SEATTLE — Terri Jamison, who lives in the West Seattle Junction, doesn’t venture out on foot after dark anymore.
“Perhaps because I’m a gray-haired lady, they think [I’m] more vulnerable,” said the 73-year-old retired teacher and school administrator. “I just don’t take the chance anymore after being followed a couple times.”
Jamison was one of 500 Seattle residents who participated in a Seattle Times/Suffolk University poll on a wide array of topics, including public safety. Though vehicle and catalytic converter thefts in her neighborhood have been on the rise over the last year and a half, Jamison said she doesn’t see much public drug use, nor does she hear gunfire.
“I wasn’t too concerned about [gun violence] because it hasn’t affected my area,” she said. But then Jamison saw Seattle police Chief Adrian Diaz on the news, talking about “how many guns are out there and how many guns officers take off felons every day — and that was a wake-up call.”
A majority of poll respondents, 85%, said they generally feel safe in their neighborhood, and 56% felt that crime in their neighborhood had stayed about the same over the past year, while a third said it had increased. Less than 8% of respondents said crime had decreased in the past year.
Meanwhile, nearly half of respondents (48%) identified drug use as their biggest public safety concern, while 33% were most concerned about gun violence. The third and fourth choices — car thefts and shoplifting — barely ranked, with 7% and 6% of respondents, respectively, identifying those crimes as top safety concerns. Another 5% of respondents were undecided.
There’s a significant age split in how people answered the question: 58% of respondents 18 to 24 said drug use was their top public safety concern, while 44% of respondents 65 and older picked that answer. Of the respondents who identified gun violence as a top safety concern, 36% were people 65 and older compared with 15% of 18- to 24-year-olds.
The poll was conducted by phone June 12-16 and has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points. Its results are “loosely consistent” with those from the 2022 Seattle Public Safety Survey, which were released two weeks ago, said Jacqueline Helfgott, director of Seattle University’s Crime & Justice Research Center.
The public safety survey — administered every fall since 2015 through a partnership between the city, the Seattle Police Department and the Crime & Justice Research Center — provides more detailed insights into crime at the neighborhood level. It reaches people in all 58 neighborhoods across the Police Department’s five precincts and is available in English, Spanish and nine other languages.
More than 10,300 people who live or work in the city completed the 2022 survey. Of those, nearly 3,700 offered narrative comments, from which researchers identified 51 distinct themes. The survey report shows property crime, police capacity and homelessness are the top three public safety concerns in the city.
Property crime and police capacity — the number of officers available to respond to 911 calls — have consistently remained top safety concerns since the survey’s inception, Helfgott said.
On a 100-point scale, fear of crime citywide was 42 during the day and 47 at night, so “people are not reporting being that fearful of crime in Seattle,” she said.
But “crime is very nuanced” and varies not just by neighborhood, but by block, Helfgott said.
According to the Times/Suffolk poll results, women were likelier than men to say crime has increased in their neighborhood — 38% to 30% — while men were likelier to say it decreased or stayed about the same.
People who identified as Democrats leaned heavily toward crime staying about the same (63%), with 27% saying it had increased and 8% saying it decreased. Independents, the next largest group, were far likelier to say crime increased in their neighborhood, 42%, while 4% said it decreased and 53% said it stayed the same.
Fourteen of the 19 respondents who identified as Republicans said crime had increased in their neighborhood, four said it stayed the same and one said it decreased.
Those who make more money reported feeling safer in their neighborhood. While 74% of respondents who make less than $50,000 annually said they feel safe, 90% of respondents who make $250,000 a year reported they feel safe. Homeowners were also more likely to feel safe (87%) than renters (80%).
Poll respondent Christopher Kinney said he and his wife have both been “high-income earners” for the past 20 years. And while his Microsoft job was recently eliminated, he said he’s happy spending more time with their two teenage daughters.
“I’m lucky enough to live in Queen Anne,” he said. “It was a very safe neighborhood 20 years ago, it was a very safe neighborhood 10 years ago and I still feel that way.”
Still, property crime has noticeably gone up, and stores Kinney has long patronized are now more likely to have plywood covering glass doors that were smashed during break-ins. He sees property crime as a byproduct of the city’s homelessness crisis and growing numbers of people addicted to drugs.
“Someone broke into our garage and stole some bicycles,” said Kinney, 57. “People have tried to get into our cars. The neighbors across the street had their catalytic converter stolen.”
But, he said, violent crime “is not a big concern of mine.”
“Unfortunately — and I don’t love this fact — certain neighborhoods bear the larger brunt” of crime in the city, Kinney said.
Lifelong Seattleite Pat Simon, who lives a half-block east of Aurora Avenue North in Green Lake, said she’s noticed an increase in shootings along Aurora and is concerned about the number of prostituted women she sees on the sidewalks.
“I see people I suspect are traffickers and pimps. There’s a significant amount of trafficking going on,” said Simon, 74.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Simon volunteered at a seniors’ law clinic in Belltown. Now, she said, she no longer goes downtown.
“It was scary before, but it hadn’t escalated to random violence,” she said, referring to the killing of Eina Kwon, a pregnant woman whose husband was also wounded in the unprovoked shooting at Fourth Avenue and Lenora Street earlier this month. “I think that’s the way Aurora is going.”
