So Citizens Of South Seattle, in the light of the above story, I was wondering…
Since the Times/PI has done a few stories on it, I am assuming folks here are aware that there are extra emphasis patrols going on in Bell Town every Friday and Saturday night?
Were you aware that on these two traditionally busiest crime nights of the week, that officers from all 5 precincts are pulled out of the neighborhoods they would otherwise be patrolling to staff this special detail?
Were you aware that while the 911 lines on Friday and Saturday nights are backed up from calls in the various precincts, that the downtown core (I refuse to call it a neighborhood…I mean, really) is saturated with officers standing around doing nothing but watching drunk idiots act like, well, drunk idiots?
One club usually has a significant potion of the SWAT unit tied-down just sitting around outside it just in case something happens…
All this because the Mayor’s favored few (people more important to him than you or I) cried crocodile tears over two shootings that happened in the space of one month (May…if I recall correctly).
Yep, that’s it. Never mind there are times we may have multiple shootings in one week, one day, or even in one single shift sometimes here, or in East Precinct. But of course if you live in Greenwood, and pander to a small core group of urbanites in north downtown who moved here from god-only-knows-where else assuming this was Mayberry, that’s OK.
It’s just not OK if something like that happens in Bell Town. Then it’s a public safety crisis.
The Bell Town crowd loves it, of course. They can stumble around bar hopping, and everywhere they go they see more police (standing around with nothing to do, because they’ve been told to just be visible, but not to do any actual police work) making them feel safe.
This of course raises some questions in my mind:
1.Why are the citizens in North, South, East, and Southwest Precincts OK with this? It’s their neighborhood precincts coughing up the majority of the extra staffing power that supports this circus. Where is the loud public outrage?
2. Why are the City Attorney and City Council going along with this? Not that I am a fan of any of them, but aren’t they the ones constantly railing about “Social Justice” and other pol-left-ically correct buzzwords with nebulous meanings? Whatever this weeks meaning of Social Justice is according to them, I am willing to bet that they would not define it as: providing preference to the yuppies in condos downtown at the expense of neighborhoods and family safety.
3. What makes the Bell Towners more important to Mayor Mikey than the rest of the city? I’d be willing to bet the percentage of votes for him (or for anyone for that matter) out of the downtown condo crowd was negligible just due to numbers alone.
4. If this type of saturation is what City Hall feels it takes to get a problem area under control, what does this say about the size of the department? What does it say about neighborhood areas where high levels of crime and violence are the norm?
5. Standing alone, the West Precinct would be roughly the 6th largest police department in the state. With all those extra resources available to them, why are neighborhood precincts coughing up resources to support West, on the two nights they can least afford to do so? Are we really to believe they don’t have the staffing?
6. Were you aware Mayor Mikey plans to carry this circus act on through the rest of the year?
7. Where’s the loud public outrage?
See you in Belltown.
Related:
- McGinn, Diaz: New anti-crime measure proving effective (The Seattle PI 8/10/10)
- More police hit street to tame Seattle’s rowdy night scene (The Seattle Times 7/20/10)
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{ 16 comments }
Just another politician with “Vote for me and I’ll set you free” bs. The crime rate in the rv far surpasses what goes on in Belltown. Good to know how our city’s leader will act when his skirt is tugged.
I am astonished that South Seattle Cop’s posting didn’t generate more ire from the Rainier Valley Post (RVP) readers. WHY AREN’T WE ANGRIER WITH OUR POLITICIANS? City Hall — both the mayors (note the plural) and the council — emphasizes safety in Belltown and downtown over the neighborhoods, and the Rainier Valley in particular. When gunfire broke out near Pike Place Market a few years ago, Mayor McCheese reassigned police officers out of the precincts to patrol the market area so tourists purchasing T-shirts, watching flying fish and riding The Duck felt safer. Now One-Term Mike decides that it’s more important to protect partiers and inebriates in Belltown from their sorry selves than it is to patrol the neighborhoods where the people who pay most of the taxes live.
Does it matter to One-Term Mike and the City Council members (at least three of them live in Southeast Seattle) that shots fired, home invasions, stabbings, and car jackings that have become all too common in our corner of the world? Clearly not. The officers whom we need to clean up the area — or stop the regular diet of violent crimes — are in the words of South End Cop “standing around with nothing to do, because they’ve been told to just be visible, but not to do any actual police work.” How many violent crimes on Rainier Avenue South and South Henderson Street must take place before the general sorry situation is addressed and hopefully resolved?
I hold One-Term Mike accountable. But the city council members share responsibility for pursuing legislation that emphasizes policy over people. I don’t see much in the media about how the mayor and the council are addressing neighborhood crime. I see articles about increasing the number of “Road Diets”, tolling city arterials, banning plastic bags, constructing more bike lans, permitting residents to keep more chickens in their yards, and reducing the frequency of trash collections to reduce the budget deficit (but not reducing our garbage bills).
The beat goes on.
Perhaps the urban village concept has run its course–isn’t that what Belltown is, an urban village? The urban village did not come to us with a written guarantee, but was merely proposed as kind of “the next thing in urban planning”. Who knows–perhaps some college professor wrote a textbook, and that’s what got taught to a crop of graduates. So with the data of this experiment now becoming available, one wonders if we are unwittingly creating by design sections of our city, that are in reality less liveable, and that will ultimately require an elevated level of resources to police and maintain?
As a kid, the adults I admired had a family, a house, a modest yard, and maybe even a vegetable garden. There were lots of kids, lots of homes, and lots of yards in which to play. In fact, the best place to play was at the kid’s house who had the biggest yard. For a particular game you might here a kid say something like, “Let’s go to Tony’s house because he has a bigger yard.” For kids, it was a no-brainer: hide n’ seek, tag, soak ‘em, football, frisbee–the bigger the yard, the better, and that’s where we kids would quickly migrate to! And if you took the same set of kids and locked them in an urban village, they probably would have become physically ill, with vitamin D deficiency to boot.
Fast forward to today. Urban villages were not demanded by the city populace but were rather pushed on us by the city officials. Is the urban village really a step forward, or is it a step backwards? Are we ultimately creating a great city for families, or a place which, because it is not a great place for families, fills that void with drug use and the abuse of alcohol? Are urban villages, themselves , one of the “underlying social issues which creates a demand for drugs”?
Give me one of Seattle’s nice neighborhoods any day! And give us back our police officers while you’re at it!
You first might want to ask what happened to McSchwinn’s campaign office down here? I guess he was savvy enough to get the votes (which were key to his victory) and smart enough to realize he can get them again without delivering to the folks down here. Just keep the local “community leaders” in power and the promises coming….
@Brian: Belltown is not an urban village. Belltown is a playground for young urban professionals. There are no affordable 3-bedroom apartments in Belltown, no grocery stores, no schools, no parks (all of which are important components of successful urban density). I don’t have the time or the data at this very moment to direct you to more successful examples, but I know what proponents of urban density are trying to avoid: the unending, unsustainable sprawl of cities like Houston and Atlanta. Not every family needs to have their own (new!) home with a yard and an hour commute in crawling traffic. If communities are planned correctly, and designed for familites, there is plenty of open space and plenty of opportunities for kids. Sorry, Belltown is just not a good example for the point you are trying to make.
People aren’t angry because they probably don’t know. I haven’t seen any coverage of this on the Times.com, PI.com, or Publicola. I’m about to send a message to the mayor at the comment form here
@Susan, there is a grocery store in Belltown. Ralph’s.
Belltown has big developers. Corporate profits are more important than human life. Keep drinking the fluoridated water, volunteering for UN Agenda 21 fascist sustainable development projects, and voting for candidates who participate in privately-funded thinktanks such as the CFR. Change and Hope is just right around the corner. I promise.
Thanks for posting this South Seattle Cop. I live in a true urban village called Rainier Beach. There are 14 kids in our neighborhood who run up and down the street taking turns playing in our yards. I love the fact that my kids have plenty of other kids to play with, and we have plenty of friendly neighbors looking out for one another.
I will never forget the summer evening in July, when I was working in the yard while all of OUR kids were a few houses north playing in someone’s backyard–thank God. There was a shoot out two houses south from me–in the opposite direction of the where all the kids were.
I didn’t vote for McGinn, nor did I vote for several of the new council members who won seats. This city’s administration is extremely ignorant of urban living in Rainier Valley. I think they are also ignorant of the political activity the consequent dissatisfaction with our quality of life can generate. They have no idea what it means to live in a neighborhood where near 50% of our neighbors live below the poverty line.
A couple of thoughts, having been involved in public safety projects on Beacon Hill.
First, South End communities would be a lot stronger if they acted together- by allowing ourselves to be fragmented into “Rainier Beach, Othello, Beacon Hill (North and South), the Upper Valley, Mount Baker, the Lower Valley, Columbia City, Jackson Place,” and all neighborhoods in between, we decrease our ability to achieve common good.
Second, we need to get rid of “left,” “politically correct,” and other buzzwords that only turn people off from listening or acting. They only convince reasonable people that other people aren’t worth listening to. If people want to throw out meaningless, tough-sounding insults, they won’t be taken seriously by electeds, career civil servants, or people who may want a positive outcome to our public safety problems. An extreme example of this is a discredited, fired, former SPD officer who’s been going around my neighborhood saying, among other things, that Jean Enerson of KING TV is a drug dealer, that Norm Rice is gay, and a lot of similar nonsense. No one takes that stuff seriously, but it distracts people’s energies from creating productive change.
Third, there’s not a lot of sense in disrespecting all members of the City Council. I know several members of the Council are actively engaged in public safety-related concerns for the northern valley and the upper Duwamish, and have discussed with Conlin, Rasmussen, Bagshaw, and Burgess issues related to public safety and the greenbelts. Sally Clark has twice gone into the Jungle with me. So did County Exec’s Dow Constantine’s legislative aides when he was a county CM. Our State Senator, Adam Kline, has also walked his talk in my neighborhood. Several former Council Members also made major differences. Only one member of the City Council has refused to walk his talk when it comes to public safety in Seattle’s woods – that person is Nick Licata, as I’ve documented in my PI Blog, Beacon Lights.
I say the following with sadness. I believe the relationships between the SPD and south end communities has degenerated over the past three years. There seems to be small effort to begin programs within the neighborhoods that will work or that seem like “real” programs that have the backing of the City Attorney’s office, much less elected officials. For example, a group of us neighbors on northwest Beacon Hill were asked to track problems arising out of the greenbelt on the west side of the hill, and were told that numerous other neighborhood meetings would take place on the hill. I’m not convinced this is a real project, as no one knows what would be done with any data we pass along. There apparently weren’t any other meetings, so there’s no coordination. We need to have the City Attorney’s liaison get in touch with us to confirm what we’ve been asked to do has merit, but requests for information go unanswered. Two years ago, half a dozen people from different block watches requested the City sponsor a forum where citizens could discuss what is working and what isn’t working – I’m not talking about police activities, but citizen anti-crime activities that are begun in the neighborhoods: some work, others don’t. Instead, we got a City-sponsored public safety fair. It was poorly attended and the neighbors were not even put on the agenda. The recent forum at Cleveland High School did not draw a number of dedicated citizens who’ve worked on public safety for years because it looked like a repeat of that earlier event.
So, yes, the City needs to address public safety more comprehensively and collaboratively. Since May, I’ve tried to find out if there is a public safety adviser on the current mayor’s staff. I’ve asked Daryl Smith, the deputy mayor and South End resident, several times for information, and I never get anywhere. He gave me a phone number for a staff attorney in the mayor’s office, who blew off the request. Regardless of the issues I had with Greg Nickels’ over Sound Transit’s conduct, Greg Nickels’ administration took public safety seriously and sought innovative ways to deal with our neighborhoods’ issues.
Since I worked very closely with Jordan Royer when he was Greg Nickels’ senior public safety adviser on the Jungle project, I know that interagency co-operation and responsible public involvement can work. I do not believe that interagency co-operation exists today, and I do not believe that our current mayor or his appointed advisers are willing to seek responsible public input on public safety matters.
How can I act on the original post here?
There’s a burden of proof on these allegations. I don’t doubt that what the original poster has said may be true, but before I can act – or write – on these allegations, I have to verify the substance, and I can’t do that from a post without a real name behind it. Before any of us go forward in an outraged manner, we need to verify that the West Precinct/Mayor McGinn Belltown initiative is causing a draw down of resources in the other precincts. Without verifiable information, we don’t have a factual reference.
Any thoughts on how to get this? Me, I’ll forward this post on and a link to the RVP to Daryl at the Mayor’s office and ask him to comment on the draw down for Belltown’s sake. Maybe this time, there’ll be a response.
There are really good comments here but I think the only way the mayor will take notice is if he lives & commutes from Rainier Beach. I do not have room, but will someone be willing to issue an invite for the mayor to live in rainier beach for at least 6 weeks? That way he can live, bike on rainier to his little office and see/experience what needs REAL change.
@Anon: LOVE it. Your RVP is all over that challenge! Maybe I will invite him to stay at my house! LOL. Seriously though, anyone out there want to volunteer a few hours of time to help spearhead this great project?
Whatever happened to the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council? if still active, I assume they have some info concerning this and other issues of safety. Maybe someone (Marianna?) could comment/report back to the community? do other SSCPC board members have some input on this (and other) particular topic?
South Seattle Crime Prevention Council they are vacationing in belltown… too busy to care or make a stink. Oh yeah didn.t mayor mcgoo get tons of vote from our neighborhood.. hmm picking fluff over substance… He is an ID&%T who doesnt give a rats butt about the south end.
“I have to verify the substance, and I can’t do that from a post without a real name behind it.”
My name does nothing to verifying the facts. Publishing my name would only serve to insure I would never be able to post here again…which would be the least of my problems at that point.
This is something fairly easy to confirm for someone who really wants to. I would imagine for someone who has contacts with all the people listed Craig’s post, it would only be a matter of a single phone call.
“An extreme example of this is a discredited, fired, former SPD officer who’s been going around my neighborhood saying, among other things, that Jean Enerson of KING TV is a drug dealer, that Norm Rice is gay, and a lot of similar nonsense.”
Actually I had heard something about Jean Enerson and cocaine years ago, something about a party, can’t remember, but it wasn’t from anyone in SPD
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