As Seattle's new mayor rolls out the latest "hot spot" policing plan (an unsuccessful strategy that's rolled out every few years as a way of reducing crime), I searched the archive for JUST the term "hot spot" and Tim Burgess, Mayor Harrell's point person on this./1
Conversation
The idea is basically to target perennial crime "hot spots," and "prolific offenders" to address drug dealing and shoplifting. The problem is that if you don't solve for the conditions that lead to drug dealing and petty crime, they just move elsewhere—the toothpaste effect./2
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Here's a piece praising Burgess from 2012 for his plan "concentrating on crime hot spots, in partnership with businesses and residents in those areas, and on that small percentage of people who commit a disproportionately large percentage of crime."/3
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Here's a Seattle Times editorial praising the plan, which they argued would fix gun crime, that same year./4
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Here's Burgess arguing against 's Center City Initiative because, he said, it didn't have "measurable results." In 2010, 2 years before this piece ran, Burgess ran a bill that would ban "aggressive panhandling." /5
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Here's Burgess praising "Broken Windows Policing," the basis of 2015's unsuccessful "9 1/2 Block Strategy" to stop petty crime and drug dealing, which focused on Third Avenue, one of the locations Harrell has said he will clean up using the new no-tolerance strategy. /6
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Scott Lindsay, who's now deputy city attorney under Ann Davison, concocted both the unsuccessful 9 1/2 Block hot spot strategy and the idea that a group of "prolific offenders" are behind most downtown street crime./7
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Here's a handwringing piece in 2011, featuring many of the same players that are always featured in these stories, in which Burgess praises the city's approach of policing "hot spots," which he argues will enable the city to clean up crime on Third Ave./8
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In this 2012 piece, the Seattle Times reporter serves as stenographer for Burgess' lengthy hot spot-based plan to clean up downtown, which praises the Giuliani approach to crime in NYC./9
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And finally, let's bring it back to 2020, during the mayoral election, when Burgess argued that, you guessed it, hot spot policing would fix what ails downtown Seattle. /10
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This is hardly a comprehensive survey of all the times Burgess, who serves as one of Harrell's chief public safety advisors, has touted "hot spot policing" as the cure for crime; it's just a partial review of 10 years of mentions in one newspaper./11
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But it's worth noting that the city has tried this strategy many times before, from crackdowns on people 'loitering" in groups of 2 or more at 23rd and Union in the 2000s to the 9 1/2 Block and Center City Strategies of the 2010s, and it has never been effective long-term./12
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You'd think that the public and newspaper editorial boards, in particular, would be aware that this is an approach the city has tried again and again with no lasting success.../13
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.... but you'd also think they'd be capable of recalling all the times they've claimed over the years that crime is bad and has never been worse, particularly on Third Ave., so perhaps the constant forgetting of history is willful and not accidental. /14
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Bonus editorial praising Burgess' "aggressive panhandling" ban. According to the Seattle Times in 2009, "some beggars are actually street toughs using the ruse of panhandling to intimidate people." !! /15
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Bonus P-I piece on Burgess' "safer streets" program, inaugurated at a time of historic low crime, which proposed cracking down on prolific offenders, "open-air drug markets, street prostitution, and graffiti" in 2008.
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