' numbers
Atlanta, for reference, has a murder rate of over 20!
Isn't it very easy for yourself to understand what the answer is? There is no one factor that can explain these things, including the Black Life Matters thing, which has different impact in different places. If you see that, you can understand my point better: unless you want to be a true believer, you really can't make statements of social issues in such a firm fashion, since there are always factors that we can't possibly control or rule out. Considering how hard you are trying to argue for the one factor you support, and argue away the ones you don't, I think you should now realize you are talking like a religious person.
I do believe that the lost of confidence in authority was a great factor in many of these issues, and Black Life Matters was a major factor. I just don't understand if you believe in scientific methods, how can you then nail yourself so hard on the cross for this being THE issue. Or are you an engineering by trade by any chance, and therefore not realizing how complicated social science is comparing to hard science in terms of interpreting data?
"Isn't it very easy for yourself to understand what the answer is? There is no one factor that can explain these things…"
umm…no, that's obvious. Why even bother stating?
The fact pattern and basic reasoning supports BLM as the (most) primary and proximate cause of the unprecedented hockey-stick spike in crime. There is no comparable support for gun purchases, COVID, etc. Obviously, the world is a complicated place, but the evidence strongly supports reasoning for the former, with little support for the latter. So why are many progressively minded Wallingfordians (at least the ones I talk to) automatically dismissive of BLM as a causal factor? Is that 'scientific', objective, intellectual etc?
"…and Black Life Matters was a major factor".
Agreed. Thank you for being not insane. (Sincerity, not embedded sarcasm).
I don't see the evidence as strongly supporting what's the causation. Even if we narrow down to very specifically Black Life Matters, what exactly are the factors involved? I can think of a lot of them, and can't prove any of them. Specific factors changed at the time were many, including and not limited to: some people openly reject police, some police intentionally change its behavior, some people abusing the change in police behavior, some people using that whole thing as an excuse to sidestep covid-related new social norms.
And the main problem of your message delivery was that you were projecting very strong correlation AND trying to reject any other factors maybe being also as important. If you said at the beginning "not saying this is an only factor, just stating it may be a major factor" instead of trying to present it as an "I am the only clear head in the room while these other idiots all try to ignore it" situation.
You made yourself sounded like the zealot you were accusing people to be.
"…what exactly are the factors involved? I can think of a lot of them, and can't prove any of them."
How could inciting historical unrest – primarily in America’s Black population – lead to a rise in homicides (primarily among Blacks)? How?!
"…the main problem of your message delivery was that you were projecting very strong correlation AND trying to reject any other factors.."
"You made yourself sounded like the zealot"
Just stating the obvious, which I did, so I'm done.
What do mean "how"? Are you just trying to say that this kind of thing is way above your head so you can't comprehend? Really, I think you are just a true believer that you are accusing people to be, and you did that accusation fast and early maybe because you are projecting? I can't prove that of course. I mean, how could you behave the way you did? How?
I read the Economist article you said, and I just talked out of the talking point of that article. You on the other hand insisted on one of the points it made.
Chances of dying in a car crash are 1 in 93? That's even better odds than the Mariners winning the World Series!
Car crashes are caused by authors in Colorado.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0d7f9c3b04cf358b8716a4fd3f06bc49c412b951cc8b794554a2f9de9da4c9ae.png