Over the past year, street sweepers in downtown Seattle saw a dramatic increase in the number of syringes on the ground. But those numbers have declined since March. They’re a data point in the larger debate over policing and drug use downtown. At 7 a.m., Lee Townsend starts hitting his “hotspots” in Belltown – the Cinerama, the Crocodile – those high-traffic nightspots where patrons are most likely to leave popcorn bags, cigarette butts and other trash. He sweeps up the litter, then makes a note in his log. He may call for assistance from a colleague with a power washer over the radio summoning him or her with a code number. “If we run across a needle, it’s a 621-N. If we run across dog feces or human feces, that’s a 612-L,” Townsend said. “So everything we do has a code. And everything we do also is documented.” Townsend works for Seattle’s Metropolitan Improvement District. His detailed records provide hard numbers for the downtown tenants who pay for these services. They also make him a front-line observer of downtown life. More residents with dogs means more 612-L on the streets, and more syringes mirror the trends around heroin use nationwide.

Joshua Curtis with the Downtown Seattle Association said street sweepers picked up 753 needles in March, almost 500 of them in the “retail core.” “And really since 2013 we’ve seen I believe it’s a 500 percent increase in needles that we find on the ground and we pick up and safely dispose of. That was astounding and most of that has happened in the past year,” Curtis said. In April, Seattle police announced 95 arrests as part of the city’s “9-And-A-Half Blocks Initiative” to curb downtown drug dealing. City agencies moved bus stops and newsstands and closed alleys to keep drug dealers away. Downtown Seattle Association spokesman James Sido said street sweepers have collected fewer needles in April (649 total, 292 of which were in the retail core) and the first part of May. “At first blush it would lead one to believe that because some of the element that was dealing the drugs had been moved out of that area, that’s since caused the decrease in the needles,” Sido said.