Danny Westneat- Seattle Times columnist (thanks to Mary Lou P.)
Seattle Times columnist Writing this column for two decades, one thing I’ve noticed is that nothing hacks some people off more than good news.
This is especially true of good news about crime. Reports of falling crime are uniquely narrative-upsetting and denial-triggering. People who regularly cite police data when crime is rising simply do not accept this same data when it goes the other way.
It’s odd when these are the police themselves. But this is how I ended up in a Seattle police union video wearing an acorn on my head.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how crime finally appeared to be dropping this year, according to the police’s own stats. As a result, I said the Seattle Police Officers Guild ought to stop portraying Seattle as a lawless hellhole on its social media feed.
The head of the union didn’t appreciate the suggestion.
“It’s disgraceful,” said Mike Solan, president of the guild, during a segment directed at me on his YouTube show, “Hold the Line.” “It’s not journalism. … It’s sloppy reporting … because crime is through the roof.”
He dubbed me “Danny Westnut,” displaying a photo mashup of me wearing an acorn on my head. Get it? The fifth graders who first called me that back in ’76 would be pleased.
He did make an argument that crime isn’t really down, it only appears to be down due to a drop in calls. People aren’t calling because they don’t think an officer will come.
“Overall 911 calls from the community for public safety services are dropping, and so the conclusion is that, ‘Hey, crime must be dropping,’” Solan said. “Well, that’s completely opposite to what the reality is.”
“The stats are going to be manipulated,” he went on. “But if you drive around, it doesn’t take rocket science to see that public safety is still a major problem in this city. In fact, it’s still at crisis levels.”
Seattle has plenty of problems, it’s true. But is it right that 911 call volume is masking the truth about crime?
Attempting to commit some journalism, I asked a crime data expert, Jeff Asher of AH Datalytics, who has testified before the state Legislature about Washington crime problems. He said it’s possible that call volume could affect rates for some property crimes, which are often not reported. But not for serious or violent crimes.
“Most 911 calls aren’t reporting crimes anyway,” he said.
He suggested focusing on four crimes with the highest report rates. These are homicide (which is reported near 100% of the time, because there’s a body); shootings that cause injury or death; car theft; and robbery.
So, through four months of 2025 in Seattle, homicide is down 25%. Shootings are down 22%, car theft is down 32% and robbery is down 26%, according to police data. Compared to the year Seattle hit a 30-year high for violent crime, 2022, the declines are eye-popping: Homicide is -50%, shootings -41%, car theft -20%, and robbery -36%.
Also: Call volume from the Seattle public is down compared to prepandemic. But it’s actually up through four months this year compared to high-crime 2022, according to the city’s dispatch dashboard.
“We’re seeing enormous drops in crime, pretty much everywhere around the country,” Asher said. “That’s not a reporting issue. Those crimes are actually down.”
“King County just experienced the safest start to a year that we’ve had in five years,” says King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion.
She announced a 35% drop in gun violence countywide last Tuesday.
Huge crime swings like these are unusual, and so big they’d be impossible to mask, Asher said.
Why is it happening?
“Nobody really knows,” he said. “We still don’t know why crime fell in the 1990s, and that’s one of the most studied periods in all of crime.”
He cautioned that these comparisons are backward-looking and across short time frames. By the end of the year, we might no longer be talking about 35% improvements, or any improvement at all.
It also doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be events that shock the senses, such as this past week when someone sprayed bullets into a public park in Rainier Beach, grazing a woman and an 8-yearold girl.
I did see, though, that the mayor of Baltimore was tweeting about how they had only five murders in April — the fewest in a single month in that city’s recorded history. The mayor credited the work of the Baltimore Police Department.
Well, Seattle had only one murder in April, back on April 2. That means we went the next 28 days of April with zero. Five makes the national news out of Baltimore, while in Seattle, which has 200,000 more people, one is apparently not news, or not to be believed at all.
Asher said police unions have “an obvious incentive to highlight rising crime” — to push the city to hire more officers. But I’d think there’d also be reason to cheer when crime falls, à la Baltimore.
The Seattle cops could be saying, “See, we’re doing a great job.” Rather than what they are saying, which is that the good news is fake.
The narrative that crime only goes up is one of the most potent in politics. This past week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to “unleash high-impact police forces” in America’s cities. The order alleged there is such an urban crime crisis that “excess military and national security assets” need to be deployed to the cities.
“Millions of Americans live in fear, worried that surging crime will destroy their lives, homes or businesses,” the White House said.
Except crime isn’t surging! Trump could be taking credit for what are record-breaking crime declines. But that doesn’t get the right-wing blood pumping. Nor would it further the continued demonization of left-wing cities like Seattle.
Call me a nut — and they did — but why not be happy that crime has eased, at least for a minute? When Seattle crime soared so much in 2022 and 2023, I wrote 16 columns about it. (I counted.) For that I got called a right-winger by the progressive left. Now that it’s falling, I’m writing about that, and being denounced as an “activist” and “a pretty staunch cop-hater” by the head of the police union.
As for that acorn the cops put on my head, those nuts come from the oak tree. That’s America’s national tree. Oaks are durable, resolute and, above all, live in the real world. So, I’ll take it.
Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com. Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region’s news, people and politics.