The Belltown neighborhood has a recurring problem. The same group of criminals keep causing trouble.

The same group of about 50 people have been arrested over 2,700 times.

"We have a pair of beat officers down there in Belltown and Third Ave., that area, we asked them to identify the 50 most problematic individuals they deal with, and then we ran the analysis on them," says Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn.

McGinn says he doesn't think it's a problem with police presence in the area.

"This is not a problem of having sufficient officers down there to arrest people. If it was a matter of arrests, we would've solved this a couple thousand arrests ago."

McGinn says the issue is becoming a costly problem.

"Think of the amount of dollars we are spending processing people through a system without actually resolving the underlying problem."

The Seattle Police Department is collecting more information to see where the breakdown is that allows these criminals to continue to be an issue.

"We have to collect more data on these individuals and try to figure out what's broken, what's broken that this is the issue, and then try to get to solutions," says McGinn.

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