Gun Fights, Machetes, and Murder

On July 5, Seattle police officers worked late into the evening
pulling bullet fragments out of the walls of the Garfield Community
Center on 23rd Avenue and East Cherry Street. Just before 7:00 p.m., a
group of young men and women had been sitting on the steps of the
community center when a green Chevy Blazer pulled up to a stoplight.
According to a police report, the driver of the SUV opened fire on the
group, shooting off two to five rounds—striking a 16-year-old
girl in the right buttock and a 25-year-old man in the leg and
abdomen—before speeding off.

This isn’t the first time gunfire has erupted outside of the
community center, which is adjacent to Garfield High School and the
Garfield Teen Life Center on 23rd Avenue. On Halloween in 2008,
15-year-old Quincy Coleman and his 16-year-old friend were shot near
the community center. Coleman died from his injures. Two months later,
former Franklin High School basketball star Donnie Cheatham was blinded
after he was shot in the temple while walking outside of the community
center.

Community centers are supposed to be safe places for kids, to draw
them away from gangs and guns. Under the city’s Youth Violence
Prevention Initiative, a $9 million program introduced by the mayor
last year to reduce youth and gang violence in Seattle, some community
centers will become a staging ground for targeted intervention and
prevention programs designed to reduce youth violence by 50 percent.
Community centers are supposed to be safe harbors for kids to take up
basketball and tae kwon do—rather than assault and
robbery—but that $9 million is spread over two years and only a
fraction of it goes to community centers. For instance, several million
will go the city’s Human Services Department for things like
anger-management and youth-employment programs.

According to records obtained from Seattle Parks and Recreation,
community centers in South Park and Rainier Beach and the Southwest
Community Center in the Roxhill neighborhood have experienced problems
with fights, gang graffiti, car prowls, and guns in the last three
years. Police records from the last month also indicate problems at
centers in Alki Beach, Lake City, and Yesler Terrace.

On June 20, a group of teen boys flashed a gun at several girls
outside of the Alki Community Center. A day earlier, police responded
to the community center after a teenage girl reported she was robbed
for her cell phone. According to a police report, the teenage girl
asked a male friend to hold her iPhone while she tied a friendship
bracelet to his wrist, then another boy approached them, punched the
boy in the face, and took off with the phone.

That same evening, police busted a teenage boy for carrying a
machete and a three-inch knife in a park next to the Lake City
Community Center—which unlike other community centers is owned,
but not run, by the city—after they caught him smoking pot
outside of a dance at the center, a report says. On June 24, a
26-year-old man also reported being robbed near the Yesler Community
Center by a group of teens, who punched him before making off with his
cell phone and wallet.

In the last year, car prowlers have plagued the Rainier Beach
Community Center; staff members, internal reports say, believe several
teen boys are behind the break-ins. A group of teen boys flashed a gun
at a woman near the South Park center in January 2008, and in June
2007, a police officer used pepper spray to clear the dance floor at a
late-night teen event after a group of boys began brawling at the
Southwest Community Center.

Despite the spate of recent incidents around community centers,
Seattle parks department spokeswoman Dewey Potter does not believe
there is a widespread problem and says kids still see community centers
as safe places. “During the shootings outside of Garfield,” Potter
says, “kids ran into the community center because they felt it was a
safe and neutral place.” However, one staff member at the Garfield
Community Center says a number of families stopped coming to the
program following the shootings. Potter adds that parks officials have
begun meeting with the police department to keep up on “trouble spots”
like the Rainier Beach and South Park centers.

City council member Bruce Harrell, the vice-chair of the council’s
public-safety committee, believes some centers should have more
structure and be staffed with police officers, as several schools were
last year. But there are no current plans to assign cops to community
centers. Harrell has been working on a plan to enlist an army of
volunteers for an at-risk-youth mentorship program, but that’s a ways
off. “If you’re dealing with higher numbers [of kids] without a
necessary agenda, the result could very well be chaos and fights,”
Harrell says. “Unless we have some structure, we could inadvertently
create the same kind of atmosphere we don’t want to create.”