By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle Police Department is setting up a permanent “Neighborhood Resource Center” at a Seattle Parks Department building in Magnuson Park in Northeast Seattle and hiring two full-time officers to staff it, with more locations to come.
The department is also “working with community partners from Santos Place and Mercy Housing to address the safety challenges in the area through this program,” according to an internal email from Deputy Chief Yvonne Underwood announcing the new positions.
The park has been a source of neighborhood (and City Councilmember) complaints about loud parties and late-night music for decades, as well as gun violence.
It’s also the location of the low-income housing complex where police shot and killed a pregnant woman, Charleena Lyles, in 2017. Solid Ground operates the apartment complex where Lyles lived and also owns Santos Place. According to a police spokesperson, SPD has discussed operating out of space owned by Mercy Housing, “with appropriate safeguards.”
The new “resource center” appears to be an extension of a pilot SPD did last summer in the park, which SPD has credited with reducing shots fired, robberies, and car thefts in the area.
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But when PubliCola asked about the new resource centers, a spokesperson downplayed the announcement, saying SPD was simply “continuing a program, the ‘Neighborhood Resource Program,” that involves two officers, housed at a Seattle Parks Office in the park” that will not be open to the public.
A search for any past SPD program by this name came up blank, and in a response to followup questions, SPD described the new neighborhood centers as basically glorified restrooms: “These are just breakrooms with a bathroom and a place to lock up coats and non-sensitive equipment,” the spokesperson said.
The new positions will come with premium pay: An extra 1.5 percent of the highest salary available to patrol officers, which currently works out to just over $2,250 a year. Underwood wrote that the officers working at the new neighborhood resource centers would “serve in the selected communities as vehicle, foot, and bicycle patrol officers” who will engage in “enforcement and non-enforcement capacities/activities” and “[m]aximize police visibility and citizen contact.”