You’re making things up again, Maritza
At Tuesday morning’s council discussion of her own gun violence resolution, Maritza Rivera told her colleagues:
“I’ll say that fatal shootings in 2012 were 211, and in 2024 there were 541. And post-pandemic, it increased exponentially.”
The peak number was in 2023, and it was 65. The 2024 number was 55. Rivera overstated the number of gun deaths in our city by roughly 10x.
10x.
So first, just a big fat no. As with so much that comes out of this person’s mouth, it is just straight up bullshit.
What Rivera doesn’t want you to know
Rivera also didn’t mention that homicides are down almost 20% compared to last year at this time. And they are down 63% compared to August of 2023. And given that September of 2023 was exceptionally bad, we are likely to end this year with an even bigger drop compared to the peak.
But you’d never know that from Rivera, or her Republican allies like Andrea Suarez or KOMO.
That’s because their agendas depend on you being afraid.
Murder in Seattle is dropping fast, to record lows.
Homicides did go up everywhere during the pandemic, a lot.
They started dropping nationally in 2021, the year Bruce Harrell won. But under Harrell, murders kept going up in Seattle for two more years. Call it the “Harrell crime wave.” (Imagine how the media would have treated Wilson if that had happened? When did they ever hold him accountable for it?)
The tide turned in 2024, when the national trend finally swamped local governance failures. But it was only in 2025 that the drop really got going, and now in 2026 we’re finally getting back to some of our all-time lows.
In fact, we had our first no-homicide June in 50 years!
So how we do we compare some of the better years of the past?
Looking back at the year Rivera invoked—2012—we had 616,500 people living in Seattle and 23 homicides, or 3.73 homicides per 100,000 people.
At our current pace, we’re likely to see about 26 homicides this year. With our current population of 823,400 or 3.16 homicides per 100,000 people. A modest improvement over 2012.
In fact, we’re near the all-time low in 2010. (There were 19 homicides, 608,660,which is about 3.12 per 100,000.)
26 murders is way, way too many. Every life lost to murder is a tragedy, a crushing loss for a family and friends, a destruction of a thread in the fabric of our community, and a stain on our social and political system. And we know we can do better – Western European homicide rates are often below 1 per 100,000. We should acknowledge that and fight to fix it.
But we don’t need to make up shit to make people live in fear just to push some conservative social agenda.
What is Rivera really up to?
Some have speculated online about what Rivera is really up to—perhaps accidentally misquoting the shots fired data, or something to that effect.
I’ll repeat what I said when the NAACP said her legislation was a “slap in the face of the black community. “Whether she is maleficent, or just maladroit, or some combination therein–is up for the reader to decide. Either way, she sure is proving malignant.