Despite concerns among some South End residents that crime—particularly assaults and robberies—has been increasing in the neighborhoods around light rail stations since rail opened last July, data obtained from the Seattle Police Department through a records request indicate that, if anything, the opposite is the case.
Although crime in the South End has been increasing generally, the number of assaults and robberies in the three police precincts encompassing the segment of the light rail line from the Mount Baker station to the Rainier Beach station (map here) has remained essentially stable since light rail opened. Taken together, robberies and assaults declined in the three precincts from a total of 397 between mid-July 2008 and December 2008 to 384 for the same period in 2009—the period between light rail’s opening day and the end of the year.
Digging into the numbers, the number of assaults was basically stable in the three precincts from year to year, increasing by one from 312 to 313 thanks largely to a sharp increase in the northernmost of the three precincts (from 80 to 101), accompanies by decreases in the other two. Robberies, which include street robberies (by far the most common type) as well as a few residential and business robberies, went down from 85 to 73.
The bottom line, Sound Transit spokesman Geoff Patrick says, is that despite a few high-profile incidents involving rail passengers, light rail hasn’t produced a rash of crime in South End neighborhoods. “I talked to both our internal police office and SPD, and they said there were one or two instances of crime involving people who had deboarded light rail, but there didn’t seem to be any kind of trend,” Patrick says.
