That's terrible. The escalating violence--particularly along the Pike/Pine corridor--is yet another reason I don't miss living on Capitol Hill (all due respect to my almost-exclusively Capitol Hill-dwelling colleagues). It's starting to remind me of the way the U-District felt in the mid-'90s. Quite sad.

There were some white boy fratty types fucking with the doorperson around the end of his name is alive, although it's probably just someone off the street. Did they get any description?

Dunno. Will post if I hear more. Yuck.

dammit. fuckin' thugs.

Can we all stop being a bunch of liberals and finally crack down on this bullshit? Can we be hardcore lefties on abortion, foreign policy, gays & lesbians, and have the guts to take this shit on?

For me it comes down to bullies vs. civilization. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, asshole punks with knives, car thieves, they're all bullies. fuck them. no more excuses. Seattle has higher violent and property crime than NYC. they have more cops than capita. I don't like cops either, but that's how you stop this shit.

i don't mean to disparage them in any way at all, but where was neumo's security?
[perhaps walking home alone after that show wasn't the smartest thing i've done this week...]
also, they fled on foot? and they were trying to take gear? WTF.

That's a well lit and fairly busy street so I doubt anyone, even security could have expected something like that to happen. That said, it comes with the territory. The crack/meth dealers are finding that Cap Hill is a great place to do business. And what comes with that? More crime and not just drug deals but more violent crime, more robberies and more break ins as well.

Actually, Seattle has one of the lowest crime rates in the country and one of the highest property crime rates, particularly car thefts/break-ins.

If you are particularly interested in this stuff, you can find all the Police Department's Annual Reports for the last 5 years here. They include stats:

http://www.seattle.gov/Police/Publications/AR/default.htm

From what I understand, what Giuliani did in NYC is to take away all the cops from the low-crime areas and put them in the high-crime areas. That seems like a no-brainer, but one can imagine earful he received from the neighborhoods who got their cops taken away.

Cops are only part of the picture. Crime prevention means each neighborhood taking on responsibility for themselves, too. It's a lot of work doing blockwatches, going to meetings, knowing your neighbors, (which is hard in a neighborhood full of security apartment buildings), taking action when you hear something or see something crime-related and generally paying attention to public safety issues. It's extra work and requires viligence over many years, which isn't easy or really everyone's bag.

Whenever I go to NYC or Chicago I think it's great to see cops walking the beat. Granted, the cops in those big cities seem quite different than the cops here. I always get the feeling they are there to protect me and not hassle me. They should get more cops to hit the streets and get outta the cruiser.

Can we all stop being a bunch of liberals and finally crack down
on this bullshit?

I'm not sure what is liberal about tolerating bullies, thugs, and generally un-neighborly people sharing the neighborhood with us, but I think I understand what you meant. I don't want us to enact "three strikes" laws and send our police out cracking skulls, but I don't want us to just accept aggressive, intimidating, and harmful behavior on our streets as part of living in the city.

I don't know what the solution is, but I can't help thinking that our police should be able to help us with it. I think they could benefit from more public input from Capitol Hill residents -- not just bitching when we think they're doing a bad job, but letting them know what we need from them. It's easy to forget this, but they're here to protect us. They need our guidance in order to help us in a manner that we see fit. A community organization known as the East Precinct Crime Prevention Coalition holds monthly meetings at which concerned citizens and police officers get together and talk about problems with crime and how to resolve them. This often results in actually doing something about the problems.

I make it to four or five of the EPCPC meetings each year, and there is rarely more than one or two other people from Capitol Hill and Pike/Pine there. Many times I'm the only one. The other 30 or so are from other parts of the East Precinct -- the Central District and Miller Park neighborhoods are heavily represented. Those neighborhoods have some serious problems with crime, and they're working with our police to do something about it. Meanwhile, we're sitting around writing about our problems on the Slog, The Stranger's forums, tribe.net, etc. It's great to communicate what's going on with neighbors this way, but I think we'd be well off to connect with the people we pay to protect us and to enforce the rules we've established for ourselves. Until we begin to do so, we're bound to come across as rather disinterested in bad behavior of the sort described in Kelly's post.

EPCPC meets fourth Thursdays from 6:30 - 8:00 p.m. at the Seattle Vocational Institute (2120 South Jackson). It would be great if some people showed up on April 27 to represent our neighborhood.