Broadcasting the Problem

There's a trend that's been going on recently: publishing photos and videos of alleged criminal behavior online. And it's troubling to me.

Here's the recent Tribune article and the Erik B. blog post about some videos that came out this weekend.

I have to ask ... is this effective?

It seems that the intended goal of the videographers is to get the word out about crime in their neighborhood by posting videos on YouTube and distributing them. Clearly that phase worked, as many blogs and the Tribune have picked it up.

But why YouTube? I assume that the videos are posted for the public's consumption and not for the Tacoma Police (after all, you could just send the videos straight to them if you wanted). Why do that? Here I would assume that the videographer is fed up with the TPD and wants to get the public behind him or her to essentially shame the police into action. So the police try to fix what they might perceive as a black eye, they put more beat cops on the street, and run more patrol cars. Eventually the crime goes away.

Fair enough. It's not that I don't see the logic of the plan, and if you've spent months--if not years--feeling like the police aren't doing their job, I can understand the motivation behind it.

But let's go back to the first part: you are announcing to the world that your neighborhood has crime. So much crime you can film it from your front stoop. It's 24/7, you can literally just walk onto the street and film some crime happening right then ... now come move in to my neighborhood and shop here and go to restaurants so it becomes more vibrant.

The assumption these video posters are making is that crime is keeping people away. And it may be, I suppose. Some people might see a movie at the Grand and then see a drug deal going down on a side street and they might not be willing to come back. But it seems like a lot more people will pick up the paper tomorrow and see, wow, there's crime near the Grand and the police aren't doing anything about it. Maybe I should see a movie at the AMC in UP instead.

It feels to me that sometimes the people giving neighborhoods a bad reputation are the people most invested in seeing it succeed. I don't hear about how bad Pacific Ave is from patrons and customers, I hear it from the owners. But Suite133 is down there, I have dinner down there all the time, and I just don't see the major problems people say are there (admittedly because the problems that do occur largely happen well after I've gone to bed).

A few years ago when I was at the Grand, Marty Campbell and the Stadium Business District worked very very hard to get their neighborhood cleaned up. They had a police representative at monthly meetings. They trained store owners on how important it was to call 911. They cut bushes down that drug dealers would hide behind. They removed pay phones so dealers wouldn't call. They added small spikes to railings so dealers couldn't sit on them. And things got a lot better.

One thing they didn't do was go out and tell their customers through the Internet and the press that their neighborhood was hurting from crime.

Some of my frustration about this issue has been with the response to crime on Pacific Avenue, so I don't mean to harp on the recent videos. But these videos are of my neighborhood, and so I felt compelled to post about it. I've lived here for four years and driven by one of the worst places in town--the so-called Molester Motel on 4th & St. Helens to get to my garage. I've seen many of the problems photographed or filmed.

But the surest way to fight the problems is to get people down here and out on the street (also converting the "Molester Motel" into market rate apartments like the owner promised would be a good start too). And the surest way to keep people away is to let them watch home movies of prostitutes getting in to a john's car on the next block from the safety of their home in a suburban gated community.

I'm not saying that we should lie to people or cover things up. I'm saying ... let's just stop broadcasting it. Keep filming, by all means. It seems to scare drug dealers and johns off the street, so kudos for that. But why broadcast it? Does it really need to go on YouTube?