Murder was falling, then Harrell, Nelson, and Davison took office

Despite continuous attempts by business interests and gullible mainstream media reporters to paint Seattle’s pandemic era crime spike as totally home grown—it runs out that after the pandemic, Seattle homicides were largely following the national pattern.

Yes, big cities like Seattle saw bigger increases in killings in 2020 than did the suburbs. But by 2021, the nation had turned a corner and murder was falling (by 4.4%), and falling much faster in Seattle (by 19%!).

In fact, Seattle had pretty much caught up with the rest of the country when looking at the murder spike and recovery in the 2019 to 2021 time period. And yes, we did this catching up despite an acute shortage of cops, and yes, our talking heads repeatedly ignored this.

(I say this even though I think we need to staff our department better. That still doesn’t mean we need to tell ourselves lies or buy the BS put out by the Chamber and their allies).

But something changed at the end of 2021–two conservative Democrats and a Trump-era Republican convert took office. Bruce Harrell won his race for Mayor. Sara Nelson got a seat on the City Council. And Republican Ann Davison became our City Attorney.

Then Seattle killings took a turn for the worse. After having tracked the national pattern, we immediately diverged. So while the rest of the nation continued to heal, Seattle did a 180 in the wrong direction.

And it has meant roughly 66 excess deaths.

To calculate this, I normalized our murder rate with the national rate in 2021, to establish a base year. 2021 seemed like a reasonable choice, since we had roughly reconverged with the national number of killings post pandemic, we were trending in the same direction as the rest of the country, and that is when these three were elected.

As you can see, as soon as the more conservative leaders took office, something went terribly wrong with homicides.

There are lots of possible reasons why. Bruce, Sara, and Ann performed security theater—rather than real reform. While the nation improved, our leaders threw blue glitter in the air instead.

The people who promised to make us safer completely blew it. And now they are trying to take credit for a favorable national trend that they totally insulated us from for years.

Yes, the national trend became so strong it finally swamped their clumsy, failed governance and continuous scandals and public preening. Yes, citizens finally managed to drag a (too small) civilian co-response for emergencies out of Bruce Harrell that may be helping. Yes, we are finally on the improvement train and playing catch up.

But these people want you to think they made you more safe. If anything, this graph shows that they made us all much less safe, for years. 

Now, of course this graph doesn’t prove that the sudden turn for the worse is their fault. 

But it isn’t exactly a leap.

One of Harrell’s first actions was to pass over a reformer for Police Chief and pick a Seattle Police insider who seemed to churn out a scandal on a monthly basis–and Harrell continuously stood by him. SPD under Harrell soon stopped investigating sexual assault - and frankly, seemed to be sitting on their hands for quite some time. Perhaps the way Harrell coveted cops’ love and cooed constantly at them about how abused they should feel created a permission structure for this bad behavior? I don’t know - but either way, the buck stops with Bruce and he needs to answer for these terrible results. And this is to say nothing of his ineffective homelessness response and his tepid approach to opioid abuse.

And let’s not forget that Nelson ran around for the cameras talking about how dangerous everything was - using the old Fox News playbook to try to rile up extra political support. And Davison couldn’t do something as basic as managing her caseload, killed drug court, and later picked a petty, protracted fight with a judge–further gumming up the courts and preventing justice from being swift, clear, or restorative.

So at the very least, I think we can all conclude - there is no way in hell they were helping. It is at least very plausible to think that the best way to understand this is that Bruce and his buddies’ botched leadership means we have faced an incredible number of excess deaths. 

It’s time to vote all three out of office.

One clarification - for this data set, I had to work with a national murder rate, versus an absolute number in Seattle, which means the graph is potentially off by a few percentage points. But the larger trend is clear.