Seattle mayor leads ‘slow-moving blob’ through U-District, but doesn’t ‘Find it’

Taken from Monday’s edition of The David Boze Show on 770 KTTH.

I was watching KING 5 News over the weekend and I was getting a good kick out of their coverage of Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s walk along the Ave in Seattle’s University District.

This was part of the mayor’s “Find it, Fix it” tour where he walks through an area listening to people’s concerns.

The folks at KING 5 did a pretty good job covering this.
Some of the other networks, I’m not going to name them, but they just went along with the mayor’s talking points explaining that he’s going through the neighborhood, listening to business concerns about crime.

KING 5 did a better job because they actually asked some business people what is really going on, and it turned out a number didn’t think the mayor really heard them on his walkabout.

Related: Ed Murray’s 6 strangest moments from his first year as Seattle mayor

“On a daily basis I watch drug dealers deal drugs on my street. I watch SPD watch them deal drugs on a daily basis. I see nothing happening,” Mike Howard, owner of Which Wich? Sandwich told KING 5.

They noted another business even put up a sign that said: “Mayor Ed Murray let’s talk homeless.”

“I want to thank the city for cleaning up the street today for the mayor’s visit because 90 percent of the time this street is a total pigsty,” said a U-District flower shop owner, adding that he didn’t think the mayor got a real look at the problems in the neighborhood.

KING 5 described the walk as an orchestrated event, “a slow-moving blob” of about 100 people with a big police presence who walked through the neighborhood ignoring traffic signals.

A business owner had a sign saying mayor come and listen to us, we’ve got this problem with crime and garbage. He’s right. The whole city is becoming a trash heap.

And the mayor had a giant police presence walking through the Ave in the middle of the day. Have we really reached that point? Maybe we have.

The people in the neighborhood may have been pleased to have the police there. But they probably weren’t so pleased that the mayor thought let’s go ahead and block traffic while we’re here, screw the people in cars.

Following the walk, the mayor told KING 5:

“This problem didn’t start overnight and it’s going to take some while to repair years of inconsistent policing.”

According to the report, the mayor and police captain blame the King County prosecutor for not prosecuting drug deals.

So it’s the prosecutor’s fault, it’s inconsistent policing, it’s somebody else’s fault. It’s not the mayor’s fault.

Let’s face it, the Ave is a challenged neighborhood, but it’s not like it’s fallen into the disrepair of Detroit, right? It’s not like Robocop. It is a place where you think you’d be able to clean it up swiftly if you got an additional police presence in there.

But instead we’ve got the mayor saying, you know what these problems have been around a long time, and I haven’t heard a single problem that is new on this walk because I’m not into talking to those business owners.

So the mayor does his little walkabout, and then less than 24 hours after the mayor walked through on the Find it, Fix it anti-crime walk, there was a new shooting on the Ave. Nobody died luckily. So maybe the mayor can point to that and say, see, things are already improving.

Taken from Monday’s edition of The David Boze Show on 770 KTTH.

JS