Seattle claims to be working on the problems in the area Barb and I call Mugme Street:
First, they removed the tents. Then, they added police. But the problems on Third Avenue persisted.
A few months ago, officials spun up a new effort to try to bring order to the area of downtown Seattle that arguably most lacks it.
The Third Avenue Project uses a constant presence in a few key blocks to connect people on the streets with pathways out, and to curtail behavior that’s deemed problematic to others.
This is the second initiative started in 2022 to move people occupying the streets of downtown to more appropriate places, the first being the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s Partnership for Zero, which seeks to end unsheltered homelessness downtown and in the Chinatown International District.
The dual approach is partly due to the urgency officials feel to help downtown recover.
We shall see.
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Wife and I visited downtown Seattle about 10-12 years ago. We walked from the hotel to the fish market area and the wife was immediately on HIGH alert. She’s never seen psycho drug addled “people” wandering around yelling at the wind, demons, whatever.
Me, being a Firefighter Paramedic of several decades have had to deal with these folks for quite some time.
I just told her that what she learned in nursing school about talking to and reasoning with nut jobs like this isn’t the course we’re going to take.
We are going to keep our head on a swivel and deal with any threat with swift, certain and *if* needed, deadly force. I bought the cigars I was looking for and we walked back to the hotel without incident other than crossing the street twice to avoid the obvious mentally infirm. I’ve dealt with these nutjobs in person, I WON’T allow them to put myself or my wife in danger.
You couldn’t get me to go to Seattle these days with the promise of a winning lottery ticket!
Seattle will be much safer now that Inslee and Ferguson has disarmed us of all those nasty assault weapons.