PORT ANGELES — Many downtown storeowners fear for their safety, citing the presence of transients, Police Chief Terry Gallagher said last week.
“I hear that a lot,” he said.
But statistics don’t appear to back up the fears. Crime is down, and homelessness numbers are declining.
City Council members were told about the fears of business owners at an Oct. 28 council work session after Councilwoman Sissi Bruch asked department heads to state their main concerns for the future.
“Our businesses are being negatively impacted by the environment being created as the result of transients,” responded Nathan West, city community and economic development director.
“They are directly impacting the comfort level of the businesses.
“Sometimes, we hear about it daily.”
Downtown safety came up at the council’s regular meeting Tuesday.
“When you start talking to people, you hear it over and over and over again,” Leslie Robertson, moderator of the newly formed group, Revitalize Port Angeles, told the council during the public comment portion of the session.
Robertson had visited with owners of 20 to 25 downtown businesses.
“They’re not feeling safe, and it’s getting worse,” she said.
Robertson argued for a second downtown police resource officer to be stationed in the city’s urban core “so people feel safe when going there.”
She cited instances of business owners finding hypodermic needles near the Laurel Street stairway and of finding people sleeping in their doorway when they come to work.
“The specific examples that I used in my remarks to council were isolated incidents that I chose to emphasize for political weight, to back up our request for a patrol officer downtown,” she said in an email Saturday.
“I don’t think there’s a crime issue downtown,” Robertson said in an interview Friday.
“It’s not that they feel unsafe as much as they don’t feel as safe as they used to.
“It’s more that people don’t like homelessness.”
Sanda Hart, owner of Moxie Boutique on North Laurel, takes her store garbage out herself to the alley garbage container rather than have her employee do it.
“I don’t want them to feel unsafe,” she said.
Hart said the alley has become a gathering place for people she thought were doing drugs by smoking pipes but were not aggressive toward her, she said.
The situation appears to have improved after Downtown Resource Officer Dallas Maynard paid a visit, she said.
Statistics show criminal activity in Port Angeles dropped from 2,343 in 2012 to 2,210 in 2013, a 5.7 percent decline, according to police records.
Totals for reported crimes were not available for 2014.
But Maynard, who works 10-hour shifts Sundays through Tuesdays, received 1,573 calls from Jan. 1 through Nov. 30, 2013, compared with 1,416 from Jan. 1 through Nov. 21, 2014, the last date for which figures were available Friday.
When a downtown resource officer was hired about 10 years ago, the department was taking 3,400 calls from the downtown area, Gallagher said.
Now, it’s about 1,600 a year.
“The downtown resource officer program has been a great success,” he said.
But the downtown area still has its issues, Gallagher acknowledged.
“There’s no question there’s an element downtown that a lot of people find to be unsavory,” he said.
“I believe downtown has become a less comfortable environment over the last couple of years.
“You hear we’ve got a lot of homeless people and transients, but we don’t know if they are homeless or transients.
“You hear a lot of people are bused in from out of the area, but there’s no evidence of that.”
Department staffing levels will remain constant for 2015, according to the preliminary budget, meaning a second downtown officer will not be funded.
Gallagher added that Port Angeles already doesn’t have the same staff resources as comparable cities such as Aberdeen.
Safety hasn’t been an issue in Port Townsend, according to Officer Patrick Fudally, Police Department spokesman.
Instead of fears of burglary, assault or other crime, complaints in Port Townsend generally are about trash or temporary campsites being set up on business property, Fudally said.
“We’ve always had a pretty consistent homeless level,” he said.
“Not a lot of people have expressed concern about their safety.”
Kathy Morgan, program and asset manager for Olympic Community Action Programs, said she has seen homeless people sleeping in downtown Port Townsend.
“We have a lot of business owners who are very sensitive to that,” Morgan said.
“If that occurred, or they saw someone who needed help, they call our agency or the ministerial association or someone to come and talk to someone and see if they are OK and see if they can help them.”
Homelessness in Clallam County declined by 13.5 percent, according to a one-week point-in-time count in January.
It chronicled 352 people who were homeless or at risk of being homeless compared with 407 in January 2013.
Martha Ireland, executive coordinator of Serenity House of Clallam County, which conducted the census, said there has been a noticeable increase in poverty, and with it, panhandling.
“I believe poverty is more visible,” she said Friday.
“For some people, panhandling becomes their job, and that’s how they treat it.”
Bob Lumens, owner of Northwest Fudge and Confections downtown, said the concerns were much ado about nothing.
“There’s always been homeless people, and always people who have panhandled,” said Lumens, also president of the Port Angeles Downtown Association.
“Hang out in Pioneer Square [in Seattle] if you want to see what real ugly looks like.”
Angela Oppelt, co-owner of Next Door Gastropub across First Street from Lumens’ store, said she believes littering is more of a problem than fear of crime.
But she sometimes is fearful for employees who must walk in darker areas of downtown to their cars when they go home, she said.
Gallagher said many people may not realize that unlike other states, it is legal in Washington to panhandle as long as it’s not done aggressively.
Nor is it a crime to sit against a wall with a backpack as long as the sidewalk is not being blocked.
It’s also legal to be drunk in public or to stand on a corner and yell at nothing.
“It is illegal to stand on a corner and threaten,” Gallagher said.
“Our mental health system is broken,” he added.
“We are not able to address some issues that are mental health issues.
“Cops are your court of last resort. We are dealing with failures of other elements of our society.”
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
Managing Editor/News Leah Leach contributed to this report.
