Crime is on the agenda at Wednesday night’s general meeting of the Maple Leaf Community Council.
Come hear Seattle City Councilmember Tim Burgess, Chair of the Council’s Public Safety Committee, and Diane Horswill from the Seattle Police Department discuss public safety issues in the Maple Leaf neighborhood.
The evening will include plenty of Q&A. A focus will be on what you can do to increase personal safety.
After that discussion the Maple Leaf Community Council Executive Board wants to hear your concerns and ideas for the neighborhood in the Town Hall portion of the meeting.
We’re told there will be a look at whether crime is up in the neighborhood this year, or if it just seems that way because we’re reporting on it regularly. Diane Horswill may provide some answers.
We’ve written before on the problem(s) with tracking crime in Maple Leaf. In a nutshell, one of them is that the neighborhood takes up chunks, but not all, of three different patrol beats.
Here’s an updated look at the one that has the biggest piece of Maple Leaf – Union 1.
Yes, it’s hard to read. Try “control +” on your keyboard to make it bigger.
It shows that property crimes – car prowls, burglaries and the like, our most common crimes – sank last summer and in October, but spiked during November, the last month on the graph for 2010. But remember that Union 1 runs all the way south to Ravenna Boulevard, and Ravenna and Roosevelt, like Maple Leaf, had a rash of burglaries in November.
Wednesday night’s meeting is from 7-9 p.m. at Olympic View Elementary School, 504 N.E. 95th Street. Child care by licensed providers is included.
I don’t see how one can claim “crime is down” when the graph shows that crime was UP for 8 of the 11 months reported.
After reading about all the recent break-ins, I’d like to share a positive story about a recent theft: My bike was stolen in mid-December while I was out of town – not a very nice welcome home surprise! I hadn’t heard a peep about it for a month and a half and had given up hope of ever recovering it, but this morning I got an email from a wonderful neighbor whom I’d never met, saying my bike was in front of his house near Nathan Hale. It was apparently abandoned there when the chain broke. This thoughtful neighbor called the police to notify them of the found bicycle and also took the effort to look up my name on the internet to find an email address for me, having discovered my name on a scrap of paper forgotten in the pannier still hanging on the bike. Today’s event has reminded me how happy I am that Maple Leaf has so many conscientious residents, and that although we seem to have more than our fair share of misguided teenagers, we really do have a lot of kind people looking out for each other.