Timely warning notifications have been on the rise, with the UW community receiving its 37th timely warning notification of the year yesterday, which addressed four individual crimes. But, while the perception of crime has spiked due to the transparency of these incidents, some say crime trends haven’t changed much at all over the last decade and a half.

“There has definitely been an increase in the number of timely warning notifications from last year, and that’s different than the number of crimes,” said UWPD Crime Analyst Elizabeth Franklin. “Part of the reason we’ve had more timely warnings is that we’ve started sending out timely warnings when arrests have been made. We wanted to send folks good news, too.”

Some members of the community feel that they have seen crime significantly increase over the past decade.

“We talked with [business owners] about how tagging needs to be [stopped] immediately, because the next step is laying down graffiti,” said Eileen Apoe, who works on the Ave and moved back to Seattle from Los Angeles in 1992. “Though the public doesn’t know what it all means, the gangs can read it like a book.”

Apoe served on a citizens advisory committee for the Los Angeles Police Department, where she dealt with and confronted organized crime. She felt there was a significant increase in gang activity in the U-District shortly after her return.

“The last thing we wanted to see when we came back to Seattle was the same thing to start up here,” Apoe said. “Within months, we could see it.”

Apoe feels that this crime has continued to get worse over the years.

“If you just avoided getting in front of Rite Aid, you felt like you were okay, but now I don’t feel safe on any of it,” Apoe said. As the economy gets worse, it gets worse.”

Despite public perception of increased crime in the U-District, Assistant Chief Ray Wittmier of the UW Police Department recalls trends in local gang activity and feels that crime levels have not increased significantly over the past decade.

“We had for a while, probably in the early ’90s to mid ’90s … a fair amount of gang activity,” Wittmier said. “More recently, a couple years ago, the U-District saw an increase with the group that was known as the East African Possé.”

Wittmier said that the group was involved with a number of thefts, burglaries, robberies and drug deals several years ago, but that activity quieted down shortly thereafter when roughly 20 members of the group were arrested.

“When you get back to the mid ’90s, when we still had a little coffee shop over on Brooklyn called The Last Exit, there was a lot of drug activity centered around there at that time,” Wittmier said. “Once The Last Exit moved out, that really helped to clean that up a lot.”

Authorities made significant drug arrests several times a week in the area, and LSD stamps were popular near the location, Wittmier said. He said that he doesn’t remember the last time he saw stamps in the U-District, and that the police got rid of most of them at the end of the ’90s.

He also said that the numbers don’t always accurately reflect trends in crime.

“When you’re looking at some of these, where the numbers are small to start with, sometimes it just takes a couple of incidents to affect the percentages,” Wittmier said. “People need to be really careful as they look at crime statistics, and not focus on their percentages particularly.”

“We do have problems periodically with public safety,” said Teresa Lord Hugel, executive director of the U-District Chamber of Commerce. “It’s an up-and-down thing.”

Lord Hugel said local business owners often notify her when they have safety concerns, and she notifies the police.

“Do we have more problems than ever before? No,” Lord Hugel said. “We’re not seeing a major rise in crime; we’re just seeing better reporting about it.”

Reach reporter Lexie Krell at news@dailyuw.com.