Stricter hours in Spokane parks appear likely as council mulls new ordinance

The Spokane City Council is poised to make it an arrestable offense to be in city parks after hours. Despite a proposal led by Council President Breean Beggs to limit when these arrests could occur, it appears that a broader version has majority support ahead of a vote on June 26.

It is against city law to be in Riverfront Park between midnight and 6 a.m., and 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. for all other city parks. Violating the rule is a civil infraction with no threat of jail time.

Police and Spokane Park Board officials have requested that the City Council increase the penalty to a misdemeanor, providing officers with the authority to arrest violators. They argued it was necessary to mitigate a rash of vandalism and violent crimes in recent years.

“We need to gain control of the parks,” police Cpt. Thomas Hendren told the City Council in early May.

An ordinance sponsored by council members Jonathan Bingle, Michael Cathcart and Karen Stratton would make being in the park a misdemeanor offense with an imminent threat of arrest.

An ordinance Beggs proposed would allow police to arrest someone and charge them with a misdemeanor for being in parks after hours, but only after an initial warning. He has expressed concern that the law would be enforced against people in the parks incidentally, including those walking their dogs or who are passing through instead of walking around the boundary of the park.

“The behavior the police are talking about is very rare and very narrow,” Beggs said Friday. “I’m willing to give them tools to handle that kind of behavior, but I’m not willing to give them such a broad tool that it could sweep up people engaged in relatively innocent conduct that they could now go to jail for.”

Hendren is skeptical the law would be effective if officers had to provide warnings before making an arrest, insisting the goal is not to put people in jail but to deter people from gathering in the first place.

“If they know that it takes contact by law enforcement before they’re in trouble, they will continue to gather,” Hendren said in May.

“We will continue to have these problems and they will wait until we contact them and we will play whack-a-mole, and I don’t have the staffing to do it.”

Hendren said in most cases, officers would use discretion and provide warnings, but the imminent threat of arrest would be necessary to deter groups from gathering.

Beggs questioned this, saying that an overly broad law could lead to subjective enforcement and implicit bias, or at least the perception of bias, undermining trust in police.

“And frankly, I don’t think we have resources to prosecute people who aren’t doing anything dangerous or damaging,” he said.

Beggs said his ordinance has the support of Councilwoman Betsy Wilkerson and Councilman Zack Zappone, who introduced an amendment Monday that would further restrict when police could make an arrest. Arrests only would be allowed for those gathering in groups of five or more, as Hendren has said that the primary cause of violent crime in the parks has been clashing groups, and only between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.

Beggs noted the autonomous Park Board is the only authority allowed to set when city parks are open to the public, but the ordinance would limit when a violator could face criminal consequences.

Councilwoman Lori Kinnear, who has expressed some concern with a broad authority to arrest, appeared Friday to be leaning heavily toward supporting the Bingle, Cathcart and Stratton ordinance, although she stopped short of declaring her vote ahead of time.

Only enforcing the law against groups of five or more could be seen as infringing on the First Amendment freedom of assembly, Kinnear argued. While in May she expressed interest in limiting arrests to a narrower timeframe than the park closure hours, on Friday she said she believed that would be infringing on the authority of the Park Board.

“If people want to change the hours that parks are open, they need to go to the Park Board and tell them,” she said.

She also said she believes police would reasonably exercise discretion, and does not feel it would be necessary to codify a warning into law.

“If you’re jogging through Riverfront Park, they are not going to take you into handcuffs and take you away. They’re going to tell you, park’s closed, time to move out,” she said.

Kinnear said she would only support the stricter ordinance on the condition that the police monitor how it is enforced and present data to the City Council in six months.

“The last thing we want is for certain groups to be targeted as a way to profile people, absolutely want to see that data, because that cannot happen,” she said.

In May, when Jones first presented the proposed changes to the City Council, he expressed that it would simply be returning to the status quo. Prior to 2018, he said, it was a gross misdemeanor to be in the parks after hours, a more severe penalty than what police are asking for now. He characterized that rule change as an oversight during a larger overhaul of park rules, one that had changed the dynamic of law enforcement in the parks that needed to be rectified.

Beggs, who was on the City Council in 2018, called this an “urban legend,” saying the change in penalty was not an oversight but a conscious decision made as part of a broader effort to reform city law.

“The city for a while has been trying to not make things a crime, because it costs a lot of money to process, and it has a lot of impacts on people’s lives,” he said.

City law on being in the parks after hours prior to 2018 is murky. While one chapter of city code did make violating park rules a gross misdemeanor, a separate chapter simultaneously made violations a civil infraction, the same as it is currently.

A prosecutor could have chosen which part of the city code to use when charging a violator, Beggs said, but he noted that a judicial principle called the rule of lenity calls for judges to interpret unclear statutes in a way that is most favorable to defendants.

It’s difficult to tell how law enforcement interpreted city law prior to 2018. In 2016 and 2017, there were neither any arrests nor tickets made in city parks for violating the hours of closure, according to Spokane Police Department spokeswoman Julie Humphreys.

“Historically, being in the parks after hours was not a violation we had to take enforcement action around,” Humphreys said.

Humphreys argued that the increase in violent crime in the parks made the threat of arrest a necessary deterrent. There were three shootings resulting in an injury in 2022, Hendren has noted, including one fatality.

“It was one of the worst years we’ve had in city parks when it comes to violence,” he said in May.

In a letter to the City Council, the Spokane Human Rights Commission opposed the ordinance sponsored by Bingle, Cathcart and Stratton, questioning the police department’s theory that a threat of arrest would act as a deterrent, and raising concerns that it would criminalize those engaged in no other criminal activities. The commission noted that other aspects of city code require a warning prior to citation, such as the city’s noise control laws.

Other approaches to safety

Though much of the attention about reducing unwanted behavior in city parks has been focused on increasing police authority, Jones emphasized in an interview that Spokane’s Parks and Recreation Department isn’t just relying on criminalization.

Unwanted behaviors also can be deterred with infrastructure changes, such as increasing sight lines around playgrounds and reducing places where people can hide, Jones said. He pointed to the Dutch Jake Park as an example, which he said had at one time been a primary problem area.

“If you look at the Dutch Jake Park of today, you’re able to see through the playground, so you don’t have some of those hiding places that the existing playground would have,” he said.

The rebuilt Don Kardong Bridge, which connects the east side of downtown for Centennial Trail users trying to reach Gonzaga University and Riverfront Park, is another good example, Jones said. A prior design has lowered lookout areas along the bridge that posed safety concerns, which have since been eliminated, he said, while updated lighting helps further improve visibility.

Activities that can attract more people to city parks is also a focus, Jones added, pointing to programs teaching at-risk youth life skills in partnership with the regional Educational Service District, free-swim clinics in partnership with the Spokane Parks Foundation and others. Having better visibility and more people in these spaces can be an effective deterrent, Jones said.

“There’s a lot of planning and thought that goes into, not only what the citizens are telling us they want, but then also the long-term sustainability and safety of the park as well,” Jones said.