Comments welcome by email. I don't care if you disagree with me but name-calling and cussing are not acceptable. Comments that are just rude and not relevant will not be posted.
Wow! My very own neighborhood has merited an article in this morning's Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I guess it makes sense that I live in an area with this weird little quirk since I'm kind of a weird and quirky person! For what it's worth, I live in Des Moines but my parents, less than a mile away in the same neighborhood, are in Kent. Actually, this no-man's land is generally called Midway because we're midway between Seattle and Tacoma. (That way we don't have to puzzle over whether any given location is actually in Kent or in Des Moines. If it's near the highway betweenSeaTac and Federal Way, it's just "Midway.")
"It's just confusing at times," said Des Moines Police Department spokesman Steve Weiland. "The problem lies when you actually go to a call and have to figure out which city it's in."
A while back, curious about seeing police from both cities at many incidents, I asked an officer about this. I was told that the Des Moines and Kent Police Departments share a radio frequency and will answer emergency calls from either city, depending on which PD has an officer available. (Good to know.)
There are a lot of accidents at the entrance to Highline Community College, for example -- a place where the borderline floats out in the middle of the street.
Up on the highway (SR 99, otherwise known as Pacific Highway South in this neck of the woods) most accidents draw officers from both departments. Around the corner down South 240th by the south entrance to the college, we have a somewhat different jurisdictional dilemma.
Most traffic problems here are due to goings on at the college. Call the Des Moines Police and they insist that it's the responsibilty of Campus Security—but Security insists that if the problem is actually off campus (even by just a few feet) they can't do a thing about it. An actual accident on 240th will actually get the city police here, but traffic blocked by school buses unloading students for whatever activity the College is hosting, well, you just give up and wait it out, even though the backup can actually lead to accidents on the highway! One officer, city or campus, out directing traffic could solve the whole problem but that would be too easy. Sigh...
