By Jordan Crawley

Following the publication of the Seattle City Auditor’s report, “Addressing Places in Seattle Where Overdoses and Crime are Concentrated”, Seattle City Council has used the report as justification for pursuing a slate of policies that fail to address the city’s public safety issues.

The report highlights specific geographic areas in Seattle with a significant concentration of drug use and crime, ultimately recommending “using an established place-based problem-solving approach that includes implementing evidence-based strategies”.

Key strategies identified in the report include increased community oversight, environmental design, and enhanced access to addiction recovery services. The report also advocates for coordinated inter-departmental and inter-jurisdictional efforts, regular intervention evaluation, and comprehensive strategies like those tried in Rainier Beach, which have been shown to both decrease violent crime and improve public perception of crime and police.

The Auditor highlighted the importance of utilizing the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration’s Strategic Prevention Framework, which outlines a five-step process for addressing substance use issues. The framework prescribes a data-driven approach guided by cultural competence and sustainability to identify local needs, expand access to services and support, implement evidence-based programs, and assess the programs’ effectiveness over time.

The report also cites a longitudinal study of Seattle and its experience with crime concentration in micro-places. The study is supported by theories of criminology emphasizing the “context of crime and the opportunities presented to potential offenders”, which suggest that it is largely the opportunity to commit crime which influences the frequency of occurrences; more specifically the “availability of suitable crime targets and the presence or absence of capable guardians”.

The study showed that 84% of street segments in the city are classifiable as low-rate stable trajectories, showing near-zero change in relatively low crime levels over fourteen years. The rest of the city, which accounted for a disproportionate amount of the crime, was classifiable as either increasing or decreasing trajectory, suggesting that areas in these parts of the city both began and ended the period with relatively high rates, regardless of their trajectory. This means crime concentration can be moved block-to-block, but never sufficiently addressed, with hot-spot approaches.

The theories put forward by the authors argue that concentrated co-occurrence of crime is driven by either routine activities or social disorganization, or both.

This means that crime is likely driven by either (1) the presence of motivated offenders, the availability of suitable targets, and the absence of capable neighborhood guardians, (2) underlying social and demographic instability, or (3) some combination of the two.

The authors then state that, if they are correct, a hot-spot approach will result in the moving around of criminal activity to areas more suitable to crime, easily accessible nearby areas, and other spaces which are not the focus of crime prevention measures. That, or have no effect at all. In any case, a hot-spot approach fails to address the problem. 

While this result might be significant in terms of outputs (e.g. number of arrests), and while it may benefit those who ran on public safety and successfully reframe this policy as a win, it fails to achieve the desired outcome of improved public safety and expanded services and support for those suffering from addiction.

Some councilmembers have admitted this approach is not meant to do any of that, but to "serve as another tool in our toolbox".

Let's be clear — communities with high crime rates experience a painful tension that is worth relieving. Our public safety departments need to be empowered to respond appropriately. The question is the degree to which a hot-spot approach and emphasizing enforcement in small pockets of the city is the right tool when the job is public safety, not crime displacement. I think the fact that these policies have been previously tried, failed, and repealed is evidence that they miss the mark.

Instead of a piece-meal approach to public safety, a much broader, more comprehensive set of policies that promote a complex combination of interventions is required if we are to have meaningful short- to long-term impacts on crime.

Jordan Crawley is a community leader and Army veteran with a degree in Law & Policy from the University of Washington.