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City tries to attack crime in Belltown

Online news site PubliCola has two interesting posts on crime in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood and the city’s attempt to address it. What do you think can be done to make Belltown safer?

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This entry was posted by Lynn on Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 at 9:51 am and is filed under Neighborhoods, Parks and open space, Planning, Politics, Seattle lifestyle, transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • http://n/a Marie

    Something needs to be done soon. I tried going to dinner there on a Monday, and my date and I were nearly assalted by homeless people on the way out of Umi. We were holding hands, and they kept trying to get in between us, begging for change and being aggressive. Belltown will die soon is something is not done about this, people are beginning to avoid the area in search of safer places to dine and go out. The city needs to address this and have a larger police presence and other measures to make the area desireable again.

  • Nic

    I have recently moved to downtown Seattle with my wife and have massively enjoyed all of the idiosyncrasies of downtown living – including strolling around neighborhoods like Belltown during the day and evenings. Our street is what you might call very active – well into most evenings. We’re not threatened at all but keep wondering about police presence. We see the mobile police office truck, we see cyborg-like cops on bikes, we see downtown ambassadors, mostly on bikes and also cyborg-like…We see these folks less in Belltown. Maybe Belltown needs these guys (they’re about 99.9% men). But where I’m going with this is that the “heavy” / threatening appearance of police, the fly-by nature of being on a bike, seems to create an aura of fear. So like Charleston, like NYC, etc. I think that we need humans, walking the street, getting to known people, making eye contact (take off those ridiculous sunglasses, please), getting to know the neighborhoods and what’s going on in Belltown, downtown, Pioneer Square, etc . We’re surprised that a seemingly friendly city like Seattle has such a fearsome robocop-like police force.

  • CJ

    Belltown is out of control. The drug dealers/addicts have taken over not only the streets of our neighborhood but also Pike Place Market, Seattle’s biggest tourist destination. Meanwhile the mayor is fighting on building a new tunnel, spending $ on bike lanes, & going to Hempfest, which caused more problems that weekend in itself. Basically public safety is not a priority to our mayor and unless he starts caring we will not see an improvement.

  • Ken W

    NY cleaned up their streets, and Seattle can clean up our streets. This isn’t rocket science, but it needs a commitment by the mayor to solve street crime, and get rid of all the beggars. The current mayor isn’t ever going to make more than token gestures. We can complain, or if we really want to solve the problem we can make cleaning up Seattle “the” major issue during the next election. There is some candidate out there who is willing to study what NY did, and do it here. This can be a beautiful, and SAFE city, but if it continues the current trend, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live downtown, or tourists would want to come here. We’re not at that point yet, but without a dramatic attitude shift, we’ll be there within a few years.