We live near Herb Martinez park. In the summertime, it gets busy. Just the other morning, while walking my dog, I saw two people emerge from the arroyo next to Kearny Elementary. One of them was walking in a peculiar way. He wasn’t stumbling, and he wasn’t dancing—something in between. He looked happy enough in the moment, though he couldn't quite decide which way to walk on Avenida de las Campanas. His female companion gave him a hug and kept on walking.
During the day, the park is lively. People play tennis, basketball, and recently there was even a bike polo tournament. It’s a genuinely nice park. But at night—especially during the summer—it draws in a different crowd.
In 2020, when my son was 2 and my daughter was around 7 months old, we went to the playground across the arroyo. I'd surely seen drug paraphernalia in parks before, but that was before I became a father and so it didn't trigger me. On this park visit I found foil and a spoon on the playground structure. This had such a strange effect on me. I was angry, and a touch paranoid, at first, then frustrated, and ultimately sad.
In 2021 or 2022, I walked the dog after the kids were in bed. As soon as I reached the park, someone yelled from a passing car, “Better get back inside unless you wanna get shot!” Naturally, I turned right around and went home—feeling uneasy and angry that a simple dog walk had turned into that. The person who yelled couldn't have been more than 20 years old. Kids these days, right!
Last summer, a neighbor whose house borders the park reported that someone got shot there—and a bullet lodged in their stucco. So much happening in what is otherwise a lovely neighborhood park.
Every morning, new trash appears in the parking lot. Fast food wrappers, empty beer cans, and—more recently—a 20% off coupon for a Fleshlight. So yeah: drugs, gang activity, prostitution, and litterbugs. Just the wholesome community vibe you hope for in a neighborhood park.
I found the Santa Fe Police Hot Sheets. The hot sheets are the police call logs published as PDFs. As a PDF the hot sheets are difficult to work with if you want to really find anything. So I built a pipeline to consume the pdfs and ingest them into a database. And my project SantaFeHotSheets.com was born. There is a lot more to do to make this project into a useful tool for the community so go have a look and email me your first impressions, ideas for improvements, or anything else you might think about the project.
I have other apps that I am building that focus on the community around Santa Fe. I provide Locally Sourced Tech because I think it's important to build apps that serve the community. Is there a community-based app idea that you have floating around in your head? Reach out and maybe we can work together!