Drug Problem Escalates at Mullinix Park
Problems at Mullinix Park aren't going away, residents and city grow frustrated
Kay Gant made an impassioned plea to Frederick city officials Monday afternoon: Help us take our back our park.
Gant, president of Friends of Mullinix Park, asked for the meeting as the group considered canceling a family festival at the park this Saturday because of accelerating criminal activity. Mullinix Park, one of 73 city-owned parks, runs parallel to Carroll Creek Linear Park, behind All Saint’s Street and borders S. Bentz Street. About 25 friends, neighbors, and others attended Monday’s meeting.
“Something’s got to be done,” Gant said. “This ‘public’ park stuff is wearing itself out with me.” She said she has no problem with anyone using the park, it’s just that the same people are always there, driving out community members and families with unsavory and sometimes criminal behavior.
[Above, police respond to one of multiple calls to Mullinix Park. Photo by Mike Harris]
In the past week, at least eight people were taken from the park to the hospital for drug overdoses, with many of the horrific scenes captured in pictures and video by a nearby neighbor.
Taking drugs in the park is only one issue neighbors and community members report to police on an almost daily basis. Drug deals, sexual activity, nudity, people urinating, defecating, and vomiting under the pavilion, throughout the park and on adjoining properties, and sleeping on picnic tables after the 10 p.m. curfew are just some of the activities that result in police calls for help.
Neighbor Bill Nicholson said park employees are forced to pick up used condoms and empty syringes left behind.
The number of calls for service, either direct patrol calls or calls from neighbors, are growing each year. In 2010, police fielded 140 calls, and 587 in 2016. From May 1, 2016 to May 31, 2017, the number of complaints totaled 945.
Chief Edward Hargis said in an interview that one of the problems with policing the park is that as a park, Mullinix “technically allows loitering, so getting someone for trespassing isn’t an option.” The pavilion that attracts a few dozen regulars is mostly hidden from view, and it’s easy to spot people coming into the park.
The park also sits in the hub of social service organizations that serve the homeless with shelters, soup kitchens and related services, Hargis said.
As for overdoses, Hargis said there’s been an increase due to a regional influx of “spice,” a synthetic marijuana, that is being laced with fentanyl and carfentanyl, highly dangerous opiods.
“They lied to me and all my neighbors”
Mike Harris bought a house that backs up to the park, close to the pavilion, in December 2015. He was aware of issues in the park, but not the frequency and depth of the problem, he said.
During his first year, he said he rarely called police because he “didn’t want to be that guy that calls the cops.” He hung out with the people in the pavilion, and bought them an industrial broom so they could sweep up after themselves.
But they don’t like using the garbage cans because that’s where they stash the drugs, Harris said.
Harris, a merchant marine who is gone much of the time, said in the three weeks since he’s been home this spring, he’s called police every day. He wakes between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. to the sound of noise in the park and the sight of people crawling on the ground looking for dropped drugs.
“The calls will be for anything from overdoses, which is what we mostly call about, to violently throwing up, or screaming,” he said. “One day, five people overdosed.” Some even return hours later to start all over again, one wearing a hospital sheet around his shoulders, according to Harris. He's started documenting everything with video and pictures, he said.
Unlike his neighbors, Harris said he doesn’t want to have to “hide in his house.”
“Most of my neighbors don’t come out. One family built a little playground in their backyard because the kids can’t play in the park. Even then they have to bring the kids in when there’s screaming, yelling and cussing. And that’s the least of it,” he said.
At Monday’s meeting, one neighbor said she had to quickly draw the blinds to shield her children from a half-naked man running around the park in the daylight.
After eight years, Nicholson has had it, he said. He’s met with police, city officials and the health department on a mission to curb the onslaught of drug activity and other illegal behaviors in the park. They told him to keep calling, keep building a case. After 3,000 calls in eight years, his case is built, he said.
In 2011, after Nicholson had met with several officials about what was happening in the park, police asked to use an upstairs apartment in his home for several months to track drug dealing activity. Several months later, police arrested 19 dealers, and Nicholson thought that was the end of it.
"It was quiet for four or five weeks,” he said. “Then they came back to sell drugs again, to drink alcohol, to destroy public property. They stand and scream at the top of their lungs. They’ve threatened people with knives, swords, samurai swords and an ax."
Now, Nicholson said, some of the regulars are bringing kids in strollers with them to the park, exposing them to all kinds of dangers. “I have seen a father get into a fight, with a baby in a bassinet sitting right on a table. And one man is smacking the other in the face.”
The first thing Nicholson said during an interview with The Frederick Extra was, “I am not a crackpot.” But after eight years of talking and getting nowhere, he said he probably comes across as belligerent and angry. “They lied to me and all my neighbors,” he said.
Same Problems, Different Day
In October 2016, Mayor Randy McClement called a meeting to discuss the issues. About 50 people showed up to exchange ideas, but the discussion broke down when city officials said their ideas, including taking down or enclosing the pavilion, were dismissed out of hand by some neighbors and friends of the park.
“It’s redundant,” Mayor Randy McClement said in an interview. “It’s the same thing over and over again. One portion says ‘that sounds great,’ and another portion says, ‘Don’t think about it!’”
But at least some of those who objected the loudest were perpetrators of crime in the park, according to several people who attended the October meeting. Read a letter from an attendee to Mayor McClement here.
The same scenario repeated at Monday’s meeting, held in the Mullinix Park pavilion. A handful of people, who were the topic of discussion, challenged Deputy Chief of Police Capt. Dwight Sommers. Sommers was highlighting previously shared ideas, including surveillance cameras, when a young man yelled out, “What about private parties? You going to film those?”
Capt. Sommers, clearly frustrated, told the group that this is the problem. “There’s no consensus. Everybody wants something done. Just agree on something and just get it done,” he said.
One attendee didn’t take kindly to the lecture. “We came here to come up with solutions. Your tone is that we’re here to complain and not to help,” said David Key, head of AARCH, a society that preserves and makes African American history and culture accessible to the public.
Later, neighbors identified several of those who spoke against plans to change the park as part of the group who’ve made the pavilion their personal hangout, day and evening.
What to Do?
After the October meeting, the city and Friends of Mullinix Park agreed that when the weather warmed up and unruly crowds began gathering again, they would counter by planning more events in the park.
“Activating the park” was the phrase McClement used when he told the group that the city would be feeding kids lunch there this summer. In addition to the June 10 festival, Friends has a game night planned for June 28, and a jazz concert on July 4, in tandem with the Baker Park festivities.
But neighbors and friends of the park fear that’s not enough.
“I almost want to say, ‘take it all down,’ right now. It’s a public nuisance,” Gant said about the pavilion. “We’re a public park, not a shelter for homeless people. I hate to be a crybaby, but this is no good.”
Key, who said he didn’t live near the park, but drives by every day, asked police about similar problems at other city parks. “Is this problem unique to this park? There must be some reason they feel it’s okay to come back to this park,” he said.
“If this is happening all over the city, we’d understand it, but if it’s just here, why?” he said.
City officials said drug activity was taking place at some city parks close to downtown.
Chief Hargis suggested motion detector lights, camera surveillance and a Park Watch program, modeled on Neighborhood Watch groups. Gant agreed that neighbors “have no problem” taking turns monitoring the video from the cameras on their home computers, and notifying police, who will also have access to the video.
McClement said in an interview that he “lived the same scenario” when he lived on Ice Street across from noisy and rambunctious neighbors. In the case of Mullinix, the mayor said, “It’s a public park and we are trying to figure out how it all works. We spent a lot of money on these parks, and want to keep it usable for the kids.”
The city will begin a free summer lunch program for kids on Monday, June 12, hosted by the Frederick Community Action Agency. Prior to lunch under the pavilion, the mayor said the city will power wash the area, and repeat the process after lunch. He’s hoping an upswing in park programming will make a difference.
But he cautions that the city has to spread its resources around and that other city parks have similar issues.
“It doesn’t matter what the subject is, if I say someone from Amber Meadows has a problem, they say, ‘I don’t care. I am worried about my stuff, “the mayor said. “Unfortunately, I am the person who has to look at it all. People who are mad about other parks who want services could say, ‘why does Mullinix Park get it and we don’t?”
