SHITHOLE

Capitol Hill is nearing rock bottom, plagued by public drug use and
drug dealing, a problematic park, a dearth of social services, a
short-staffed police precinct, and a mayor who apparently couldn't
care less.

Before the rainy season began in earnest earlier this month, Capitol
Hill's Cal Anderson Park was literally awash in human crap. And used
needles. And beer bottles, condoms, and tiny drug baggies. While the
park is currently disguised as a playground for small kids, a soccer
field for big kids, and a construction site--the city is currently
working on capping the reservoir--neighbors know what the park is
really being used for.

"Public use of illicit drugs, blatant drug dealing, misuse of public
facilities--people are dying of drug overdoses in our neighborhood,"
says Ann Donovan, Capitol Hill Community Council president. "People
steal and beg to get money to buy drugs."

Many of the problems center on Cal Anderson Park, bordered by East
Pine Street and East Denny Way, a block east of Broadway. People are
shooting up heroin on the sidewalk, and in the park's new bathrooms.
"The new restroom? It immediately got taken over," Donovan says. "I
had a meeting at the shelter house [next to the bathroom], and we were
sitting there with eight people in the room, and there were people
shooting up right outside. And they could see that we could see them."
There's prostitution in the same bathrooms. On benches along Pine
Street, groups sit and drink during the day, often arguing loudly or
shouting at passersby. Still more people camp out in the park day and
night, curling up in the bushes or just dozing in the grass.

There's nothing inherently wrong with drug use, prostitution, or
drinking (hell, this paper is all for all three). Cities are places
where adults should indulge their vices. The problem comes when those
vices start to become concrete problems for others. It's no longer a
victimless crime when other people in the neighborhood are forced to
deal with your drug use, dealing, and sex work every day. Kids can
step on the needles, property values decline, residents' sense of
security drops, and the entire homeless population gets blamed for the
problem.

Neighbor Brad Trenary, who lived across the street from the park for
10 years, is certainly sick of it. He's been doing daily patrols of
the park all summer and documenting what he sees. He sends his
unsolicited reports to the city. In his June 25 report, he wrote: "On
a daily basis, there are at least two to three groups of street
persons, anywhere from teenagers to well-seasoned adult homeless
persons, who are congregating on [the] ball field. These are not small
groups. They range in size from 10 to 20 people. They are hostile,
aggressive, foul-mouthed and filthy dirty. They leave enormous amounts
of trash and debris behind, not the least of which are hypodermic
needles, empty vials of saline solution (which amazes me), beer and
wine bottles, tampons, [and] toilet paper. Frequently, there is
clothing of all types spread all about the park. In the bathrooms, I
have found bloody socks and underwear that are too nasty to imagine."
Gross.

Donovan says the park's problems coalesced this summer, because of
several factors. "Construction pushed things out of the [reservoir
area of the] park. There was an extended stretch of nice weather."
Also, social services have been cut around the city, including
drug-treatment beds. And the newly enacted Alcohol Impact Area in
Pioneer Square seems to be pushing public inebriates up to Capitol
Hill, where they can still buy a single can of cheap beer.

The park isn't the only problem area--or "hotspot," as the police
department calls it--around Capitol Hill. Neighbors report plenty of
drug dealing in front of the post office at Broadway and East Denny
Way. Dealers hang out there, making calls on the pay phones and
stashing drugs in newspaper boxes. "They hide it under a few papers,"
reports resident Gary Clark.

Along Pike and Pine Streets, among all of the boutique stores and
popular bars, public drinking is the biggest problem. Seattle Central
Community College fenced off a vacant property on Boylston Avenue this
summer, apparently to curb drinking in the lot, though empty bottles
still litter the space. Groups of homeless men wander the corridor
asking for spare change. And on the eastern edge of Capitol Hill, near
East Madison Street and 22nd Avenue East in the Miller Park
neighborhood, residents have been complaining for years of drug use
and prostitution in their own yards, plus drug dealing, frequent
fights, and shootings on Madison in front of bars like Deano's and
Oscar's II.

This summer, neighbors like Trenary and Donovan started working
together to compare notes and come up with some solutions. "I realized
that with all these different problem areas in one precinct, something
should be done," says Andrew Taylor, head of the Miller Park
Neighborhood Association. "We really should request more police."

Neighbors also talked about social services. Donovan's community
council is trying to do an inventory of social services on Capitol
Hill, to see what's there, and what might be needed. "We sort of know
that Stonewall [Recovery Services] closed, but let's be more
specific," Donovan says. "What would be more acceptable to the
neighborhood? Could we site things like a hygiene center on Capitol
Hill?"

On August 21, the community council sent a 24-page letter to the
Seattle City Council and Mayor Greg Nickels--a compilation of
residents' observations of criminal activity, and a plea for help.
"Mayor Nickels, your election campaign platform included promises of
increased public safety," the letter read. "That has not only failed
to materialize, we see the standard that was being maintained has
perceptibly decreased." The letter noted Nickels' cuts to the police
department in the 2003 budget, and the general understaffing of the
police department (Seattle is 27 percent below the average national
cop-to-citizen ratio). "Additionally, citizen letters and emails
complaining [about] public safety... are often met with no response
from your office."

Indeed, Nickels has yet to respond to the letter. The mayor has a
history of ignoring Capitol Hill. In his State of the City speech in
January, the mayor tagged several neighborhoods in need of assistance,
but failed to mention Capitol Hill, though the area was already
clearly in crisis and the mayor's staff had promised that Capitol Hill
was "on the agenda." And in his budget address last month, Nickels
mentioned Broadway as a priority neighborhood, but didn't list any
specifics, as he did for other tagged neighborhoods like South Lake
Union and Northgate. Nickels did offer a solution to Cal Anderson
Park's problems on October 14, but it seemed more PR strategy than
substance.

Capitol Hill residents have gotten a response from several city
council members. Jim Compton made a bid at solving the neighborhood's
woes a few weeks ago, but it's mostly a stopgap measure. In a letter
to residents on September 24, Compton said, "[I]t is abundantly clear
to me that the level of staffing in the East Precinct is simply not
enough to handle the problems you are encountering. I have called upon
Chief [of Police Gil] Kerlikowske and the precinct commanders to loan
officers to the East Precinct to better address the criminal behavior
you have witnessed." Compton sent a memo to Kerlikowske and the heads
of all five police precincts the same day, requesting the cop
reshuffle and asking for suggestions on how to flat-out increase the
number of Seattle cops through the upcoming budget process. It was a
new strategy for cop committee chair Compton, who rarely--if
ever--gets involved in the day-to-day management of police resources
at the precinct level. His aides report that their phone "blew up" the
next morning with calls from precinct captains upset over Compton's
meddling.

Some residents were skeptical of the letter, noting that Compton is up
for reelection and hadn't been particularly responsive to neighborhood
concerns before, despite a tour of the Madison and 22nd area hotspot
nearly two years ago. "It wasn't ever clear what he did as a result of
walking around with us," Taylor says. "It was hard to see what the
initial result was."

Neighbors have gotten the best response from council member Nick
Licata (members Richard Conlin and Judy Nicastro also wrote residents
to offer support). Licata met with residents at a home near Cal
Anderson Park several weeks ago, after doing a loop around the park.
"I toured the park. It was amazing. Within the first hundred yards I
saw human feces, and I saw a very young woman incapacitated on drugs,"
Licata says. "I met with Brad [Trenary] and the organizers there a
week ago, and I promised them that I would not drop this issue until
we found a solution."

In just two weeks, he had kept his promise. Licata immediately got to
work crafting a "neighborhood safety initiative," which would funnel
nearly a million dollars into social services, police, and
environmental design (things like better lighting) in both the East
Precinct and the West Precinct (where Belltown and Pioneer Square are
also plagued by similar issues). He's currently looking for funding
sources via the current budget process. One possible source is
$700,000 the mayor directed toward capital improvements in the East
Precinct--curb bulbs on Pike and Pine, crosswalks on 12th Avenue, and
other pedestrian improvements on Madison. Though neighbors would love
to see pedestrian improvements, many want cops first.

"It doesn't do any good to have a nice crosswalk if people are afraid
to go out of the house to use the crosswalk," Licata observes. "The
mayor's plan isn't necessarily a bad plan, but it's putting the cart
before the horse."

Licata says the money--which is funded through a real-estate excise
tax and has to go toward capital improvements, not public safety or
social services--could be swapped into the city's neighborhood
matching fund for its projects, which are capital-improvement heavy,
and other cash could be moved from the neighborhood matching fund
budget to address safety issues on Capitol Hill.

Licata's top priorities? "We definitely need more bike cops. And bike
cops specifically--their range is longer than foot patrol, and they're
more personal than car patrol. Let's have dedicated bike patrols. Six
new bike cops for the East Precinct, and I'm going to try to do the
same for the West. And you've got to have a social service element.
Police presence by itself doesn't work. Social services to people who
are out there, to get them off the street permanently." The neighbors
couldn't agree more: "We're not trying to kick people out of the
park," Trenary says. "We just want them to use it legitimately."
Donovan says she'd like to see help offered to addicts first, "but
when people are reluctant to go to treatment, that's where law
enforcement steps in."

"More cops!" was the drumbeat when Capitol Hill neighbors went to the
city's packed public budget hearing on October 8. (A competing
drumbeat, however, came from South Lake Union Vulcan lackeys stumping
for Nickels' pet neighborhood project, the South Lake Union streetcar,
which is already slated to get $6 million in the proposed budget.) As
for social services, Donovan says the neighborhood wants, at the very
least, $30,000 in continued funding for Capitol Hill's case manager--a
title held by Randy Nelson of Street Outreach Services, who works with
street youth to help them get the services they need, and acts as a
liaison between social services providers and the neighborhood. "It's
a very small amount of money for a very needed position," Donovan says.

Indeed, social services are key on Capitol Hill, a neighborhood that
has long embraced homeless adults and street kids as residents of the
area. "Capitol Hill residents are sophisticated. They're politically
and socially aware," Licata says. "They're not saying, 'Just arrest
the homeless people.'" And most folks want to help the homeless
people, though not necessarily by tossing quarters at them on the
sidewalk. But in the last year, the neighborhood has lost its youth
drop-in center, a curbside food service, and a drug treatment
center--victims of either a poor economy and lack of funding, or
issues with their landlords.

Nelson sees plenty of opportunity for more services in the area. "I
think one thing we definitely need is easier access to drug
treatment," Nelson says. "Something that might be good is a person who
works specifically with chemical dependency issues on Capitol Hill."

Licata has also mentioned an even bolder idea--a safe injection site,
akin to the one in Vancouver, BC. It would be a place where addicts
could go to get clean needles and administer their drugs under the
watchful eye of medical personnel. "I'm beginning to think maybe
that's something we've got to look at. If they've got a solution in
Vancouver that works, if that takes drug use out of the parks, then
I'm okay with it," Licata explains. "If you have a safe injection
site, you're not going to have kids stepping on broken needles in the
sandbox. Seattle has a reputation of being the heroin capital of the
West Coast. And we're just ignoring it." In 2002, there were 87
heroin-related deaths in King County--a huge jump from 2001 numbers.

The neighborhood is already seeing some changes, thanks to a team
effort from a few city departments--including the parks department,
the cops, and the Department of Neighborhoods. Representatives from
those departments have been meeting for weeks to address problems in
and around Cal Anderson Park.

"We're having each department step up to the plate and do what it's
supposed to do," says parks rep Royal Alley-Barnes, who manages parks
in the Central-East section of Seattle. "We're doing what we can
already do, and doing it fast." For her, that meant hiring a part-time
park aide--a young homeless woman who reminds park users of the rules,
trims hedges, and cleans up litter--and quickly completing work orders
for things like vandalism. Parks employees also have been locking one
door on each of their bathrooms, leaving the other door as both the
entrance and exit, to prevent folks who are doing illegal activities
from sneaking out the back. "We've had a 50 percent reduction in
biohazards and illegal activity by locking one door," Alley-Barnes
says. And on November 5 at 7 p.m. the department will host a community
workshop about the park, at Miller Community Center on 19th Ave. E.
For its part, under the direction of Captain Fred Hill, the East
Precinct--which sits just one block away from the park--put together a
team of officers to step up patrols of the neighborhood by October 22.
(It appears they've started early--while walking around the park one
recent week, I was nearly mowed over by a pair of bike cops three
times. Another resident reports a police sweep of the corner by the
Broadway and Denny post office last week.) Those city efforts--and,
residents wryly note, the recent rain--have all but emptied the park.
But residents report that the former park denizens have simply set up
shop in doorways around the neighborhood, and even in the nearby QFC.
One Pine Street resident reports seeing a few homeless men sleeping
behind QFC's floral counter last week, until store employees found
them and kicked them out. And the crowd at the post office persists.

Enter the mayor. On October 14, the mayor issued a splashy,
no-nonsense press release, announcing a "17-step action plan to keep
Cal Anderson Park safe." The half-baked plan--which took effect
"immediately"--was quickly put onto the mayor's website, and garnered
some daily headlines.

Here's the plan. First off, East Precinct Captain Hill will personally
attend community meetings. Cops will also enforce the parking
restrictions around Cal Anderson (three-hour parking regulations were
added last year to discourage camping), and "aggressively" issue
citations under the parks exclusion ordinance--a problematic and
controversial Sidran-era program that allows officers to ban folks
from a public park without due process--to people violating rules or
laws. Cops will sweep the park at closing time--11:30 p.m. --to cite
people who are there after hours. Cops will enforce narcotics laws.
Parks employees will keep the park clean. Vandalism will be repaired.
Seattle Central Community College--which hosted a meeting last month
to address the area's problems--will be more involved. And benches and
bleachers will be removed, to discourage camping and loitering.

So was the mayor finally getting serious about Capitol Hill?
Hardly.

First of all, Captain Hill already attends meetings. And while the
cops may not always tow cars at the 72-hour mark, they certainly
enforce the three-hour parking rules (you can count my tickets if
you'd like). As for the parks exclusion law, Donovan notes 100 parks
citations have been issued so far this year. And we don't need to amp
up a civil-rights-stomping Sidran law that seems to grant redundant
enforcement powers to the police. The problem is that there aren't
enough cops to keep up with 911 calls, let alone regular park patrols.
What few cops Capitol Hill has already enforce the laws--that's their
job.

The parks department, as noted above, is doing its best to fix up
broken park elements as they occur. SCCC's already involved, thanks to
their new president, Dr. Mildred Ollee. And the benches-and-bleachers
thing is just weird--isn't it supposed to be a park, where people can
sit down or watch their kid's soccer game? Heck, cops on Broadway
often steer homeless folks off the sidewalks and into the park--where
they're allowed to sit. "I think there is a fine line between making
the park inhospitable to illegal activity and making the park
inhospitable," case manager Nelson says.

So thanks for nothing, Team Nickels.

Really, most of Nickels' "new" plan was already happening, courtesy of
the focused interdepartmental team and neighborhood pressure. The
mayor simply stepped in to take credit for it. And his plan made no
mention of the two things neighbors want most: more cops and more
social services funding, the things Licata is addressing. Frankly,
Nickels' plan is too rudimentary to turn things around on Capitol
Hill--when the illicit activity dies down over the wet winter, parks
employees and cops will return to their regular duties. By next
spring, the problems at the park will probably return.

Before the mayor's "solution" was announced, neighbors were grumbling
about Nickels' lack of response to their pleas for help. He still
hasn't replied to the community council's August 21 letter (and his
plan does nothing for Capitol Hill's other hotspots, like the Madison
and 22nd area). While residents are happy that the mayor is paying a
bit of attention to their concerns (hard not to, when several papers
have done stories on Trenary's daily park patrols), they're still
looking to Licata--who already has the support of Richard Conlin,
Peter Steinbrueck, and Judy Nicastro--for real solutions. "I think we
hit the bottom of what we're willing to take," Donovan says.