Mozart used to shoo off hoodlums

Published 9:00 pm Monday, July 30, 2007

TACOMA – Meet the city’s new gang-busting squad – Beethoven, Mozart and Bach. Police and transit officials hope playing classical music at bus stops will disperse unwanted gang activity.

The first speakers are being installed at the Tacoma Mall Transit Center and should start piping classical music radio sometime this week. They will be tuned 24 hours a day to KING 98.1 FM.

The problem is that too many young criminals are using public transportation to bounce between places of mischief, particularly near the mall and the transit center there, said Lt. Kathy McAlpine, who supervises the Tacoma Police Department’s gang unit.

By playing classical music, Pierce Transit and Tacoma police hope to create an unpleasant environment for criminals and gangster-wannabes, she said.

The alternative is taking away covered bus stops that attract too many loiterers or drug dealers – something Pierce Transit has already done with some stops near the mall, said Rod Baker, the organization’s chief of public safety.

If the music seems to work, Pierce Transit will look at installing more speaker units in other places.

The approach is based on studies done in other cities that show that classical music deters negative behaviors at transit centers, Baker said.

“We want to create an atmosphere that is safe for our passengers,” Baker said. “If this has an impact on encouraging people to move elsewhere instead of hanging around and loitering around an area, then why not?”

Psychologist Jacqueline Helfgott, who chairs the Criminal Justice Department at Seattle University, said the plan has the potential to work.

Though Helfgott said she’d never heard of using classical music as a crime deterrent, she said it follows the same principle as setting up neighborhood pinochle games on dangerous street corners, which Tacoma neighborhoods have tried with some success.

“It’s based on routine-activity theory and situational crime prevention,” Helfgott said. “You mix different types of activities in locations that are crime-ridden to change the composition of the environment.”

She added that she found it unlikely that aspiring gang members would want to hang around an outdoor spot that plays “uncool” music.

“I don’t think classical music is a type that corresponds with criminal behavior,” she said.

Baker said the music is just an idea to complement Pierce Transit’s other security measures. The organization already has about a dozen off-duty police officers patrolling its facilities at any given time in addition to a private security staff, and is working to add seven King County sheriff’s deputies to its policing team. It also has started installing security cameras at transit centers and is looking into putting them on buses.

“Classical music as a stand-alone solution is not going to solve our problem,” Baker said.

But bus driver Tony Wilson said he worries that playing the music could cause more trouble than it solves.

“It could do one of two things: It could calm the beast, or it could just stir things up,” said Wilson, who has driven buses for Pierce Transit for 18 years. “I think the reason we don’t have music on the buses is that you can’t please everyone. It would just cause drama.”

Even if the music does succeed at driving loiterers away from the transit center, they won’t go very far, said 19-year-old Vrahmel Obleanis, who sat at the Tacoma Mall Transit Center playing a Nintendo GameBoy.

“They’ll say, ‘This is whack,’ and go over and hang out at the mall … ,” said Obleanis.

Pierce Transit has some concerns that people who don’t like the music will try to vandalize the speakers playing it, said Monica Adams, a planner with the group’s bus-stop program. That’s why planners are looking at placing the speakers high off the ground atop bus-shelter roofs or attached to poles.