Seattle Reintroduces Beat-Style Policing at Park After Crime Decline

Samm Thompson doesn’t hear nearly as much gunfire as she did a year or two ago from her apartment at Mercy Magnuson Place, old Navy barracks that were converted into low-income housing in Magnuson Park.

Street racers are still a problem. She said she's seen 40 or 50 low-to-the-ground Honda Civics and other sporty cars with modified exhausts regularly roll into the park along Northeast 74th Street in the Sand Point neighborhood, gather behind a hangar at the park’s north end, then tear up grass and cause other damage as they roar through the area.

But even the obnoxious revving of engines and squealing of tires, once an every-Friday-night-at-8 occurrence, is more sporadic now, said Thompson, 42.

Drug activity, car prowls, thefts, and late-night parties that keep some neighbors awake with thumping bass and gunshots all seem to have gotten better in recent months.

“I haven’t heard people complaining as much. I certainly haven’t seen it as much. I haven’t had to call the police as many times as I’ve had to before,” she said. “It feels like crime is down here and that’s certainly a great feeling.”

Seattle police Chief Shon Barnes is hoping to continue that downward crime trend by reintroducing and expanding neighborhood policing.

Standing outside the park’s community center, Barnes announced at a Tuesday news conference that three officers from the North Precinct will regularly patrol in a 3-mile radius around the center, making permanent a 90-day pilot project from last year.

He said the two officers assigned to the July-to-September pilot project ended up responding to almost 90% of all police engagement activity, including arrests, crisis calls and field contacts. According to police data, property crime dropped 9% during those three months.

Their presence “had a very, very, very good deterrent effect on crime,” Barnes said, adding that the newly dedicated officers will patrol on foot and on bikes starting Wednesday. They are tasked with building relationships with residents and other community members and reducing crime through what the police chief calls “problem-oriented policing.”

Though Magnuson Park may not have as high a concentration of crime as other parts of the city, Barnes said the location was chosen because it’s the second largest park in the city (after Discovery Park) and the only one with housing inside its borders. As staffing increases, Barnes said he plans to expand the neighborhood resource officer program to other precincts.

“Community policing, to me, means smaller beat ownership and neighborhood accountability,” said Barnes, noting officer trainees are already working similar beats around 12th Avenue South and South Jackson Street, as well as at Third Avenue and Pine Street.

He said he expects the officers to familiarize themselves with community members well enough to know who the oldest person in their beat area is and who just had a baby.

The park’s community center was where Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera hosted a packed neighborhood meeting in fall 2024, where residents vented their frustration and called on police and other city departments to address rising crime in and around the 350-acre park.

Rivera, who joined Barnes at Tuesday's news conference, said the shooting death of 23-year-old Skylar Johnson galvanized the community to demand more. The young father was killed after asking people partying in the park to keep things down so his baby daughter could sleep, she said.

Since then, private security guards have been hired and park rangers assigned to aid visitors and address code violations, Rivera said. Design changes — like the placement of boulders near the boat launch, to keep people from driving around the gates that close at 10 p.m. and partying in the area — have helped improve things, she said.

“You can’t eliminate everything, (but) you can mitigate and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Rivera said of crime in the park.

“There are people living in the park that I very much care about and I want to make sure the families and kids living here … are living in a safe environment, as well as all the surrounding neighbors and all the people that come to visit the park,” she said.

Officer Nathan Morehouse, one of the three officers who volunteered to be assigned to Magnuson Park, said he wants to get to know people and help prevent crimes before they occur.

Morehouse, a former university security guard, joined the Seattle Police Department in 2017 at age 53.

“One of the things that I really liked about Seattle policing way back in the day was … you saw a lot of beat cops up front downtown,” he said. “For me, in a lot of ways, this is an adaptation of the beat cop way of doing policing, where you know everybody in your community.”

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