Last week I spent the day filming for an upcoming Seattle Channel story about more scientific approaches to community policing. The idea involves using very specific data analysis to more effectively appropriate limited resources toward reducing crime. City Council member Tim Burgess’ office was hosting a group of academics from the George Mason University who’ve been analyzing Seattle crime data over a period of time and were in town to present to the city council based on their findings. The morning shoot involved a short round table discussion at the Casey Family Foundation offices at the corner of 23rd and Union, a former Central District ‘hot spot’ that has recently successfully brought down the local crime problem. The round table was followed by a neighborhood tour to 4 local businesses, where the owners spoke briefly to the group about their own individual relationship with the community, and the police, and told their story of how things had progressed and changed over the past few years, from recent implementation of the ‘Drug Market Initiative’ to gentrification’s impact on the neighborhood, and a hand full of other themes. The businesses included a coffee shop, a restaurant, a neighborhood cinema, and another multipurpose business. The best part of the day was the ride along with Lieutenant Joel Guay. Together with my producer, we cruised the East Precinct, which includes in his words “everything from billionaires who live in Madison Park to indigent crack smokers who live in the area known as the jungle.” The East precinct stretches from St Mark’s Cathedral in N. Capitol Hill to Dearborn Ave. in the south, Lake Washington to the East, i5 to the west, and everything in between. It was a pretty amazing tour, as I sat contorted in the front passenger seat between the dashboard mounted laptop and the window, attempting to get a good profile angle of him as he drove, with the streetscape passing behind him through the window, the outdoor exposure constantly shifting as we cruised and I tried to maintain a solid shot. That was followed by interviews in the City Council chambers with councilmember Burgess who’s a former police officer, and a former detective and special victim’s unit officer from the Baltimore police who is now a PhD candidate at George Mason involved in doing the research. A great way to spend a day learning about our city from a completely different perspective. Air date is June 2nd on Chanel 21 in Seattle.
Fresh off our recently announced 3rd Emmy nomination, I again teamed up with friend and colleague Penny Legate to produce another story for The Seattle Channel program City Stream. In addition to my work with private clients, I continue to freelance with The Seattle Channel as a cameraman and editor, doing stories mainly about sustainability, the environment and overall people and organizations engaged in positive work in our community. Though the pay isn’t great, I enjoy doing work for broadcast and seeing my work on television. This year The Seattle Channel was nominated for overall station excellence and the broad spectrum of programming is a great reflection of the character of our city, far beyond just covering boring city council meetings.
For the last 2 years Cedar Grove Composting has been one of Pangeality Production’s best clients, and when I learned that they were composting all of the food scraps and packaging at the main sports stadiums here, I thought it’d make a great story for City Stream. I was especially impressed by their partnership with Safeco and Qwest Fields, the homes of Seattle’s MLB team the Mariners and NFL team the Seahawks.
Via my work with The Seattle Channel, I’ve just learned that we won a NATOA Award, commonly referred to as the Emmys of government television. The Government Programming Awards (GPAs) are annual awards that recognize excellence in broadcast, cable, multimedia and electronic programming produced by local government agencies, in this case The City of Seattle. The piece was the story about Rob Rose and his organization The Rose International Fund for Children and their work on behalf of young people with disabilities in Nepal, and the movement to battle the stigma of disability in Nepal and South Asia. We won’t know until September whether we won the category or not, but the nomination itself is an award as all nominations are given recognition for their work. There will be an awards banquet in Washington D.C. in early October. Very cool.
This week I’ll be a guest together with the Rizal family on KBCS’s program Voices of Diversity. The Rizal’s are the Bhutanese Refugee family featured in the story I did last year for the Seattle Channel that told the story of their journey from a refugee camp in SE Nepal to Seattle’s Rainier Valley. Living in the camp for 18 years after being forced out of Bhutan, the UN and various countries recently moved to resettle the community of 110,000 to new countries, the vast majority coming to areas scattered across the United States. Khem is one of 4 brothers that I originally met when driving down Rainier Avenue one afternoon in the late summer of 2008, recognizing them by their Nepali hats (I speak somewhat fluent Nepali after having lived there for a year and a half spread out over 15 years). A year and half later we have become friends and I’ve remained connected to their community, helping to connect them with resources and jobs, and taking groups on occasional walks to Seward Park. Khem and his brother Krishna celebrated election night 2008 at our house with friends, and I was fortunate enough to witness he and his brother Mani’s wedding celebration to 2 sisters recently. Right now the thing their steadily growing community needs are jobs. They are lovely people who need opportunities. If you have any work or leads, please get in touch with me. Listen to the archived radio program here.
