Seattle's Tech Boom Blamed for Rise in Anti-Gay Attacks

Few big U.S. cities are more liberal than Seattle, which has a gay mayor, a socialist city council member, and a garbage utility that red-tags the bags of people who don't compost. So it's all the more surprising that a neighborhood long the center of the city's gay community fears rising anti-gay hate crime.

Anxiety in the area, known as Capitol Hill, runs so deep that one nonprofit organization last month launched a nighttime shuttle to ferry residents home safely, and Mayor Ed Murray named a task force to investigate reports of increased attacks. Already on edge after a gay bar was set on fire by an arsonist in the early hours of New Year's Day in 2014, the neighborhood has been alarmed by several incidents in the last 12 months. In February, a man was jailed after spitting at and charging two male victims in the area. Seattle Police Department records show that "bias crimes" against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the first half of 2014 had already outnumbered those for the whole of 2013. There's been talk of resurrecting the Q Patrol, a beret-wearing group modeled after the Guardian Angels that patrolled the neighborhood back in the 1990s.