The Politics of Community Policing: Rearranging the Power to Punish

4. Communities and Crime on the South Side of Skid Road

Chapter 4 Communities and Crime on the South Side of Skid Road The Valley is different from the rest of the Seattle. Once it was a thriving, heavily Italian farm community, and Columbia City was its center. But huge government housing projects built in the area to handle the influx of workers at Boeing and the shipyards during World War II were converted to low income housing when the war was over. The decision made a ghetto of the Valley. -Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 10, 1988 1. Introduction Rainier Valley has had a sometimes difficult relationship with the rest of Seattle. This relationship has contributed to decline and a wide range of citizen activism in the valley around issues of crime and community revitalization-the community component of what the National Institute ofJustice later called a model police-community partnership. In this chapter, I argue that the declining capacity of communities in Rainier Valley to control crime was a foreseeable consequence of choices made by Seattle's public and private leadership in the postwar era. While individuals are the victims and the perpetrators of criminal violence, crime is a community concern because crime rates vary by geographical location and the socioeconomic composition of a city's communities.1 Differently located communities have dissimilar capacities to control crime. The cumulative effects of legislation, public housing , freeway construction, zoning enforcement, investment patterns, and job opportunities "can ultimately destroy the integrity of communities as viable collectivities."2 Reiss argues that public and private decisions can and do adversely affect the capacity of communities to mobilize and promote social order through informal social controls, as advocates of community policing expect. 57 58 THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY POLICING When there is reason to conclude that the mobilization of a community to control conduct affects its crime rates, then one may want to intervene in whatever causes a diminished capacity. When public programs or laws destabilize a local population and hence its capacity to control conduct locally, one may question the soundness of such policies) Decisions about land use, demographic changes, and changes in the socioeconomic status of the population all contribute to a neighborhood 's capacity to address crime.4 In Southeast Seattle, community stories about a more effective and accountable police presence were interwoven with calls for a more "vigorous local political control of zoning, planning, and building code requirements."5 Residents in Rainier Valley were active in these areas and in seeking other political reforms aimed at enhancing community control: district-based city council elections , local control over Seattle Housing Authority decisions and school administration, and a police-community partnership.6 Seattle is a middle-class city with the highest rate of home ownership in the United States.? In 1989, Money magazine rated Seattle the best place to live in the United States. In 1993, the Seattle Times reported that crime had "pushed Seattle to #2."8 The entire city was concerned about crime, as shown by the prominence of the issue in the mayor's race, but Rainier Valley had the worst reputation for high crime. According to the Seattle Weekly, this perception was partly deserved (crime was a problem in the valley), but it was no more deserved than parts of Capitol Hill, the Central District, Greenwood, Aurora, the University District, Northgate, or Wallingford. In 1990-91, these areas had more than twice the rate of serious crime as Rainier Valley. And lower Queen Anne, Westlake, Pioneer Square, and First Hill had rates 50 percent higher than the valley.9 Valley residents have long struggled against the way "smug North End residents mix the geographically and culturally distinct Rainier Valley and Central Area into a single lawless stereotype."l0 From the time of the first white pioneers through the early nineteenth century, Seattle prospered because it encouraged commercial development in a way that was designed to support family and community life.ll But the boom of the late nineteenth century marked the beginning of the withdrawal of the wealthy from civic leadership, the rise of class and racial divisions, and the decline of a vision of Seattle COMMUNITIES AND CRIME ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF SKID ROAD 59 based on commercial diversity.u U[PJublic values evolved into a private vision of individual and family well-being, and the possibility of politics as the expression of something more than personal desires was IOSt."I3 When the decisions of civic...