Progressive Seattle leaders ignoring crime issues

When I walk the streets of Seattle during the day or at night, with the exception of Pioneer Square and parts of Belltown, I almost always feel safe.

I know we’ve got some problems and I know crime will always exist, but I walk around not feeling like I’m going to become a victim. I’ve lived in Queen Anne, Eastlake, and South Lake Union, and even though I’ve been the victim of a couple car break ins, I’ve never been too concerned.

Unfortunately, I’ve been buying into a phony narrative over our safety and been relying too much on anecdotes as to how well we’re doing.

Turns out, Seattle is a city chock-full of crime, though mostly the nonviolent sort.

The FBI just released data for 2013 on crimes in Washington and it’s broken down by city. We took a look at the numbers out of Seattle, specifically, but we’ll go over some other interesting findings as well.

First, the good news. Regardless of what activists say, there’s still no gun violence epidemic in this state. Our levels of murder and non-negligent homicide are still statistically insignificant.

Now, the FBI didn’t break down the weapons used in the murders for this particular data dump, but even if you assume they were all committed by guns, there’s no epidemic.

In Bellevue, Bremerton, Covington, Everett, Lynnwood, and Monroe last year, they each had one murder. Auburn had five, Federal Way had six, Kent had two. Seattle had 19 and Tacoma had 10. Of course, so many cities had 0 murders, like Snoqualmie and Snohomish, Sammamish, Shoreline, Redmond and Maple Valley. Washington, from a violent crime perspective, is a very safe state to live in.

But, when you look particularly at Seattle, you get the clear sense that city leaders are focused too much on pushing their utopian agendas of a progressive, faux-European city and less on crime.

There were over 1,600 instances of reported robbery from 2012 to 2013 – a jump of nearly 13 percent.

There were an astonishing 4,310 instances of motor vehicle theft reported last year. The two years previous, the numbers hovered around 3,500. That’s an increase of over 21 percent.

Now, one could say, ‘Well, we know there’s been a huge uptick in population. Maybe that’s part of the cause.’

Maybe, I suppose, but there’s no clear, causal relationship. Our population in 2013 increased only 2.5 percent, yet we’re seeing an increase of 21.2 percent in motor vehicle theft? I don’t buy that, especially because the big reason behind the population increase is the tech industry attracting new workers – the kind of workers less likely to, you know, steal a car or rob you of your iPhone.

So what’s really to blame? I’d argue a few things.

No. 1: This city is hyperfocused on modeling itself after progressive big brother and sister cities in this country and abroad. Seattle is focused on bringing free yoga and pottery lessons to community centers. City leaders are focused on spending hundreds of millions of dollars on bike lanes that only get used in the summer and only get used by 5 percent of commuters who happen to live close to work. They’re focused on forcing businesses to pay their employees more than they bring in to the building in profits. They’re focused on killing innovation, like ride sharing services.

When you’re so singularly focused, the stuff that actually matters tends to be forgotten. So while I’m glad you can do the downward facing dog at a community center in Ballard, well, the car you drive to that community center may get stolen because of it.

No. 2: Arguably even more important, is we now live in a city so hypersensitive to politically correct standards that you’ve got a bunch of officers in the Seattle Police Department worried to go after some criminals in a way that might upset folks like councilmembers Mike O’Brien, Bruce Harrell, or Nick Licata, or the many activist groups out there.

God forbid a car thief might be Latino. Arrest him and then you’ve got a group of councilmembers saying you’re going after an underprivileged minority group. Then you’ve got a city councilmember saying, ‘Well, to prevent this, we should pay folks $20 an hour and then they won’t need to steal.’

Then, if you’re a cop who uses any force whatsoever, you’ve got the anti-cop folks coming out of the woodwork pretending the cop is an evil power-hungry cretin who can’t be trusted. Blah blah blah.

City leaders and activists in this community have effectively created a culture in which you can’t really enforce the law without being controversial.