 |
| Rahwa Habte co-owns the Central District restaurant Hidmo, where she says police have harassed her, her sister, and her customers. Photo by Karen Johanson |
It was early in the evening and people were just starting to arrive for the “Ladies First” hip-hop reading that takes place each month in the Central District at Seattle’s Hidmo Eritrean Restaurant.
In the first of the restaurant’s three small rooms at 20th and Jackson, young women who volunteer at Hidmo were collecting a $5 cover charge to benefit Communities Against Rape and Abuse – one of many groups that Hidmo partners with to offer youth programs. In the back room, listeners surrounded a mike where a woman was reciting poetry.
The scene was far removed from the loud music, drug dealing and fighting that neighbors say were a constant near the restaurant last year, including a gun being fired inside the restaurant last summer. After they complained to the city, an assistant city attorney asked Hidmo’s owners – sisters Rahwa and Asmeret Habte – to come to a meeting at the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct, where the two heard from a dozen neighbors just how unhappy, and unsafe, they felt living next to Hidmo.
Rahwa Habte, 29, who manages the restaurant, says the meeting was like being jumped. She had never met any of the people at the meeting, who she says were mostly white, all relatively new to the Central District and seemed to hold Hidmo responsible for the area’s general conditions — an issue of the gentrification that civil rights activists say is slowly squeezing out Seattle’s Black-owned hangouts. All the same, Habte says the meeting opened an important dialogue that led the sisters to make changes.
The two participated in a community clean-up in January, put lights in the parking lot behind their building and, though Habte says they cannot afford a uniformed security guard, a young man named Kasi was paid during “Ladies First” to stand watch at the door to their bar.
Sitting in the front room of Hidmo as the reading got started May 3, Noah Davis – one of the neighbors who once complained about the restaurant – expressed nothing but gratitude for the sisters, their restaurant and their attempt to bring positive changes to a community where he says drug dealing, prostitution and violence would go on with or without Hidmo.
But, “Ever since we had the meeting, it’s gotten better,” says Davis, a 36-year-old lawyer who moved into a townhouse last year overlooking Hidmo’s parking lot. Davis is white, but says race isn’t the issue, safety is. While there is still an occasional fight near the restaurant, he says, “I really support this establishment and the other neighbors do too.”
The police, however, have not gotten that memo. Since February, Habte says, she and Asmeret have had a series of weird run-ins with East Precinct officers, who she says have harassed them and their customers, accused them of lying and aiding criminals, and threatened to shut them down.
She says it began on Feb. 23 when several officers burst in the front door of Hidmo around 11 p.m. Her sister Asmeret was minding the door to the bar and she was behind it when three officers stormed through and starting banging on stall doors in the restrooms. Habte says neither she nor her sister saw anyone run into the restaurant, but, after she showed one of the officers a back restroom and turned on a light in the kitchen, the officers grabbed a man seated with other diners in their back room.
Hours later, Habte says, the three officers returned, surrounded her and began yelling that she had lied to them and even led an officer away from the suspect, with one officer telling her, “If this is the way you guys are going to conduct your business, I’m going to call Public Health. I’m going to call the Liquor Board. I’m going to get you shut down.”
“After that, for the next couple of weeks, officers were in here almost every day,” Habte says, with a police cruiser pointing a floodlight on Hidmo the entire evening of Feb. 28.
Around dinnertime that day, she says, officers strolled into the bar while it was closed, left, then popped in the restaurant’s back door and carded a group of college students at a table where Habte says no alcohol is served before 11 p.m., when the whole restaurant turns over-21.
By the time the officers left, she says, her customers had cleared out of the restaurant. “Them coming in and out in uniform multiple times ID’ing a whole table of people kind of gave this air like something was going to happen, like there was going to be some raid,” Habte says. “Everybody inside was completely uncomfortable.”
Multiple calls to the captain, a community police officer and the former community liaison of the police department’s East Precinct were not returned. Habte says other harassment incidents included officers running a make on a customer smoking a cigarette outside, detaining and searching another as he was leaving, and asking the owners if they wanted someone who was “hanging around outside” taken care of — a question Habte says she and her sister felt like was some kind of strange loyalty test.
In a way, it was, says Waid Sainvil, owner of Waid’s Haitian Cuisine at 12th and Jefferson. For a year and a half, Sainvil says the police harassed him on behalf of five neighbors who constantly complained about noise, but have since moved away. Once Hidmo’s owners show they’re serious — he suggests the sisters hire a security guard and put up a camera, like he did — the police won’t be in position to keep up the pressure.
“It goes with gentrification,” Sainvil says. “That’s what’s going on in Seattle.”
But, “Black people in Seattle are not really together,” he says. “That’s why every place that caters to African-Americans is being shut down.”
|
