> If you don't live in Capitol Hill or Pioneer Square (which face
> issues of rapid gentrification and homelessness), the
> local crime stats show that you are vanishingly
> unlikely to be facing even property crime.
In the past five years:
- The strap was cut and a gas can was stolen out of the back of my truck, a week after I got it.
- A chair was stolen from our front porch.
- My wife's car was broken into and her ancient iPod stolen.
- Someone climbed our fence and was wandering around in our backyard before a neighbor scared them off.
We would have certainly had lots of packages stolen too, but we simply don't ship things to our house unless we know we will be home. In addition to those direct crimes against us, we've experienced fun things like:
- Countless RVs illegally parked all around the neighborhood.
- People leaving literal piles of trash behind when they relocate their RV
- People dumping their sewage waste on the road when they relocate their RV.
- RVs catching on fire.
- Someone shitting on the street.
- Another person shitting in our alley.
- A neighbor found a gun in their bushes.
- Needles left on the ground in our yard. (We taught the kids not to touch them.)
- Screaming fights in the middle of the night.
- Homeless people using the port-o-potty painters placed in our front yard. (We put a lock on it after that.)
Seattle has a very serious homeless/drug addict problem and it affects virtually every neighborhood. None of this has anything to do with race, of course, but property crime and the other knock-on effects caused by a large homeless heroin/meth addict population are rampant.
This makes it sound like we live in the same area (Rainier Valley). Property crime is definitely a thing here and gun crime has been consistent - though limited - in the Columbia City area.
Pioneer Square is also a different animal since it is highly commercial and not residential.
Regardless, the Rainier Valley has plenty of crime. I've had my car stolen, my car broken into, and a townhome next to mine being burgled in the few years I've been down here.
We are, of course, undergoing rapid gentrification as well.
First, I'm not sure I believe your numbers to begin with. Is there a source?
Second, a huge issue is racism in law and police policies (not necessarily in individual cops) - crime statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt. The numbers reflect what the police and courts do, not what people do- they're related of course, but there's a bias.
Homicides are one way to dis-entangle this (in jurisdictions not prone to To Kill A Mockingbird asshattery). It's objective as to when it happens. And our courts are relatively better, at least in the post-DNA era, about due process when it comes to such crimes.
It appears blacks committed 52.2% of homicides from 1976 through 2005 while representing 12.3% of the population [1]. The 2013 statistic for "murder and nonnegligent manslaughter" arrests of blacks is also 52.2% [2]. That said, (a) arrest does not mean conviction and (b) we decided long ago, and rightfully so, that projecting population characteristics onto someone who did not choose to be a member of that population is morally wrong and therefore, oftentimes, illegal.
[1] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf page 12
[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
We can take this further: It should not be compared against the total population, but segmented by traits known to be associated with violent crime, like poverty. But even then, since violence is itself cultural, I'd expect certain area's to be more unsafe than others, despite similar levels of poverty. So we'd need to look at blacks and non-blacks in those specific areas and compare those specific traits. I'm _sure_ someone has done this study, does anyone have enough familiarity with this area to provide some high quality references?
[1] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226953/Sampson_... journal page 377
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
It appears blacks were victims in 52.3% of homicides while representing 13.3% of the population. [1]
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-hom...
I'm sure The Stranger will have a field day if anyone actually gets kicked off because of this "don't share with the media" position. And if NextDoor think that media folks aren't already embedded, in every neighborhood group, so they can have access to the kinda-racist goings-on of the platform, they are surely mistaken!