Pinehurst Seattle

Be SMART – Gun Safety to Reduce Child Gun Deaths

As Pinehurst representative on the SPD North Precinct Advisory Council, I bring citizen concerns to the police, and pass information from SPD back to neighbors. This month the guest speaker brought a particularly important topic. I want to call it out, more than just hoping you read the NPAC minutes (I often wonder if anyone reads them!)

Be SMART is a campaign by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America to reduce child gun deaths. See its website: BeSMARTforKids.org. It advocates responsible gun ownership. It puts politics aside, and laws aside – in other words it does NOT weigh in on the pros and cons of gun control. It just wants to teach safe storage of firearms. The premise is that everyone agrees that:

– We all want kids to grow up safe
– We each have the right to decide whether to keep guns in our homes
– It is our responsibility to prevent kid gun deaths

Every year almost 300 kids 17 and under in the U.S. gain access to a firearm and unintentionally shoot themselves or someone else. U.S. kids are 11 times more likely to die by shooting than in the other developed countries. An average of 1300 lives a year of those 17 or under die by gun violence. Almost 500 kids a year die by suicide via guns.

SMART is an acronym for steps you can take to make kids safe from guns –

S = Secure all guns in your home and vehicles. They should be locked, unloaded and stored separately from ammunition. Hiding a gun is not secure; curious kids can find them – 70% of kids under 10 know where their parents store their guns. The majority of school shootings use guns from the home. 4.6 million kids live in homes with guns loaded & unlocked.

M = Model responsible behavior around guns. Be sure all adults in the home are trained in gun use. Model safe handling, such as pointing guns in a safe direction, always treat them as loaded, don’t rely on the gun’s safety lock.

A = Ask about the presence of unsecured guns in other homes your kids go to. Talk to family and caregivers. Volunteer information about guns in your home.

R = Recognize the risks of teen suicide. Suicide is an impulsive act & unlikely to be tried again. Gun suicide attempts result in death 85% of the time.Unsecured guns in the home are a risk factor for suicide. Signs of risk are changes in mood or behavior, talking about wanting to kill oneself, and feeling helpless. The national suicide prevention lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK.

T = Tell your peers to be SMART. Talk to family, friends, and neighbors about gun safety. Volunteer to be a BeSMART presenter. Since May 2005 over 2000 volunteers have trained to present the program.

King County has a Lok-It-Up website about safe gun storage here.

Seattle’s responsible storage legislation will go into effect February 13, 2019. See announcement.

2018 Taste of Eritrea

On October 6, meet your Eritrean neighbors and enjoy great Eritrean food at Taste of Eritrea, hosted by Hope Eritrean Social Services and the Holy Trinity Eritrean Orthodox Church, from Noon to 7 p.m. at 12327 15th Ave NE. Lunch ticket is $20.

D5 Forum on 2019-20 City Budget

On September 26, the D5 Community Network is hosting a forum on the 2019-20 City of Seattle budget with District 5 Councilmember Debora Juarez, City Budget Director Ben Noble, and City Council Staff Director Kirstan Arestad. See the flyer below. The meeting will be from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Bitter Lake Community Center, 13035 Linden Ave. N.

This meeting will be a kind of training session for community advocates. You will hear highlights of what is in the Mayor’s proposed budget for key issues of interest to District 5, how citizens can most effectively advocate for the issues of most interest to them, and Councilmember Juarez’s priorities for this two-year budget cycle. There will be a 50-minute question and answer period for budget-related issues. By agreement with Councilmember Juarez, approximately half of this time will be set aside for written questions submitted that night, with additional questions submitted by community organizations in the district.

North Precinct Advisory Council Minutes for September 2018

This month NPAC met at its new venue, Cascadia Elementary at 92nd and Wallingford. The guest speakers made a Be SMART presentation, on responsible gun ownership, to safe kids’ lives. The campaign is above politics; it merely offers commonsense practices to reduce gun violence to children. I will make a separate post about this topic. In other precinct news, compared to last year, year to date, person crimes are up 2% and property crimes are down 3%. In particular, car prowl is down 14% but car theft is up 10%. While robbery is up 6%, the captain pointed out that 88% of robberies are shop lifting that turn into robbery when shop personnel accost a shoplifter and the personnel is assaulted.

The north precinct had 842 registered Night Out block parties, far more than any other precinct (even taking into account that ours is twice as big as other precincts).

Read all the minutes here.

Urban Survival Skills

Check out the upcoming “Urban Survival Skills” fair – fun and informative!
Sunday, Sep 30, 10am to 2pm
Near the Victory Heights park
(NE 106th St between 17th and 19th Ave NE)

September is National Preparedness Month.

Kids’ Art in Pinehurst Pocket Park

Well, this month it’s a pastel pencil drawing by an adult. Come enjoy the park anyway, at NE 117th St & 19th Ave NE. Parks Department fixed the water spigot so volunteers have been watering the plants the community planted last fall. They’re looking good!

If you would like to submit your child’s artwork (or yours!) for the Pocket Park, please email nancy@pinehurstseattle.org.

Earthquake Drill Practice September 15

Everyone is welcome to participate in Victory Heights HUB’s earthquake drill. See the poster below for details.

Scenario:

Day 3 after a medium-sized earthquake (magnitude 5.0) lasting 25 seconds.

Goals:

Move those papers around and actually match resources and needs
Brainstorm how to shut the Hub down for the night
Continue to educate the community

Advocacy for SPD North Precinct Budget

City Council and the Mayor are starting up the next city budget cycle. This is a good time to get involved and tell them what you want city priorities to be. It’s our civic duty to be involved. Strong citizens result in strong leaders – if we don’t exert our civic muscles, in the vacuum we can get leaders who serve the rich, or corporations, or whomever, but certainly not us. It is not enough to complain to each other about how things are wrong; we must communicate with our leaders (and, by the way, vote for our leaders). Here are the email addresses of city council and the mayor. All you have to do is copy and paste these strings into your email To: line.

harrell@seattle.gov; sally.bagshaw@seattle.gov; lorena.gonzalez@seattle.gov; lisa.herbold@seattle.gov; rob.johnson@seattle.gov; debora.juarez@seattle.gov; mike.obrien@seattle.gov; kshama.sawant@seattle.gov; teresa.mosqueda@seattle.gov

jenny.durkan@seattle.gov

Pinehurst Community Council just sent a letter asking for increased budget for the Seattle Police Department’s North Precinct, which serves Pinehurst. If you would like to advocate for more police around Pinehurst, feel free to use some of the points in our letter and send your own letter:

Dear Council Members and Mayor Durkan,

This is a request for more funding for the SPD North Precinct in the upcoming budget cycle.

Our neighborhood, Pinehurst, is nestled between Northgate and Lake City in the North Precinct. We appreciate Seattle Police Department’s efforts to ensure public safety and respond to our concerns. Besides the patrol officers, the Crime Prevention Coordinator is a wonderfully responsive resource, as is the Community Police Team. In the meantime, we know SPD’s services could be even better, so we are asking you to increase the North Precinct budget so Captain O’Donnell has more resources at his command.

Many people in Pinehurst (as evidenced on our 2000+ member Facebook group, Pinehurst Seattle) are concerned about response time to 911 calls. For instance, in December one member said it took almost 4 hours for police to come after he called 911 saying his car had just been stolen at work around midnight. There is a lot of fear of property crime, and people are not satisfied with police response. North Precinct is the largest geographical precinct in the city. The officers have to reach all corners of the precinct from the one precinct building while traffic is getting more and more congested. We would like the budget to allow for some small satellite offices so patrol officers can be stationed closer to different parts of the large precinct so they can respond faster.

Another way to increase 911 response time is having more officers on patrol. We would like the North Precinct budget to be increased to hire more patrol officers. Having more patrol officers also helps citizens feel that SPD is out there being proactive. We hear VERY often from neighbors that ‘the police just don’t care.’ More patrol officers for the North Precinct will help show citizens that they DO care.

Public perception of police cannot be ignored; it is in the interest of SPD to present a friendly, available, helpful face to the public. Bike patrols help do this. We would like the North Precinct budget to be increased to add more bike officers.

We are looking forward to reimplementation of the Community Service Officer program. We would like CSOs to be assigned to precincts, as opposed to being central, so the officers will get to know their precincts better and be able to help more with neighborhood issues. More bike teams and CSOs dedicated to the precinct will help people feel more connected to SPD and help them see that SPD does care about the neighborhood.

We would like more reported crimes, such as burglaries, to be investigated; it’s very discouraging to report a crime and then never hear another thing about it. This is a disincentive to people calling in crimes, and it also reinforces the belief that the police don’t care. Therefore, we ask for more detectives to be added to the precinct’s Crime Investigation Team.

We look forward to SPD budget increases in the North Precinct to help solve these issues and concerns in Pinehurst. Thank you for the job you do juggling priorities in the city; we know it is difficult!

Sincerely,

Rules for Stopping for the School Bus

School buses will soon roll out across Seattle. Here’s a review of what to do when their red lights flash.

RULE 1 – When you’re behind the bus
Always stop, regardless of the number of lanes. Never try to pass on the right, since that’s where kids are loading and unloading.

RULE 2 – When the bus is coming toward you
Stop unless the road has three or more lanes (at least one in each direction, plus a center turn lane) or the lanes are separated by a physical barrier or median.

Once the red lights come on, you need to stay stopped until the bus driver turns them off.

From Pemco Insurance

District 5 Community Budget Forum

Mark your calendars. District 5 Community Network (D5CN) is hosting another community forum, this time focusing on the city’s budget process. D5 Councilmember Debora Juarez and City Budget Director Ben Noble will be the featured speakers.

The objective of this budget forum is to help the neighours understand the details of the city budget process, including:

How the budget process works
How we as in neighbours can be involved
How the budget matrix among districts gets decided
What happens between the mayor and the City Council in finalizing the budget

Date: Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Time: 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Location: Bitter Lake Community Centre, 13035 Linden Ave N, Seattle, WA 98133

For questions, please contact D5 Community Network at contact@d5cn.org.

Pinehurst Seattle

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