OPINION | Seattle, Make Arts and Culture Part of Our Year-Round Safety Strategy

Dear Mayor Katie Wilson and members of the Seattle City Council,

We are artists, cultural workers, and stewards of creative and cultural communities and spaces who have dedicated our lives to the vitality of Seattle. We share your fundamental goal: a safe, thriving, and connected city. We are writing to you today to bring light to a tragically overlooked yet proven community-centered pathway to achieve that goal in the 2027–2028 budget.

This past summer, Seattle experienced something extraordinary: a historic decline in violence, including a celebrated "homicide-free June."

We must look at the most significant and transformative change made in our city this year: the 2025 $3.6 million investment through the Office of Arts and Culture to activate our neighborhoods for the 2026 World Cup summer. Distributed to over 120 grantees, this funding generated more than 80 distinct public art and cultural activations all over the city from May to September of this year.

By paying local artists to bring life to our streets, parks, and business districts, the city fostered deep community engagement. These activations increased positive foot traffic, built relationships among neighbors, and created a vibrant cultural presence everywhere from north of downtown to the South End.

The link between community cultural investment and lower violence isn't just a Seattle story. A 2017 study of 264 U.S. cities indicates that community organizations have an important role to play in reducing violence and creating public safety. When cities support community solutions, homicide rates are shown to drop. This is consistent with other research that shows community engagement, environmental design, and creating positive spaces can decrease crime, as well as a study indicating that expanding library hours is correlated with a reduction in community violence.

This summer proved a critical reality: Art and cultural placemaking is public safety infrastructure.

This is not merely an exercise in Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED); it is also an active investment in healing. By resourcing existing creative networks, we are funding culturally relevant interventions that actively break cycles of violence. Artists and cultural workers are trusted messengers in their communities; when we fund their work, we are funding the social cohesion and collective care that true public safety requires.

Decades of research demonstrate that per capita officers do not reduce violence in communities. A meta-analysis that included 62 studies and 229 findings of police force size and crime found that per capita staffing did not reduce crime rates and that "this line of research has exhausted itself." A 40-year systemic review with meta-analysis of the efficacy of CCTV concludes "no significant effects observed for violent crime."

Yet, the proposed 2027 budget misses a critical opportunity to build on the successes the city has had in violent crime reduction. Instead, amidst a $175 million deficit, the budget proposes a staggering $68 million increase to the Seattle Police Department to add 66 sworn officers and continues the mass surveillance that is putting vulnerable community members in greater danger.

We respectfully submit that such a massive expansion of the SPD budget is the wrong approach, particularly when the department is not suffering from a lack of resources, but rather from a bottleneck created by its own union's policies. As the inspector general's August 2026 report clearly outlined, the collective bargaining agreement negotiated with the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) actively throttles the efficacy of our Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Department.

By contractually prohibiting CARE from responding solo to incidents on private property or those involving substance abuse and by granting SPD sergeants the power to veto CARE dispatches, SPOG has artificially manufactured an ongoing reliance on armed police for nonviolent crises.

We should not reward a system that deliberately limits our city's alternative crisis response capabilities with an additional $68 million. Throwing more money at a structurally constrained system is not a sustainable safety strategy.

We have a better model right in front of us. If we can fund community activation for FIFA and our summer tourists, we can — and must — do it for the people who call Seattle home year-round.

Therefore, we respectfully request that the City Council amend the 2027 budget with the following action:

• Redirect $8 million from the proposed $68 million SPD budget increase into the Office of Arts and Culture (ARTS).

• Dedicate these funds specifically for 2027 grantmaking in creative placemaking and public art activations.

This $8 million redirection is only a fraction of the proposed increase to the police budget, yet it allows us to more than double the 2025 investments in community-led public activations that brought us the first homicide-free June in Seattle since the 1970s.

By scaling up this highly successful "World Cup model," we can transform these 80 summer activations into year-round, comprehensive safety infrastructure across all Seattle neighborhoods.

This is not just arts funding; it is a direct investment in a proven public safety strategy. By beginning to value artists and cultural workers for the essential public safety infrastructure they provide, we can proactively build the healthy, vibrant, and safe neighborhoods that Seattle deserves without relying on constrained and overly expensive policing models.

We have seen what works. Let's fund it.

Sincerely,

365 artists and cultural workers and 61 arts and culture organizations

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