Desperate Seattle residents putting up steel flower planters as barriers to block off their streets to quell runaway crime have finally drawn the attention of the city’s socialist mayor.

Mayor Katie Wilson said this week that Seattle is “acting now” on shootings and drug and human trafficking-related crime after being pressed by a local news anchor on why citizens had to take matters into their own hands before City Hall did anything.

The location at issue is the neighborhood hit by reoccurring violence tied to Aurora Avenue on the city’s north side.

Fox 13 co-anchor Hana Kim told the mayor:

We’re hearing from residents saying there are constant shootings there, bullets going through homes, human trafficking is up, prostitution is up. Desperate residents put up steel planters to block some of the crime. They say it was working, but then the city took it away and said that they need to have a permanent solution, so they want to study it. But at what point do you act?

“So we are acting now,” Wilson responded. “A number of members of my team… were up doing a walk with the neighborhood a few days ago, and I totally understand why people put the barriers in the streets.”

Residents along the corridor spent Memorial Day weekend constructing the barriers out of metal planters, concrete blocks, and other items to block streets “after weeks of shootings, high-speed chases, and crime concerns tied to prostitution, trafficking, and alleged turf wars,” Fox News reported.

One resident, Peter Orr, told KTVB 7, “It’s either this, or bullets in my neighbor’s houses.” The Mayor was mocked online for her residents taking such drastic action to ensure their own safety.

Conservative commentator Paul Szypula wrote on X, “When progressive policies result in neighborhoods literally barricading themselves off… that says everything.”

The mayor explained her policies in the Fox 13 interview, saying, “The issue is emergency access, and so what we’ve done for the time being, there’s one barrier that’s actually still in place, but the other ones we replaced with what are called chicanes, which is basically not entirely blocking off the street, but really slowing movement through it.”

Wilson shot back, “Residents say that barrier isn’t working.”

The Mayor responded:

I understand. So that is like a very temporary thing. But again, SDOT (Seattle Department of Transportation) is now, and you say study it, and it is true, study it, but study it very rapidly. So, we are talking about doing a quick assessment of what it would look like to more permanently block off certain streets, but they need to study emergency access.

Wilson promised that the Seattle Police Department (SPD) was increasing patrols in the area and was seeking to step up “gun violence reduction” in the area, calling them “immediate fixes, right?”

Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Masquerade: A True Story of Seduction, Compulsion and Murder, the story of the double life of an elite Detroit psychologist and his fatal affair with a drug-addicted street prostitute See lowellcauffiel.com for more.