Downtown Resource Officer on Scooter Patrol

The Port Angeles Police Department will be using a Segway Personal Transporter for a 2-week trial period. Basically it’s a $5,500 scooter that runs on a battery, goes 24 miles on one battery charge and goes up to 12.5 miles an hour.

The police department is hoping to be able to buy the Segway after the 2-week trial period. The downtown resource officer will be the first police officer to be trained to use the Segway.

They’re hoping the Segway will provide more effective patrols of the downtown area and the waterfront trail.

Graffiti in Port Angeles

Finally it gets acknowledged in the PDN. Peak’s Pub sure seems to be a favorite target for graffiti “artists.”

This article quotes the police department and the Downtown Association as saying the best way to deal with graffiti is to paint over it quickly. “It discourages taggers from continuing. They don't tag along on it. Someone puts it up and somebody else wants to have their two bits worth. Clearing it up tends to discourage an expansion of the graffiti.”

And yet earlier in the article they said Peak’s Pub was tagged right after the owners had painted over the old graffiti. Wanda Smith — she and her husband Ed are the owners — said: “We got hit a couple of weekends ago, so Sunday we repainted the whole side of the building and by Monday, they’d hit us again. Before the paint dried, they did it again.”

The article also didn’t mention that if your building gets tagged, YOU are in violation of the law until you’ve painted over the graffiti. That’s sort of like prosecuting a mugging victim for vagrancy.

It’s hard to know how much impact there is from graffiti and similar crimes. There are obviously a lot more serious crimes than that. But according to the Fixing Broken Windows theory, these crimes do have a large impact. “Minor” crimes like graffiti, a broken window, garbage on the streets, etc. are causing a blighted appearance which will set the stage for more serious crimes.

This problem needs to be dealt with.