DDBA busy address growing crime and safety concerns
January 23, 2025
By Dan Urazandi
I wrote this letter for other downtown businesses. When asked to reproduce it publicly I refused, as it involves an internal DavisDowntownBusinessAssociati
All of us know crime is increasing downtown and most of us have been hurt by it. Over the last 5 years my son and I have been victims of assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated assault, and three burglaries let alone the felony vandalism and many other lesser but costly crimes, all because we operate a downtown business in a town that has given up on law enforcement. By comparison in 27 previous years of business, we suffered 2 felonies, both minor.
The problem is obvious and yet our city council and police force want to pretend it does not exist. So too, apparently, does the DavisDowntownBusinessAssociati
When I witnessed my neighbor being pummeled into the ground by a 250 pound homeless man through the window that was broken just days before in a burglary, I went on TV to call out how the city and police were ignoring all complaints about crime in the alley beside my store. The day after that aired the deputy chief of DPD was in my shop. But this method of publicly shaming the city into action can only be used sparingly. If we bang the drum constantly about how dangerous downtown has become, we will scare away our customers.
So Heather Caswell of The Wardrobe has been working within the system and behind the scenes to address the crime emergency. She wants DDBA to take action, which could be a way of influencing the city to withdraw its pro-crime agenda. DDBA is notoriously close to city hall, so much so that the current DDBA head is the former mayor and until the position rotated a week ago the mayor was the former head of DDBA.
Also like city hall, DDBA is a closed system even as it claims to represent us all and lives off our taxes. Both feign democracy but control the system so incumbents run unopposed and status quo is maintained. In order to vote all us involuntary DDBA members have to physically show up or send a representative to the meeting Thursday Jan 23 at 5:30 at Natsoulas Gallery. Making votes secret and difficult is how a dozen people run a 500+ member organization. Most of us have no time for DDBA and their games but if we turn out this Thursday we can elect Heather Caswell and Ezra Beeman to the DDBA board. They have promised and proven themselves to be committed to downtown safety and will be replacing members of a board that has refused to take any position on crime. This will be a move in the right direction to fight back against the political mismanagement that is endangering us all.
"If we bang the drum constantly about how dangerous downtown has become, we will scare away our customers."f
Too late. That horse has left the barn.
Posted by: Alan C. Miller | January 23, 2025 at 04:57 PM
About a month ago I parked in the downtown Davis G Street lot in front of the old (vacant for years now) ACE Home Store on my way to a local business and there were so many "homeless people" aka "street zombies" wandering around that I just decided to back out of the lot and go home (and buy what I needed online). Like so many other locals I have had a car broken into in town and I'm done shopping in downtown Davis downtown and even the Woodland Home Depot and Walmart (that have homeless drug addicts that live near the lots breaking into cars on a daily basis). I don't want to be a crazy "conspiracy theory" guy but I have to think that someone is paying off the elected officials that tell the cops to "ignore homeless crime" over the past decade since I first stopped shopping at the West Sac Walmart after they locked up half the stuff in the store and like many people I would rather pay $5 more on Amazon than wait for a half hour for a guy to come with a key to open a cabinet in an aisle where everything is locked up. I'm not a fan of Jeff Bezos but like many I'm buying more items than ever from him than ever. I was in the Rite Aid near UCD just last week (since the South Davis location closed like the office Max on the other side of Safeway) and most of the aisles in the store were as empty as the Target toilet paper aisle during Covid and lots of stuff was locked up. Some friends that live "South of Davis" sent their High School son to Target this summer, and his bike lock was cut and his bike was never seen again…
Posted by: South of Davis | January 23, 2025 at 07:12 PM