Downtown group fights to keep vagrants away
More tourists were flocking to downtown, more shoppers were buying his Indian jewelry, baskets and pottery. The timing seemed right, so McEntire took the plunge and expanded his Desert Indian Shop near the canopy, doubling the floor space.
But today, he's frustrated. Desert Indian's profits are 10 percent less than what they were when McEntire was operating with half the space, he says. Tourists have told him they're afraid to come in. It's not pandora murano glass beads 100% genuine his shop, they tell him it's the vagrants congregating outside.
"I'm about ready to put my shop up for sale," McEntire said of the 35 year old business he's owned for the past 16 years. "Customers see the bums on the benches outside and turn away. They don't feel safe. It's not the trash they leave behind; it's the language they use and the smell."
Metro Police have crafted a plan to keep McEntire and business owners like him from ever having to hang that "For Sale" sign.
Dubbed the "Downtown Business Response Committee," the project's goal is to help downtown business owners and security chiefs take back their properties from the vagrants, drug dealers and prostitutes who have taken root.
It can be done, insisted Sgt. Juanita Goode, "but it means we all have to share the responsibility for the community's problems."
One of Metro's sergeants overseeing the Downtown Area Command's bike team, Goode and her officers have been a useful tool in getting rapid police response to people in need. Cops on bicycles can sneak up on crime that a patrol car would scare off, and they provide visibility that deters crime in pedestrian congested areas like the Experience.
Pedal as they might, though, bike cops can't keep pace.
Downtown business owners who remember frequently seeing bike cops five years ago riding by every day, every few hours, say they rarely see them anymore. Goode blames that on pandora jewelry increasing crime: Bike cops today are taking more reports, making more arrests, working pandora rings on proactive crime fighting projects and circulating in more neighborhoods.
And while the county's exploded with several hundred thousand more residents in five years, only a few more bike officers have been added to the team.
And that's where community partnerships could make a difference.
Still in its formative stages, the committee met for the second time Tuesday. Desert Indian's McEntire was among about two dozen interested business owners and security directors who attended the three hour forum permitting police to explain the odds they are up against and encouraging business owners to think creatively for ways to build a united front against crime.
Both big and small business owners turned out from Main Street Station to the Fremont Mini Mart.
Officer Dan Zenhder, who coordinates the downtown unit's community oriented policing program, explained that criminals' presence is merely the symptom. Ending crime, he says, means putting an end to the reason that initially attracted the criminals.
Zenhder suggested steps as simple as encouraging convenience stores in the area to sell beer pandora charms in six packs rather than individually to reduce the amount of bottles, cans and paper sacks from littering commercial sidewalks and gutters.
Hotel and motel operators should discourage fellow hotel and motel owners who knowingly, and willingly, permit drug dealers and prostitutes to "work" on their properties, police said.
Eugene Hamilton has taken the undercover approach, wandering through the Harley 14k gold charms pandora compatible Davidson shop at Fremont and Fourth Street where he works in his street clothes, to catch shoplifters and vagrants. He goes the extra mile, making citizen's arrests. Hamilton said it's helped to keep riff raff out of the store and keep paying customers coming in.
Tapping an offender's pocketbook is another way to go. Nick Lucas, director of security for Binion's Horseshoe hotel casino, makes sure that anyone they arrest for property crimes pays restitution at sentencing for what they've damaged.
"It's not that $100 worth of damage would hurt the Horseshoe," Lucas said. "But $100 is going to hurt the offender."
McEntire suggested that removing the benches along the Experience would be a logical first step to unseat crime and the vagrancy problem.