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Like the Metropolitan Improvement District’s safety ambassadors, park rangers will act as unarmed guides who prompt homeless people to move along. Photo by Revel Nt |
The city of Seattle just put out a public relations fire over the discovery that it destroys homeless camps on city property. Now the Parks Department is hiring seven people as park rangers who will have the power to banish people for camping in the city’s downtown parks and committing other violations of park rules.
The rangers won’t be able to do it without a fight, however: The Seattle police union says that it is police work to write parks exclusion notices, which can ban people from parks for days or months, with union president Rich O’Neill threatening to file an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board.
That’s just one of the struggles the Parks Department faces as it advertises to hire the rangers, who are expected to hit the streets in April or May. A total of six unarmed rangers (five full-time and two part-time) will patrol in pairs from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. seven days a week, primarily in nine downtown parks: City Hall, Occidental, Hing Hay, Freeway, Westlake, Victor Steinbrueck, Myrtle Edwards, Waterfront, and South Lake Union.
The mayor’s Downtown Parks Task Force came up with the idea in 2005 and, after failing to get funding in 2006, Parks got the City Council to allocate $462,000 for the rangers last year. Each will wear a green uniform and be part concierge, janitor and community cop, providing directions to tourists, picking up trash, and letting people know when they’re breaking park rules, such as playing a boom box too loud, drinking alcohol, or urinating.
City documents obtained through public disclosure, however, show that the rangers will largely be expected to keep an eye on the homeless and the non-approved meal providers who feed them. The Parks Department also is still hoping to win the police union’s approval for the rangers to write actual tickets with fines for park code violations – something that documents show Mayor Greg Nickels wants but that Parks has temporarily backed away from until it can negotiate the matter with the Seattle Police Officers Guild.
Until such time as they can issue tickets — if ever — a Dec. 10 memo written by the Parks Department’s enterprise manager, Eric Friedli, states that “Patrolling the parks, educating people about Parks Code regulations, and following up on non-permitted feeding programs will remain important parts of the park rangers’ jobs.” A job description posted on the city’s website also lists one duty as “Monitor for unauthorized camping, trespassing, use of loud music, and alcohol.”
With the city actively discouraging meal providers from serving anywhere but an approved site at Sixth Avenue and Columbia Street, David Giles of Food Not Bombs, which has served meals in Occidental Park for 15 years, worries that the rangers will issue parks exclusion notices to members of the group — something Parks spokesperson Dewey Potter says is possible.
“It remains to be seen,” Giles says, “whether it’s important enough to them to keep people from serving outdoors.”
A syllabus for roughly two weeks of training that the rangers will receive includes courses on nonviolent crisis intervention, defusing difficult situations, drug recognition and liquor control, civil rights and city laws, animal control, suicide prevention and Seattle social services, with rangers to carry social service referral information to handout, according to Potter.
The police union’s O’Neill and Tamara Brown, co-chair of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness express concerns, however, about the impact the patrols will have on both officers and the homeless.
Patrols and ability of rangers to issue parks exclusion notices, which not only banish people from parks for a certain period of time but subject them to arrest and jail time should they be found again in any of the downtown parks, won’t solve the city’s lack of shelter, Brown says, and amounts to criminalizing homelessness.
“It’s not offering any solutions other than ‘Get out of the parks,’ which isn’t a solution, because where are they going to go?” Brown asks. “Get out of the park and go where? That’s not a smart thing to do.”
O’Neill agrees, for different reasons.
“These people are out there unarmed, and we have no idea what their level of training is,” O’Neill says. If a ranger ends up in a confrontation with someone in the bushes, by the time he calls for help, “it’s a heated, potentially violent situation… for officers to go in,” he says.
The union also doesn’t want to see work given to the rangers that officers have traditionally done — namely, writing parks exclusion notices. “That will generate a ULP” or unfair labor practice charge, he says, “because that’s what we do: issue parks exclusion notices.”
O’Neill says the union originally filed a “demand to bargain” letter over the proposed ranger program back in October 2006 and has heard nothing from the city since.
“We’re not opposed to park rangers,” he adds. “What we’re opposed to is park rangers taking away a body of work that belongs to police officers by making them ticket writers and enforcement agents. That has to be negotiated.” | 
