Harger: 95 shootings in two years on Aurora Avenue. The city sent someone to argue about planters
May 25, 2026, 7:17 AM | Updated: May 26, 2026, 5:07 pm
If you drove on Aurora Avenue in north Seattle this weekend, you might have noticed colorful balloons on the orange footbridge near Oak Tree Village. They weren’t decorations. There were 95 of them. One balloon for each shooting in that part of the city since 2024.
Ninety-five shootings. In a neighborhood. In two years.
Saturday morning, 40 shell casings on the pavement near Aurora Avenue N. and N. 98th Street. Another shootout near the Burgermaster. Another night, the neighbors counted rounds instead of sleep. One week earlier, bullets blasted through the wall of a home on the same block and passed within inches of a window where a six-week-old baby boy was sleeping in his bassinet.
By daylight, the neighbors were done waiting.
North Seattle Aurora neighbors blocked the streets with steel planters. SDOT had promised to do it last summer
They hauled in large industrial steel planters and blocked off three residential side streets. Not the city. Not the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT). Not the mayor’s office. The neighbors. At some point over the past few weeks, a group of people in north Seattle quietly decided that if the city wasn’t going to protect them, they would protect themselves.
They attached letters to the planters.
“For more than three years, many of us have been engaging almost daily with city officials, law enforcement, SDOT, and other local agencies to find both immediate and long-term solutions,” the letter read. “Homes have been hit by gunfire, narrowly missing children. Our military veterans, thinking they’d found a peaceful neighborhood, are now suffering from PTSD.”
After last summer’s Aurora shootout, which drew national attention, SDOT agreed to close two residential streets at Aurora and planned to close several more. That order never came from the mayor’s office. The gun violence moved deeper into the neighborhood instead.
The city had its chance. The neighbors took theirs.
Aurora Avenue gun violence 2024-2026: this is not the old Aurora
Aurora Avenue has had its rough stretches for decades. Prostitution. Street crime. Cheap motels. Nobody’s pretending this is new. But what’s happening now is different. The gun violence tied to pimps fighting over turf is not the old Aurora.
In a single 60-day stretch in the summer of 2024, there were 31 shooting incidents in the area. Stray bullets in a child’s bedroom wall. Car windows shot out. Houses peppered. And it’s gotten worse since.
Pull up Google Street View at N. 97th Street and Aurora Avenue. In broad daylight, a woman is walking mostly undressed in front of the Public Storage building. Residents said a typical afternoon looks exactly like that.
The turn happened in 2020. The city council eliminated prostitution loitering laws. Since then, city officials themselves have acknowledged that dangerous gangs moved in. The police department in that time has shrunk from roughly 1,200 deployable officers to around 860.
Aurora Avenue: Seattle vs. Shoreline. Same road, different choices on prostitution and policing
Just look at a map. Aurora Avenue runs north into Shoreline. Same street. Same pavement. At N. 145th Street, the city line, something changes. South of it, in Seattle, open prostitution and brazen gun battles. North of it, in Shoreline, officials said those problems are virtually nonexistent.
Same road. Different city. Different leaders. Different choices.
The city of Seattle is stuck in an ideology that treats cracking down on pimps and drug dealers in north Seattle as somehow inequitable. Meanwhile, the people who actually live there are getting shot at. Their babies are in bassinets with bullet holes above them. Their kids are finding shell casings at the bus stop. The city’s answer for years has been patience. Outreach. Services. The same philosophy producing the same results on the same streets.
So the neighbors moved the planters themselves.
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Councilmember Debora Juarez spoke Thursday. The rounds were flying again Saturday
A representative from the mayor’s office showed up Saturday. SDOT showed up. They came to push back on the planters. The neighbors waved them off. The planters are staying.
On Thursday, Councilmember Debora Juarez made her first public statement on the Aurora gun violence. “We should not live in fear of being shot by a gun in our homes or community.”
What she didn’t say: we should not live in fear of being shot by pimps and drug dealers while our city leaders turn a blind eye to a turf battle on Aurora.
Forty-eight hours after she posted that, the rounds were flying again on 98th Street.
The mayor’s office responds: emphasis patrols and the Gun Violence Reduction Unit
Over the weekend, the mayor’s office provided a statement to KIRO Newsradio. The city said SPD is immediately increasing emphasis patrols during late-night and early-morning hours along Aurora and deploying the Gun Violence Reduction Unit in the area. Key public safety staff from the mayor’s office met with community members Monday morning.
The statement also said the city “remains committed to working alongside the community to improve safety and quality of life along Aurora.”
On Saturday, one neighbor told me what they want from the city. They just want to get through the weekend without somebody being killed.
That is the bar in north Seattle right now. Get through a weekend without someone dying.
The city sent a guy out this weekend to argue about planters.
Just spitballing here, but maybe they should send someone out to argue with the pimps and drug dealers.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
