Getting tough on violence: Neighbors try to save South Delridge from crime
 |
|
||||||||||
Some people know it as South Delridge, the neighborhood that straddles the southwest stretch of the city limits and bleeds over into White Center.
Some people call it Rat Center. Census tract 114. The Triangle.
Over the past couple of decades this neighborhood also has become known as tough, crime-ridden. Delridge Way carves a seam down its middle like railroad tracks, but lately it seems every side is the wrong side.
"It's a very tough little area," said Wayne Lennon, a civilian who has been working with the Seattle Police Department to coordinate anti-crime efforts in the area the past 10 years.
But South Delridge is a scrapper, and so are the people in it, immigrants from El Salvador, Cambodia, Vietnam, Russia and Mexico. Blue-collar workers looking for affordable housing, looking for a foothold.
But despite the poverty and the language barriers, South Delridge is starting to organize.
In the past year or two, a small group of neighbors has created a "Triangle Coalition" to reclaim the neighborhood and has made limited progress.
Chris Vike has organized summer block parties that brought gang members and longtime residents to the same barbecue. Lennon organizes block watches. Longtime resident Mary Steere tries to dissuade younger teens from joining gangs.
Russell Parks, a carpenter well-known around the Triangle for confronting drug dealers, also pickets absentee landlords. He put a community garden - "Jardin del Barrio" - in the place where three people who had been shot tumbled into his yard last fall.
When the city wouldn't clean up a bus stop after three months without a trash can and a week of neighbors' phone calls, Parks staged a "Delridge Tea Party." He dumped a load of trash at the entrance to City Hall in downtown Seattle, while Steere drove the "getaway car." Four hours later, a new trash can was in place in South Delridge.
"We're not organized enough or yuppified enough to get the services that other communities get," Parks said as he stood in the street, ordering ice cream from a truck for two neighborhood kids, chatting to each other in Spanish. "My community doesn't have the same access to city government because they don't speak the same language."
Ron Angeles, of the city's Department of Neighborhoods, grew up in South Delridge. He says the city has been paying attention to the neighborhood - especially in the past six months since it was named a Neighborhood Action Team Seattle (NATS) project, one of only two such projects in the city.
NATS brings together officials from all city departments to tackle chronic problems in a neighborhood.
Permanent transition
Despite a core of longtime residents, South Delridge has always been in transition.
Historically, immigrants have flocked there. The Hispanic population has quadrupled since 1980; the Asian population has more than tripled. Minorities made up 18 percent of South Delridge in 1980. Now the minorities are the majority, at 53 percent.
But crime, no respecter of language barriers, cultural differences and poverty, hasn't changed much in the Triangle.
"A lot of people are struggling, working to raise their children," Steere said. "And at the same time they're working two or three jobs."
At the end of a long day, some people don't have the energy to organize, to fight crime. And, Lennon said, it's often more difficult to involve immigrants in crime fighting because of police corruption in their native countries and their corresponding lack of trust in law enforcement.
A couple of years ago there was no block watch, no community council. The numbers of burglaries, rapes, robberies, assaults and auto thefts placed the Triangle near the top of the citywide crime index.
Steere, who works as a banquet server, used to sit on her front porch on summer afternoons and watch the drug deals go on right in front of her. Her house has been broken into four times.
Now crime is down some, Lennon said, as it is everywhere. But it remains squarely in the faces of Triangle residents.
Three teens shot
In a year's time, there have been three shootings in the Triangle. Last month two more youths, ages 16 and 17, were shot in front of Parks' house. Just an hour before, Steere, Parks and Vike had intervened in a fight over turf and were pleading with the teens to take care.
"An hour later, I heard gunshots," Steere recalled. "I was unprepared for that."
She ran over to the spot with a blanket to keep one of the wounded boys warm. Neighbors gathered over him to help and to pray.
"He was conscious but couldn't speak," Steere said. "He was staring into space. I was afraid he was dying."
Shot in the head, he is still in the hospital. The other teen was less seriously wounded. The police gang unit has made four arrests.
Steere continues to have dreams about it. Parks was so traumatized he called the community together for a vigil. Later, he found a shotgun shell on his front porch.
The following Thursday, about 30 older residents, community organizers, parents and children from the local community center gathered at dusk in front of Parks' house, standing in the cold and wind that tugged at people's hair and ruffled little girls' lacy anklets. The raindrops were like pinpricks.
The Rev. Ralph Figueroa, pastor at the Highland Park United Methodist Church, said a prayer in Spanish and in English, asking that the violence stop.
They wanted it to be a candlelight vigil, but the wind blew out their candles. So they began a procession, walking around the boarded-up houses, abandoned cars, rolled-up carpets dumped on lawns, feral cats hunched on a truck's bench seat.
The procession stopped in the alley where a teen was killed months before, shot twice in the head. A police cruiser escorted the slow march, blue strobe lights flashing on children's faces. Some people peeked at the grim parade from inside their apartments; some joined in, almost doubling the crowd.
"I was hopeful at that vigil," Lennon said later. "I mean, it was a sad thing. But 60 people showed up. And I hope that the people there saw those 60 other people and knew that there is some strength in numbers."
Modest goal
The alley has since been lighted and regraveled as a part of the Triangle's NATS project. Lennon is trying to set up a community steering council of volunteers. Mayor Paul Schell is due in South Delridge on Saturday. The Triangle Coalition is planning another block party this summer.
Steere said people needed something else to think about besides violence.
But right now the goals are modest, Parks said.
"We don't want anybody shot in the next six months," he said.
Caitlin Cleary can be reached at 206-464-8214 or ccleary@seattletimes.com