The monthly East Precinct Crime Prevention Coalition meeting is an opportunity for City of Seattle safety officials to meet with the community and for community members to sound off on crime issues near their homes or businesses. Here are the CHS takeaways from last night’s January session.

• City Attorney Pete Holmes was the guest speaker. He spent his time framing his approach to law and order and justifying the exit of some City Attorney staff the crime meeting regulars had grown accustomed to working with. There were a few awkward questions about liaison Tienney Milnor (whose exit we covered here) and prosecutor Bob Hood (who blasted Holmes in a bitter letter) both of whom were active in the Central District’s Drug Market Initiative effort to clean up 23rd and Union.

  Declining to comment on any specific ‘personnel matters,’ Holmes said, “We had a transition period. It’s behind us. We’ve made all the cuts we’re going to make in this office.”

  Holmes said he intends to lead the City Attorney’s office to “a re-dedication to what the central mission is. Not simply a mission to obtain convictions. It’s a mission to do justice.”

  Asked by a community member whether his stance on drug prosecutions would weaken efforts like the DMI, Holmes said he still wants police officers to have the ability to intervene when they see people doing something illegal like smoking marijuana. Holmes said his office will treat prosecutions in situations involving a program like the DMI on a case by case basis.

“As long as marijuana remains a crime,” Holmes said, “officers who witness someone with marijuana have the right to detain.”

“It’s about limited resources — we take care of genuine threats first”

Call Your Mom, She Worries by avitania.
• From the community reports section of the meeting, there were only a few Capitol Hill speakers along with a dozen or so from the Central District. One woman reported having read about area strong arm robberies on CHS and being doubly concerned when a strange man followed her a few weeks ago. A man commended police saying he had never seen such a decrease in the drug trade on Broadway. Another said he didn’t have much to report and that he had walked from Capitol Hill to the meeting location at the Vocational Institute at 23rd and Jackson and that is had been very pleasant — but he did say that one of the last remaining pay phones on Broadway is being used by junkies (“sometimes lined up 10 deep”). He says the phone even has a sign on it. Junkie Phone.

  CHS asked about the strong arm robberies we’ve reported lately and the recent report of shots fired in I-5 Shores from a few weeks back.

  East Precinct Commander Capt. Jim Dermody was on hand to answer many of these Capitol Hill concerns and the Central District issues.

  He told CHS that his Precinct hasn’t yet identified a significant increase in street robberies and is not currently planning an increase in patrols on the Hill. He also didn’t have additional information about the shots fired report but did provide some interesting information regarding November’s shooting on Union at Boylston.

  You can get a rundown of the CD notes from Central District News.

• We also encouraged the meeting organizers to schedule more of the monthly meetings on the Hill, thanks.
• One Central District issue of note spans the fuzzy borders into Capitol Hill. Dermody said burglaries are ‘driving me nuts’ and told the audience his detectives have identified a group of a dozen or so people — most juveniles — who are behind many of the recent burglaries in the area. Dermody said that it’s a group of high school-aged kids registered at Garfield and that the Precinct is pulling out the stops to haul the teens in and keep them detained longer in an effort to break the current cycle of quick releases from juvenile detention facilities. More at CDNews.
• Dermody also briefly noted Wednesday’s death behind the apartment building at Roy and Boylston. Dermody said police are certain the death was a suicide and that it was a very sad incident for his officers to respond to.
• Jim Kenny was introduced as the new liaison between the City Attorney’s office and the precinct replacing Milnor. In a budget directed shift, Kenny will serve as liaison for the West Precinct also. Busy man.