The last two shootings took place about four hours apart on Sunday. The first, reported around 4:30 p.m., happened in the 9200 block of Rainier Avenue South, near Safeway. A male victim was shot in the arm with non-life-threatening injuries, said Detective Valerie Carson, a Seattle police spokeswoman. No further information about the shooting was immediately available. The second was reported shortly after 8 p.m. Sunday near Hamilton Viewpoint Park in West Seattle. One person was reported shot. On Friday night and early Saturday morning, nine people were injured and one was killed in five shootings in Seattle and Renton. Interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz said Sunday afternoon that none of the shootings on Friday and Saturday appear to be related. A man and a woman, both in their 20s, were shot in Hillman City late Friday. Around the same time, four people were shot at a party in Renton’s Ron Regis Park. Shortly after midnight Friday, a 14-year-old girl was shot in the leg outside T-Mobile Park after more than 80 shots were fired from a nearby bar. A short time later, police said, a man in a car with gunshot damage arrived at Harborview Medical Center, reporting a head injury. Just 15 minutes after the Sodo shooting, a man was shot near the Capitol’s Cal Anderson Park. He died at the scene, the only shooting death of the weekend. Another man was shot shortly after 3 a.m. Saturday in the Pioneer Square neighborhood. On Sunday, five people remained at Harborview Hospital after the rash of shootings. All five had been upgraded from critical to serious condition and remained in the ICU, said Susan Gregg, a spokeswoman for Harborview. In an interview Sunday, Seattle Police Chief Diaz said police are looking for patterns when multiple rounds are fired. “We pay attention to every shooting to determine if there is a connection to gang activity, homelessness, youth violence, robberies, etc.,” he said. “Right now, all the shootings, there doesn’t seem to be any consistency to any of the shootings.” As he has in the past, Diaz described the department’s low staffing levels as a crisis. He said a shooting like the one that happened in Sodo early Saturday, where the 14-year-old girl was shot in the leg, could take nearly half a district’s resources to respond. “That leaves us very, very thin,” he said. “During the summer months, I make sure that every weekend we do our best to make sure we have enough staff to hopefully have a visible presence in the community.” He said police are still investigating where the shooting began in Sodo. He said officers found more than 80 cartridges and handguns at the scene. “These are huge concerns for us,” Diaz said. “A shooting like Friday night, when you’ve fired a lot of bullets, could have had a lot more victims.” Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed spending $2 million on recruiting and hiring incentives in an effort to add 500 new officers to the police force over the next two years. The City Council is expected to consider Harrell’s proposal this week. “We are in crisis,” Diaz said. “We have a personnel crisis.” Over the past decade, the number of sworn officers in the SPD has fallen from around 1,300 from 2013-19 to less than 1,000 in 2022, with more than 400 resignations and retirements since 2020. While SPD staff have been fully funded in that time, the department struggled to recruit fast enough to keep up with attrition.
