Pike/Pine’s Bowie-inspired Life on Mars has become the poster child for a pandemic-era surge in commercial burglaries that continues to plague Capitol Hill.
Co-owner John Richards brought the latest break-in at the Harvard and Pike bar to light on social media Thursday, calling Seattle broken “just like my door” —
They broke our back door down, we enforced it. They broke our window frame we secured them. They broke the front lock, we secured lock. Today, they broke down the glass, we have no more front door. Thousands of $ and it just keeps happening. Seattle is broken, just like my door. pic.twitter.com/RI01jgdhsQ
— John Richards (@djjohnrichards) April 28, 2022
The KEXP DJ has a larger audience for crime issues at his bar but Life on Mars is not the only Capitol Hill business that has been dealing with the ongoing costs of the break-in surge.
Debuting before the pandemic in 2019 with cocktails, a plant-based menu, and walls lined with thousands of records, CHS reported on the challenges at Life on Mars and Capitol Hill shops and restaurants during the depths of pandemic lockdowns in October 2020. Conditions have not improved.
Commercial burglaries that surged during the pandemic when many businesses were shuttered and fewer people were on the street have continued at high levels.
Through the first three months of the year, reported break-ins around the East Precinct climbed about 10% over 2021’s already high levels.
So far this year, reported burglaries remain 50% higher than the same period in 2019 before the pandemic. And of the more than 330 burglaries reported in the East Precinct through March, 40% of the break-ins occurred along Broadway or in Pike/Pine on the streets near Life on Mars.
Meanwhile, the city as a whole still is seeing reported burglaries more than 30% higher than pre-pandemic levels.
It’s not clear what Richards and the experienced nightlife veterans he partnered with to open the bar can do. There is already a security system in place. The periodic break-ins have continued even with the thieves often getting away with nothing.
Seattle Police statistics show crime fears in the city dropping even as crime has risen. CHS looked at 2021’s rise in reported East Precinct crimes here.
SPD staffing remains a concern with Chief Adrian Diaz continuing to say he needs more officers to patrol the city.
Statistics also show a major change in how the city is policed. For 2021, the department reported a 27% drop in officer-generated responses like, for example, an officer driving by and noticing a smashed window at a business. Part of the gap was made up for by so-called “community-generated” calls like 911 calls or someone flagging an officer down — those incidents climbed 6% to just over 233,000 events. But overall, SPD responded to 5% fewer events in 2021, according to the department’s computer aided dispatch reports.
Meanwhile, a proposal to expand the street clean-up and safety programs of the Broadway Business Improvement Area to include Pike/Pine was scuttled in 2018 after a coalition of small Capitol Hill property owners including the owners of the Harvard Market shopping center across from Life on Mars organized opposition to the plan over cost concerns. The assessments would have run around $2,000 to $5,000 per year for most of the 850 or so properties involved in the expansion that would have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars for providing street clean-up and merchant support across the neighborhood. The failed push for the expanded BIA also eventually sunk Capitol Hill’s chamber of commerce which shut down operations in 2019.
At City Hall, Mayor Bruce Harrell has embraced a strategy of “hot spot” policing with SPD focusing increased resources in one area of the city at a time to crack down on street disorder and crimes. City Attorney Ann Davison’s office, meanwhile, says it has successfully sped up the rate at which it is charging new misdemeanor crimes even as it moves to dismiss a backlog of similar cases that has built over the past two years.
In March, after touting success in Little Saigon, Harrell and SPD shifted the strategy to focus on downtown.
With more smashed glass around Pike/Pine, we might eventually find out if “hot spotting” E Pike could make a difference when it comes to broken glass on Capitol Hill.
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I guess these aren’t, “Golden Years”?
Good luck getting hot spotting on Capitol Hill. We have no Councilmember to advocate for us, which is why we don’t get the attention other areas get for these issues. Why would the mayor or a citywide Councilmember wander into the morass that is Sawant dominated Capitol Hill politics? They can go to other parts of the city and get much more support without worrying so much about pushback.
I’ve been forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars hardening our apartment building after numerous breakins. Cameras, interlocking door mechanisms, new rolling garage door, enhanced lock sets and handles, paid overnight security, and security consultants. The costs add up quickly and it is an issue plaguing all manner of business and enterprise in our neighborhood and citywide. I do so wish we has a Councilmember who was sympathetic to the needs of victims of these crimes. But we don’t, so we will be last on the list.
Exactly. The post office stopped delivering mail to my building because of how often our building and mailboxes were broken into. Ann Davison is the first, and hopefully last, Republican I’ve ever voted for, but something has to change. We too have spent many thousands on upgraded security, locks, and cameras. It’s getting ridiculous.
Hear hear. No time to spend on actual district issues, but time to fly to NY to rabble rouse about unionizing Amazon workers. That makes sense.
You are aware that 12th and Jackson, the most prominent hot spot, is in D3 right?
Sawant isn’t nearly as powerful as her detractors imagine
You are aware that Sawant is also MIA in regards to supporting Little Saigon and that Mayor Harrell and City Attorney Davison were the ones to final take action at 12th and Jackson, right?
If the claim is that the mayor won’t put a hot spot on Pike/Pine because it’s Sawant’s district, that claim is obviously disproven by the fact that the most prominent hot spot is in D3 (and I doubt Sawant had any input)
What’s preventing what you want isn’t Sawant
Not as powerful, but certainly as useless…
And you are aware that 12th and Jackson isn’t Capitol Hill, right? I’m sure you are also aware that Sawant has played no part in stepped up enforcement efforts in either the Central district or Capitol Hill.
I’m aware of that fact but I don’t think Sawant is. Where has she been on that issue, which you point out, is taking place in her own district? Nowhere to be found. If she had her way those POC business owners and residents would continue to be victimized by crime, violence, and rampant drug use/sales. She would rather parade around Bobby Morris with a bunch over educated thirty year old white baristas than address the crime issues plaguing Capitol Hill and the rest of D3.
My point is, if she wasn’t able to prevent a hot spot at 12th and Jackson, it’s not her preventing one on Capitol Hill (complaining is not preventing)
The only person making the decision of where the hot spots go is Mayor Harrell (and his aides) and he claims to base it on data. Not everything you dislike is Sawant’s fault.
She wasn’t elected on a platform of stopping crime, so I’m not sure why it should be her focus.
Haha, totally. It’s an absurd notion that our representative should care about crime in her district.
I am wondering what is her focus then? I don’t think she does anything besides political, communist propaganda.
May be not so powerful but useless for capitol hill for sure.
Sawant unfortunately sees her roll as leading a crusade against capitalism rather than good city governance. Something many of us can sympathize with if it wasn’t that her particular causes were purely symbolic (as if unionizing starbucks baristas will do anything to stem the long decline of high paying private sector union jobs) and that the poor and POC weren’t the primary sufferers of city mal-governance (crime, open-air drug use, florid psychosis of vagrants, housing scarcity, vandalism, decay of public spaces).
Her victory of the recall could not have been narrower, yet she seems to be treating it as vindication of her approach to city government.
It’s a mystery to me who so many residents of D3 still support Sawant, in spite of all the evidence that she is incompetent.
The swan song of ‘rent control’ and ‘unions’ is all it takes to convince them to vote for her. Add into it ‘eat the rich’ or ‘tax Amazon’ and it makes her supporters all but guaranteed to vote for her no matter how demonstrably incompetent she is.
They came to my house during the recall, and basically lied about everything. They were claiming ‘Trump’ had organized it. It was RIDICULOUS…however they must have fooled enough people.
The Sawant machine had her minions printing ballots and suggesting that if the pedestrians they confronted didn’t vote for her they were somehow supporting the right! Every corner of some of the busiest intersections were covered, folks were shamed into voting for her.
It’s funny when all the opposition can do is wring their hands. They failed to run a legitimate candidate, they failed their recall; all they can do is complain on neighborhood blogs.
Vegas odds might be on her to win reelection due to her opponents repeated incompetency.
This is a good point, even if its not gently put. (certainly applies to my post) Recruiting local politicians is hard. Historically most people who went into it did so out of explicit self-dealing corruption or the implicit corruption of the local machine. Seattle (and many other large cities including historically very corrupt one like Chicago or NYC) is fortunate in that most of its city leaders are genuinely motivated by a desire to make the world better, even if their view of that is blinkered and supported by faulty assumptions.
I don’t know what the solution for our current batch of regional pols. In San Francisco David Campos, arch progressive and truely one of the worst of SF politicians (easily as bad Sawant, IMO worse) lost to Matt Hanley, a very liberal candidate, but one who’s reformed his policy views considerably especially re: housing (moving strongly into to the YIMBY camp) and has eschewed at least some of the strident, performative, confrontational, activist oriented politiking of the progressive camp.
That suggests that at least part of the answer may be reforming local leaders, perhaps by gentle persuasion and providing cover from knee-jerk, antagonistic activism.
Instant runoff elections are a good way to reform elections. It’s one way to avoid the two party stranglehold on our nation’s politics.
The number of broken and boarded up windows is insane. Until the city finds the backbone to maintain a civil society, they should compensate business owners for the cost of repair.
I wish the cops would set up some sting operations where they’re actually ready and waiting to net the burglars, car prowlers etc. Instead of just arriving after the fact to go through the motions of taking a report and saying, yeah never going to catch them.
They’re super disincentivized from doing anything to actively fight that kind of crime. If they engage actively to stop an assault / rape / murder, they are unlikely to get written up or charged unless their actions are truly egregious. With HB1310 from last year, the rules on when and how they can engage suspects were changed. Those rules are being clarified with new laws now, but cops don’t want to get jammed up by the “new” regime they don’t yet understand.
You are not aware that police already overwhelmed because so many officers left and still leaving. Not blaming them for that seeing that disrespect, which they don’t deserve despite single unfortunate events.
Our neighborhood and building has been plagued by the crime wave. We’ve spent a lot of time and money to avoid more break ins. It seems everyone around us has a story of a car broken into or a stolen and their residences broken into. The reality is the whole city is somewhat of a hot spot. We have somewhere between 300 – 500 less officers than other cities of similar size and with all the talk of alternatives to police I have yet to see any respond to issues
More cops doesn’t mean less crime. Chicago has one of the highest per-capita police forces in the country and way more crime than Seattle. 43.9 cops per 10K people vs. Seattle’s 19-ish. San Jose has 9 per 10K people, so I’m guessing your expectation is that it has 24/7 looting in the streets.
Fix the reasons people are committing crimes. Stop thinking cops are the solution.
Seattle is so obviously under-policed as is evident by the increased robberies, shootings, smashed windows, bold shoplifting, and public disorder. I don’t know what is going on in Chicago, but I do know that Seattle was a better, safer, more functional city when we had more police, foot patrols, community policing, and arrests for blatant criminality. I am so tired of this BS ideological position “police don’t prevent crime!”
Maybe look at what else has changed since that nostalgic past. Things like growing income inequality and cost of living increases being a double whammy.
Broke, unhappy citizens that can’t get a foothold in order to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” is not something cops can fix. But NIMBYs making room and not vetoing public services would go a long way.
Your utopian world view is a delusion. The rest of us are tired of living in the dystopia created by it.
When you remove Chicago’s endemic gang crime and the police task forces associated with fighting it, the numbers balance more favorably. Chicago also does not have the same per-capita level of street living, for the simple reason that it’s too cold there not to be forced into a shelter much of the year.
Sawant is the welfare lady, those are the only issues she speaks about. We have other members that are no better, they don’t respond to our concerns. Instead of taking responsibility for their policies that built things up to now, they either don’t respond or they get defensive. I hope others will wake-up and stop voting by party for people who have a proven history of not working for us. What good is cheap housing if it’s because nobody wants to live there because of crimes. What good is $15 an hour if your employer has to close or move because of vandalism, theft, and customer stop coming out of safety concerns.
Sawant and the activists who cheered the CHOP will try and spin the false narrative that all this crime is due to the perpetrators being “victims of poverty”. Their solution is defund the police and no longer prosecute misdemeanor crimes. Somehow I don’t see that working out for anyone but the criminals.
You’re right and I get really tired of people blaming crime on poverty coming from a background of people that had very little that never committed crimes. Crimes whether rich or poor is a mindset more than victim of circumstances