Dominic Holden has the story:

Earlier this month, the office of City Attorney Tom Carr warned Capitol Hill bar owners that police will approach apparently intoxicated pedestrians, ask them where they’ve been drinking, and try to shut down any bars they name. Many bar owners claim that menacing police patrols have already begun and that Carr’s latest crackdown appears to be politically motivated.

Bar and club owners have united to oust Carr—who is up for reelection after eight year in office—because Carr has protested liquor licenses, imposed onerous restrictions on upstanding businesses, and, most infamously, was a leading force in an aggressive 2007 anti-nightlife sting called Operation Sobering Thought. A campaign of organized harassment that cost the city tens of thousands of dollars, Operation Sobering Thought resulted in zero convictions and sparked an avalanche of bad press for Carr’s office.

A city attorney liaison who met with club owners "accused the bars of being responsible for a rising trend of assaults and robberies on Capitol Hill. People are being overserved, she reportedly said, and then assaulting and robbing people when they leave the bars. Carr, reached by phone after the meeting, repeated Milnor's claim that there is a problem with overservice and associated violence near the clubs on Capitol Hill."

Jumping ahead:

It is absurd to link bars to a spike in assaults and robberies on Capitol Hill, because assaults and robberies on Capitol Hill aren’t rising.

They’re going down.

Crime statistics from the Seattle Police Department, which track crimes monthly and are broken down by police beat, disprove the claims being made by Carr’s office. Comparing the most recent three-month period for which data is available—May through July of 2009—to the same three-month period last year shows no spike in assaults or robberies. In the three beats that include the Pike/Pine corridor and much of Capitol Hill and First Hill—within roughly a mile of all the bars in question—assaults dropped from 121 in 2008 to 119 in 2009. Robberies dropped from 23 to 21. Assaults and robberies are down or flat across all of Capitol Hill. Those aren’t significant declines, but they demonstrate the claims being made by Carr’s office are false.

The full story is HERE.