By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
New data from the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office (KCPAO) shows that of the several hundred retail theft cases filed with the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) West Precinct since 2023, just a handful of filed cases are from called-in incidents from the Chinatown-International District (CID). Most filed cases appear to have been in the Downtown area.
In August, the KCPAO announced that, as of June this year, prosecutors had filed 142 retail theft cases, an average of two-and-a-half times more than over the past four years. The office attributed this jump in filings to the creation of a retail crime-specific deputy prosecuting attorney position within the KCPAO in 2021. This attorney works in the office’s Economic Crimes and Wage Theft Division, which Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion created in 2023.
It also said that the higher amount of filings in the first half of 2025 was due to a temporary retail crimes deputy prosecuting attorney position, funded from January through July of this year by a grant the state Legislature created.
The KCPAO provided the Northwest Asian Weekly with both a visual snapshot and a spreadsheet indicating the location of calls and the incidents for which the KCPAO has filed retail theft cases based on West Precinct-handled incidents respectively. The office said that each call recorded on the visual snapshot can represent multiple incidents.
However, KCPAO cautioned that the map is based on data provided by SPD and comes with limitations. “[I]t relies on accurate data entry by SPD and PAO personnel AND a complex matching calculation which links PAO data to the SPD data feed. As such, we cannot guarantee accuracy,” KCPAO said.
The KCPAO filed just two retail theft cases stemming from incidents in the CID. According to the spreadsheet the KCPAO provided, each filed case concerns one incident.
One case involved robbery in the first degree, where the person displayed a deadly weapon. The other case involved the person possessing stolen property in the second degree, which means there was more than $750 of stolen property in the person’s possession.
In total, the office filed 157 felony retail crime cases in 2022, up from 52 cases in 2021. The following years saw the office file more than 100 retail crime cases each year, with the office filing 142 as of June of this year. The office said that the cases often involved multiple codefendants and multiple incidents per person.
Retail theft prosecutions have increased sharply citywide, but the small number of cases linked to the CID points to possible gaps in how incidents are reported, recorded, and charged. With new staffing and temporary funding aimed at addressing organized retail crime, officials say they’re better equipped to respond. Still, limitations in the data suggest the current picture may not fully capture the scope of the issue—especially in neighborhoods like the CID.
SPD’s Crime Dashboard records 279 incidents of theft in the CID in 2025 thus far, with a fairly regular monthly trend. The dashboard notes that data for September is incomplete.
Last year, SPD recorded 409 theft incidents in the CID, while 2023 saw 453 recorded theft incidents in the CID. The data does not indicate how many of these incidents were retail theft cases.
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