Downtown Seattle business, residents want plan to stop crime

Pot smoking in public, open-air drug dealing, sleeping in doorways, using stairwells as toilets: People who live and work in downtown Seattle see this behavior and wonder if there are some laws that simply don’t get enforced.

This week, Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes announced he was seeking dismissal of about 100 tickets written for smoking marijuana in public. There are plenty of other crimes on the books that some people think the police ignore, such as loitering and lying on sidewalks.

But the biggest problem downtown is drugs.

“We see plenty of drug dealing and it seems like we’ve got more drug dealers than police officers at times in downtown,” said Jon Scholes, Vice President, Advocacy and Economic Development at Downtown Seattle Association (DSA). “When you walk downtown on a Saturday night, you don’t see foot patrols that you do see in other cities like Boston, New York and Chicago so we think we’re way understaffed.”

In his budget speech Monday, Mayor Ed Murray said that next year’s budget will get the city halfway to his campaign goal of adding 100 police officers in four years.

“By the end of 2016, we will have the highest number of fully trained officers in Seattle Police Department’s history,” Murray told the city council.

It’s a good start, but there’s a long way to go to ensure that we have more foot and bike patrol officers out on the streets of downtown,” countered the DSA’s Scholes.

Seattle Police did not provide an interview for this story, but Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole has been out in the neighborhoods and met with Belltown residents this week to hear their concerns about downtown crime.

In some cases, officers’ hands are tied. A significant number of complaints from downtown visitors and employees are about aggressive panhandling. But a 2010 law to make that a crime was vetoed by then-mayor Mike McGinn.

Scholes is pleased with the confirmation of O’Toole. He likes that she lives downtown. But he wants to see a coordinated effort to deal with, not just drug crimes, but basic civility.

“If we send a signal that we’re not going to enforce certain laws, it invites, what we believe is, more challenging issues down the road,” warned Scholes.

One problem that downtown residents and businesspeople are taking on is graffiti. Between July 2013 and last June, crews hired by the Metropolitan Improvement District, funded by the neighbors, removed 45,732 graffiti tags from public areas, according to the DSA. That includes 1,876 tags removed from parking pay stations.