If you only watched the TV news and read newspapers, you’d think crime was out of control.
The truth is, crime has been on the decline in Washington state for years, stretching all the way back to 1994.
Violent crime has been cut in half and is still dropping.
Property crime is also drastically down.
Raw data on arrests, on the other hand, shows some surprising and counter-intuitive results.
You’d expect places with big cities to have more crime compared to sleepy small towns and rural counties. But when you compare apples to apples – arrests per 1,000 people, statewide – things get interesting.
King County actually has a very low arrest rate compared to its big population, while some rural counties have high rates.
And this isn’t consistent or linear. There are similar counties, sometimes next door, with drastically different reports on the raw numbers of arrests for major crimes.
The data is available here: https://wa-state-ofm.us/CrimeStatsOnline/
Another good source for crime data is the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, which compiles many of the raw numbers used by others and also creates an annual report on crime. You can read the 2013 report here: Crime in Washington 2013
A few key facts from that report:
- Juveniles made up 8.6 percent of all arrests
- Domestic violence and drunk driving are among the most common crimes, with 32,442 domestic violence incidents reported and and 27,414 people arrested for drunk driving.
- The new initiative on marijuana may, indeed, reduce the load on the criminal justice system, with arrests for possession of marijuana making up 19.6 percent of the total 8,793 arrests for drug offenses.
- Hands, fists or feet were reported as the weapon used in 38,659 incidents of crime while firearms were involved in 5,394 incidents.
Many local police departments also do crime mapping, giving anyone with a computer or smart phone the ability to zoom in on a map and see incidents of reported crime.
The City of Seattle, for example, has three useful maps online: 911 Incident Response, Police reports and Monthly crime statistics.