Posted on 12/03/2021 11:35:30 AM PST by george76
DENVER — Trash, drug use and violence out in the open at Union Station’s RTD train and bus stops have employees demanding something be done about it.
The union representing 2,000 workers for RTD and First Transit, RTD’s largest fixed-route contractor, alerted the community of the conditions in a Wednesday press release, calling Union Station a “lawless hellhole.”
“It’s not safe to come to work when you have to inhale smoke from drug pipes,” the union said. They join riders and even some who are homeless in calling for action.
‘They have no respect’..
Union Station is a staple of downtown Denver transportation and services shuttle buses, light rails and commuter and Amtrak trains. According to the union, RTD passengers and employees in recent months have faced loiterers, encampments and illegal drug use while boarding buses, trains and light rail.
...
“I had another operator tell me that she considers it a great day when nobody is seen smoking methamphetamine or using heroin on her bus,” Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1001 President Lance Logenbohn said.
Videos obtained by FOX31 show an employee confronting drug users at the Union Station stop near the Chestnut Pavilion and another of a man fighting police.
These are the kinds of conditions RTD employees must face daily, Logenbohn told FOX31.
“We’re here to do our job. We’re not here to necessarily tell them how to fix it, but they need to figure it out,” Logenbohn said
One homeless man, who said he lost his job during the pandemic, said that “because they closed down Civic Center, there’s not many other places to go.”
He agreed that an increased police presence is needed at the station to control trouble makers.
“They have no respect for themselves or for anyone else,” he said.
Union Station has high crime concentration..
The Problem Solvers also found the Union Station area has Denver’s second-highest concentration of violent crime.
As do RTD’s employees, who “heroically risked their own health to get first responders and other essential workers to work during a pandemic,” Longenbohn said in a press release. “They now face an increased risk of being assaulted on the job and every day they have no choice but to endure Denver Union Station because that is where RTD forces them to be.”
The union urged for more to be done for the safety of RTD passengers and employers.
RTD passengers deserve better. The public that likes to enjoy lower downtown deserves better,” Longenbohn told FOX31.
The union said this is not the first time the union has alerted RTD management of its concerns.
The union pointed to a Nov. 29 statement from RTD General Manager and CEO Debra Johnson, who acknowledged the “unwanted activities, including illicit drug use and the sale of those drugs, vandalism, prolific loitering, and acts of aggression and violence” that occur within Union Station and said she “witnessed these activities first-hand.”
They also said that on Oct. 19, during a tour of the facility, Union Vice President Ronald Short and Chief Operations Officer Michael Ford “had to walk in very close proximity of a group of people actively smoking drugs in an aluminum foil pipe just to get into the bathroom to inspect the conditions” at Union Station.
How is RTD responding? In a statement to FOX31, RTD said employee safety is a top priority, and they are stepping up security.
Johnson said RTD is partnering with the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration in the deployment of Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams to help detect and deter suspicious or dangerous activity.
RTD will also add increased transit police patrols during peak times on the Union Station platform, as well as along the 16th Street MallRide and along the Colfax Avenue corridor.
Here’s the full statement from RTD:
Recognizing the safety and security of RTD’s employees and customers is paramount, the agency is enhancing security measures in response to an increase in unwelcome activities that are impacting Denver’s central core, and in particular the area surrounding Denver Union Station. RTD is supplementing its transit police operations through strategic partnerships with the federal Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams and the Guardian Angels nonprofit organization. Leveraging these partnerships, and through increased transit police patrols during peak periods, the agency will significantly bolster the security presence at Denver Union Station, its bus concourse, and adjacent rail platforms and transit pavilions, as well as on 16th Street MallRide shuttles and other bus routes along the Colfax corridor.
Colorado Ping ( Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from the list.)
Drug addicts and freaks? This is why we can't have nice things.
I have no more sympathy for drug addicted bums. Ship them to some kind of interment camp where they won't bother decent people.
It is governments fault, by design many would add, to push the problems it is supposed to handle back down on the backs of the people. This is the case with crime, rioting, theft, homelessness, broken education, and just about any of societies ills today. It is left up to the people to fix these. Government is just in the way.
The number of decent metro areas is vanishing toward zero.
What a bunch of mealy-mouthed corporate crapspeak. They will do nothing while “expressing their concern.”
Bump
Hickenlooper’s restaurant is directly across the street. Funny how the decay began when the glorified bartender/owner left his establishment to enter politics.
There’s the answer!
Form an organization like the old Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).
Put em all out in the woods to harvest pine cones and rocks.
Let those peeps touch those things for once.
Incarceration and Bail are racis’
I agree with you. These folks need to be shipped off to remote work camps where they're only allowed to return to society when they've proven they're able to keep a job and manage their addictions.
CCC: Exactly!
Denver apparently has a ‘Rat allowed Anti problem.
Hickenlooper is AOC in drag.
Hick owned a restaurant that employed illegal aliens… One of his illegal aliens murdered a Denver police officer in cold blood…
Raul Gomez-Garcia, an illegal alien, shot and killed Denver police detective Donald Young and wounded detective John Bishop. Young left behind a grieving wife and two young daughters, who are left to grow up without a father.
Did Hick apologize ?
Most CCC recruits were not incorrigibles.
I took a train from Denver to Glenwood Springs and back. This was 5 or 6 years ago. Nothing wrong with the station then.
Sounds like it was a relatively fast onset.
I guess that is what happens when you stop policing your city.
it’s the way pos polis(d) wants it ..pretty soon they’ll be smokin’ crack in the Brown Palace lobby.
Wife worked at an office there for a few years ending in ‘09.
We thought it was dangerous then.
Never forget, Hickenlooper, after 19 years of trials and appeals, gave a ‘reprieve’ to Nathan Dunlap, who mass murdered his co- workers at Chucky Cheese’s.
4 innocent victims of a no account murderer, and after all that time, Hickenlooper, said, ‘not on my watch’ and overrode ALL the juries, judges and courts of appeal, he knew better than all of them that this mass murderer should not be punished as required by law.
Nathan Dunlap hid out in the restaurant’s bathroom until closing time, then emerged to shoot and kill three teenage employees and one 50-year-old mother of two..
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