It’s hard to tell who is taking the most political advantage of the controversy that has bubbled out of City Attorney Tom Carr’s relationship with Pike/Pine club owners.
But if the East Precinct wants to tackle a problem with Capitol Hill assaults, its officers had better look beyond the convenient target of Pike/Pine.
We look at the East Precinct trends every month when the latest batch of crime data is released by SPD. The last drop gave us totals for 2009 through July. By the way, last month, the July totals were available midway through the month. SPD’s hasn’t yet added August totals as we reach the final week of this month.
We told you then that Hill crime totals were climbing. The takeaway? A surge in theft was helping to drive Capitol Hill’s 2009 numbers to uncomfortably high levels. While citywide numbers — especially violent crime — looked bad, Pike/Pine’s data for July were especially bad.
These fever lines below show the trends for the four East Precinct beats that cover Capitol Hill. You can see problem sector C2’s ugly theft-driven uptick.
Here’s what the trends look like if we look only at theft totals. You can see C2’s Pike/Pine one-month spike but also E2’s Seattle University area’s extraordinarily high, sustained theft totals.
Hopefully somebody is planning a crackdown on Seattle U. area thievery. While they’re at it, they might get distracted by Pike/Pine also having a one-month spike in July assaults.
They had better also take a look at solving northern Capitol Hill’s C1 assault problem. Can’t really see it looking at the fever lines but C1’s assaults, in total, through the first seven months of 2009 should be of bigger concern than the short-term trends in Pike/Pine.
Here are two tables with year-to-date totals for the two categories compared to the same period in 2008:
North Capitol Hill has an assault problem — 45 assaults through July in 2009, 33 in the same period in 2008. That’s a 36.4% increase. Even with a relatively small sample, that’s a jump that warrants concern. Meanwhile, you can see that theft has surged across the precinct’s Capitol Hill beats so far in 2009. The area that’s seen the smallest jump in theft on the Hill? Pike/Pine. Go figure.
