Full article available below:
Recently the Seattle Police Officers Guild came up with a fresh new way to show what they really think of the city where they work.
On their social media accounts, they’ve taken to using the slogan “this is Seattle” as a catchphrase to sum up almost any crime. No other explanation needed.
“This is Seattle,” the cops union wrote over a recent report about a man arrested for child pornography.
“This is Seattle,” they said over a video of a driver shooting a BB gun at a Ballard homeless encampment.
“This is Seattle,” they said about gunfire in West Seattle and other shootings on Aurora; about a Tesla being burned; about a report of an attempted robbery, about a killing in South Seattle, about a mentally ill man damaging a park, and so on.
They even said “this is Seattle” about that viral video back in February of an irate parent rushing into the hockey rink to shove some youth referees to the ice.
Parents losing their minds about kid sports — is that really a distinctively Seattle thing?
Anyway, the reason I was sifting through the cops’ contemptuous social media feed is I wanted to see if they were feeling any pride about the big news around town.
Maybe you didn’t hear it, that crime in Seattle is … plummeting?
Say what? It’s true, according to the police’s own records.
Shots fired incidents are down 24% year to date, according to the Seattle police dashboard.
Violent crime, which includes murder, aggravated assault, robbery and rape, is down 15%. Seattle just had its lowest quarter for violent crime going back five years, to the pandemic, when street disorder began to soar.
Through the end of March, Seattle had eight homicides. The city hasn’t seen a figure that low in the first quarter of any year going back to 2019.
Or take the scourge of car theft. It’s down 30% from a year ago. Seattle was car-theft central a few years ago, with up to 1,100 incidents per month. That’s more than 35 cars swiped on average every day. So far this year the rate is down more than 50% from that peak, to around 14.
Great news, right? It’s not just confined to Seattle, either.
“Three months in and homicide totals for 2025 are still trending down,” reports the tracker site Washington State Homicide, which keeps a running tally of murders in the state. “Down by 23% so far this year compared to the first 3 months of 2024. Only 15 homicides in the whole month of March statewide. That’s pre-Covid numbers.”
That last part is a big deal. Seattle and Washington state have frustratingly lagged the nation in bouncing back from COVID-era crime spikes. So maybe — maybe — we’re finally getting back to some semblance of “normal” around here.
It could all go to hell tomorrow with the start of a new crime spree. The stats are backward-looking, with no guarantee of future results.
It also doesn’t mean there aren’t still lots of crime hot spots around, or that my own car, or yours, isn’t going to get jacked this weekend.
But caveats aside, it sure seems counterproductive that Seattle’s police union is portraying the city as lawless and degenerate, even as the department’s own stats show marked improvements.
I remember how the police used to boast when crime numbers went down. They’d hold a press conference and speak of it with pride. If you’re a cop, isn’t falling crime the main metric to show you’re doing your job, and doing it well?
Crime is down enough that police response times also are down, for the first time since the pandemic. Police are getting there about 10% faster so far this year, according to their dispatch dashboard (though the year is young.)
Again, it would seem this is a sign that things are going, dare I say it, better?
This being Seattle, I half expected a klaxon to start sounding when I typed the word “better.”
There’s something strange in the psyche of our city, especially with issues of crime. When crime was surging, many progressives were in denial about it, probably because the police, along with conservative media around the country, were pointing at Seattle and saying: “See? You are a liberal hellhole.”
But now that crime seems to be easing, the police are the ones acting like the change isn’t happening.
I get that the police union is tasked with arguing for more cops, so saying the town is a Wild West wasteland maybe boosts that effort. But the story of crime rising due to Seattle’s hostility to police is out of date. Crime isn’t rising, and defund the police is long, and mercifully, dead.
Recently I was 5,000 miles away from here, in another latitude and attitude. The first thing my host asked about Seattle was: What is it like living among all that crime and all those homeless tents?
I tried to make a case that this was a stale narrative — that Seattle has its problems, but things are looking up. He didn’t buy it. The videos he’d seen on social media were more potent. For all I know he’d been viewing “this is Seattle” posts coming from our own police.
That isn’t Seattle, though. Their own stats say we’re just about back, to a prepandemic normal. What’s definitely not back? Our brand and our good name.”
