In most ways, the former Umpqua Bank building at the corner of Wall and Riverside is a monument to law and order. A red metal sign screwed to the brick wall declares that "sitting or lying near or against this facility will result in prosecution," which it backs up by citing two city ordinances ("SMC 10.10.025" and "SMC 10.12.50").
And the building itself hosts the enforcers of those ordinances. The Spokane Police Department leases space in the Riverside property for its downtown precinct.
Moving the precinct to the heart of Spokane's central business district in September 2020 represented a fulfillment of Mayor Nadine Woodward's No. 1 campaign priority.
And yet, outside the building's vacant lobby, underneath the building's iconic clock tower and between the two police precinct entrances, were two anti-loitering noisemaking devices that absolutely screamed "illegal."
Or, more precisely, they screamed "eeeeeeeeeeeeee."
For hours. Every night.
As a stream of pedestrians exit Ridler's Piano Bar late Saturday night, they react viscerally to the sound blasting from the former Umpqua building when they pass by:
"Holy shit. What is that ringing?!" "Sounds like someone is bank robbing the place." "It's loud as shit." "Quote us: It's awful."
Another pedestrian simply covers his ears and cringes as he shuffles past.
The source of the noise: anti-loitering noisemaking gadgets — dubbed "mosquito devices" by their originator for their high-pitched buzz — that the Spokane City Council outlawed in the summer of 2020.
However, this ordinance ("SMC 10.08D.050") has not resulted in prosecution.
The building was once home to Sterling Savings, then Umpqua Bank, which relocated its downtown branch to the Crescent Building in 2016; Denver-based Confluent Development now owns the building. The SPD didn't install the devices — they were there when they moved in. But the City Council and multiple departments in the Woodward administration knew about the devices in the building for months. It's only in the last week, after the Inlander raised concerns, that they've done something about it.
"The precinct was [supposed to be] a place for people to go in and get help downtown," says former City Councilwoman Kate Burke. But the mosquito devices sent the opposite kind of message: scram.
When the Spokane City Council was debating banning mosquito devices back in 2019 and 2020, the case focused on one capability in particular: At their default setting, the mosquito devices blared out a squeal at a frequency of about 17 kilohertz — a pitch so high that only young ears could hear it.
Which is why I was so surprised when, walking home from a late-night deadline coffee session last month, I heard the sound: a maddening ringing that builds and builds the closer I get to the building's clock tower.
It turns out, there's a second 8 khz setting, a frequency that everyone — even a 35-year-old who listens to This American Life at max volume — can hear. But the council made devices blasting out that frequency illegal, too.
Steve Ridler, owner of the nearby Ridler Piano Bar, says he believes the building's property owners put in the mosquito devices around 2019 because of the sheer number of homeless people who would take refuge in front of the lobby door, sheltered from the elements.
"There would be like 20 homeless people sleeping under there," Ridler says. Some of them would sleep in front of his door, too. But once the high-pitched mosquito devices were installed, it "ran them out."
He's not worried that the mosquito devices were affecting his business.
"To me, if I'm walking by it, I hear it and I'm past it in seven seconds," Ridler says. "It's annoying. It's more annoying to have a whole bunch of people laying there, sprawled out asking everyone for money or that kind of thing."
But, of course, that doesn't solve Spokane's unsheltered homelessness problem — it just moves it. On Saturday night, there's no one sleeping under the Umpqua clock tower, but someone's huddled up across the street, next to the doorway of the former WSU Connections store, covered in blankets.
It's not like the mosquito devices are a secret. The barista Monday night at Indaba Coffee tells me she's definitely heard the terrible high sound from the device and says a friend told her that it was to discourage homeless people from sleeping there.
When I ask about it to a random police officer, standing next to a patrol car outside the downtown precinct about it, he gives a similar explanation.
But wait, I ask, aren't those devices illegal?
"Above my pay grade," the officer shrugs.
Ironically, the downtown police precinct became central to 2020's tussle over passing the mosquito device ban. Voting against the ordinance, Councilman Michael Cathcart argued that a ban on the mosquito devices could make more sense after seeing the impact of "a stronger presence of community-engaged law enforcement officers" from the new precinct location. And when Woodward used her first-ever veto on the ordinance, she told KREM that "we need to let the downtown precinct open... and give it some time to make a difference downtown."
So when Councilwoman Betsy Wilkerson became the deciding vote to override Woodward's veto of the ordinance in July 2020, she forged a compromise: The same night, the council also passed a resolution asking SPD to refrain from enforcing the ordinance until 60 days after the new precinct had been open.
"We are replacing indiscriminate noise devices that bother pedestrians on the sidewalk with live police officers walking their beats out of the new Downtown Spokane Precinct," City Council President Breean Beggs wrote in a press release after the veto override.
The new downtown police precinct opened in late September 2020. More than a hundred days passed, and the devices remained. During the first council meeting of 2021, local activist Nicolette Ocheltree explicitly complained to the council that "the police precinct is still using mosquito devices or at least their building is."
She repeated her complaint at a February 22, 2021, council meeting, asking the council how she could make a formal complaint about the devices.
"Obviously me talking to you guys hasn't changed anything," Ocheltree said.
Beggs encouraged her to call 311, the city informational hotline. Ocheltree tells the Inlander she did, but the operator "didn't seem to care or understand the problem."
The council had spent nearly a half a year negotiating details about the mosquito ordinance but hadn't clearly specified whether the police department or the city code enforcement department should be dealing with it, much less outlined a clear complaint process.
"We're not going around looking for mosquito devices," city spokeswoman Kirstin Davis says.
Instead, the city relies on complaints. If there aren't official complaints, little happens.
"I haven't reported it," says Ryan Wolfe, a local resident who's ranted about the devices on Twitter, "because I don't know where to freaking report it."
By last August, Luis Garcia, code enforcement supervisor, reported that they hadn't received any official complaints about mosquito devices.
After Mark Carlos, the legislative assistant for Councilwoman Wilkerson, heard the whine of the mosquito devices outside the police precinct building in November, he recorded video and audio documenting the issue and forwarded it to Garcia in code enforcement. But instead of being treated like an official complaint, Carlos's email was sent through internal channels: Since the police department was leasing a space in the building, the code enforcement forwarded the email to the city facilities department. And for months, nothing was done. When the Inlander started raising the issue, that changed.
By the time the Inlander connected to the property manager for the former Umpqua on Monday, the yearlong problem had apparently been solved.
"I am the new manager of the building," says Jason Dolloph of Black Realty Management. "I did not know the devices were on and have made sure they are turned off."
But just because one mosquito gets swatted, it doesn't mean there aren't others buzzing about.
"I haven't reported it, because I don't know where to freaking report it."
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It's nearly midnight on Saturday when I meet Wolfe at the eastern side of the Washington Trust building, a block directly south of the downtown police precinct. He points out the mosquito device perched on the wall. Unlike the one under the Umpqua clock tower, I don't hear anything from this device.
But Wolfe, six years younger than me, says he hears it loud and clear.
"I heard this thing from, no joke, like down the corner," he says. "My little sister used to scream in my ear all the time when I was a kid, I would have thought I would have lost my hearing by now."
Just to make sure Wolfe's not full of it, I poll a group of younger folks who pass on the sidewalk: Can they hear a high-pitched sound coming from the thing?
"Kinda, yeah," two of them say.
I call Washington Trust. But, in an unexpectedly spooky twist, Washington Trust spokeswoman Katy Wagnon says their facilities guy told her that he was pretty sure that mosquito device wasn't even connected to anything.
"He goes, 'Actually, I don't think that's been hooked up for years," Wagnon says.
But in order to remove any question, Wagnon says they removed the device on Monday.
"You have to hear them before you can respond to a complaint before you know where they are, and not everyone can hear them," Councilwoman Kinnear said at a committee meeting last August.
But even when devices that are plainly audible — like the blaring sirens and chirps that blast out nightly from the Cataldo building, just north of the Spokane river near Division — the city can face enforcement challenges.
If the frequency of the sounds are low enough to be under 8 kilohertz, for example, mosquito-type devices don't appear to violate the City Council's anti-mosquito device ordinance. Yet long before the mosquito ordinance was passed, city ordinances prohibited "excessive" sounds that "unreasonably annoy" a "reasonable person of normal sensitivities" such as "frequent, repetitive, and/or continuous sounds" from "audio equipment."
But that particular regulation, at least, specifically relies on the police department to enforce it. And in 2018, KHQ reported, it was the police department that recommended the owners of the troubled 7-Eleven near the House of Charity homeless shelter add speakers blasting out high-pitched beeps to combat crime.
Under the former Umpqua clock tower, at least, the screeching has been squelched. It's not exactly quiet. The soundtrack of downtown — the rattle of HVAC systems, the rumble of the Burlington Northern, the hiss of STA bus brakes — remains. But it's no longer a scream. It's the hum of a city. ♦
