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Apr

20

WHEN PARKS GO BAD: Kinnear Park’s short career as a major Seattle drug market

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In March of ’09 luxury condo residents in the tony west end of the Uptown Urban Center noticed that their neighborhood park had become very popular with non-neighborhood people. Kinnear Park is a fragment of that Olmstead Legacy of view-rich, forested open spaces in Seattle’s well-to-do neighborhoods.

Cars and pick-ups parked and double parked on classy Olympic Place. Drivers and passengers rushed in an out of the steep, wooded park. Some were wearing construction worker clothing and hard hats. There are no major construction sites near Kinnear Park.

Known drug dealers added to the packed out crowds on Elliott Avenue Metro buses, exiting through rear doors at the shuttered City Team hostel on the south border of the park.

The hostel had attracted a mini tent city on a seasonal basis for some years. Murders and knife fights became part of underground life in the tangled lower reaches of Kinnear Park with its disused tennis court and steep trails.

Early this year the floating Seattle drug retail market moved in with a new ingredient: Honduran dealers with sub-par crack cocaine to sell. Uptown people shunned the park and crowds of drug buyers and sellers grew. Open air prostitution followed, leaving a snow storm of used condoms on the ground.

Neighborhood groups lead by the Uptown Alliance launched a barrage of complaints at City Hall and the Seattle Police Department. The City’s Department of Neighborhoods lead by Stella Chao went into high gear to marshal bicycle and undercover SPD officers, King County Transit Police, Park/Rec. cleanup crews, and to bring together Uptowners to begin a positive approach to remodel the lower part of the park.

At a meeting in the Bayview Manor conference facility more than a hundred friends and neighbors of the venerable hillside open space began a planning process to create a new master plan for Lower Kinnear Park.

Speaking to the Uptown Alliance April meeting – in the wake of a massive anti-drug dealing campaign in Kinnear – narcotics specialist Officer Tom Burns outlined the results. 36 arrests were made in the park in a short time period: 14 were known drug dealing leaders. Honduran new arrivals aside, those arrested had 719 previous arrests of which 88 were felony arrests. 12 had criminal records in other states.

Those arrested who fall into the “usual suspects” category are part of Seattle’s floating drug market that has orbited around Downtown, Belltown, First Hill, Aurora Ave., and Capital Hill for the past decade. Officer Burns pointed out that there is a swiftly revolving door in and out of the criminal courts and jail systems for drug-related crimes. Currently tax revenue shortfalls are dictating more early releases for drug selling pros all around Puget Sound.

Metro Transit Police under the King County Sheriff are in very short supply, largely operating out of patrol cars rather than riding the busses.

Burns pointed out the sad fact that drug dealing clusters around certain informal encampments, human services facilities, and especially needle exchanges. After the law enforcement blitz in Kinnear, the drug market shifted back to Belltown where many arrests were made, yet again, in mid-April.

Can things look up for Kinnear Park, or is it an outmoded public facility in an urban world the Olmstead brothers never dreamed of?

Kinnear neighborhood folks in Uptown are pushing forward with a master plan process to re-purpose and re-landscape the lower reaches of the park. The Department of Neighborhoods will help to pull together a planning grant application. This one missed the boat on the new Parks Levy. Crime does not coordinate well with levy bond issues and their strictures.

Ideas for a rehabbed Kinnear Park run from the venerable dog park proposals to a new trail that would connect access points to the nearby waterfront parks south of Elliott Avenue.

There’s a crying need for some lighting. And there’s that tennis court. Tennis anyone?

by D. John Coney

Comments

One Response to “WHEN PARKS GO BAD: Kinnear Park’s short career as a major Seattle drug market”

  1. Squints on April 21st, 2009 1:51 pm

    I wish there was an easy answer to all of this. One option I’ve thought of would be to have a designated part of town where dealing can happen legally. A red light district of sorts. Obviously this would never happen in this political climate (unlike the netherlands), but it seems like the main problem is dealers (and prostitutes) invading residential neighborhoods and parks. Put them all in a no-man’s land and let them do their thing, and put our money and efforts into providing treatment for the people who need it and will accept it.

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