Auburn public officials want to talk about crime and safety

Safe Auburn: Community Conversations Part 2 coming to four sites in January.

By Robert Whale • January 10, 2025 7:30 am
On Jan. 14, the city of Auburn will roll out Safe Auburn Part 2, a series of meetings where attendees may ask city officials questions about the uptick in crime in their neighborhoods and what the city is doing about it. At one of last year’s meetings, attendees suggested at least one possible improvement – more National Night Out events with the Auburn Police Department in city neighborhoods. Photo courtesy of City of Auburn
On Jan. 14, the city of Auburn will roll out Safe Auburn Part 2, a series of meetings where attendees may ask city officials questions about the uptick in crime in their neighborhoods and what the city is doing about it. At one of last year’s meetings, attendees suggested at least one possible improvement – more National Night Out events with the Auburn Police Department in city neighborhoods. Photo courtesy of City of Auburn

Safe Auburn: Community Conversations Part 2 hits the ground running in two weeks.

It’s one more opportunity for Auburn residents concerned about safety in their neighborhoods to gather, answer questions from city officials and propose solutions.

The Part 2 meetings, however, will differ in one key respect from those that took place in Part 1, as Mayor Nancy Backus noted in her weekly online newsletter.

“Last time around,” Backus said, “we asked you to do most of the talking, so please come ready to hear from us, with updates. We heard your concerns and listened to your ideas. Some of those we have already been doing, others will be acted upon in the future.”

“Over the holidays,” Backus added, “our team has been hard at work preparing Part 2 of our Safe Auburn: Community Conversations series.”

Backus, city staff, city councilmembers, Police Chief Mark Caillier and others will be at all of the meetings, listening and taking notes. Auburn School District Superintendent Alan Spicciati will be at every meeting except the first one.

To get a general taste of what it’s about, the 60 city residents who came to Chinook Elementary School’s library on Oct. 24, 2024, for the final gathering of that year’s series discussed traffic scofflaws, public safety and the recent uptick in crime in their neighborhoods. Among the many proposed, community-based solutions were a greater police presence and more police-community events like block watches.

Topics are not set in stone because issues can and do differ from neighborhood to neighborhood, but here is a brief sampling of what attendees had to say the Chinook Elementary School gathering, starting with traffic.

“I don’t believe it’s enough, just pulling people over and giving them tickets for running a red light, for running stop signs, or speeding, racing — you hear them all day long. What is our police department doing about that, and further about curtailing some of the violence and bad activities?” one woman asked her small group.

Caillier said all Auburn officers are fully authorized to make traffic stops, but if they are responding to a higher priority event, they may have to leave that stop. The city’s traffic unit, he said, logs many traffic complaints online, from speeding to people using their cellphones, and officers will respond to those.

At that moment, Caillier noted, the APD was short on officers.

“Right now, there are four traffic officers, so it’s kind of a smaller unit, but it’s what we have, and they try to address the needs in every district in the city,” Caillier said. “So, they do selective enforcement.”

“Auburn is big, so 128 is a good number of officers to have,” Backus then told the gathering. “Law enforcement in Washington in 2020 and beyond lost a lot of officers, some who left the state to pursue their law enforcement careers in other states, and others who got out of law enforcement altogether. It’s just not as attractive anymore.”

“We’re bouncing back from that,” Backus said, adding, “if you know anybody who’s an officer, please send them our way. We have not lowered our standards, but there are things that perhaps would have kept someone from being an officer in the past that will not keep them from being an officer today.”

Caillier said the recent uptick in youth violence at that time involved juveniles who weren’t from Auburn, but had come here to commit crimes. He said many of the incidents were probably connected to 15 to 20 juveniles and it was happening throughout the region.

“It’s the kids,” said one man, who lives at the bottom of Muckleshoot Hill and had seen several incidents there. “I’ve seen video of them shooting at people and shooting up the mall. … Two weeks ago, they drove up and shot my neighbor’s house all up with 32 rounds. They shot out a window a few feet from my head where I was lying in bed.

“Yeah,” the man continued, “I know there’s all kinds of problems with traffic and and other stuff, but I’m more concerned about holding people responsible, and kids responsible for what’s going on, and gang violence, and what we’re going to do about it. Because it’s ridiculous, so ridiculous.”

Here is the meeting schedule for the Part 2 meetings:

West Auburn High School: 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 14

Mt. Baker Middle School: 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 23

Auburn Mountainview High School: 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan, 28

Chinook Elementary School: 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 6