Seattle Neighbors Build Street Barricades to Stop Nightly Shootings | City Refuses to Help

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:02]In North Seattle, by necessity and even emergency, residents are now discovering the utility of walls. But no, these aren't the racist authoritarian walls many call for 12,200 m south. These are inclusive walls. Actually, they are clearly labeled all are still welcome here. It's not about blocking people.

[00:00:24]It's just about the tactics that certain people deploy. And yes, for whatever ineffectiveness these barriers look like they'd have against foot traffic, that is the point. These are installed to obstruct cars as the preferred means of conducting driveby shootings and getaway routes from shootings conducted nearby.

[00:00:43]These are walls constructed with love, not hate. That's the difference. Mostly the love of not getting shot. Aurora Avenue is a major north south Seattle traffic artery running parallel with Interstate 5 with many residential neighborhoods off the side streets. And recently these neighborhoods are becoming practical war zones. Street shootings multiple times a week, sometimes nightly and residents frustrated with a lack of intervention from the city and police. It comes after residents like Kate and Peter say they've documented at least eight shootings in about the past month.

[00:01:20]within roughly 10 blocks of their homes.

[00:01:24]>> We celebrate when there's not a shooting.

[00:01:28]>> Dozens of bullets ripped through this North Seattle neighborhood along Aurora Avenue, striking homes and sometimes blasting in the bedrooms where children sleep.

[00:01:36]>> Seattle police say when they arrived, they found 40 shell casings. Rudy Pantoya shared this surveillance video with Fox 13.

[00:01:44]>> It's like again, you know, when is this stuff going to stop? Well, it'll stop when the city and law enforcement actually get serious about arresting and imprisoning the people doing it. But that simple reality remains elusive, as it's not just the shootings that are under policed. It's the causes of these shootable disputes, too. It's apparently an ongoing turf war related to prostitution in the area. This is pimp on pimp, perhaps pimp on hoe or even ho ho violence. Turf wars erupt between armed groups involved in prostitution and other crimes along this troubled North Seattle corridor.

[00:02:22]>> We have nightly prostitution. We have the the gun violence that is coming along with it.

[00:02:27]>> If you can shoot freely in Seattle, well then you can certainly love freely too or in this business love for a mutually agreeable fee. Likewise, Seattle police are trying new reformed methods of intervention in this criminal arena too.

[00:02:42]instead of the traditional approach of actually arresting the offenders.

[00:02:46]Prostitution is still illegal in Washington state, even if it is de facto legal in this particular area of the city. It's just the policing isn't serious. In recent months, Seattle PD has tried a new method of enforcement.

[00:03:00]They find where the action is going down. They take a photo of the car and they send the photo to the car owner to say, "Hey, we saw what you did. Don't do that again." Yeah. In other contexts, we call that a peeping tom, not police work. Besides, these photos are more likely to be used in promotional brochures for these prostitutes to advertise their services to clients than they are to actually deter them. Cuz it turns out it's pretty tough to embarrass or shame a prostitute any more than she's doing to herself already. So without effective police intervention either in the shootings or in the ongoing sex trade that motivates them, neighborhood residents have been effectively abandoned to install their own solutions, hence the street barriers. They're really just planters filled with anything heavy, but they are strong enough to block cars. You can't just move these makeshift barricades out of the way. And you can see here they're made of dirt, gravel, chunks of concrete, and even logs. What's bizarre is that for several of these local news stations investigating, the story is the barriers. The story is not the constant shootings, at least primarily. Neighbors block roadway. That is the headline.

[00:04:12]Somehow nightly shootings are just a given, only a supporting premise, otherwise unworthy of the headline itself. One of these reporters is even self-aware. The conflict is the neighborly intervention. The conflict is not the shootings themselves. Another conflict divides North Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood.

[00:04:31]>> Is either this or bullets in my neighbor's houses.

[00:04:34]>> Not gunfire, but how far residents are going to stop it. And you might think that for a city that loves to protest, even with frequent street obstructing tactics, even sometimes to fatal effect, that the simple right of not getting shot in your home, would be welcomed into the everexpanding blob of worthy progressive causes. But nope, this is the one protest that has finally gone too far. Some say it goes too far.

[00:05:02]>> It's not a good way to protest. Um, it doesn't solve anything.

[00:05:06]>> Well, I noticed there's no reference provided for the last time that a Seattle protest actually did accomplish anything. So, that seems like a bit of an unfair standard. But, of course, to call this a protest isn't strictly accurate either. These neighbors didn't install these barricades to bring attention to themselves or to convince someone of their perspective or to win an argument. They did it to avoid getting shot or at least to reduce the likelihood.

[00:05:32]>> Our neighbors put these up in self-defense. But whatever the aim, whether practical self-preservation or just the cause of anti-shooting awareness, for some reason, in the same town where obstructive tactics have been used routinely for years themselves, creating lawlessness with deadly results and tens of millions of dollars in liability for the city. Suddenly, those same tactics are now unacceptable.

[00:05:59]And this particular objector looks exactly like you'd expect him to. I just don't think that this is the right fix.

[00:06:06]Doing it yourself, I don't think is right.

[00:06:09]>> Just my guess. But I doubt that calling the racist police is an acceptable solution for this guy either. Not that they'd do anything anyway. But if calling the police is unacceptable and defending yourself is also unacceptable, what solutions are available? Just die at the hands of thugs? Probably. I guess if anyone would sign up for such abuse, it would be this guy begging to get his man bun pulled.

[00:06:36]But again, these neighbors understand they aren't solving anything or everything. They're just doing something, anything in the context of exactly that unworkable situation.

[00:06:47]>> It's not a fix for sure. It's a band-aid. This is Tylenol for stage 4 cancer.

[00:06:53]>> They tried going to the doctor and the doctor refused to help them. So, sure, we can look at their Tylenol chugging and mock it as silly and ineffective, and it probably is, but it's really all they have. In a letter that these neighbors have included on the barriers to provide explanation to those inconvenienced, they say they've been trying to work with the city on this issue for 3 years. They say that the Seattle Department of Transportation previously agreed to block these side streets just as they have as a shooting deterrent, but the mayor's office never took action to make that happen. Other neighbors say the same. Go ahead, call the city or the mayor's office and watch nothing happen.

[00:07:33]>> They say they've reached out to Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson's office, the city council, and Seattle police.

[00:07:38]>> And what we've gotten is a lot of nothing.

[00:07:41]>> Last week, neighbors sent two emails asking the city to declare an emergency on Aurora, and also threatened legal action. They made several demands such as enforcing Seattle's soap law aimed at curbing sex trafficking.

[00:07:52]>> We said a deadline of Monday. Somebody said, "That's a holiday." I said, "That's great. The pimps don't take holidays. Now, >> of course, I don't know how these individuals voted. And regardless of how they did or did not, they do have a right to change their minds when confronted with shootings to disprove their prior politics and to defend their lives and property from those shootings.

[00:08:13]But also fair to say that this non-law enforcement approach is exactly what the city overall voted for, including this specific area of North Aurora Avenue.

[00:08:24]They voted for new self-described socialist mayor Katie Wilson who in 2020 as an activist with the transit writers union advocated for a future quote entirely without the Seattle Police Department. 6 years later and that future is here affirmed by Seattle voters who now get to enjoy life without that pesky abusive police intervention and as a result the necessity to intervene on their own. Now, in fairness, Mayor Wilson did soften her police stance somewhat for her campaign last year, saying she favors not no policing, but instead community policing, whatever that means, because quote, "Public safety isn't a binary choice between no policing and arrest everyone and throw them in jail." Well, it kind of is, though, with just one technical qualifier. It's not arrest everyone obviously, but it is arrest everyone who commits crimes because until you do they will continue to commit crimes and victimize good people.

[00:09:26]But the area residents quoted in the news coverage continue to insist it's some kind of complex mystery.

[00:09:33]>> I think it needs to be a more community effort because the the issue with gun violence is that it's systemic. Um it's not just solved by like putting up some barriers in some streets.

[00:09:42]>> Okay. So, how is it solved then? And outside of arresting the people committing the shootings and locking them in prison for a very long time to think about it, what solution hasn't Seattle or broader Washington state tried? Community solutions. That is the mayor's platform. That's what she's doing right now. Passive police observation and sending offenders warnings in the mail is not working. Ban the guns. Yeah, that's been a Washington state political priority and so-called achievement for the last decade plus.

[00:10:15]Universal background checks, red flag law, mandatory safe storage, ghost guns banned, highcapacity mags banned, assault weapons banned, permit to purchase in progress. Please, we can't ban any harder. Meanwhile, Seattle police have been reduced to mere crime spectators instead of crime stoppers.

[00:10:35]And despite all of this creativity otherwise, the only solution that hasn't been seriously tried is the most obvious one. Arrest the criminals and remove them from society. No matter their demographics, no matter their living conditions or lifestyles, no matter whatever supposed sympathy deserving characteristics they may have, because crime must be brought to justice for its own sake on moral principle. There are no special circumstances that make it acceptable. The only thing that matters to inform our approach to crime is the basic truth that some people insist on bringing the fight. And so we have to fight them. Anything softer is surrender and will necessarily be conquered. It seems like every case for soft policing ignores that basic truth and inserts its own delusion in its place that fundamentally everyone's really a good guy. So if we're just nice to people, surely they'll be nice to us in return.

[00:11:34]No, they will not. Some people are bad.

[00:11:38]Some people are evil. Some people, if unopposed, will attack, steal, even kill until someone gives them a forceful reason not to because they have no moral restraint against those things themselves. Some people only speak in the language of violence, in other words, and thus we all have an obligation to be fluent ourselves because otherwise evil wins. Either we as citizens take that obligation seriously or we delegate it to police or both. But if nobody bears that responsibility, we're banned from defending ourselves and police are reduced to paparazzi photographers instead of law enforcement agents, well then the bad guys run society. I say that like the latter choice is somehow unacceptable. Clearly not. Cities like Seattle choose it every day and still do, even when their homes and businesses are riddled with the consequent bullet holes. The only thing more naive than thinking one of those rounds isn't coming for your face very soon. Is this insistent bet that the bad guys will one day soon turn good, that we just haven't been quite nice enough to them yet. But once they see how nice we really are, they'll change. And speaking of bets, I would bet comfortably that Seattle will elect one of these gunslinger pimps before they'll ever actually get serious about arresting any of them. And ironically, that guy would probably be an improvement, too, cuz at least that pimp would have some actual business experience to push back on all this nonsense. Thanks as always for listening and for supporting this channel. Always appreciate that thoughtful discussion down below and especially over on X that is ML Christensen. You're always welcome to coming out and chatting my live streams is live on Wednesday and Sunday nights. Looking forward to it. Goodbye.

[00:13:30]Well, if you made it all the way to the end of the video, that means you probably found some value in the video.

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