The hammer has come down and the party kids are _pissed_.

[solarbird]

First weekend after the riots two blocks south of here. It's interesting.

The house next to mine had a party going when we got back a little before midnight. It got noticeably louder in the first 20 minutes we were home - they cranked up the music and the screams-per-minute count started going up. Also, someone was parked blocking the south driveway and the partiers were parking on the front lawn next door, and illegal other places as well.

I went next door, tried to talk to them and tried to find out whether the person who owned the car blocking our driveway was there; they were mostly too drunk to talk coherently, but said that nobody there owned the car.

So I called in the blocked driveway, and then I made a separate call about the party noise itself. It had been well over the noise limit when we got here, and it only got worse, so I figured it was going to ramp up into fuck-off land by around 2am.

15 minutes later, the car was ticketed and the party was shut down. That was neat. And also kind of creepy. But neat.

However.

Apparently, police are now marking driveway-blocking tickets as "citizen complaint." This is true. But it's also new. So, of course, I got a 12:40am knock on my door by the car's owner and his friend, who proceed to yell at me for "getting them a $40 ticket." (They apparently don't consider the driveway blocked unless it's _completely_ blocked, and yelled at us, saying it was "mean" and that us calling it in was "inhuman.") We just kept saying that we'd tried to find if anybody knew who owned the car and nobody claimed it, and that entry was blocked (to which he said anybody who couldn't get around his car - which was a good four or five feet over the legal line - shouldn't have a license), and if he didn't want tickets he should not park in front of our driveway, but that, aheh, did not help.

After we closed the door, he stood outside on the sidewalk with his friend having a hissy fit for about 10 or 15 minutes, complete with those little "burst of rage" screams that you sometimes hear.

So. If you're in Seattle, be aware that if you call in someone parking in front of your driveway, it may get marked "citizen complaint," and since it's your driveway, they'll know where to go to yell. They're still outside cursing quite loudly about it right now. Fun!

There was just another stream of pissed-off partiers going by heading back south, too. Another party must have had the hammer come down. Or something.

By comparison, last year at this time there were four active, out-of-control parties in a three house radius. So it's kind of an improvement. We''ll see what happens next.

Comments

[banner.livejournal.com]

Hey, if you ever need someone to come up and sit on your porch with a shotgun for the nite, let me know.

Ugh

[spazzkat.livejournal.com]

Total Suck.


*hugs*

[firni.livejournal.com]

That sounds like fun! Or maybe hiding in the bushes with a wrist rocket and ice cubes.

[dianala.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's not like it's a MYSTERY when you get ticketed for blocking someone's driveway what happened.

That happened to me once in Wallingford, and they actually TOWED my car. I wasn't even blocking the driveway at all, but I guess I wasn't aware that the law is you have to park 6 FEET back from someone's driveway. Like who ever does that in the city anyway?

So I think it was egregious.

I came out of the late showing of a movie (last one at the theater) by myself and NO CAR.

[carebearc.livejournal.com]

i wish i had known about this warning before i got a $40 parking ticket yesterday -- my entire neighborhood was blanketed by the angry parking violation gods. you can read about my complaints about the law here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/carebearc/236917.html) -- it sounds like you had a valid complaint, but man, a lot of us got screwed for parking 3 feet away from a driveway. oh well.

[solarbird]

This guy's back wheel was in the driveway space, and the trunk of his car was another two feet into it. The only way anybody could have gotten it would have been to remove the car parked on the other side of the driveway along with the giant pile of trash the party neighbours had piled up on the sidewalk and planting strip, and then driven along the sidewalk and turned into the driveway. And then it would have been tight because the driveway is right up against a wall. So basically, he was full of shit and just screaming to scream at someone.

That riot last week is not a new thing. There've been four like it in front of my house in the last few years. (No lie. Cops on horseback sweeping the streets free of pedestrians, smashed up cars - no fires, but plenty of fistfights and other violence.) We've been screaming the University and the city to do something about it for years, because it's been out of control.

We've tried to reach out to the more, um, temporary residents, too. But the best we get is "yeah, whatever," and more often we get threats, intimidation, and retaliation. My house was attacked four times last year by drunken party fucks, and at least two of them were in specific retaliation. (They figured out we'd called the cops on them when they were throwing stuff out the upstairs front window at passing cars, again.) So the entire neighbourhood up here in the northeast corner has had it, and honestly, we're generally really glad to see a party crackdown and think it's really, really overdue.

(The four attacks doesn't count the number of times I had to chase drunken partiers out of my garden - behind a fence and gate - when they'd gone there to pee.)

But the five feet thing is dumb. I mean, I painted the curbs on both sides of my driveway kind of as a warning - bright red means "tow zone," btw - and I only painted three feet on each side. And I don't call unless they're actually impeding access. Like he was.

Anyway. Blah. Sorry to rant. It's just been crazy - dangerous crazy - here the last few years and it needs to stop now.

[brombear.livejournal.com]

Ditto on the heavy firepower. It's great that they're finally doing something about it...and pretty sorry that it took this long before they finally did something about it.