More fallout from how we’re defunding Seattle police backward, this time in Pioneer Square

Laura Zeck owns an art gallery that is usually not a high risk company when it comes to occupational safety. But today she finds herself with zero employees willing to even come to work.

“You have decided that it is no longer worth it,” said Zeck the other day. “At this point, I have no employees coming here.”

Katherine Anderson owns a restaurant nearby.

“We are about to lock our doors because our staff can no longer stand to be on the front lines of the mental health and harassment patrol,” she said.

Jonathan Fleming says he sometimes feels like he’s working in the “wild, wild west”.

“I don’t even call the police anymore, that makes no sense,” he says. “I’m in the phase where I just try to cover every incident personally and alone.”

These three all run Pioneer Square stores (Zeck owns the Zinc contemporary art gallery, Anderson owns The London Plane, and Fleming runs Pioneer Square D&E, which is for drinks and food) to help them create a street scene manage what they say is overwhelming the neighborhood.

The three wrote to two city-wide elected councilors Teresa Mosqueda and M. Lorena González and their district councilor Andrew Lewis. They copied Mayor Jenny Durkan, the park division, and a number of Seattle police officers, from a deputy chief down.

They described how there are several incidents every day where people who appear to be suffering from a mental illness or drug addiction hit their windows, harass customers, smash things or, in the worst case, physically threaten and attack staff.

“We are at a loss how to deal with the relentless aggression that is affecting our business,” said Anderson.

Zeck said: “When we call the police, they say, ‘We decide not to react.'”

Anderson said he called the police four times in one afternoon with no success. She added in her plea to the city guides: “We know the police are understaffed and we know that they are not necessarily the solution to these problems anyway … (but) I am ready for some REAL solutions.”

Fleming added, “There’s a lot of pessimism down here right now.”

Pioneer Square, Seattle’s oldest neighborhood, has never been the safest neighborhood in the city. But these three people, who have lived or worked there for decades, say that a delicate balance has been thrown off the rails lately.

Fleming said he now needs to regularly wake people who wander into his restaurant when it’s open and start rummaging through employee workplaces.

“You haven’t had such brazen aggressiveness that often before,” he said.

Zeck said she wanted to move now. It should sound the alarm in City Hall that an art gallery could give up Pioneer Square, one of the original art districts, with the nation’s first art walk.

What I suspect is going on here are further consequences of reversing to reinvent or expose the police. I’ve written about this before: How the city, and now state lawmakers, are trying to dissuade armed police officers from making every emergency call related to mental illness and drugs. It’s a sensible goal – in many of these situations it would probably be better to have psychologists on hand than cops.

But the problem is that the city and state have not yet put in place a replacement for the police – let alone assessed whether that replacement works.

Local news website Crosscut reported what this did on the ground: In August this year, the number of police interventions on mental health calls decreased by 45% compared to the previous monthly average. The decline is apparently due to a tug-of-war between police and lawmakers over a new state law restricting the use of force by police, which was passed in the wake of the defunding police movement.

Meanwhile, a new “Triage One” crisis team, which is supposed to replace the police in many of these situations, will not be deployed until next year. The city council on Monday approved $ 700,000 for a pilot program.

You do not dismantle crisis interventions and later start your pilot program for crisis intervention. This practically guarantees that in the meantime there will be more souls in the grip of episodes who are not getting help, and more friction on the streets.

In some cases, people are left to decay until they can harm themselves or others, a crisis worker told the Seattle Times.

In a note to Anderson, the owner of The London Plane, Durkan’s office admitted this timing inconsistency.

“We do not expect any immediate convenience, but we do expect the first of these (triage) teams to be operational by January 2022,” it says.

I didn’t know what to say to those business owners in Pioneer Square. There is hope that it will get better … next year? So just hold on?

Left unspoken: At the moment it looks like you are basically on your own.

Danny Westneat:
dwestneat@seattletimes.com; Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the news, people and politics of the Puget Sound area.