Our photo shows a Seattle Police car we saw at Alki Beach early this evening, as the first night after a shooting that killed one person and put three others in the hospital (WSB coverage here). No new developments in the investigation today, SPD tells us. We asked Southwest Precinct commander Capt. Kevin Grossman about the plan for police presence in the days/nights ahead. Here is his reply:
I have requested that the SPD Community Response Group (CRG) increase its presence on Alki on weekday afternoons and evenings, and as we have been doing on the weekends, we will have on-duty officers from the Southwest Precinct assist the Parks Department on the weekdays in encouraging beach fires to be extinguished by 9:30 pm and in closing the beach at 11:30 pm.
We constantly attempt to match resources with predicted needs, which is why we have emphasis patrols on Alki on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. This year, an additional challenge is the reduced police staffing citywide — to include the Southwest Precinct — combined with a rise in gun violence across the city. We want to staff events and areas appropriately, which means utilizing the right amount of police resources for potential hotspots while maintaining sufficient staffing to answer 911 calls.
The man killed last night – whose identity we do not yet know – was the fourth homicide victim in Seattle in a week noted on SPD Blotter. As for police staffing, we’ve been reporting on that for months – here’s some local information and discussion from a report back in January. There have been some major shows of force at Alki, though, most notably one month ago, on the night a crowd estimated at thousands thronged the beach for a party organized via social media (WSB coverage here) and the night after.
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