2023 Crime in Washington report: homicides dip from 2022 but vehicle thefts and juvenile arrests rise as staffing lags

Steve Strand, executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, presented the association’s 2023 Crime in Washington report, saying the data snapshot dated March 26, 2024, shows mixed trends across categories.

The report records 376 homicides in the 2023 snapshot, a 5.8% reduction from 2022’s recorded 399 homicides, though Strand noted subsequent updates raised the total to 382. "Every single number in this 600-plus pages of numbers is a victim," he said, stressing the human toll behind the statistics. He added the overall violent-crime count fell about 5.5% in 2023 and property crime fell nearly 12% in that snapshot.

At the same time, vehicle theft continued to escalate. The report lists 54,187 motor-vehicle-theft incidents in 2023, about 6,700 more than 2022 and roughly a 112% increase since 2019, Strand said. He warned that many stolen vehicles are older models owned by lower-income residents and said the legislature has boosted funding for task forces and technology; he also cited proposals to expand sentencing and vehicle-seizure authority as tools being considered.

Strand highlighted juveniles’ rising role in auto theft: juveniles accounted for over 20% of arrestees for motor-vehicle theft in 2023, and juvenile arrests were up about 24% from 2022 to 2023. He said restrictions on questioning juveniles under state law have complicated investigations and that lawmakers from both parties have recognized the issue.

The presentation stressed the difference between raw counts and rates. Strand said Washington’s murder rate was about 0.5 per thousand in both 2022 and 2023 and remains far below the state’s late‑1980s/early‑1990s peak, even though recent counts are higher than pre‑pandemic levels.

Hate crimes also rose: the report records 576 hate-crime incidents in 2023, a 6% increase from the prior year. Strand said the most frequently reported bias motivations were anti‑Black for race-based incidents and anti‑Jewish for religion-based incidents; aggravated assaults tied to bias rose about 11%, with 79 such assaults recorded.

Staffing remained a central theme. Strand recounted a net officer loss in 2021 and additional losses in 2022; though 2023 saw a modest net gain to about 10,760 sworn officers, the per-capita rate fell to approximately 1.35 officers per thousand residents. "If we were to get to the national average of 2.31 officers per capita, we would need to hire roughly 8,000 more officers," he said, adding that Washington has ranked last in officers-per-capita for 13 straight years. He linked low staffing to reduced investigative follow-up, slower response times and officer burnout.

Strand emphasized data quality and reporting caveats: the report uses the state’s submissions (forwarded to the FBI for the national compilation) and Washington has largely completed the FBI’s NIBRS transition, giving the state a high reporting rate. He cautioned that comparisons across states can be distorted by differing reporting practices and by the FBI’s use of estimates for incomplete national data.

On policy questions raised during the online Q&A, Strand said the association opposes decriminalizing hard drugs and opposed some "less-assertive" versions of the Blake bill. He said juvenile-questioning restrictions have been a legislative issue that likely contributed in part to rising juvenile arrests and that he expects lawmakers to revisit the matter.

The full Crime in Washington report and the presenters’ slides are available on the association’s website; the association said it will respond to additional researcher and public requests and will forward the dataset to the FBI for the national report later in the year.