Closing case on Seattle's culture

Seattle, Chris Caudill has had enough of us.

It's not the usual suspects, either. Our rain he claims to like. Our standoffish "Seattle Freeze" he says he never much noticed.

But after 14 months of trying to make this city a home, this 28-year-old is giving up.

"I'm done. I need a vacation from Seattle," he said the other day while recuperating in his Magnolia bed.

The breaking point arrived, according to the police report, at 2:05 a.m. Saturday. Caudill, a structural engineer, was walking down a Belltown sidewalk with a co-worker when a car brushed them in a crosswalk.

Words were exchanged. Typical late-night bravado and then the car drove off.

On the next block, four men jumped out of the car and beat Caudill unconscious.

When he woke up in the hospital, Caudill learned that passers-by had stepped in just as one of the men was stomping on Caudill's head while he lay blacked out on a downtown street.

"If they hadn't come along when they did, I'm positive I'd be dead," he said.

One random beating wouldn't be enough to chase Caudill from town, he says.

In January though, someone broke into the Magnolia house he rents, looting $38,000 worth of stuff. And last year, shortly after he got to Seattle, someone stole his Siberian husky.

The last straw came Monday, when he called police to ask about the assault case. Now that he was conscious, he wanted to give a detailed description of the attackers.

Witnesses had also ID'd the car as a 1990s-era gray Acura Legend, with the numbers "518" in the license plate. Maybe something could be done to catch these animals before they kill someone, Caudill thought.

Nope. Case closed, he was told. Not enough evidence.

Case closed without ever talking to the victim?

"I don't feel like they're taking it seriously," Caudill says. "It's almost like they expect a few beatings down there on a weekend night."

Seattle's just like that, he has concluded.

"It's extremely bizarre here," he said. "I had never seen a drug deal before I moved to Seattle. Here you can sit in nice restaurants and watch drug deals go down right outside the windows. It happens all the time. Nobody does anything. It's part of the scenery."

He's heard all the stats about Seattle's low crime rate. The shiny numbers obscure a raggedness that he says goes oddly accepted here. Even by police.

In Belltown Tuesday I ran into Capt. Steve Brown of the Seattle Police Department, who was out making the rounds. I told him of Caudill's critique, both of his officers and our city's culture.

Brown said every weekend night he sends out up to 20 officers, including a SWAT team and the gang unit, just to hawk over the bar closings in Belltown and Pioneer Square.

It's all the resources he's got and it won't stop every fight, he said.

Brown didn't know the specifics of how Caudill's case was handled. He later sent me stats showing there were 25 assault calls in Belltown last month, up markedly from last year, with six arrests.

But Brown kind of agreed with Caudill about the culture.

He said police make more drug arrests in Belltown, downtown and Pioneer Square than in the rest of the city combined. Yet those areas continue to be plagued by what Brown calls "civility problems" — drug dealers and addicts, transients and small-time hoods sometimes dominating the alleys and sidewalks.

"It's not that we accept it," Brown said. "It's a matter of it being an extremely complex problem to solve. You can't just arrest everyone and that's that."

Complex to solve, yes. But I'm telling you Caudill's hard-luck story because he's got a point. We do accept it. Not everyone — Belltown recently formed its own citizen patrols to fight back. Yet Seattle overall seems fine with how it is.

Maybe it's our skid-road heritage. Caudill, though, isn't from here. He's seeing us with outsider eyes.

"This is just not normal," he says flatly.

Where's he from? Where's he moving back to so he can take a break from us?

Detroit.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.