I find the recent news reports about city council for city of Seattle working on requiring strip clubs to raise their light levels to that of a super market as well as banning the dancers from coming within 4ft of the patrons to be quite interesting in a weird sort of a way. This is obviously being done to shut down the strip clubs as attendance to strip clubs would become pretty non existent if these rules were to be enforced. I hear that strip clubs are bad as they bring crimes and other undesirable elements with them, yet I haven’t seen anything backing up those claims. For example what do they mean by “undesirable elements”? I would also be interested in seeing statistics on crime rate between say Lake City Way and Pioneer Square, Bell town Capitol Hill. If strip clubs are such a nuisance why do you hardly ever see Seattle PD along Lake City Way where there are couple of strip clubs, but Pioneer Square and Bell town are always crawling with Seattle PD. Is Seattle PD misappropriating resources or is the Seattle City council over reacting and catering to conservatist purism. My bet is on the second one. News media around here seems to be somewhat biased and very much into sensationalism so I tend to take anything I read or hear in the media with a grain of salt. So when I read stories about violence in Pioneer square or Bell Town I figure it probably has some truth to it even though it could be blow out of proportions. Yet I don’t recall when the last time they published a story about the crime problems surrounding strip clubs. Consider that this is the type of stories that seems to sell these days I’d think that if there was any traces of criminal activity problem around those clubs they would be writing about it.
So my message to the Seattle City Council is, get a life and work on issues that truly are affecting the safety and well being of your residents.
For good or bad I live outside the Seattle City limit and only go into the city for entertainment so it doesn’t directly affect me too much, but stupid stuff like this still bugs the crap out of me.
