A Seattle Police Department lieutenant and a City Attorney's Office lawyer say they have been meeting with Mr. Lucky owner Kyriakos Kyrkos, along with the owners of the surrounding parking lots, in an effort to put a lid on the violence that has taken place around the hip-hop club in Lower Queen Anne.
Kyrkos has said he is hiring extra security, according to Tamera Soukup, a City Attorney's Office prosecutor for the West Precinct. And as noted before by City Attorney's Office spokeswoman Kathryn Harper, Kyrkos no longer plans to use the hip-hop promoter whose regular followers have been linked to violence, Soukup said - violence that included a recent homicide outside the club.
That promoter staffed the door at Mr. Lucky with his own people, and they determined who got into the club and who didn't, Harper said.
Legally, Kyrkos is responsible only for security inside his club, Soukup noted. She conceded that, since he's making money off their presence, Kyrkos would seem to bear some responsibility for violence associated with his customers when they leave the club.
"But the law isn't clear about that," Soukup said. "There is a difficulty in dealing with nightclub disturbances after closing because they take place on the sidewalks or in parking lots."
In Mr. Lucky's case, Diamond Parking and Republic Parking own the lots around the club. "And representatives from Diamond and Republic are working with us to make those lots safer," she said.
Among the ideas discussed is closing the lots late at night for an hour or so by chaining them off and having Diamond and Republic staff them, Soukup said. However, that's not the only proposal.
"One of the things we've talked about for the immediate future and the summer months is the suggestion that private security be hired to police those lots," she said.
No one from Diamond Parking responded by press deadline to a company request for employees' written comment. But providing private security is only one end of the spectrum, said John Meek, Republic Parking's manager of self-park operations.
There are a couple of approaches along those lines. One would be to hire private security guards, who typically are unarmed, Meek said. But that could be a problem, he worries, because the private guards might not get a lot of respect from a crowd of people who, police reports indicate, have been armed on more than one occasion.
The other option, Meek said, would be to hire two off-duty police officers for six-hour shifts on weekend nights when hip-hop music is played at Mr. Lucky. He didn't sound too enthusiastic about that because of the costs.
Indeed, the average wage would be $30 per hour per cop. Moreover, according to police sources, Kyrkos might have a difficult time finding sworn officers willing to work for him in the first place.
A lower-level option under discussion is having the parking-lot owners sign a trespass-authorization agreement that would allow the police department to trespass people from the parking lots with the understanding they would be arrested if they return, Meek said. "We're more than willing to work with police to do that," he added.
Normally, a property owner has to request that police trespass someone, but a so-called code of conduct would have to be posted in the parking lots before police could do it without permission, said Lt. Ron Wilson from the West Precinct.
Wilson said both he and West Precinct Capt. Linda Pierce have met with Kyrkos as well as the parking-lot owners. He added that the code of conduct would prohibit loitering and drinking in the lots, for example.
"That doesn't change a lot," Soukup said of the trespass-authorization agreement, "because police can go on their property anyway [when there's a disturbance]."
Still, signing the trespass agreement would have to be voluntary, said Wilson. "We're not about to force anyone to conform to any activity," he added.
The police department has received complaints from the community about Mr. Lucky, and the department is striving to address them, according to Wilson.
Most of all, he added, the police are trying to figure out how to prevent "any future incidents that result in death or injury."
News reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com or 461-1309.
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