Building Community Cooperative Effort Is Paying Off Again

Nearby residents not only gave the Spokane MarketPlace a warm reception when it moved into its new home at First and Jefferson, some even pitched in to help spruce up the building.

A year ago that wouldn’t have happened. Residents in and around the 1100 block of West First were too terrified of street crime to venture outside their locked doors.

In July 1996, “the block,” as the area was known, accounted for 165 times its share of the Spokane Police Department’s attention.

Graffiti proliferated. Motorists circled the block to buy sex and drugs curbside.

Unsavory elements ruled the streets while the law-abiding people who occupy the neighborhood’s low-income housing stayed inside.

Then, when two gang-related drive-by shootings in 48 hours wounded six people, the neighborhood’s tolerance for crime and disorder finally hit overload.

Police, residents and businesses cooperated on a response.

For two months, police officers saturated the area. The city removed on-street parking spots and painted nearby viaducts white to get rid of drug dealers’ hiding places. They outlawed certain right turns to break up traffic patterns. They put lights in alleys, relocated a bus stop in front of the COPS shop on West First, and even moved a trash can in which drug dealers would stash goods and weapons when police showed up.

It paid off. Overall police calls in the block are down 30 to 40 percent since November. Violence calls are down 76 percent. Residents are no longer captives.

But driving the outlaws away isn’t enough. Undesirable as they and their customers were, that clientele also supported the neighborhood’s legitimate businesses.

“We created a vacuum,” says Spokane Police Officer Rick Albin, who is assigned full time to the West First COPS shop.

The Spokane MarketPlace and other legitimate small businesses that move into the area will attract law-abiding customers and generate foot traffic that supports honest commerce, not to mention civic street life that discourages criminal behavior. “Crime prevention through environmental design,” police call it.

As it did before in Spokane’s West Central Neighborhood, community-oriented policing has shown that police, businesses and residents, working together, can overcome hoodlums and restore safe streets and neighborhoods.

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