Last night I attended the Neighborhood Policing Open House at the Woodland Park Zoo. Residents and community groups from Seattle’s north police precinct crammed into the small, windowless ARC building conference room, where I once dissected owl pellets in the 2nd grade. The room was lined with tables filled with brochures and pamphlets about emergency preparedness, graffiti prevention and there were order forms for “Vehicle Anti-Theft Device The Club.” I grabbed a copy of “Can I Park Here? 20 Ways to Avoid Parking Tickets.”

Mayor Nickels stood in front of the crowd to pitch a new neighborhood policing plan to improve response time, redistribute precinct workloads and create a more proactive police force where “officers will feel some ownership” and be more accountable to the areas they patrol (didn’t former Police Chief Norm Stamper pitch something like this in the mid-90s?). Nickels talked about improving police response time -currently at 7 minutes- referencing the high profile Jewish Federation and Capitol Hill shootings, emphatically stating that “we have to be able to respond quickly, with force.”

The discussion turned towards the numbers game involved in improving Seattle’s policing as Nickels was joined by Deputy Chief Clark Kimerer who pleaded with the crowd to help the department recruit new officers.

S.P.D. already has to hire 50 to 60 new officers every year to keep up with retirements, but Nickels has proposed hiring an average of 21 additional officers annually till 2012. The neighborhood policing plan is also intended to more evenly distribute officers and workloads amongst the city’s five precincts.

After Nickels and Kimerer wrapped up their sales pitch, Kara Ceriello, co-president of the Wallingford Chamber of Commerce - citing an article in the PI which challenged Nickels’ assertion that the city could afford so many new officers- aggressively questioned the financial feasibility of the Mayor’s plan. Nickels assured the crowd that “My budget will have 20 new officers.”

On my way out of the meeting I was accosted by a large man who wrapped his giant meat hooks around me and asked me “if I liked video games?” “Uh, sure” I responded, not knowing where the conversation was headed. The gentleman in question proceeded to attempt to recruit me for the police academy, luring me with tales of the Firearms Training System, which sounded a lot like a grown up version of Duck Hunt. I told him that working for The Stranger would probably disqualify me from working in law enforcement and went on my merry way.