By Erica C. Barnett
City Councilmember Maritza Rivera misrepresented the number of fatal shootings in Seattle by an order of magnitude earlier this week, claiming at a council public safety committee meeting that “fatal shootings in 2012 were 211, and in 2024 there were 541. And post-pandemic, it increased exponentially.”
Councilmember Rob Saka chimed in, saying that gun violence was “the one unique outlier” among crimes that has continued to increase year over year.
In reality, according to King County data, there were 19 firearm homicides in 2012 and 21 in 2024. (Between 2012 and 2024, there were a total of 228 such homicides in Seattle.) Although that is an overall uptick of two deaths, the actual homicide rate was lower in 2024 than in 2012, despite a post-pandemic upswing, because Seattle’s population grew by nearly 200,000 in those 12 years. Editor’s note: This post oriignally said there were 120 homicides in Seattle between 2012 and 2024. We have corrected this error.
The numbers Rivera cited appear to come from this March 2025 city audit, which found that there were 211 and 541 reports of shots fired citywide in 2012 and 2024, respectively.
So why does Rivera’s alarmist overstatement matter? Because she’s using those numbers, and other claims about the rising danger of living in Seattle, to pressure Mayor Katie Wilson to bypass ordinary contracting processes and sign a $418,000 gun violence prevention contract with Rivera’s handpicked consultant, the National Network for Safer Communities.
NNSC, a project of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, pioneered the concept of “focused deterrence,” in which teams of police officers, social service providers, and community leaders focus their efforts on young men deemed most likely to engage in gun violence, with services on the front end and the threat of increasing consequences, including jail, if they commit violent crimes.
Wilson has said she plans to make focused a key component of her gun violence strategy, which she plans to announce next week. But NNSC is not the only consultant the city could choose to contract with to implement focused deterrence, a concept that has been around for decades; Seattle has used versions of focused deterrence off and on since at least 2009, when the city first launched a “drug market initiative” that offered low-level drug offenders the choice of treatment or jail.
The reason Wilson must hire this specific contractor, Rivera explained, is because unlike “some organizations” King County has partnered with, NNSC “includes law enforcement” by design. King County’s Regional Peacekeepers Collective focuses on preventing gun violence through public health interventions.
Rivera credited NNSC with reducing violent crime in cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, Stockton, CA, and Chicago. On KUOW this week, she explicitly credited NNSC with reducing gun violence in Baltimore.
But Baltimore, as Rivera surely knows, actually stopped contracting with NNSC after two efforts at reducing gun violence in partnership with that contractor failed to show results. The current, successful model is a more comprehensive approach that includes a type of focused deterrence developed at the University of Pennsylvania, but also “community violence intervention, victim services, improved investigations, and sustained leadership from City Hall,” according to this overview.
It’s unusual, though not unprecedented, for a city council member to insist on hiring a specific contractor for such a large contract. (NNSC facilitated a symposium Rivera convened on gun violence earlier this year.) Rivera has continued to flog the issue, castigating Wilson via press release for telling KUOW that the city needs to be methodical in its approach to gun violence rather than rushing forward with a single “premature, very large investment in an out-of-state organization.”
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Failing to contract with NNSC, specifically, Rivera said, would send a message to “the people of Seattle” that the city doesn’t want to “stop future tragedies.”
Rivera’s resolution passed out of committee 3-0, with Eddie Lin abstaining.
What resolution is this that is referred to in the last paragraph? It’s not mentioned earlier in the article that I can see.
Let’s all remember Councils failures on gun violence:
CM Kettle focused on non violent graffiti issues over gun violence as the leader of the public safety committee
CM Hollingsworth’s “immediate action” plan for cap hill safety is still not fully implemented, a year after it was proposed
CM Hollingsworth pushed for SPD officers for city council chambers for “etiquette” issues over pushing for SPD in the community
Oh and my favorite – repeated gun violence at A Pizza Mart gets addressed with Christmas lights over the streets, 🤦♂️
Then there’s the SPD allocation. Council and Mayor Harrell choose to allocate multiple detectives for years on graffiti. The same group allocated a lot of SPD for the Belltown Hellcat. SPD at Denny Blaine to arrest law following citizens
I don’t understand why this article isn’t outraged over the increase of gun shots that happen under Mayor Harrell. Gun violence, not gun shots vs gun deaths. Right???
So only doing what we have been doing gets the approval of socialists? Ridiculous! Even socialists would agree that investigating new gun violence prevention methods is a good idea. The only reason socialists here are describing this as right wing is to create a political divide where there is none.
How many times do you need to say “socialists”? Twisting the argument is not an argument. It’s a con job.
Fact is the Kettle faction is going to make as many mountains from mole hills as possible. This is political. Croney politics. The last administration turned their time in City Hall as a money grab free for all where any buddy of Bruce’s can simply apply for jobs and get them w/o having to actually do anything. Made up jobs. Jobs he kept off the books to hide it from taxpayers. Bruce put all the costs onto Katie’s ledger.
The corporate politicians are fading into history.
Ballardite has obviously not traveled much or he would know that the kind of “socialism” in Seattle is similar to that in Finland, Norway, Denmark, etc. which still have thriving business communities and much less crime and far fewer police. They achieve this by not letting people fall through the cracks so that they don’t have to prey on other residents to survive or feed their addiction.
An eye opener for me was traveling to New Zealand in which a homeless person made the front page news since it was such a rarity. We need the same kind of “we won’t let anyone fall through the cracks” mindset, not the expensive and wasteful “lockem up” mindset of Rivera and Kettle and the Republicans that was rejected by Seattle voters last year with blowout wins over Ann Davison and Sara Nelson who Rivera is attempting to emulate.
You can be a “socialist’ like Katie and still be pro-business and anti-crime. It’s just that the business you promote is not exploiting their workers and supports the community that allows them to thrive. And more effort is placed on undermining the root causes of crime (unaffordable housing, addiction, mental illness, lack of job skills/training, etc.) so there is less motive to commit crimes, which requires less police.
Not true
Ballardite is a crank who is bosom buddies with the likes of John Arthur Wilson, judging by the large amount of typing they’ve output defending the gross stalker.
“So only doing what we have been doing gets the approval of socialists?” Yes, don’t fix wait ain’t broken. The ultra-low gun violence statistics speak for themselves, except to police state-obsessed fanatics like Ballardite and Maritza Rivera, who are completely unfazed by lying and cheating to get to their cop-fueled security state utopia.
Metteyya, it’s cool that you got to visit New Zealand and all, but maybe do like the most basic research before asserting that your anecdotal experience explains everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_New_Zealand
The differences between the Nordic countries and the United States (or even worse comparing a country to a city), and the challenges of just importing practices from them, are so well discussed that I’m not even going to find a link for you. And by the way violent crime is getting worse in some of those countries (i.e. Sweden), while the economies of others are predicated on massive oil extraction (i.e. Norway).
sam98144, I have no notes, your post is a great advertisement for what you’re opposing.
“sam98144, I have no notes, your post is a great advertisement for what you’re opposing.”
Thanks for giving me nothing to respond to! It must be true then, right?
Rivera is amplifying right-wing narratives promoted by Donald Trump that the city is more crime-prone under “socialist” governance, rather doing something meaningful to reduce gun violence. Given how razor-close her race was in 2023 (237 vote margin-the weakest of the centrist candidates that cycle), it is difficult to see her making it back on the Council by promoting right-wing politics. The entirety of the U-District is in Rivera’s district, and it is the most populous and most progressive part of District 4.
Wrong on your premise. The numbers Rivera was quoting (erroneously at first, and then corrected within a day) are from the city’s own data which only runs through 2024, before Wilson was in office. Nothing she said pins anything on one mayor or another, except that Wilson is the current mayor and she can do “something meaningful”. Just because the right harps on law and order doesn’t mean that proposing ways to reduce gun violence is amplifying their narratives. I don’t really care whether it’s one contractor or another, or no contractor at all (the Chamber of Commerce letter has a lot of good ideas for free, which can easily be folded into all the comprehensive stuff that will take time to roll out, although I disagree with the need for more money in the SPD budget until all the officers they have are actually serving and protecting).
But yeah, the BoS mass shooting and the SPD-Mayor’s office shitshow, and last weekend’s string of killings in Belltown have rightly gotten a lot of attention (at least, more attention than the regular rhythm of murders in Capitol Hill and the CD do). So what, if anything, do you think the city should do about gun violence?
I have an idea! Let’s revoke freedoms from Seattleites and tell them them must give them up so they can be safe. And then continue to march ever forward towards this goal. Because under such careful and also total management, the city can 100% eliminate gun violence, they promise, and your property values will continue to rise just like all those years when we had ZIRP. It just takes a little more policing, and our property values will skyrocket. It’s a promise, if not a logical outcome.
Thank you. Who would point this out if you didn’t. It is scary how close we are to no oversight by the press.