Jack Nelson stands at the edge of Little Brook Park in Lake City—just a few blocks from the northern Seattle city limits—next to a large, shiny playscape. Around him, used condoms litter the ground and a nearly empty can of Steel Reserve sits in the branches of a nearby tree.

When the city purchased the football field–sized lot—which Little Brook Park now sits on—in 1994, neighbors called it "the last open space in Lake City." Now the area around Little Brook Park has a new name, used by neighbors and police alike: Little Beirut.

"It's basically a war zone," says Nelson, who manages an apartment building overlooking the park. Little Beirut, depending on whom you ask, stretches from about Northeast 130th Street to 145th Street along 32nd Avenue Northeast. "We have a lot of crack-dealing right out in front of the park. We've got winos, we've got the prostitutes—we've got the whole works out there."

In the last few years, neighbors say the park has become a hub of criminal activity. At night, they say, it's filled with drug dealers and prostitutes who bang on passing cars trying to drum up business and who heckle passersby. In late January and early February, Seattle police were called to the neighborhood for several strong-arm robberies, reports of gunfire, and a drive-by shooting.

With an increase in youth violence and gang activity in the South End drawing massive attention from newspapers and the Seattle Police Department, some neighbors have started demanding some attention from the city and the police in the North End. On March 5, residents invited police to a sizable community meeting at the Lake City branch library. At the meeting, residents prodded police about failing to do anything about prostitution—which, SPD North Precinct captain Mike Washburn told residents at the meeting, is "not a high-priority call"—and chided the department for assigning police to set up speed traps near Lake City, rather than dealing with crime in the neighborhood.

Although Washburn did announce at the meeting that the department would add bike patrols in Little Beirut one day a week, Nelson isn't waiting around for SPD to swoop in and clean up his neighborhood.

Nelson is an imposing man. At about six foot three, the denim-clad ex-machinist and shipyard worker looks a bit like Santa Claus, if Santa Claus were a member of the Hells Angels. Because of his intimidating stature, Nelson—a Kansas transplant by way of Lynnwood and Marysville—hasn't been shy about confronting the problems that plague the park just outside his living-room window. He knows the prostitutes in the park by name, he knows which apartment buildings house drug dealers, and he knows which neighbors have put up fences in hopes of preventing any more police foot chases from going through their yards.

"I sit on my couch and watch the park from my front window," Nelson says. "In the summer nights, I can look out the windows and see [prostitutes] being picked up by johns and dropped off 15 minutes later."

Nelson's confrontations with Little Beirut's regulars—he says he's chased "gang bangers" and their pit bulls out of the park—have earned him about a dozen death threats from drug dealers in the last three years. "I don't take it much into account," Nelson says, adding—without a hint of irony—that he "know[s] 19 ways to kill a man with one punch."

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Little Brook Park was empty, save for a few children playing. Whether Nelson can take credit or not, SPD will ultimately need to make its presence known to really clean up the neighborhood—a job that may be harder than it sounds. Although SPD is ramping up patrols in Little Beirut, the department may be fighting an unwinnable war against public perception.

At the March 5 meeting, SPD's Washburn told the crowd that the department recently performed an "experiment" in Belltown, parking a squad car on a high-crime corner. After officers made an arrest at the spot, they waited for another squad car to show up and replace them on the corner before leaving. Despite the constant police presence in that part of the neighborhood, Washburn says residents still complained about the department's lack of presence in Belltown.

If the police want a real barometer of how they're doing, they'd probably do well to ask Nelson. For now, Nelson is glad to see the bike patrols through the neighborhood on Friday nights, but he isn't happy about how long it's taken. "I wonder if a bunch of these winos stood in front of Greg Nickels's house and yelled... all night long, I wonder how long it'd take the police to clean it up?" Nelson asks. "I bet pretty fast."