An opinion piece published this week on Crosscut by Walter Hatch, who lives in the Phinney Ridge / Greenwood area, was bizarre. In it he suggests that most of his neighbors who comment on Nextdoor lack any compassion and are profoundly contemptuous of the homeless. While his piece amounts to nothing more than a whiny rant, it’s a surprisingly lazy piece of work for someone employed in academia. It reaches plenty of conclusions, most of them far-fetched, but offers no solutions whatsoever.
Hatch employs guilt by association to conclude that his “angry neighbors” are uncompassionate. Although I don’t live in his neighborhood, I’m not far away and see some of the same posts on Nextdoor that he is exposed to. It’s true that some of our neighbors say some outlandish things there, but they’re by far the minority. I’ve had countless debates and conversations with dozens of people on Nextdoor, some of whom have vigorously disagreed with me. But the vast majority have been very civil and we’ve often been able to find numerous areas of agreement. It’s intellectually dishonest to suggest we’re all angry and lack compassion.
Not to miss another opportunity to slander, Hatch goes on to blame our supposed contempt on the racial makeup of our community. That’s right, it’s because we live in, as he calls it, the “Great White North”. In another world, such a comment would be labelled racist. Crosscut’s editors did themselves no favors in publishing such nonsense.
The only time Hatch gets close to saying anything of substance is in arguing that Seattle’s overall crime rate is nothing to worry about and that all we’re witnessing is crime spreading to areas it didn’t use to exist in. To back up this claim he cites Gene Balk of the Seattle Times. But as others have pointed out, Balk is asking the wrong question about crime in Seattle. Our city has been the beneficiary of a nationwide trend in crime reduction since the 1980s.
The right way to be thinking about this is to ask how are we doing relative to other cities and could we be doing better. On that count, Seattle is doing very poorly indeed. Not only is our property crime rate higher than comparable cities, it’s nearly twice as high as Chicago, two-and-a-half-times higher than Los Angeles, and four times higher than New York City. How the tables have turned.
It’s also unfortunate for Hatch that, in the same week he was published, the Seattle Times ran a piece with the headline “King County homicides in 2018: troubling trends in homeless cases, random killings”. In it the Times notes that, like our property crime stats which are bucking national trends, “preliminary FBI data for the first half of 2018 show a 6 percent decrease in homicides in metropolitan areas from the same period in 2017, compared to [King County which] shows an overall 5 percent increase from 2017 to 2018.”
Countless numbers of people in this part of Seattle have been working extremely hard to explore these complex issues and offer practical solutions to the problems we face. It’s a shame that instead of attempting to engage in a dialog with his fellow neighbors, rally people to his cause (if he even has one) and build community, Hatch instead opted to defame them.
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