Thanks to a CHS reader for providing pictures from the scene
A reported armed robbery attempt ended with one alleged suspect shot dead and another fleeing the area early Tuesday morning at a Metro bus stop across from the Capitol Hill Station apartments near 10th and John.
Police said they were investigating after a 24-year-old was shot in an armed robbery attempt reported around 1:15 AM. UPDATE 1:00 PM: SPD says officers provided aid at the scene in front of the Broadway Locksmith but the man was pronounced dead by the time he arrived at the hospital. “Patrol officers interviewed a 39-year-old man at the scene who said that the man who died was attempting to rob him when he opened fire striking the suspect,” SPD reports. “Homicide detectives are now interviewing the man in an attempt to understand what led up to the shooting.”
Eyewitnesses say the shooter in the incident is a white male. The man who was shot was Black.
A second gunshot wound victim who arrived at Harborview with an injured foot around 2 AM is not believed to have been involved in the Capitol Hill shooting, an SPD spokesperson said.
The SPD spokesperson said the department will provide details of its investigation and possible criminal charges to the King County Prosecutor’s office. Prosecutors will decide whether any charges will be filed.
According to East Precinct radio updates, a 911 caller told police their partner shot a male attempting to hold them up at gunpoint. Police arrived and found one person down at the scene and the armed couple. It’s not clear if a second weapon was recovered.
According to witnesses, a second suspect fled the scene and police were also looking for a newer model F-150 pickup involved in the incident.
The person who was shot was taken to Harborview. We do not have information on their condition but they were reported as conscious.
Broadway east of John was closed during the response.
The shooting follows a weekend of gun violence in Seattle including two deaths.
It would also be the second self-defense shooting of the summer in this area of Capitol Hill. In July, a man told police he was being robbed of a “significant amount of cash” in a dispute involving pick-up basketball wagering when he opened fire in Cal Anderson. There were no injuries in that incident.
There is an ongoing wave of gun violence across King County, part of a nationwide trend in 2021. Recent shots fired incidents near Tuesday morning’s shooting including this August 8th shots fired incident in the park. Most recently, East Precinct gun incidents included this shootout at 21st and Union and a man shot in the hand in an exchange of gunfire involving vehicles on First Hill.
Early Saturday morning, police also investigated a shots fire near Cal Anderson’s basketball court. Officers located evidence of a shooting, but no injured parties were located in the incident reported around 1:45 AM. One vehicle was damaged.
Meanwhile, late Friday night in north Capitol Hill, two women were held up at gunpoint by a man who first tried to steal a purse by wrestling one of the victim’s to the ground before pulling a gun and taking a bag from the second. The suspect reportedly fled the area in a red sedan. There were no reported serious injuries and no arrests.
Officials including Mayor Jenny Durkan are slated to take part in a press conference Tuesday morning to address the ongoing wave of gun violence in the city:
Following weekend gun violence that included six shootings and two deaths, public and community safety leaders Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz; Human Services Department Safe and Thriving Communities Division Director Rex Brown; and Councilmember Alex Pedersen will host a media availability to share updates, including on recently announced budget requests to help curb community violence.
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Cops continuing to double down on not enforcing laws to pay Capitol Hill back for supporting Progressives.
SPD officers are leaving in droves, and the city council refuses to replace them because they’re claiming the savings from vacated positions are their promised “defunding the police.”
As a result, response times are through the roof this year, and crime continues to get worse. Who could have guessed this would be the result of attacking, neutering, and defunding our police?
I’m still waiting for the social workers and therapists. Weren’t we promised social workers and therapists? I thought the point of “defund SPD” was to replace SPD with social workers and therapists, because in the drug-addled minds of our activist overlords, that would solve crime. Instead we’ve replaced them with nothing, and crime has skyrocketed.
Now we’re being asked to vote for a city attorney who will legalize all crime, and to make the woman who spearheaded the “Defund SPD” movement our next mayor.
Social workers and therapistsâŚI do wonder if any social workers and/or therapists who would agree to stand in for police on emergency calls would be deeply naive to the point of ineffective in a crisis involving threat to life. Am I the only one to solemnly marvel at the lack of foresight here? Things are getting scary here, folks.
Yeah, why wasn’t a police officer stationed on that corner at 1am Tuesday morning? </sarcasm>
I get the sarcasm, but, that’s EXACTLY what Seattle needs in the short term: public safety booths at 3rd and Pine, Pioneer Square, Capitol Hill Station, Cal Anderson Park, Pike/Pine at Broadway, 23rd & Union, etc.
Long term, we need a complete overhaul of public safety here, but a transition will need years. In the meantime, we need to hire better, require residency and staff up enough to double down on community policing, by foot and bike, especially at night.
So many here have no perspective. Know-it-alls (on all sides) who simply don’t know. That’s no help in fixing anything. Successful major cities tackle crime by both making investments in deterrents/vulnerable communities AND ensuring there are enough public safety responders and enforcers in the community. However broken -and it is broken- our police department is, it is also profoundly understaffed and has been for over a decade. Critics, look up the stats.
The Stranger was complaining about 30 minute+ delays for a police response by stabbing victims 10 years ago.
We must demand loudly that, yes, we need to change how we do public safety long term, commencing that change now, but also that, in the immediate, we need proper staffing of better-trained police, with consequences for abuse.
Oh, and, it’s time to admit that a relative-handful of CCTV cameras is preferable to soaring body counts -each one a human who either won’t wake tomorrow or will suffer other consequences if they survive a shooting.
Next victim could be any one of us. Literally. So…
Cops have almost nothing to do with any of this. They show up after things happen and then ask for civilian witnesses to inform them on what happened. This is a problem of poverty exacerbated by the global pandemic.
Poverty is not a significant driver of violent crime.
Most crime is driven by a general feeling that you’ll get away with it. Most offenders “graduate” into more and more dangerous and violent criminal acts because they are not caught or stopped along the way.
Yup, because the poorest people have the latest F-150 pickups.
Lol. Well said!
Seattle citizens continue to double down by electing zealots that fuel the drug zombie apocalypse and associated crime and violence.
The Sackler family just got off scot free despite personally profiting billions off of selling illegal opiates and perpetuating the current opiate crisis.
But yeah, it’s Seattle citizens and government that are responsible.
Because of progressives on the city council SPD is down 300 police officers
This is some serious Q-level conspiracy business, Doom. Care to back up your assertions?
I personally think this is possible, but not necessarily as you stated. I think that the knowledge that their city doesnât support them might have some influence on their morale, not so much as spitefulness towards the city (although perhaps thatâs the result for some cops just waiting to transfer to another city) but just a general lack of enthusiasm for the job. Itâs a seriously high risk job, and I personally wouldnât take it even with the high payânot ever. I was once assaulted in Cal Anderson park and the cops that arrived almost immediately afterwards had to fight this guy who was on meth and he bit and spit on them as they wrestled him to the ground. I doubt anyone in my position these days would get that sort of response time/effort. I do know that corruption and racism is very real in all branches of government and has to be addressed, but public safety cannot be the sacrifice. This way ultimately puts vulnerable populations into even more vulnerable positions and affirms that security is only available for those who can buy their way into safer neighborhoods.
Sad that it has come to this but it is not a surprise. Seattleâs grand experiment in electing increasingly extreme activist ideologues to city council, defunding the police, decriminalizing crime and creating an environment that attracts drug addicts and dealers from across the country to the land of no rules and no consequences has been an epic failure and a black eye for the progressive movement. There are smarter ways to address systemic racism and build a more equitable society.
Anyone who thinks less police at this time in our city is a sign of progress has been drinking some juice. Periods of great instability (hello pandemic) are not times to overhaul important infrastructure like law enforcement. Please let us make sensible choices. Please.
There were more cops, per capita, in the 1990s, when the Seattle crime rate was significantly higher than it is today.
It may seem counterintuitive, but more cops does not mean less crime. Chicago has double the number of cops, per capita, as Seattle, and a significantly higher violent crime rate.
Can you please post some statistics with source? SPD dashboard only goes back to 2008. What you are saying may be true, but it is hard to compare the psychological insecurities many people are experiencing to any time in recent history. Such an unstable time as this may require more support in all ways. Another poster commented asking where are the therapists and social workers? It all just feels like a utopian suggestion thrown up with no practical application for political aims.
I don’t have it handy, but I was just googling “per capita” police per city, then found one that compared those rates between 1990 and 2000. Seattle was on those lists, and there were more cops per 100,000 (which was its metric) than today.
Seattle had like 24 cops per 1,000 people in the 90s, when the crime rate was way, way higher (which you can also find in other places), and around 20 today. Which is above/around average for most cities. Chicago has like 40+. DC has something like 55; both cities have higher crime rates, all normalized against the population.
Other cities have way fewer cops and way less crime; you would assume, based on the panic expressed here and elsewhere, that those cities should be, for obvious cop-free reasons, crime-ridden cesspools. Because their assumption is the presence of large numbers of cops means less crime.
But in fact, crimes are committed regardless of the number of cops, because people tend to commit crimes when cops aren’t around. And the motivations to commit violent crimes are more complex than simply “fear of being caught.”
The complexity of the moment is something that we canât compare easily to other times, other places. My argument is not that more cops= safer city, but that having a city council that has effectively driven off a hefty chunk of our police at this complex, unstable time will inevitably lead to greater instability in ways that are hard to deconstruct. Kind of like having a broken window in your home and instead of replacing it, you decide the urgent matter is knocking down a wall. The weirdness of it begets more weirdness.
I have this handy.https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-cities-with-the-greatest-police-presence-most-officers-per-capita.html
You’ll see, Privilege, that excepting Portland (with its own huge problems with murder and violence increases of late) and Sacramento, there is no city with a population over 500,000 in the USA with fewer police than Seattle.
We can debate what a public safety organization for Seattle should look like but all problems require resources and innovations to solve them. Even if one erroneously believes that good, well-trained police can’t play a big role in crime deterrence, one cannot argue with any sanity that a lack of detectives and community officers to prevent crime and solve just who killed, maimed, harmed and/or destroyed (so they may be separated from society and punished/rehabbed) is progress. It’s not.
At the en of the day, while we must have compassion and understanding, we must protect those who’d be harmed at least as much as those doing the harming. And, most believe that we should protect the harmed and vulnerable (most of us) with priority.
Therefore, does it not stand to reason that having adequate staffing to maintain public safety is sound policy? We do not have that adequate staffing in Seattle right now, just as we have no viable long-term plan amongst our electeds to re-do public safety so that we will have better public safety with less violent responses, community-based officers and deep investments in the most vulnerable in our community.
Your point being? Look, it’s a factual statement to say our violent crime rate is lower today than it has been previously, and that we had more cops per capita when we had worse crime. It’s also true that the crime rate is higher over the last couple of years when there’s been a global pandemic, an economic collapse, a dirtbag president, open racism, blah blah blah. Maybe it’s our number of cops. Maybe it’s Kshama Sawant. I don’t know. You probably don’t know either.
But the solution for most white people is always more cops, never anything else. How many more? At what level will you finally feel safe and protected? You’ve had more cops and had more crime. There are cities with more cops that have higher crime rates, and cities with fewer cops and lower crime rates.
But we need more cops!
Yeah, Seattle isn’t Chicago, it isn’t Sacramento, it isn’t even Portland. I mean, cool? I don’t suppose I get the point, beyond “stats don’t care about histories, demographics, etc.” The stats don’t support most people’s perceptions on crime, because crime doesn’t have a linear rate with the number of cops. And you can’t really discuss the sociologic differences between cities, then dismiss sociological influences on crime rates that extend well beyond “more cops, more cops, more cops!”
Also, our perception of crime is heavily influenced by our following crime blotters, or reading blogs that cover crimes, or being on Facebook or NextDoor, or wherever your racist uncle is bitching about the world going to crap. It doesn’t matter if that’s true or not, he just “feels” it is because… he’s immersing himself in it. My only sympathy to cops is that they are always immersed in the worst of a city and its people, which I think can really ruin their perception of the city. But people voluntarily do this too, which is… baffling. And toxic.
Privilege, correlation is not causation. So much has changed since the violent 1990s in United Statesian society, policing, policies and economic realities.
And comparing Seattle and Chicago -public safety-wise- is like comparing Vietnam to Lichtenstein, apples with oranges and sugar with salt. The histories, demographies and local realities are so vastly different -so much that, the only really obvious similarities between both places is that they are both in the USA, English is the primary language, both are global business and culture centers and both are located on water.
Capitol Hill was much safer in the 90s. There were a few high profile murders, but nothing like the frequency of shootings today. It was quirky not dystopian. Police used to walk Broadway, Pike Pine and Cal Anderson Park. There was an emphasis on LGBTQ community safety. Homeless people went to congregate shelters at night and tents werenât allowed anywhere. The encampments didnât start until Mayor McGinn, Mike OâBrian, Pete Holmes and Kshama Sawant shifted policy and in effect creating a right to privatize and destroy public spaces. The drug gangs followed.
Violent crime statistic says otherwise, but it’s cool that you believe the great liberal boogeypeople made everything bad.
You did, however, fail to mention needles and human feces littering the sidewalks, so I didn’t get to fill out my bingo card.
Another amusing thought: people like yourself tend to demand full accountability of all money spent on the homeless, and any expansions are met with “what about the money? Where’s the money going? I want stats to back it up!”
And then there’s a shooting, and the same people say, “We need more cops! Who cares how much it costs, who cares about stats or results. MOOOAAAR COPS!” You only see one solution to a crime, one that was literally committed within walking distance of the precinct. as if more people out patrolling would stop people from committing crimes. Because people who commit crimes are acting rationally, and are deterred by fear of being caught. (Hint: They’re not acting rationally, and are no deterred by fear of being caught. They can also wait for the car to drive by before criming. Problem solved!)
Anyway, we’re so authoritarian in the immediate aftermath of being scared. But maybe everyone here is right, maybe we need more cops, no idea. Fact is, you have no idea either. Everyone has been trying to solve crime with more cops forever, with pretty poor results. It’s typically societal change that impacts crime rates, but maybe we’ll be the unicorn city that will see crime rate perfectly tied to number of cops.
Or maybe we’ll see crime rates go down when/if the pandemic ends, when/if the economy recovers, etc. And then we won’t be stuck with the bill for MOOAAAARR COPS that were never necessary in the first place.
Or maybe we should just arm them with automatic weapons, attach machine guns to their vehicles, and have them patrol Capitol Hill like it’s Fallujah. There would probably be less crime, and you can finally feel safe in your house in Everett.
Does anyone have violent crime statistics per square mile for the Capitol Hill neighborhood from mid 90s through the present?
https://www.seattletimes.com/life/lifestyle/culture-clash-on-capitol-hill/
This article is a pretty good vault of the exact sea change on the Hill. Makes me sad to read because I remember how lovely and weird and community oriented Capitol Hill was before everyone crammed in around 2013-14. Ive heard it said, and this article explains that things were really pretty violent in the 90s. If things are no more violent now, thatâs not really a good thing.
That depends on your definition of violent crime. The Seastat dashboard doesn’t go back as far as you want, and it filters out Assault 4, which can be a very serious assault (person walks up and punches you in the face so hard you fall to the ground is, for example, and assault 4). But you can view those (4,918 so far this year) by choosing the ALL and ALL OTHER category when viewing crimes on the dashboard. I was looking at it last night and man, there sure are a lot of assaults on the hill. https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/crime-dashboard
“Eyewitnesses say the shooter in the incident is a white male. The man who was shot was Black.”
1) Please be consistent in bringing up race.
2) Capitalizing black and lowercase white? If that’s not racist I don’t know what is. I’ve heard the justification for this new standard and it’s lame.
We adhere to the current journalistic standards regarding capitalization — AP Style — Additional commentary from cjr.org
Thanks for linking the CJR article! Completely worth the 5 minute read time
#2 – that’s not racist & you clearly don’t know what is.