Bayshore Blvd versus Nebraska Ave
The following email was sent from a neighbor. Having seen the lack of attention brought to our area by Tampa Police, I do feel some of the frustration. Please read on.
FROM EMAIL:
Below are some quotes taken from the Tampa Tribune in Tuesday’s paper. I was outraged to see this article and the comments from the city regarding Gasparilla. I hope you will please post this to our neighborhood blog as we too have been “complaining” and “had enough” with the issues facing our neighborhood. For many in Seminole Heights, the fight has been long fought with very little assistance. For me personally, I have fought for almost 10 years. When my husband and I purchased our home, we had every intention of selling before starting a family. Instead we fell in love with the location and more importantly the neighbors. We have since started a family and pray that our neighborhood safety will improve. I hope you will be outraged as well. What will it take to make things better. Maybe since Mr Corrado is so good at listening and solving problems, he should be promoted to Seminole Heights Prostitution Liaison for a year. Below are quotes and comments. Thanks for posting this, I hope neighbors can come up with some great ideas that we can forward to the city leaders. Your site has proven to be extremely effective in helping solve some of the neighborhood woes. Keep up the effort. Karen G.
FROM THE TAMPA TRIBUNE: http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/feb/02/na-were-changing-the-culture-of-parade/
“Armed with a zero-tolerance policy against drunkenness, indecent exposure and general illegal behavior, Tampa police cracked down and sent a message that past transgressions – which had become somewhat tolerated – will not be taken lightly anymore.”
- If only this “zero-tolerance” policy could be applied to Nebraska Avenue and the prostitution and drug problems.
“We’re changing the culture,” police spokeswoman Andrea Davis said, “changing the way people are going to perceive Gasparilla. We listened to the residents and residents of that area had had enough. It was time to make a change so they could enjoy the parade as well.”
- Residents have had enough??? You mean to tell me that the poor residents along Bayshore have had enough dealing with drunks and partying? ONE DAY A YEAR!!!
Assistant Police Chief Marc Hamlin said the hard-line stance “came about because people in the Hyde Park area, adjacent to the parade route, complained about the bad behavior in their neighborhood – disorderly conduct, public urination and people overly drunk.
- For years, residents of Seminole Heights have been complaining about bad behavior in our neighborhood. Drugs, prostitution, crimes and so much more. Hyde Park complains about the past two parades and voila, problem solved!
“We listened to them. We did the research and saw videos and the coverage of it and figured the best thing to do was a zero-tolerance policy,” Hamlin said. “It was becoming an unsafe environment. It seemed like it was getting worse and worse every year.” “I’ve said from the beginning,” Hamlin said, “that it could take two or three years to change culture, and I think it still might.”
- Neighbors throughout all of Seminole Heights have consistently complained, supplied research, photos, data, studies and so much more. The work has been handed off to the city of Tampa and we still have not seen a consistent approach to the problem. We would have been happy with changing the culture within two or three years. We know it will take a while to change the culture but a plan must be developed and implemented to create change.
The zero-tolerance policy called for charges against anyone police saw exposing themselves for beads, urinating in public places, in a state of extreme inebriation or having an open container in a no-drinking zone.
Residents who live along the parade route, mainly Bayshore Boulevard and the side streets that lead west from the route, have complained in years past about boorish behavior.
- Really? Boorish behavior. Try taking your kids to church and getting flashed at 9am on Sunday by a transvestite! Try coming home on a Saturday night and your husband is solicited with you in the car! Try having to stop in the middle of the road because there is a drug deal going on and you have to wait for it to be completed. Now that is boorish!
The city’s plan this year included a larger police presence in the neighborhoods burdened by partygoers. The city also rented 1,600 portable toilets and placed them along the parade route, which apparently helped that problem. Changes to this year’s Gasparilla were announced well in advance, city officials said. “Everything we promised, we delivered on,” the city’s neighborhood services director, Santiago Corrada, said.
- I recall attending a meeting with my husband about a year ago. At the meeting many residents suggested a publicity campaign to help deter the john’s from coming into the neighborhood. This has yet to happened. I do recall a newspaper that maybe a handful of people pick up getting a full page. We were told that more officers could not be brought to the area because of manpower shortage. Yet Bayshore gets 1600+? Who pays for Gaparilla?
By now you can tell that I am extremely frustrated. How can the city take such a hard stance for what seems like such petty issues? Yet, we live a daily hell with the issues that the city seems to brush aside. The parade publicity has received a nonstop barrage of media attention and press releases. Yet our ends up in a newspaper that most have never heard. Yes we all know that the Bayshore corridor is a wealthy area but aren’t all the areas of Tampa guaranteed the same level of service? We have been given years of lip service. We’ve been promised the moon, only to be disappointed. How can we get the same level of service?
Tagged as Nebraska Avenue, Seminole Heights
Categorized as uncategorized
You “go” girl! This is no laughing matter. It seems as if City of Tampa is not willing to tackle this problem because it is omnipresent here in the Heights. We’ve certainly let them know about it and all we get is occasional reverse stings and lip service.
What’s this rumor I heard about declaring a prostitution-free zone?
Gasparilla is for a day. As #1 pointed out, prostitution in SH is an ongoing issue. There is not enough manpower in TPD to have a zero-tolerance policy here for any reasonable length of time. They have done short term crack-downs that have been effective for a while, but then resources must be shifted elsewhere and the “business” picks up again. The solution lies not in police but in redevelopment to remove the environment that attracts the hookers, Primarily, that means the motels. Unfortunately, this requires private investment that is hard to attract without significant (at least at first) zoning and tax incentives that the city is unable or unwilling to provide in this budget climate.
Let’s start with proper street lighting. There are too many shadows along Nebraska, let’s have consistent lighting and I bet they’d find somewhere darker to ply their trade.
While Gasparilla is only a single day it brings in 200k+ people into a small area. It’s an apples and oranges comparison. What’s a high-end estimate for regular street walkers from the city limits south for any given evening? Multiply that by 365 and I bet you still have a proportionally lower incidence of crime than on that single day.
The problem isn’t so much with street-level enforcement as it is with the lack of punitive action once they’re arrested. Like any business it’s always cost v. benefit, and right now there is still too much benefit(reputation advertising, plenty of darkness, easy access to hourly hotels) given the lack of any real cost(minor harassment, maybe a night in jail) for doing business on Nebraska. The only hope is to make it harder to do business here so they go elsewhere. Both suggestions above are in the right direction. Disrupt the motel owners that run nuisance businesses, increase lighting to make the johns less comfortable, and publish the names and mugshots of the offenders.
Right now it’s still well known that if you want a pro in Tampa, go to Nebraska. Until that kind of advertising changes to something like “go to Nebraska and get arrested and your wife finds out”, it’s a losing battle.
There needs to be zero tolerance on prostitution. If we enforced the property law where if the property has the policed called a certain number of times the city can close your business down. We need to publicly annouce the pictures and names of those who get arrested for prostitution and for soliciting prostitutes. If the Tampa Tribune created a daily column posting the pictures of the offenders you would see the problem decrease. Right now they can hide in cracks and sweep their arrest under the record because it’s not publicized. If the Tribune created a column like that they’d sell more papers.
They only reason these hotels stay in business is because of the pro’s and drug users. How about we stake a cop out at all of the hotels all weekend long. What are there 15 hotels along Florida and Hillsborough Ave. If there is a cop there then the pros won’t go there and when they start creeping into the neighborhood we can call the police and get them arrested because they won’t have any place to hide.
The issue is we’re not as rich as Bayshore. If we were millionaires, the problems would be gone!
#7 That’s a chicken and egg situation…a neighborhood of millionaires wouldn’t likely be facing this issue to start with or it would never have become a neighborhood of millionaires, so that’s not the issue nor is it constructive to the discussion about solving the problem. I always have to chuckle at wealth-envy, blame all of the problems on the rich, that’s the ticket.
I know it has been a few years but what happened to all of the ordinances that Bob Buckhorn passed when he was on the Council. The guy took alot of grief for them but they seemed to work. He got TPD to start impounding the vehicles of johns……think they got a couple of thousand cars and hundreds of thousands of dollars to be used for increased police activity. Passed the ordinance prohibiting loitering for the purposes of prostitution and for the purposes of prostitution, started John TV on the city tv station that highlighted all of the johns that were arrested for prostitution, passed the adult ordinance that targeted lingerie shops, body scrub establisments and massage parlors that seem to populate every street, etc, etc etc.
I didn’t agree with everything the guy did but at least he was out here and trying to help us out.
It’s evident that everyone in Seminole Height is profecient on the internet and has lots of time on their hands. If everyone dedicated free time for one week, they could post tons of post about here to find prostitutes in Tampa.
We could post areas such as: South Howard Avenue, Curtis Hixon Park, Kennedy and Westshore, Etc. With enough posts and reviews they are believable and over time begin working. Do you really think the city would allow prostitutes at the New Curtis Hixon?
Legalize and tax prostitution. License them as sex workers, and make them hold health certificates. Regulate their businesses and mandate zoning for it. Then strengthen the punishments for illegal unregulated activity tenfold, including publication of mugshots for johns. If a sex worker gets busted for illegal unregulated activity, then pull her card, and give her minimum of a year in the slammer for the second offense.
Wow, sounds ridiculous on the face of it… but it would get them off the streets and help to protect the public, wouldn’t it? I guess it does work in Vegas…Crazy, but interesting solution.
You cannot, no matter how hard you try, legislate morality. The only thing that happens when a society tries to do so is create the opportunity for criminal enterprise. A black market for illegal goods and services brings with it much more disease and associated crimes than the souls that might be saved from an immoral act. I am fully behind legalization of prostitution because, as we see, the laws prohibiting it are not, nor will they ever prevent it.
INB4
So I guess you’d legalize murder also, if you can’t stop it legalize it.
There is a clear victim in murder, a clear removal of rights of one person by another, a clear distinction where one party is harmed by another. Those are the sorts of crimes that need laws.
There is no clear victim in vice crime involving consenting adults. You can try to say the john’s family is a victim, but then adultery isn’t criminalized, nor is infection with an STD. You might say the prostitute is a victim, but legalization would actually empower such workers. The victimization of sex workers occurs because of its illegality not in spite of it. There is no logical reason why alcohol(now shall we talk about victimization of families) and tobacco use(unfortunately one cannot be arrested for smoking while pregnant or around children) is legal when prostitution and marijuana use is not. By legalizing prostitution you establish minimum standards of health and behavior that improve the quality of life of everyone involved. Prohibition has not prevented and will never prevent prostitution, but has created the environment that fosters all of the associated problems that follow prostitution. Every attempt to legislate morals is destined for failure. Humans will be humans, and animals will be animals.
False equivalence 14. Try again.
#15
Do you know what it means when INB4/inb4 precedes a post?
“In Before” or “I’m saying it before any dumb $hit has a chance to do it”
Normally done when a post is going to get a knee-jerk reply you’ve seen a million times before.
Not familiar with that meme 17, sorry.
I live off of Nebraska in what we call “Criminal Heights” and what we do is we make them VERY UNCOMFORTABLE when they come on our block. ANY time I see on on my block I call the police !! Its funny,Anytime at night you can go to 3 coins and see a cop or 12 but they dont seem to do a thing about the hooker hotels or drug holes right down the street (El Rancho!!). I guess they gave up. What do we have to do? Start breaking Johns windshields? Harass the street whores? If the police WONT do anything about it, some nut job is and it wont be pretty!
#19
If you’re not a troll, refer to #’s 11, 13, and 15
there is used to be a web page that it tells you this guys picking up hooker and posting pictures of them in tampa and clearwater area!!!!!!!!!!1 any help
Mugshots?
or Trophies?