The brazen thugs in our midst

Two men were wounded in a shooting the other night near the Pike Place Market. A shooting occurred near a Belltown nightclub earlier this summer. There was a shooting in the broad daylight of rush hour late last month at Third and Pine.

Downtown Seattle has never been more lively. It bustles with new residential units and new retail spaces. But in its transition to a 24-hour, energetic city center, downtown is also experiencing more high-profile urban menace.

Seattle has always had crime, but not midday shootings and anonymous beatings where people gather.

One early July evening, with sunlight still illuminating the streets, a hairdresser waiting for a bus at Third and Pine was assaulted after three aggressive young females approached asking for money. The victim, who works in a Belltown salon, said no. By the new rules of Seattle's mean streets, she took a hard punch to the left cheek.

All of which contributes to a feeling in the summer of 2007 that the thugs are gaining on us.

"Overall, this is a safe city," said Marianne Bichsel, spokeswoman for Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. "We're making a lot of progress in a lot of areas but we have some specific areas of the city we need to pay attention to: Pike-Pine, southeast, Third and Pine."

What's most interesting is that after all the headlines, we are not in the midst of a big citywide crime wave. We are in the midst of a new brazenness in certain troubling hot spots.

Serious crime dropped the first six months of 2007. Violent crime is down 14 percent. Property crime is down 4 percent. Statistics sometimes obscure the way many residents feel about the city. A sense of well-being can be just as important as actual well-being.

In May, a man was beaten and robbed in the parking lot of the Safeway in Rainier Beach. He suffered a facial fracture and other injuries. Violence can be a regular thing in the neighborhood, where police tabulated numerous assaults in the census tract that includes that Safeway.

At the Safeway farther north in the Rainier Valley Square, scraggly beggars who weren't there 10 years ago appear out of the shadows, as shoppers juggle packages and try to load groceries into the car.

"Can you help me fix my broken car, which is a few streets away?" asks the beggar at the worst possible moment, and he knows it. This fix-my-car shtick takes place regularly at this Safeway and the QFC store farther north on Rainier Avenue.

The stores have off-duty police officers and uniformed or undercover security located inside looking for shoplifters. Additional mischief is occurring outside.

It has been my policy to refuse a clerk who asks if I need help getting to the car with groceries, leaving those eager assistants for customers who really need a hand. But if the stores don't police themselves better outside, it's easy to understand customers who may not really need the physical help loading the car, saying yes anyway. "Can you help me carry my new toothbrush to the car?"

Better to feel like there are more people in the parking lot.

Our livable city is still livable. But it is time for Seattle to face the rough, tough facts: Being discovered sometimes means being discovered by the bad guys, too.

Nickels asked the police to increase their presence at hot spots throughout the city, including Third and Pine, with a mobile precinct in the area various times of the day.

Before the July 30 shooting in broad daylight, the copmobile was near Third and Pine late evenings and early mornings, as staffing allowed. After the shooting, the mobile precinct is deployed additionally during daylight hours, 11:30 a.m. to about 8 p.m., as staffing permits. That will continue through the rest of the summer.

Seattle needs more cops and a bigger police presence in several areas.

Since 2005, the city added funds for 49 new officers, but police are having a tough time recruiting qualified candidates. To which I say, step up the effort. Treat downtown and neighborhood policing like they are the overpriced tunnel project, the absolute most important thing the city does.

Mild-mannered Seattle voters may not pay much attention to city politics, council elections and mayoral politics two years before an election unless something feels like it is not right. The bad vibes on the streets these days feel that way.

Joni Balter's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is seattletimes.com">jbalter@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com