Gun And Drug Violence In Seattle

[steve_bank]

A few hours ago two shootings in close proximity. A cop killed a suspect on 3rd Ave in a drug bust. Also on 3rd Ave two men starting arguuuuu9ng and pulled out guns shooting indiscriminately. 1 dead, 7 wounded. One a young kid.


3rd Ave is the major shopping and tourist district. It is the main bus transit corridor. The concert hall Benaroya Hall.

I have seen drug deals on the street. Part of it is the liberal drug and crime policy. Heroin has essentially been decriminalized. Get caught with a 'user amount' and you are not detained. People hanging out smoking pot. People get arrested on the street and a few hours later they are back.n
I live in an apartment a short way off 3rd Ave. Recently the building was hit by bullets in a drive by shooting. Shootings abd stabbings in the area are now routine. The area is not run down. Upscale apartments and condos.

An entrance to the King County Court House had to be closed because it is too dangerous to use it.

Last month I was confronted by someone ranting in Chinatown. It diffused I was ready to use my cane. I few days ago I walked by somebody around my building in a park area with no one else around. I turned around and he was right behind me. I elevated my cane, he stared, then walked off.

Folks, do not visit Searle.

Perhaps a harbinger of things to come in this country. Seattle police are overwhelmed. There is too much crime to cover. It is looking like anarchy with little rule of law. When I am waiting on 3rd Ave for a bus I can see transactions happening. There are police around on bicycle and in cars. They are ignored, no one is afraid of the police.

 

[Trausti]

A few hours ago two shootings in close proximity. A cop killed a suspect on 3rd Ave in a drug bust. Also on 3rd Ave two men starting arguuuuu9ng and pulled out guns shooting indiscriminately. 1 dead, 7 wounded. One a young kid.


3rd Ave is the major shopping and tourist district. It is the main bus transit corridor. The concert hall Benaroya Hall.

I have seen drug deals on the street. Part of it is the liberal drug and crime policy. Heroin has essentially been decriminalized. Get caught with a 'user amount' and you are not detained. People hanging out smoking pot. People get arrested on the street and a few hours later they are back.n
I live in an apartment a short way off 3rd Ave. Recently the building was hit by bullets in a drive by shooting. Shootings abd stabbings in the area are now routine. The area is not run down. Upscale apartments and condos.

An entrance to the King County Court House had to be closed because it is too dangerous to use it.

Last month I was confronted by someone ranting in Chinatown. It diffused I was ready to use my cane. I few days ago I walked by somebody around my building in a park area with no one else around. I turned around and he was right behind me. I elevated my cane, he stared, then walked off.

Folks, do not visit Searle.

Perhaps a harbinger of things to come in this country. Seattle police are overwhelmed. There is too much crime to cover. It is looking like anarchy with little rule of law. When I am waiting on 3rd Ave for a bus I can see transactions happening. There are police around on bicycle and in cars. They are ignored, no one is afraid of the police.

Members of the city counsel express open contempt for police and law enforcement in general. Surprise, the police are understaffed and have a hard time with recruitment and retention. Property crime? Too bad. No one is to be held responsible for their own actions - blame Amazon. I know someone who recently quit the prosecutor's office as, despite the hard work put in, violent criminals are given short sentences or simply released. Is it is bad as San Francisco? Don't know. But apparently this is what it means to be progressive.

 

[steve_bank]

There are oprn air drug markets. There is one om 23rd and S Jackson [n the Walgreen parking lot. No attempts o hide it.

The progressive reality. Nobody is responsible for actions.

 

[Jarhyn]

So, this just seems like pearl.clutching at this point. The corner of third, between Pike and Pine, is a known location in Seattle for drug deals, sketchy behavior and such. The McDonald's there is known colloquially as "methdonalds" and "crackdonalds".

Anyway, drug dealers tend to mind their own business. I mean shit, walking down Hennepin Ave in Minneapolis, I have about even odds as to whether someone tries to market drugs to me, usually weed but sometimes they try to sling crack, heroin, or meth.

This is, in fact, one of the realities of living in a city: somewhere, in one of the frequently travelled areas of the city, there's going to be a place where people sell drugs. Boo. Fucking. Hoo.

Of course, if the drugs were legal, there would be legal stores to buy it at, designed in such a way that the violence that plagues illicit drug markets would evaporate.

After engaging less pearl-clutchy less whiney residents of the city, it's apparent that these events are not "frequent", and it strikes me that police enforcing gun laws ("Oh NoEs We MuSt NoT PaSs SenSiBLe Gun LaWs") and the frequency of arrests makes the carrying of guns by the criminal element there LESS common.

At any rate, the solution is to end the war on drugs so that we can actually address drug markets like this by making them safe, clean, affordable, geographically distributed, and taxed. THAT is the PROGRESSIVE reality. What you're asking for is... More of this. And that it involve MORE violence.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

At any rate, the solution is to end the war on drugs so that we can actually address drug markets like this by making them safe, clean, affordable, geographically distributed, and taxed. THAT is the PROGRESSIVE reality. What you're asking for is... More of this. And that it involve MORE violence.

Dude, you're making way too much sense. You need to watch the latest installment of Reefer Madness to get that old-timey religious fear and hatred of "them people" rekindled. Drugs are bad, bad, bad, like alcohol, which is why we have a war on alcohol too. What? We don't? Since when? Why? People use it? But it's bad. What? We sell it in grocery stores? What? But it's bad, bad, bad!!! What? People still want it? What? But it's bad, bad, bad!!!

In a couple months I'll be spending a week in one of those "dry" southern counties. What a fucking laugher! No, you can't walk into a bar and sit down and have a drink but you can stop at the local gas station and buy all the booze you want, or have plenty of drinks with your meal, or have fifty cases of Jack Daniels in the trunk of your car.

I really don't know how to react to such blatant hypocrisy when I encounter it.

 

[krypton iodine sulfur]

It seems both violent and property crimes have fallen considerably since the 80s. Property and violent crime rates have lowered slightly since 2000. While these crime rates are higher than the national average (rape and murder, specifically are lower), there are tens of cities with worse crime rates without much clear relationship to progressiveness.

Granted, the data I've looked at at a glance obviously doesn't run up to 2020. For Seattle alone, it goes up to 2016/7. For comparisons across cities, the data only goes to 2009. I didn't find immediate numbers regarding illicit drug use or related crimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate
https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/crime-dashboard
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattl...if-you-look-crime-rates-from-the-80s-and-90s/
https://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/washington/seattle.html

To be clear, I am not pretending I have been thorough or comprehensive. Not by a long shot. It's just, at a glance, I am not sure data supports what the OP suggests. Perhaps there have been certain shifts in certain neighbourhoods, in very specific types of crime, or in who is targeted by crime, but Seattle doesn't seem to be all that dangerous now compared to the last two decades, or to its peaks in the 80s and 90s.

 

[Jarhyn]

It seems both violent and property crimes have fallen considerably since the 80s. Property and violent crime rates have lowered slightly since 2000. While these crime rates are higher than the national average (rape and murder, specifically are lower), there are tens of cities with worse crime rates without much clear relationship to progressiveness.

Granted, the data I've looked at at a glance obviously doesn't run up to 2020. For Seattle alone, it goes up to 2016/7. For comparisons across cities, the data only goes to 2009. I didn't find immediate numbers regarding illicit drug use or related crimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate
https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/crime-dashboard
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattl...if-you-look-crime-rates-from-the-80s-and-90s/
https://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/washington/seattle.html

To be clear, I am not pretending I have been thorough or comprehensive. Not by a long shot. It's just, at a glance, I am not sure data supports what the OP suggests. Perhaps there have been certain shifts in certain neighbourhoods, in very specific types of crime, or in who is targeted by crime, but Seattle doesn't seem to be all that dangerous now compared to the last two decades, or to its peaks in the 80s and 90s.

It doesn't matter, really, to the OP's claim. My suspicion is temporal bias: as the years pass, no matter who or where, there will be "more" incidents from the perspective of the viewer, and thus later years will seem worse because their collection of events is bigger in those later years.

If you plot number of violent shootings reported in a person's life against their age, and then plot that against their perception of social violence, I suspect the graphs would line up.

 

[Elixir]

There are oprn air drug markets. There is one om 23rd and S Jackson [n the Walgreen parking lot. No attempts o hide it.

That's why they need to legalize drugs, fully and completely like Portugal. No more financing criminals and illegal immigrant gangs, no more crimes of desperate addicts.
CHECK IT OUT STEVE and tell me about the downside, and how it's worse than what you have in Seattle now.

The progressive reality.

Nope, what you are looking at is THE WAR ON DRUGS in action. An epic FAIL of the right, like most of their "wars".

 

[steve_bank]

The effect of decriminalizing drugs is evident in Seattle. It is not good. It worsens problems.

Pot is everywhere in Seattle, you can not go anywhere without smelling it on the street. Young people old people in groups hanging around on the street and in parks and parking lots smoking, analogous to whnos drinking out of a paper bag.

Pot is the new cheap wine.

You do not see the effects of the progressive views on drugs unless you get out of your comfort zone. I have a crack head living in my building. I know someone who worked in addiction. Hard drug addiction has spread far up the socio economic ladder. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers.

It is a cancer. I would not have said that in the 70s when I used drugs, I say it now. It is driving crime in Seattle. Addicts can not work resorting to crime. From a social worker I know she works hard to get a program of treatment and job traing for someone and they reject it.

Legalize all drugs and you u unleash something that will be even more dievasting socially.

 

[Worldtraveller]

The effect of decriminalizing drugs is evident in Seattle. It is not good. It worsens problems.

Pot is everywhere in Seattle, you can not go anywhere without smelling it on the street. Young people old people in groups hanging around on the street and in parks and parking lots smoking, analogous to whnos drinking out of a paper bag.

Pot is the new cheap wine.

You do not see the effects of the progressive views on drugs unless you get out of your comfort zone. I have a crack head living in my building. I know someone who worked in addiction. Hard drug addiction has spread far up the socio economic ladder. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers.

It is a cancer. I would not have said that in the 70s when I used drugs, I say it now. It is driving crime in Seattle. Addicts can not work resorting to crime. From a social worker I know she works hard to get a program of treatment and job traing for someone and they reject it.

Legalize all drugs and you u unleash something that will be even more dievasting socially.

And yet, other than you being able to smell it (Oh Noes!!!), in places where drugs are decriminalized (not the same thing as legalized), crime & drug use actually decrease over time. So, you're going to have to come up with some actual evidence if you want anyone to believe your bullshit.

 

[Mumbles]

There are oprn air drug markets. There is one om 23rd and S Jackson [n the Walgreen parking lot. No attempts o hide it.

The progressive reality. Nobody is responsible for actions.

Yeah, they have those in pretty much every big city I've been to in the US. My only real chuckle is that apparently even the drug markets in Seattle look nice, relative to the ones we have on the east coast. I mean, of course it's awful that apparently two rivals (or the dealer and a buyer) decided to start blasting with people in the crossfire, of course, but ours tend to be in more run-down areas where "open air" can often mean "in an abandoned building".

 

[Jarhyn]

The effect of decriminalizing drugs is evident in Seattle. It is not good. It worsens problems.

Pot is everywhere in Seattle, you can not go anywhere without smelling it on the street. Young people old people in groups hanging around on the street and in parks and parking lots smoking, analogous to whnos drinking out of a paper bag.

Pot is the new cheap wine.

You do not see the effects of the progressive views on drugs unless you get out of your comfort zone. I have a crack head living in my building. I know someone who worked in addiction. Hard drug addiction has spread far up the socio economic ladder. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers.

It is a cancer. I would not have said that in the 70s when I used drugs, I say it now. It is driving crime in Seattle. Addicts can not work resorting to crime. From a social worker I know she works hard to get a program of treatment and job traing for someone and they reject it.

Legalize all drugs and you u unleash something that will be even more dievasting socially.

"Old man yells at clouds"

So, you don't like the optics of people smoking weed? Cry more, old man.

You're gonna have to define "hard drug addiction" there old man, but for the record, heroin and cocaine, definitely hard drugs, have always been big "high up" the socioeconomic ladder. Maybe when you were young enough to understand new things, you just hadn't been exposed to the realities of drug proliferation? Within society?

Legalize all drugs and literally nothing will change except that drug based economic activities will happen in places designed for it, and crimes orbiting that exists nomic activity will cease, as long as legal prices undercut street prices.

This is just more old-man-bitching about problems where "we haven't tried anything and we're all out of ideas? Let's throw them all in prison!"

 

[Elixir]

The effect of decriminalizing drugs is evident in Seattle.

No, that is the effect of half-assed measures that seem to have the effect of enhancing rather than eliminating the black market. Most of the ills related to drug use are still present, some are exacerbated, and it bears no resemblance to the Portugal example. The only thing it has alleviated is the waste of the judicial system's time processing petty offenders and end-users. You need to read the linked article and explain why the dynamics that work there can't possibly apply here.

BTW, If you lived in Portugal and there was a crackhead in your building you almost certainly wouldn't even know it.

 

[ZiprHead]

The effect of decriminalizing drugs is evident in Seattle. It is not good. It worsens problems.

Pot is everywhere in Seattle, you can not go anywhere without smelling it on the street. Young people old people in groups hanging around on the street and in parks and parking lots smoking, analogous to whnos drinking out of a paper bag.

Pot is the new cheap wine.

You do not see the effects of the progressive views on drugs unless you get out of your comfort zone. I have a crack head living in my building. I know someone who worked in addiction. Hard drug addiction has spread far up the socio economic ladder. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers.

It is a cancer. I would not have said that in the 70s when I used drugs, I say it now. It is driving crime in Seattle. Addicts can not work resorting to crime. From a social worker I know she works hard to get a program of treatment and job traing for someone and they reject it.

Legalize all drugs and you u unleash something that will be even more dievasting socially.

"Old man yells at clouds"

So, you don't like the optics of people smoking weed? Cry more, old man.

You're gonna have to define "hard drug addiction" there old man, but for the record, heroin and cocaine, definitely hard drugs, have always been big "high up" the socioeconomic ladder. Maybe when you were young enough to understand new things, you just hadn't been exposed to the realities of drug proliferation? Within society?

Legalize all drugs and literally nothing will change except that drug based economic activities will happen in places designed for it, and crimes orbiting that exists nomic activity will cease, as long as legal prices undercut street prices.

This is just more old-man-bitching about problems where "we haven't tried anything and we're all out of ideas? Let's throw them all in prison!"

You missed such a great opportunity to Okay, Boomer.

 

[repoman]

I live in downtown Seattle and have seen these people a fair amount. In this location that I go by kind of rarely it seems like this crowd is mostly focused on themselves. There are late 20s to much older people who either look perma drugged out, drunk or maybe mentally ill. These have more whites in general than the younger crowd which is heavily black. There is a happy loitering vibe with that crew as if there were in a community center or a park. There is no menacing by them of the downtown working people and commuters that I see. Occasionally I see kid level horseplay and loud boasting and it does not make me nervous. I only remember seeing one fight.


Anyway, kids and young adults who are not druggies loitering have to be treated differently from druggies and mentally ill adults. I have no idea what kind of services and are available for youth or homeless in Seattle and how they work, don’t work and so on.


I am trying to rattle my brain for instances of white kids loitering except in malls, I know they must as well. In front of my apartment in the summer there is a backside of a hotel and a seating ledge on the sidewalk. In the summer about two to three times a week there will a group of four to six black ladies (~20 year old so) that come by and talk for about an hour. There are so loud despite being right next to each other cackling live a bunch of crows. Guess it is cheaper than going to a restaurant or bar.


One time maybe 20 years ago I got on the elevator to the bus tunnel and there was a middle aged guy smoking crack and I realized I was pretty safe because his focus was on the crack.


Also another time about 20 years ago I was near the Seattle Center Denny Way gas station (7-11?) and there was a massive crowd of blacks on a Friday night in the parking lot. The vibe was very tense and there was a lot of angry yelling going on. I said to the friend I was with that we had to cross the street immediately. Seconds later about six bullets were fired and everyone scattered.

 

[Trausti]

Marquise Latrelle Tolbert (left) and William Ray Tolliver (right) are wanted as suspects in a downtown Seattle shooting. (Seattle PD) Police are searching for two men suspected in a mass shooting in downtown Seattle Wednesday night.

Arrest records reveal both are documented gang members with extensive criminal histories. Tolliver has previously been arrested 44 times with 20 convictions, for offenses including unlawful possession of a firearm, theft, malicious mischief, and assault. Tolbert has been arrested 21 times with 15 convictions, including robbery, possession of a stolen vehicle, discharging a firearm in a public place, theft, and harassment.

Manhunt underway for Seattle shooting suspects

63 arrests and 35 convictions between these two 24 year-olds; and they're out and about with no worries. So progressive.

 

[Elixir]

"Tolliver has previously been arrested 44 times with 20 convictions, for offenses including unlawful possession of a firearm, theft, malicious mischief, and assault. Tolbert has been arrested 21 times with 15 convictions, including robbery, possession of a stolen vehicle, discharging a firearm in a public place, theft, and harassment."

What? No Drugs?
That's an OUTRAGE I tellya!