A Look Into Crime Downtown
It was about 1:30 a.m. Millie Lovett, then director of operations at The Blue Note, was about to lock up the venue for the night. For most of her six years working at The Blue Note, she’d leave around 2 or 3 a.m., but that night’s show ended earlier than usual, around 11 p.m. With all the other employees gone by midnight, Lovett had time to wrap up some last-minute work before heading out.
“I always tried to park my Jeep right in front of doors so it was only about 10 feet away when I’d leave,” she says. With her overstuffed work bag tucked behind her, her car keys in her right pocket, a small pocket knife she often used to open boxes in her left pocket and her car only feet away, Lovett locked the three front doors and walked by to check each one, one last time, when she heard people talking loudly behind her. as she turned to walk to her car, they crossed the street toward her and asked for a light.
“I was already smoking a cigarette, so I couldn’t really say no,” she says. But as he got closer, Lovett began to get nervous. “I could tell they were pretty intoxicated.” She passed him the light. The larger man was in front of her, one man was between her and her vehicle, and the third man walked behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. Then the man in front grabbed her arm, and they began steering her toward the alley between
The Blue Note and Coffee Zone. Lovett continued to resist and talk back when she remembered her pocketknife. She opened it in her pocket, cutting her leg in the process, and pulled it out.
“That’s when I started acting crazy,” Lovett says. She waved her knife in the air and began alternating between speaking gibberish and screaming at the top of her lungs. “I just went ballistic.”
The men called her crazy and ran off in three different directions.
“I ran to my Jeep, locked the doors and cried until I could drive,” Lovett says. As she headed home, she heard police sirens south of Broadway. When she arrived home, she posted about her ordeal on Facebook.
“The next day, the chief of police called my cell,” Lovett says. So she told him the story, and he told her that officers would stop by The Blue Note later that evening to take a statement. “And he asked me why I didn’t call the police. But I knew they were busy, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.”
On the rise?
From 2010 to 2014, calls for service and reports taken by the Columbia Police Department in beat 70D, which basically aligns with the boundaries of downtown Columbia, have increased by 31 percent, according to Columbia Police Department statistics.
Many of the crimes that have seen the most statistically significant increases include vandalism (up 97 percent between 2010 and 2014), assistance to citizens (120 percent), peace disturbances (107 percent), parking violations (95 percent) and checking on suspicious persons or activities (134 percent and 152 percent, respectively).
“You see certain things stay very stable, like assaults and burglaries,” says Sgt. Chad Gooch, supervisor of the CPD’s downtown unit. Other things, like shots fired, are statistically immaterial. In 2010, there were no incidents of shots fired, then four in 2011, three in 2012, four in 2013 and one in 2014 in beat 70D, for a 100 percent increase over five years.
Perception versus reality
To better serve residents and business owners downtown, CPD and the Downtown Community Improvement District Board, also known as Downtown CID and The District, are work- ing to conduct a survey of crime perceptions downtown. Gooch, who has been in his role since august 2014, says it’s something that has worked well for his predecessors.
“I think that’s how I’m going to be judged as far as the success of our unit: by perception,” he says. “any crimes that occur downtown are going to be perceived so much differently than somewhere else in Columbia.
Downtown receives more attention; more people have a vested interest in it.”
Skip Walther, an attorney at Walther Antel & Stamper downtown and member of the Downtown CID board, agrees.
“If [anything] occurs downtown, people develop a fear about coming downtown, whether that’s rational or not,” he says. Although Walther can’t recall the last time he’s been downtown after 10 p.m., he’s worked downtown since 1979.
“Crime downtown isn’t the problem that a lot of people think it is,” he says.
Adam Dushoff, co-owner of restaurants Addison’s and Sophia’s, has been on the Downtown CID board for more than six years.
“I think it’s funny how in a town of little more than 100,000 people, there are actual geographic distinctions of where people would and would not go,” he says. Dushoff says he’s never felt unsafe downtown. although he says he’s “been out of the business of being downtown at 2 a.m.” for almost a decade, he hasn’t heard of any late-night issues from his employees at Addison’s, which is located downtown at 709 Cherry St. “But it’s not like I walk down dark alleys when I am downtown.”
Lovett offers a different perspective of safety perceptions downtown. Some people often have to walk down dark alleys; workers must ensure doors are locked and take out the trash. She thinks much of the perception is in response to high-profile people, like her, posting about their experiences downtown. Her post to Facebook after her incident garnered nearly 200 comments. She also cites a couple friends who have posted similar experiences to social media.
“But people have to realize that my thing happened at almost 2 a.m.,” she says. “I had people acting like they were afraid to go downtown for dinner at 7 p.m.”
“It’s like Mom always said: The crazy stuff happens after 1 a.m.,” she continues. “The after hours are where it gets hairy.”
Lovett says what she’s seen the most during the past two years is an increase of people lingering on the streets after bars close. She says even if only a small number of those people are looking for mis- chief, there are so many intoxicated people that are “easy prey for the small percent who want to do people harm.”
But Lovett emphatically says she doesn’t want people to think downtown is unsafe for them.
“Taking out the trash in a dark alley at 3 a.m. is very different from walking down Broadway at 9 p.m.,” she says. “I will always live and work in downtown Columbia.”
Ultimately, the response to various perceptions of crime downtown will be based on the upcoming Downtown CID/CPD survey.
“We have over 400 businesses, so to try to speak for them would be really difficult because every one of them will have a different perception,” says Katie Essing, executive director of the Downtown CID. She hopes whatever appears in the news around the time people take the survey doesn’t color the results. “Surveys can often get swayed by recent news, so then that becomes the main topic of conversation.
“It all depends on what happens to individuals,” she continues. “If something makes them feel unsafe, and they tell their friends, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t go there,’ that is very harmful for an economy, so we want to make sure that people feel safe in any situation downtown.”
Why can’t we all agree?
One topic everyone seems to agree on is that day- time and nighttime downtown are very different, and that has changed significantly during the past 50 or so years.
When Walther was a kid, he says downtown was the only retail area in Columbia. With the addition of Broadway Shopping Center, Parkade Plaza, Crossroads and the Columbia Mall, that all changed.
“For a period of time, Columbia was just offices and banks, with a few restaurants,” he says. “You didn’t have a lot of activity at night, which is when most criminal activity occurs.”
Now, he says, Columbia has seen a resurgence of retail and entertainment business, as well as an ever-increasing student population.
“You have more people coming downtown, more people living downtown and a lot more activity after 10 p.m., and criminal activity is more likely to occur in those later hours,” he says.
Gooch says there’s also a difference in perception of safety based on the time of day someone tends to visit downtown.
“The perception of safety may be different for those heading to lunch downtown and those coming here to go out to the bar,” he says.
Although most of the members of the Downtown CID board are more likely to see the aftermath than the storm — for the most part, they operate daytime businesses — Mike McClung, who owns Tonic and Quinton’s, also sits on the board to represent those late-night concerns. The board also gathers a lot of information from police officers during board meetings and tries to keep all channels of communication open.
“The leftovers definitely get people’s attention,” Walther says. “You can just imagine what’s left on the street after a loud night. It’s a byproduct of an awful lot of younger adults occupying downtown.”
“We have two very different and healthy economies that need to coexist,” Essing says, “and there’s a vastly different audience of customers who are here during the day than are here at night.”
The priorities between these two groups are also different. One main issue is vandalism, which increased by 55 percent between 2013 and 2014. Gooch expects the increase to be even more pronounced in 2015, as most of the vandalism picked up at the end of 2014.
Removing graffiti is a responsibility that often falls to business owners and can take a significant amount of time and effort to remove. at one point, downtown was getting hit with graffiti at several locations every couple of days.
“The problem with graffiti,” Walther says, “is that if it’s allowed to remain in place, some people think it emboldens the graffiti artist to expand on their work.”
CPD has also begun a bike and pedestrian safety initiative, as well as an initiative to improve lighting in some of downtown’s darkest alleys.
Essing took a walk with CPD officers to review and prioritize alleys and try to work with building owners to install LED lights.
“One of the biggest deterrents of crime is light,” Essing says.
Lovett has an even larger initiative. She would like to see more police officers in the downtown unit.
Several years ago, Lovett says she would often ask for a police escort to her car when she felt unsafe.
“Now, I don’t want to do that because I know they’re so busy with other issues,” she says. “The police are doing their jobs. They’re just understaffed.”
So she often walks to her car alone. She also instigated an informal escort service from The Blue Note and would appreciate some sort of escort option for her and others who leave work after midnight or a downtown safety ambassador program of some kind.
Adding officers
In November 2014, Columbia’s Proposition 1 failed at the polls. The proposition, which called for a 30-cent increase of the city’s property tax levy, would have generated an estimated $6 million per year to hire, train and equip additional public safety personnel, including police officers.
“I think people were going through a rather difficult period in municipal government where there was a vocal group of people who expressed dissatisfaction and mistrust with City Hall,” Walther says. “I think to some degree, that sentiment spilled over into [that] vote.”
Walther says the CPD staffing issue doesn’t stop with downtown, and Gooch agrees.
“Manpower is our biggest concern, and we’re trying to do better on that by offering overtime and hopefully expanding our unit,” Gooch says, “but that’s needed department-wide.”
The downtown unit has six officers, one during the day, Gooch as supervisor and four at night. The beat has had an opening for a few months, though it’s currently working to incorporate a new officer.
“Meanwhile, it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a Saturday night and a Wednesday night,” Gooch says.
James Kanne is the owner/operator of 9th Street Public House, and he’s lived in Columbia for more than a decade. On April 28, 2015, Kanne says he heard shots fired right outside his window. He lives across the street from The Blue Note, where a crowd had gathered after a show.
“It was a Tuesday, but now, there’s something going on every night of the week,” he says. “Downtown is also our entertainment district, so there are a lot of people concentrated in one area at a time when tensions are already higher, but that’s the case in any city.”
He says he began hearing people first talk about downtown being unsafe eight years ago. He says now, people have a much better grasp.
“We understand now that, yeah, crime is going to increase because we’re becoming a bigger city,” Kanne says. “It’s a growing pain.”
Gooch says it makes sense that an increase in calls for service has correlated with an increase in population, and Dushoff agrees.
“For so many years, we tried to figure out ways to increase density downtown; every study said we needed that,” Dushoff says, “but we never really considered what we were going to do, police-wise, if we did get that density.
“As that population increases, it’s completely reasonable for more officers to be added to that force,” he adds.
With more officers, Gooch says community policing, where officers attempt to be more proactive and a part of the community rather than just reactive, would be possible.
But it’s also important for businesses to communicate even the little things to the police so they can make informed decisions about their efforts, Dushoff says. To provide an outlet for this, the police are present at every monthly Downtown CID board meeting to provide an update on trends. “And we help pass information between [the businesses] and the police,” Essing says.
But downtown officers face another issue: turnover.
“[Downtown] is a pretty intense assignment,” Gooch says. “Just because of the density of the population and the likelihood of in-progress calls, it’s pretty active. It takes a lot of work and sacrifice, a lot of weekends and late nights.”
When Gooch became supervisor of the down- town unit in august, nearly all the downtown officers also rotated. The unit also handles some of the difficulties of dealing with intoxicated people.
“A good portion of the late-night population downtown is students, and they’re going through a learning process of what’s appropriate, what’s allowed, and it cycles every four years, so we’re constantly educating these people,” he says.
Moving forward
To meet the ever-changing needs of a rapidly evolving downtown landscape, the Downtown CID has brought in a consulting firm, RHI (Responsible Hospitality Institute), to evaluate downtown this summer and recommend infrastructure improvements to initiate prior to students’ return in the fall.
The board has selected a small Transformation Team, including Lovett, to get started with the first round of the evaluation.
The group went out on the Thursday night before the University of Missouri’s Reading Day, a night well known for partying, with a checklist of things to look for, such as police activity, sidewalk congestion, dimly lit passageways, security cameras and disruptive behavior, among others. In June, each member of the team will be asked to select 10 or 12 people for roundtable discussions, which will continue through July.
Essing says safety, along with transportation, noise and other concerns, will certainly come up during those conversations. She appreciates the idea of a late-night security escort service, creating a public safety ambassador program downtown and other unique measures to improve safety, and she’s sure these ideas will be discussed in the upcoming roundtable discussions.
In august, the Downtown CID and RHI consultants will put together action steps and recommendations to keep downtown a safe and attractive place to live and work.
“It takes community involvement to create a safe city: volunteer work, paying attention, looking out for your neighbor,” Kanne says. “It isn’t just a police job; it’s the whole city’s job.”