What safety means to us.

Thank you for posing the question of "What does safety mean" to us on The Bellingham Plan website. We feel that this should be the most important issue for Bellingham to address if we are not going to fall into the collapse and despair facing many other cities.

I would like to begin by describing what safety is not by relating real-life situations in Downtown over the past two years:

1. Female employees downtown who are afraid to walk two blocks to their cars after work in the evenings because of addicts and vagrants hanging around the area.

2. Employees arriving at work in the morning to find their way blocked by threatening addicts and vagrants in the doorways.

3. A family driving down a primary downtown alley from work regularly has their vehicle blocked and pounded on by drug addicts grouped around dealers in the alley.

4. A business owner was trapped in her business for over an hour after closing because a man with drugs and a knife was camped in her doorway. The police did not come.

5. Businesses with tip jars on their counters have to deal regularly with hit-and-run robberies.

6. A female business owner was working late at night with her 2-year-old son by her side. A man began pounding on her store window while yelling that he was going to take the child. When this mother called the police, they asked her if the man seemed mentally ill. When she responded that he obviously was or he would not be doing this, the police refused to come and left her on her own.

7. Families who have worked and shopped downtown for years are often afraid to walk their children downtown where they will be exposed to people on drugs and threatening, irrational behavior.

8. Businesses regularly have vagrants enter their businesses and threaten customers, steal merchandise, and destroy restrooms.

9. After a series of robberies during the middle of the day, a hair salon had to start keeping their doors locked during business hours and just opening them to quickly let customers in or out. That salon is leaving downtown due to the constant lack of safety for themselves and their customers.

10. A local bank has addicts and vagrants constantly hanging out in their drive-through area causing bank customers to no longer want to do business there.

11. People are regularly seen downtown carrying weapons including knives, machetes, and guns. The police cannot respond to reports on these.

12. A city-sponsored operation downtown hands out free needles to addicts which obviously attracts drug use to the area along with the crime that entails. This may make downtown safer for addicts but definitely not for anyone else.

These are just a few of the dozens of examples that have been happening on a regular basis over the past couple of years.

What 'safety means to us' is the elimination of everything listed above in our downtown area. Families visiting or working downtown should not have to be exposed to any of the situations listed above. The downtown areas that are critical to the health of any city should not be centers for drug use, petty crimes, and threatening behaviors. Downtowns should also not be used for drug and mental health treatment centers or places where drug needles are handed out. These are important services but they do not fit with a safe and healthy downtown business district. A neighboring city recently made fun of Bellingham by saying they would never allow those sorts of things to destroy the health of their downtown.

What we desperately need are laws and regulations specific to the needs of a downtown business district and the enforcement of those laws. We also need shelters and treatment centers, but not in the Central Business District where they directly conflict with the sense of safety so critical to the health of downtowns everywhere. Let's not follow the disastrous collapse of Portland and San Francisco where faulty priorities destroyed downtown areas.