Businesses in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood worried about crime, want help from city leaders

Businesses in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood want a bigger police presence and are worried crime levels are about to reach those of last summer.

Over 20 business owners sent a letter to the Seattle City Council and Mayor’s Office Friday demanding a meeting with city leaders in the next month to address their safety concerns.

The letter reads:

Dear Mayor Murray and City Council,

The Pike/ Pine neighborhood on Capitol Hill is continuing to experience assaults, robberies, car prowls, open drug dealing, and more people with addiction and mental health problems on the street. As we head into the warmer months we expect to see a sharp increase in these issues and want to make sure the city has a plan in place to address them this year before they turn into the crisis levels of last summer (though we’re near that now).

Capitol Hill has a quickly increasing number of residents and people visiting it. This increase needs to be met with an increased budget for policing and social services. We have been asking for an increase in the number of officers in the East Precinct, along with officers on foot and bike patrol in the busy business district of Pike/ Pine, for several years, and feel we’re being ignored.

Last summer you heard our concerns and reacted quickly with short term emphasis patrols. We sincerely appreciate this response, but at the time we feared that as soon as summer was over we would see a decrease in policing, and that seems to be exactly what happened.

This year, instead of the East Precinct having to ask for an increase in their overtime budget (which has been cut down to 2008 levels) in response to a crime wave crisis, it would make sense to increase their overall budget for the beat officers on foot and bikes now.

We see Downtown is getting some great resources, including the new Neighborhood Response Teams. We would like the same attention in what has become one of Seattle’s busiest and most well known neighborhoods with some of the City’s worst hot spots, but one which isn’t getting the resources it should be. We also fear that the focus on downtown, while neighborhoods bordering downtown are ignored, will result in crime being pushed into those neighborhoods, especially Pike/Pine.

Pike/ Pine desperately needs continued help from the Narcotics and Gang units, cops on a regular beat throughout the week and not just Friday and Saturday nights, and social service outreach to the various street people living on the sidewalks, in doorways and in Cal Anderson Park.

As business owners and residents in Pike/Pine, we want to be an active and engaged part of the improvement in public safety in the neighborhood. We not only want to hear what the City’s solutions are but also how we can best be utilized moving forward.

We request another community meeting with the Mayor’s public safety staff, the Chief of Police, the East Precinct command staff, the East African outreach staff, the Council’s Public Safety Committee members, and the stakeholders in and around Pike/ Pine, to discuss our concerns and discuss solutions. We would like this to happen in the next month.

The mayor announced a new task force Thursday aimed at creating a safer environment for LGBT people, specifically addressing issues on Capitol Hill.