On Saturday, Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers arrested a man suspected of killing King County Metro bus driver Shawn Yim, a tragedy marked over the weekend with a vigil at the scene of his death in the University District. The attack represented the first killing of a Metro bus driver in 26 years. by Ashley Nerbovig On Saturday, Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers arrested a man suspected of killing King County Metro bus driver Shawn Yim, a tragedy marked over the weekend with a vigil at the scene of his death in the University District. The attack represented the first killing of a Metro bus driver in 26 years. The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office released details about the attack over the weekend. Just before 3 am on December 18, Yim picked up two passengers from a bus stop on 15th Avenue and 43rd Street NE, directly across from the University of Washington campus. As one of the passengers boarded, he closed a bus window. This sparked an argument between Yim and the passenger: Yim said the window needed to stay open to prevent the glass from fogging up, while the passenger said he was cold. Yim drove just two blocks before stopping to close the window. According to court documents, the argument escalated and Yim ultimately told the man to exit the bus. The man then walked up to Yim, and allegedly pepper sprayed him, before stepping off the bus. Yim followed and the man sprayed Yim again, allegedly kicked him, and then walked away. Yim continued to trail the man, calling 911 and saying a passenger had attacked him. Yim told dispatch, “Hurry please … he’s fleeing.” Surveillance video showed Yim following the man for about a minute, before the man turned around and the two began to fight. The man allegedly stabbed Yim about 10 times before walking away, leaving Yim on the ground. Less than a minute later, the other passenger from the bus can be seen on surveillance video checking on Yim. He told police that Yim already appeared unresponsive at that point. Yim’s death spurred a manhunt and a flurry of news articles. KOMO described how the man suspected of stabbing Yim had dragged the driver off the bus, which turned out to be false. Multiple outlets blasted out the suspect’s name and photo after SPD posted it online. Others, such as The Stranger and the Seattle Times, refrained from naming the suspect prior to prosecutors filing formal charges, which the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (KCPAO) finally did Monday, charging 53-year-old Richard Sitzlack with murder. The KCPAO spokesperson Casey McNerthney said his office and SPD detectives became aware of Sitzlack last year when SPD officers arrested him for murder in connection to the stabbing death of his roommate in November 2023. Prosecutors never filed formal charges however, and McNerthney said while police investigators initially had doubts about Sitzlack’s claim of self-defense, he said further investigation seemed to support Sitzlack’s story. A mounting problem In the hours after the stabbing, King County Officials such as King County Executive Dow Constantine, officials from King County Metro, and representatives with the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 587, held a press conference about Yim’s death. The union called for an expansion of the transit police force and for the installation of protective cages for drivers. The union’s president, Greg Woodfill, argued the county and the region haven't done enough to keep drivers safe. Over the last two decades, assaults against Metro bus drivers have generally decreased from the highs of the early 2000s, such as in 2006 when drivers reported 189 assaults in one year. In 2018, with daily ridership close to about 400,000, the number of assaults hovered at about 81 that year, with 40 of those incidents involving passengers spitting on drivers. With daily ridership sitting just below 300,000 in 2023, there were 34 assaults, nine of which involved spitting. As of November this year, Metro has recorded just 15 assaults even as daily ridership continues to rebound since the pandemic. That said, some drivers have busier routes, may have faced multiple assaults over their time at Metro, and many drivers view this as a cumulative issue, and not easily quantified. The number of assaults directly against drivers is one statistic and it doesn’t encapsulate all the times drivers felt unsafe on their buses. Bus drivers deal with passengers fighting, people overdosing, and, in general, people kind of sucking sometimes. Even before Yim's death, it became clear something had come to a head for drivers when last week Metro announced that it planned to close its stops at 12th Avenue and Jackson Street because of potential dangers to its drivers and passengers. Yim's death led to renewed calls from the drivers' union for better barriers to protect them from attacks and random riders' spit. At the same time, the union’s demands for more transit police seems like a way to exacerbate the issue of people becoming more agitated in this City, and create more hostility to people in poverty. Agitation in the City In particular, the city’s police force seems already predisposed to be hostile to the homeless. Kristina Sawyckyi happened to be handing out meals in the University District as cops searched for the suspect in the stabbing. She described watching as members of law enforcement approached homeless people hanging near bus stops and started shining flashlights in their faces. She said she heard the officers yelling about how homeless people in Seattle commit so much crime and are a burden and a problem. SPD spokesperson Eric Muñoz said he was on scene the day of the stabbing and he was “not aware of any of this.” SPD officers, KCSO deputies, and UW Police Officers all helped with the search, he said and he cannot speak for what any officers may have said during that time. Greg Kim with the Seattle Times just wrote an excellent piece about how Mayor Bruce Harrell’s plans to clean up downtown have yielded major results along Third Avenue in the last two months. Kim described how a combination of arrests and street "cleanings" have led to a lower number of reported crimes, calls for drug activity, and people on the streets. But as Kim said, the disorder "didn’t go far."  Kim pointed out how as Third Avenue calmed down, issues in the Chinatown International District simultaneously surged, and gave examples such as the stabbing that injured nine people in November. Kim describes how police have become more physical with people living homeless on Third Avenue, grabbing them by the shirt, and making them feel unwelcome. However, these individuals are often pushed into Little Saigon, right near where Metro had to close the 12th Avenue and Jackson Street bus stops. These policies don’t reduce poverty and addiction; they simply keep people struggling with these concerns constantly on the move. And the easiest, cheapest way to move around this city is public transit. And while in the coming days, many people will stress that public transit is generally safe, the other point to remember is that people are generally safe too. Including the people on public transit who make you uncomfortable with their mental illness and poverty. However, even a typically safe person, when dealing with constant instability, fear, and violence, may lash out during a particularly bad day. (That said, unhoused people are far more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than the perpetrators.) And look, I don't know much about this Sitzlack guy, and whether the city could have done something to prevent this tragedy. I wish I did. What I do know is that the more this city treats the homeless and the people struggling with addiction like criminals, rather than a population who need services, money, and evidence-based support, the deeper the city pushes them into poverty, illness, and crime. Instead of increasing police, we should focus on improving the lives of our citizens. We should finally create a functioning police alternative to help people in crisis—a program that continues to flounder in Seattle due to resistance from our police union and the Mayor’s constant capitulation to their demands. We should make sure JumpStart money goes toward housing, not our bloated police overtime budget. We should create hiring incentives for social workers and mental health counselors, not cops. We should make sure people in this city fall into a social safety net, not a jail cell.