There was an organized community walk on Saturday May the 30th.
I wasn’t aware of it, but I walked by and I joined in. The following are my notes.
Presents
The walk was moderated by Brandon - neighbor and commissioner in Seattle.
Many neighbors were presents including several whose house has been hit by bullets in the pimps war.
Several representatives of the city council and office of the mayor were present as well as the Chief of Police, Barnes, and representative of the North Precinct.
State Representative Gerry Pollet was present as well.
Representative from Aurora Reimagine Coalition (ARC) were presents as well.
Discussions
During the walk we discuss several points including: barricades, traffic, cameras, police tooling and city policies.
The following is my obviously imperfect recollection.
Barricades
Barricades seem to work well in deterring johns. Johns seems not to like being forced in closed spaces and doing a 3 point turns. Exact same but stronger arguments for pimps, who simply cannot afford to be stuck without an easy escape route.
However, they do block the traffic and some concerns were raised for emergency vehicles (ambulances, fire trucks). It was also clear that once the emergency personal know the route the barricade it is not an issue and routinely emergency vehicle drive around closed roads.
The city has removed barricades on 97th and replaced them with staggered jersey designed to slow down traffic. How useful would they be is yet to be seen.
ARC mentioned that funding of several millions have been allocated to improve the area, but they have sat unspent for years.
Police
The police seems toothless.
This seems to be a multifaced issued from lack of tooling at both the city and the state level.
There seems to be consensus that at city level, the SOAP was the most useful tool.
However, the City Attorney Erika Evans is strongly against them, and it is not enforcing them anymore. Up to my knowledge the City Attorney has not provided any alternative.
However, the city can issues only minor infractions - misdemeanors. Not felonies.
At the moment the policy has no impactful tools at the state level.
Most felony are around pimping that the police indicate being extremely hard to prove and persecute. After all they are only sitting in their car.
SOAP seemed to be useful also to start to get those criminals into the systems.
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