The dissonance could not have been more stark.
Just days after the killings of two teenagers in Rainier Beach left the community devastated and heartbroken, Seattle police Chief Shon Barnes announced that while it was not time to take a “victory lap,” crime overall in the city was down 18% last year and that homicides, nonfatal shootings and other crime were down by double digits.
Of course any drop in crime is more than welcome news but it was hard to feel any comfort knowing that the lives of two of our community’s young people — Rainier Beach High School students Tyjon Stewart and Traveiah Houfmuse — were cut short so brutally.
At impromptu vigils and support events last week, I heard tearful, anguished community members ask an all-too-familiar question: how can we stop this?
Because the inconvenient truth is that when any young people lose their lives, all adults bear some responsibility for the societal failures that brought us here.
In Seattle, sometimes it feels like we are in two different cities having two very different conversations. In Rainier Beach, where I live, I doubt if many people would say they can be less hypervigilant about crime, despite what city statistics might suggest.
It’s not just the tragedies like the one that took the lives of two students, but it’s also the near misses — ones people frantically try to parse on neighborhood social media groups and that often don’t make the news.
Just feet from where Stewart and Houfmuse were killed, for example, there have been shootings near the Rainier Beach Community Center, one of them last January that punched a hole through the window of the pool with families inside. While thankfully no one was physically injured, there is a huge psychological impact when you have a place that should be one of safety and wellness turn into one of terror and fear.
I had the same feeling of disconnect last year when similar drops in crime were touted just months after a shooting at nearby Be’er Sheva park on May 1. On that day, warm spring weather brought throngs of people to the newly renovated park next to Rainier Beach High School. But around 7 p.m., a drive-by shooting sent terrified families scrambling to protect their loved ones. Parents reported diving on top of their kids to shield them from flying bullets. Others said they crouched behind logs with their kids.
Two people — an 8-year-old girl and a 76-year-old woman — were injured that night. They and so many other people who were there are some of the reasons why I can’t feel sanguine about these “positive” crime statistics.
In King County, for example, a report by the county prosecutor’s office found over 1,000 shots-fired incidents in 2025 with 177 nonfatal shooting victims and 58 fatal shooting victims. The majority of victims were under 24 and a disproportionate number were African American. Yes, the numbers were down from the previous year but they are still higher than prepandemic and the decline is cold comfort to victims, families and communities.
Also, while we may have seen a drop in crime, we can’t normalize the gun violence that has become such a regular part of daily life.
The U.S. still stands alone in terms of high-income countries with populations over 10 million in our rate of gun violence. According to 2023 data from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the U.S. has an age-adjusted rate of firearms homicides 77 times that of Germany and 33 times that of Australia. We might have gotten used to it, but this is not normal.
Over the years I have written numerous columns about the scourge of gun violence. I wrote about gun violence as a public health crisis and about looking further upstream to provide kids and families with the social support, economic security, education and mental health care to prevent violence in the first place. I wrote about restorative justice and transformative justice approaches for young people to try to prevent new generations of harm from mass incarceration and about the community violence intervention programs that are working against many odds to keep young people on a healthy path.
The solutions are the same as they were all the previous times I wrote about this. We have a massive gun problem, we have too many young people who feel like there are no opportunities open to them, we continue to have racial disparities that rob children of their potential, we have vast economic inequalities and disinvestment in low-income communities.
But we will make no progress on any of those things if we are in denial about the severity of the problem.
As one woman said at a community show of support for Rainier Beach and South Shore K-8 students last Monday, all of our kids “deserve a chance.” They absolutely do.