It ain't over till it's over
Our neighborhood has been much quieter since the closure of the bar and convenience store on E. Madison Street. Nonetheless, Summer is approaching and, as the stories below and the reports from our neighbors on 22nd Ave and elsewhere indicate, we still need to be alert to activities in the neighborhood.
From the Capitol Hill Times POLICE BEAT, May 16, 2007The following are based on incident reports from the Seattle Police Department's East Precinct. They represent the officers' accounts of the events described.
From our neighbors near Frazier Park on 24th:
DRUGS, TRESPASSING
Just before 3:30 p.m. on Friday, May 11, officers on routine patrol stopped in front of a convenience store near the 2000 block of East Madison Street. The neighborhood is well known for a wide variety of chronic criminal activity.
Officers saw several people loitering in a suspicious manner. In particular, they recognized one youth in his mid-teens as someone they knew from several previous drug encounters. Upon seeing the officers, the youth began walking away, soon turning into a nearby nightclub's parking lot, also a location notorious for chronic drug activity. The officers lost sight of him when he left the parking lot.
Moments later a call came in that a youth matching the description of the youth they'd just observed was dealing narcotics by the convenience store. Officers drove around the block and soon found the youth. He was arrested for having trespassed in the store, then searched. The search uncovered a baggie with a rock-like white substance which later tested positive for crack cocaine.
The youth was then booked into the King County Youth Service Center. Charges for trespassing were pending.Just got a call last night from a neighbor who observed a drug dealing going down in the street in front of the park. It was an old gray Volvo with some African-American males and one tall African-American female. Another neighbor got the license plates of both cars and reported it to the police. I need to follow up today.
Also, last night the same neighbor who observed the drug deal heard a muffled gunshot and called 911. She said it sounded like it was happening on 24th and just after that she heard a car speed away.
On a more scatological note, several neighbors (me included) have had to clean up human feces in the park lately. Although it may seem just gross, it’s also potentially a serious health hazard.
Also it seems that someone has been sleeping in the park on the hillside off and on. Please call 911 if anyone is even in the park after 10pm. We worked really hard to get our park hours changed from 11:30pm to 10:00 PM, so we do have the right to have the cops forcibly remove anyone in the park after 10.
4 comments:
I live on 21st between Pine and Olive and we have a port-o-potty in front of a construction site that's regularly used for drug use and prostitution. I usually call the police when I see someone go in there when it's obvious they're engaging in a criminal activity and not just relieving themselves (e.g., one woman and 2 men entering all at the same time -- it's amazing to me how blatant they are about it, going in there in the middle of a Sunday afternoon with me standing there across the street staring right at them), but they're always done and gone by the time the police arrive. Fortunately, the construction should be complete pretty soon.
A tactic that may work is to approach the contractor about getting a lock on the port-a-potty. Problems arise when subcontractors forget to re-lock it after use (and the lock finishes up in the sh*t).
A contractor on 21st N. of Madison moved his port-a-potty inside his construction fence after being approached by our Community Police Team Officer.
Andrew
Yeah, they had a lock on it at first, but it disappeared after a couple of weeks. Our neighbor actually put his own padlock on there for a while, unlocking it in the morning when he left for work. This worked until someone broke the lock one night.
I suggest you contact your Community Police Team Officer (Tim Greeley, Timothy.Greeley@Seattle.Gov, (206) 684-4349), if you have not done so, and get him to work with the general contractor.
Andrew
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