On Safety in Seattle Schools

Following up on the news that the Chinatown Seafair Parade was interrupted because bystanders saw guns present. 

The people with the guns were young teens - two 14-year olds and a 13-year old. Two of the three guns were stolen and one modified to be automatic. 

Questions abound like:

1) Who stole the guns? 

2) How did these kids get the guns?

3) It appears to the eye that there is an uptick of robbery and violence from some very young teens. I recall there has been a wave of crime over in West Seattle using stolen cars that are then used in robberies. And, of course, both the murders in Seattle high schools, with the shooter at Ingraham High School being a young teen.

4) Where are we on the Garfield shooter?

5) Why no safety updates on the planning and work around school safety from Superintendent Brent Jones? Schools are closed so nothing needs to happen?

The Seattle Times follows up with this article today, Many more kids are being shot and killed in King County in 2024.

At least 17 children under 18 have been killed in homicides so far this year in King County, more than double the number of juvenile homicide victims in all of 2023, the county’s most deadly year.

Easy access to guns, the proliferation of untraceable ghost guns and “switches” that turn semiautomatic handguns into machine guns, widespread use of extended and drum magazines and young people’s love of gun content on social media all appear to be fueling the deadly trend, they said. The desire and willingness to fire a gun also seems to be increasing among teens and young adults.

Barbosa noted that in all of 2016, prosecutors filed nine murder cases against kids under 18, “which was very unusual.”

Prosecutors have already matched that record a little over midway through 2024, she said. 

So what might be the issue? 

Interim Seattle police Chief Sue Rahr thinks the lingering effects of school closures and interruptions during the pandemic coupled with the “ridiculous availability of guns” is driving a lot of the violence.

There used to be a perception, she said, that kids who carried guns were intent on committing a crime.

“I don’t think that’s the case anymore,” Rahr said. “I think there are a lot of kids carrying guns for protection and that is a frightening, frightening development because if you have a volatile teenage mind and a gun, I think it happens so quickly and then there’s no take-backs.”

I have also seen footage of gun fights on Aurora as this section states.  

Police have worked to disrupt street-racing gatherings that draw young people and sometimes involve gunfire. They’ve also investigated gun battles waged on Aurora Avenue North between teenage boys and young men involved in the drug and sex trades, she said.

One story: 

In one June gun battle alone, officers recovered more than 160 casings fired from 11 different guns at 20th Avenue South and South Main Street, near Pratt Park. At least two people were hit and taken to local hospitals, though they refused to speak with officers, and several nearby apartment buildings were struck by bullets, according to SPD. Luckily, none of the buildings’ residents were injured.

However, tragic for this girl's family:

Most recently, Derreon Johnson, 16, was charged last week with second-degree murder and three counts of second-degree assault. He is accused of firing 16 rounds from a 9 mm handgun at three teenagers in a stolen car outside a Skyway apartment complex in May. One of those rounds pierced the wall of a building, went through a headboard and killed 10-year-old Anfa Mahamud as she slept in her bed, charging papers say.

What is happening in the law enforcement system and schools?

King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Jamie Kvistad, who helped launch the juvenile division’s Safer Schools Strategy at the beginning of the year, sees school districts struggling in the pandemic’s aftermath to reconnect with students and parents and address their student populations’ mental and behavioral health issues.

Prosecutors are now working with districts’ security teams and have sent out roughly 70 notifications to alert them when a student has been charged with a gun-related felony. They can also help secure warrants and with other interventions to get guns away from kids.

“It’s not a fair expectation for schools to deal with this on their own,” she said. “Schools are not designed to do threat assessments, schools are not designed to come up with these comprehensive safety plans for not just targeted violence but reactive violence.” 

This is true that school districts aren't the best entities to develop safety action plans. However, it's a bit hard to read  on the graphic but at the "individual/student level" it says:

- prosecuting school threat cases

- reducing information silos

- increasing communication between schools, probation and law enforcement 

This all sounds great but SPS is NOT good with always calling law enforcement or following through on suggestions. It seems that there are kids who come to school with a gun and then are allowed to stay. No kid found with a gun should be in any school. Zero tolerance. 

Until SPS pledges to FULLY work with this SSS program from King County, you'll see more problems in Seattle schools. If I were renegotiating with Brent Jones for his superintendent job, I'd ask for this. 

COVID issues:

In Washington, nearly 67,000 kids were dropped from public school rolls between the 2019-20 school year and the 2022-23 school year — and while many of them transferred to private schools or homeschooling, plenty of others have fallen off any kind of official radar, Kvistad said.

Many of the criminal cases that hit Kvistad’s desk involve kids who, after a certain number of absences and no response from their parents, were simply dropped from school rolls.

“I do feel like there’s this avalanche coming because so many children have been displaced,” she said.

I found this odd:

Basketball, football and track programs have all but disappeared in Seattle’s Central District and South End — and with them, practices, workout sessions and out-of-town tournaments that can stave off attempts to draw young men into the streets, Davis said.

Maybe at the community centers but all the comprehensive Seattle high schools have basketball, football and track programs.  

This is frightening:

At the same time, the very definition of a gang has shifted. Gone are the hierarchies, fixed affiliations and neighborhood divisions, Davis said, citing the previous rivalry between gangs in the Central District and the South End as largely a thing of the past.

He estimated there are 15 different gangs of varying sizes in a 20-block radius in the Central District and many of the shootings in the neighborhood involve people from the Central District, a phenomenon that’s playing out to a certain extent in South Seattle, too.

“Now you have inner beef going on in the Central District and they’re shooting at each other,” Davis said. “It never used to be like that.”

Six years ago, Davis was able to bring a group of OGs — “original gangsters” — from the two neighborhoods together to agree to a peace treaty. He said that’s not an option anymore. 

“There’s OGs, but there’s only a handful,” Davis said. “There’s all these other little, small gangs and the OGs are saying, ‘These little dudes don’t listen to us. They ain’t listening. They do their own thing.’ ”

And Garfield High School is right in the middle.