Will steep Council budget cuts add up to downtown public safety?
Common sense or at least caution, prevailed this week as the City Council majority backed off its pledge to defund the Seattle Police Department (SPD) by 50%. Still, the draft budget shows 20% cuts to SPD including laying off 35 officers and permanently abolishing 93 patrol positions.
The Council may have pulled back from the brink but you won’t find many downtown dwellers celebrating. Between pandemic and protests, residents, especially seniors, are voicing increased concerns for their safety.
Downtown activist Karen Gielen questioned whether Seattle police were fully staffed to begin with and brought her query to The Seattle Times. The answer was revealing.
Its columnist reported the ratio of police to residents in America’s 50 largest cities averages 26.9 officers per 10,000 residents. But Seattle’s ratio is 18.4, landing just inside the bottom tier of cities. By comparison, the ratio in Washington D.C. with 60,000 fewer people is three times higher at 54.
For further context consider crime numbers downtown. According to SPD’s Crime Dashboard overall crime in the West Precinct is down from 2019 but violent crime like aggravated assault hasn’t changed much and homicides doubled this year from 5 to 10. Meanwhile with many businesses boarded up or closed, year-to-date burglaries jumped 18% from 1,850 incidents in all of 2019 to 2,176 just through September of this year.
The Council is taking a calculated risk that diversion programs and increased social services will neutralize the reduction in officers and we hope that’s true. But as promising as those programs are, they still aren’t funded to scale, leaving trouble spots like Third and Pike without as many officers and without a targeted outreach plan.
It’s a bold bet and one not many cities have taken. KOMO news reports that Seattle with its 20% reduction is second only to Austin, Texas (34%) for the deepest cuts to a police force in any major US city. Next in line is New York City with 16% and Las Vegas with a 7% reduction.
With the final budget vote scheduled for November 23, we’re heading into uncharted territory. Only time and those who live and work here will tell if the Council’s cuts to SPD add up to a safer downtown.
