Recent Stories in Crime

It is a sweet ride.

"I know I've been encouraging people to ride bikes more, but I didn't mean u could 'borrow' my wife's bike without asking," tweeted Mayor McGinn earlier this evening, shamefacedly (I would think) admitting later that the bike was stolen "[a]fter I rode it to work today. Peg is pissed." 

Unfortunately for the Mayor, the theft comes on the heels of his alienating some 82 percent of the Seattle police force, when he seemed to suggest in his State of the City address that only officers who live in Seattle really share the values of city residents: "It's hard to have a good local police force if the police aren't local."

"Has he invited the police union to sit down for talks? Frankly, I was hoping for more specifics," City Council member Tim Burgess told the Seattle Times. It seems fate has just handed the Mayor a chance to work more closely with the police department.

A guerilla "Seattle Times" front page found downtown.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

"If there's borderline criminal or suspicious activity, I say let it go," union president Sgt. Rich O'Neill told Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat. "Don't go out on a limb. It's not worth it, because if it goes sideways, you're going to be the latest poster child on the news."

This passive-aggressive response is due at least in part to the fate of officer Ian Birk, who resigned from the police force after his shooting of John T. Williams was ruled unjustified by the Firearms Review Board. The Board simply could not make sense of discrepancies between Birk's behavior and his after-the-fact testimony. 

With backup only 20 seconds away, Birk emerged from his patrol car alone to contact a "suspicious person," so far as dispatch knew. Yet his service sidearm was drawn and in a "low-ready" position. He closed distance on Williams, failed to identify himself as a police officer while ordering Williams to drop his knife, and ended up shooting Williams to death, all in a matter of seconds. 

With deference to O'Neill, I want to suggest that--despite all these mistakes or lapses in judgment--had Birk not shot a man to death in the street, he would not have been the latest poster child on the news. That is the takeaway here. Few expect police to be perfect, and a police officer is generally given the benefit of the doubt. People know it's not easy wearing blue; we all read about officers getting jumped and choked in the line of duty. ... (more)

Dan Satterberg

Today King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg announced he would not be filing charges against Seattle police officer Ian Birk for the fatal shooting of John T. Williams, reports the Seattle Times. Subsequently, Seattle Police Chief John Diaz announced that the Firearms Review Board officially determined the shooting "not justified."

NWCN quotes Satterberg as saying: "There is no evidence to show malice, there is no evidence to refute Officer Birk's claim that he acted in good faith. There is simply no evidence to overcome the strong legislative directive … not to prosecute a police officer under these circumstances."

The Seattle City Council's Bruce Harrell responded with this statement:

I am very disappointed in the King County Prosecutor’s decision not to file criminal charges regarding the death of Mr. John T. Williams. This matter demonstrates that changes to state law regarding the Public Inquest proceedings should be made. The public must have a restored confidence that the inquest process is fair, impartial and thorough. This result erodes public confidence in that process.

Officer Birk should be disciplined to the fullest extent provided under the internal process used by the City of Seattle. Our recruitment and training of police officers must prevent this type of tragedy from occurring again. We must adopt a zero tolerance culture relative to the unlawful use of force.

My proposal that officers be required to wear body-mounted cameras when they are dispatched to potentially violent situations, as opposed to relying on their stationary dashboard cameras to provide evidence, remains a feasible solution to restore public confidence in any process that examines police accountability and possible misconduct.

...

Summit Slope Park (Photo: CHS)

Thanks to Seattlest, I'm alerted to the heartwarming story of Antonio Curatolo, who spends his days dealing heroin in a Perugia park. This news arrives just as Seattle Parks poobahs have decided not to name a new Capitol Hill park "Perugia Park," but "Summit Slope Park" instead.

This, in all seriousness, is because Seattle's most famous study-abroad student, Amanda Knox, is locked up over there, and people feel that Perugia hasn't earned a memorial. See our earlier recap of this crucial inernational decision.

Now how silly do they look? What could be more evidence of our sister-city bond than the fact that Antonio Curatolo and his heroin supply would fit right in at just about any Capitol Hill park. How hard is it to look for common ground, instead of what divides us?

In Perugia, for the curious, your heroin will run you 30 Euros. At Cal Anderson, it's just $10. 

A commenter on CHS story about the name change says:

Sorry, I just can't support the backing off of the Perugia name. So, every time we disagree with a decision or policy in Italy, or another country, we want to dis them? This makes about as much sense as "freedom fries" did after 9-11 or the renaming of sauerkraut in WWII to "liberty cabbage."... (more)

John T. Williams has less than 30 seconds to live in this picture.

At the ongoing inquest into the August 30, 2010, shooting death of Native American wood carver and (I think it's fair to say) chronic alcoholic John T. Williams, officer Ian Birk has testified that he had "no doubt in my mind that an attack was coming" based on his reading of Williams' body language and face (clenched jaw, thousand-yard stare).

Today, witnesses who were in the area are testifying that they did not perceive Williams as aggressive, so much as Birk. At Seattlepi.com, you read that "Birk testified he thought the incident would end with a conversation, but 'it became pretty serious pretty fast.'"

In the video below, taken from the dashboard camera of Birk's patrol vehicle, you can see Williams making his way across the street, in a crosswalk, at 51 seconds in. Birk exits his vehicle and crosses in front of it at 1:03, some twelve seconds later. He's walking with speed and his gun appears to be out and in his hand. So while it is not clear how he thought the conversation would go, the situation seems to have become serious to him very early on, before confronting Williams.... (more)

After a brief hearing in late November, Amanda Knox's appeal process is set to begin again in Perugia on December 11. The Seattlepi.com's Andrea Vogt says the appeal makes its case along two fronts: offering alternative suspects for the murder of Meredith Kercher, nominated by prison inmates, and continuing to critique the DNA evidence. 

Convicted child killer Mario Alessi has three other inmates who back up his claims that Rudy Guede told him Sollecito and Knox had nothing to do with the murder, while Mafia snitch Luciano Aviello says his brother did it. The DNA challenge is perhaps trickier because, in essence, Knox's defense has to argue that "everyone else" has higher forensic standards than Italy:

The amount of Kercher's DNA found on the blade was such a trace amount it registered with a "too low" reading when analyzed.

A top geneticist at one of Europe's top forensic labs at the University of Salzburg confirmed in an interview with seattlepi.com that it is possible to amplify such a small amount of DNA, as Stefanoni did, until DNA can be identified.

But the expert added that it would not be allowable unless the result could be reproduced, something police biologist Stefanoni said under cross-examination could not be done.

Meanwhile, the race is on for the Lifetime movie about murder of Meredith Kercher to come out--in March--before Amanda Knox's appeal might free her (the Seattlepi.com's source says that a reduction in sentence, if anything, is more likely). A Cambridge grad student with a remarkable likeness to Kercher has been cast opposite Hayden Panettiere's Amanda Knox. Director Robert Dornheim professes not to care that much about the legal wrangling: "What interests me more is the psychology and personality of the protagonists rather than the blood of the crime and the search for those responsible."

End of October, a wave of credit card fraud caught people's attention, with BECU acknowledging some 100 cases reported by its Capitol Hill customers. A month later, the U.S. Secret Service is saying that over 1,000 credit and debit card accounts may have been breached by a foreign hacker. Reports Bank Info Security:

The scheme appears to involve the sale or distribution of the stolen account information to numerous individuals across the country, as well as in foreign countries. Those individuals then used the information to make purchases against the consumer accounts. 

Capitol Hill Seattle (CHS) reported on the story from the ground up, discovering that the Broadway Grill restaurant was the victim of a hack of its software, and then the hacker was able to "leapfrog from the restaurant's access to a critical server in the transaction process where account information was available."

"He was able to access numbers off the server going back prior to October," Secret Service Agent Bob Kierstead told CHS, gaining access to accounts of people who had never eaten at Broadway Grill. At that time, fraud reports had totaled about 400. ... (more)

Photo: Capitol Hill Seattle blog

Mid-morning Monday, as snow was falling, Michael LaRosa walked up to a man he didn't know and repeatedly struck the 58-year-old's head with a hatchet, killing him, say Seattle police. The murder, on the 1400 block of East Union Street, occurred in view of students in a nearby school. ("I don't know what came over me, because I've never done murder, you know," LaRosa later told detectives.)

The Seattle Times contacted LaRosa's half-brother, in Florida, who said LaRosa has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but occasionally believes he's well enough to quit taking medication. "Since moving to Seattle nearly three years ago, LaRosa had become a patient at Sound Mental Health on Capitol Hill and enrolled in Seattle Mental Health Court as part of a 2009 municipal-court case involving an assault on a security guard," reports the Times.

For Capitol Hill residents, those circumstances bring back all-too-vivid memories of the 2007 New Year's Eve murder of Shannon Harps by a Sound Mental Health patient with paranoid schizophrenia. (CHS: "In 2009, James Williams, who was receiving treatment and medication from Sound Mental Health prior to his crime, pleaded guilty to the stabbing murder of 31-year-old Shannon Harps....")

About a year ago, I wrote a piece called "King County's Mental Health is Deteriorating," based on an interview with Amnon Shoenfeld, director of the King County Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division. Schoenfeld mentioned the stress his department was under to deal with people whose mental illnesses made them unsafe for society, as funding was being cut for programs that paid for medications, and kept the dangerously unstable under constant supervision. ... (more)

Thanks to our Flickr pool's shawnmebo for illustrating that Belltown can be beautiful.

Last night Mayor McGinn and I'm-official-now Police Chief John Diaz had some squishy "news" to report in the battle to reclaim Belltown from drunken douchenozzles and menacing assmittens. A month and a half in, the pair claimed their Late Night Public Safety Initiative has "paid some huge dividends."

The Seattlepi.com quotes Chief Diaz saying, "We've stopped at least two shootings that I know of that were this close to turning into something very serious, we were able to stop the individuals."

For balance, the Seattle Times notes one woman complained that a morning walk to the store included "a pimp and a group of prostitutes, a drug dealer waiting for a buyer and a homeless man who was masturbating in a doorway."

Belltownpeople attended the public safety meeting, and notes that besides the increased police presence, Belltown will see once-a-week foot patrols, new LED streetlights, a drug-dealer and mentally unstable diversion program (which needs funding), and faster cleanup on Aisle 4, thanks to a CleanScapes pilot project.... (more)

A city lives in fear!

You know how it is with younger employees, they're never on time for work, and once there you cannot pry them off the break room couch. Do those terrible work habits remain in place when they take up lives of crime?

"According to East Precinct commander Jim Dermody, the majority of the neighborhood's burglaries are perpetrated by a few juveniles," says CD News, reporting that the Central District's burglary rate for May, June, and July has been down between 30 and 45 percent, compared to last year.

To be fair to the rookie hoodlums out there, it's possible that most of what's not nailed down has already been stolen by now, and that people are much more on their guard. I'm not saying they're not trying at all.

Just how juvenile is evidenced by this CHS story about an armed holdup at 13th and Denny this weekend, perpetrated by two kids, one between 10 and 11 years old, the other 13 or 14. The victim says she didn't believe it could be a real gun, until one seemed to chamber a round. The two disappeared in a dark blue sedan.

Like Avis, a few kids just try harder. Two of the three teens convicted of manslaughter for killing the Tuba Man, Edward McMichael, have since been arrested for robbery. The second was arrested Saturday in the investigation of an armed robbery, where three teens "armed" with a cigarette-lighter gun lightened a man's wallet by $200.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

A little while ago, King County Superior Court Judge Michael Heavey had to defend himself for his support of Amanda Knox. Now her parents have had to appear, in Italy, at a pre-trial hearing for slander. If the case goes forward, they'll have to return in mid-October for trial--though it's likely they would have been there anyway, as that's when Amanda Knox's appeal of her 26-year murder sentence begins.

At issue is their response in a London Times interview in 2008, when her father recounted what Knox told him about her interrogation:

Curt says: "Amanda was abused physically and verbally. She told us she was hit in the back of the head by a police officer with an open hand, at least twice. The police told her, 'If you ask for a lawyer, things will get worse for you' and 'If you don’t give us some explanation for what happened, you’re going to go to jail for a very long time.'" Edda adds tearfully: "She was told she wouldn’t ever see her family again, and her family is everything to her."

Police in Perugia have denied those allegations, and both Amanda and her parents now face slander charges. Could we get the Perugia-Seattle sister city association in on this? If it felt a teensy bit like overkill to go after Amanda Knox for slander in addition to convicting her of murder, the case against her parents is remarkable in its devotion to the letter of the law. With a criminal justice system so thorough, Italy must near to stamping out crime entirely.

The Seattle Police Department spent much of last week in the center ring of the media circus surrounding a jaywalking bust gone bad, and I couldn't shake the feeling the brass's eye had wandered off the ball.

As if to underscore that, Belltown saw another weekend shooting (June 6: shooting death of Steven Sok outside Belltown's V-Bar; June 13: the "shots fired" weekend), and one man was beaten unconscious. He'd confronted four men who were making catcalls at his girlfriend.

Belltown has been on a roll this spring: An end-of-May brawl saw 20 to 30 people fighting in the street.

Belltown People compares the post-last-call scene to Clockwork Orange's "ultraviolence":

Nearly every shooting, mugging, bludgeoning, and assault takes place after the neighborhood's clubs herd their drunken patrons onto the street. Neighbors are rightly concerned at the apparent inability of the police department to cope with such a serious onslaught of drunken hooligans....

Teens today have so much more stress than I remember. A week ago, there weren't eight pages of YouTube results for "Seattle cop punches jaywalker," and now there are.

It's become an international story--though Al Jazeera has yet to take note. Slackers. But thank you, Paris Match: "Un agent de police frappe une jeune femme."

A week ago, 17-year-old Angel Rosenthal didn't have a legal team, per se, just acquaintances with public defenders. It seems safe to assume that she wasn't on speed dial for Urban League President James Kelly, or Rev. Reggie Witherspoon, Pastor of Mount Calvary Christian Center.

But that's life: One moment you're blithely ignoring a pedestrian overpass to jaywalk across a 4-lane boulevard, with cars routinely hitting 45 mph, and the next you're pushing around a Seattle police officer and getting punched in the face. Could happen to anyone--as luck would have it, it was someone previously charged with second-degree robbery and third-degree theft.

Finally comes the media event with Interim SPD Chief John Diaz, Deputy Chief Nick Metz, and Rich O'Neill, President of the Seattle Police Officer's Guild, where you apologize to Officer Walsh, while facing charges of third-degree assault. If you have always wanted to be in a drama, this is pure political theatre. Listen as the Chief speaks:... (more)

The video of a Seattle police officer striking an uncooperative jaywalker is all over the news this morning. Punching a young woman in the face seems disproportionate to the crime of jaywalking, although you're not at liberty to tell the police to pound sand (in the parlance of earlier days) when they catch you doing it.

As it happens, my Twitter feed produced this counterpoint, for which no one has produced video: "Woman arrested for punching police officer in Bremerton." Multiple times. I don't mean to suggest that it's a question of punch-or-be-punched, but let's not pretend that police officers' jobs are any easier than they are, or that verbally abusing them and obstructing the process of their duty leaves you blameless. When people are behaving like jackasses, the rest of us can walk away shaking our heads, but police can't.

Just before 3 a.m. on June 6, a shooting took place outside the V Club (V-Bar) at 2nd Avenue and Blanchard St. A resident of the building across the street took the footage above. Police officers monitoring bar closings in the area responded and found two men with gunshot wounds on the sidewalk.

21-year-old Steven Sok was dead, reports KOMO, and a 44-year-old man who may have simply been a passer-by was transported to Harborview with life-threatening injuries. MSNBC says a witness told them Sok was outside, having a cigarette and talking with the club's bouncer when he was killed. An update later on Sunday on the SPD Blotter said, "As of this posting, there are no known suspects and no one is in custody."

Forget Thailand. Belltown is where the action is. Our network partner Seattle Crime tersely summarizes the condo rebellion:

Seattle police are on the hunt for Belltown condo owners who are apparently holding their condo association's flatscreen TV hostage as part of a coup to overthrow the building’s owner association leadership.

Realtor descriptions of the Ellington betray no evidence of the social unrest that has flared up so dramatically, though it seems to have stemmed from a fine levied for running the security gate and secretive board meetings. Paying $709 in HOA dues leaves you feeling entitled to due process, apparently. Maybe this cautionary tale can be worked into future performances of Condo Millennium?

The Seattle Police Chief Search Committee furnished eleven candidates. Two dropped out. Now the 26-member citizen panel has selected three finalists for Mayor McGinn to choose from: interim chief John Diaz, Sacramento chief Rick Braziel, and East Palo Alto chief Ron Davis.

Some of you may be questioning my handicapping skills, since I said the smart money was on Spokane's chief, Anne Kirkpatrick. I should have mentioned that "smart" is not usually the way to bet with a 26-member citizen panel. In my defense, I did have Diaz to show, and Braziel and Davis to place.

John Diaz

It looks like the panel has skewed the selection, with a "safe" local choice and two stem-the-murderous-tide candidates who bring "new thinking." Diaz may look good on paper, but he's been alleged to be part of a "good old boys in blue" network, and his promotion to interim chief seems to have been a last straw for Assistant Police Chief Linda Pierce, the SPD's highest-ranking woman officer, who left to go to work for the Colville Reservation. Pierce was a 28-year veteran. At the time, the Seattle Times reported that:

[B]efore leaving, she told people around her that she believed the department had mistreated female officers and failed to retain them in the higher ranks, according to three sources familiar with her decision.

The department now has no women in the assistant chief or captain ranks, although at least four women are serving as lieutenants.

The four women who made it to precinct captain in the last several years, says the Times, have all since left the police force. I can't be the only one who thinks the SPD has a little too much testosterone at the moment, can I? Tears and "That's not who I am," after stomping someone? What does that sound like?... (more)

RvO reports from The SunBreak front lobby that a young woman was just robbed of her phone by a man who leaped from a car, pushed her down repeatedly, and then took off running. The theft took place on E. John Street between 11th and 12th Street, at about 10:30 this morning.

TSB neighbor Mark Friedenberg was an eyewitness. He says the assailant was a young black man of about 20, about six feet tall, 180 lbs. Friedenberg tried to block him as he ran up the block toward 12th, but the man got past, ran around the corner, and jumped back into the car. Another witness got the car's license plate, though, so police have something to go on in this case. 

Cell phone theft makes a frequent appearances in the Capitol Hill Seattle blog's blotter, but the incidents usually occur at night. This daylight grab, within shouting distance of the East Precinct, is unsettling, not least for the victim. UPDATE: More details from CHS!

The Seattle Police Chief Search Committee has named eleven candidates for Seattle's top cop spot, and it's time to narrow the field to three. Being as how the committee is likely worn out after hiring the Police Executive Research Forum to do their looking for them, The SunBreak has decided to handicap the race. That way, the committee's interviews on May 8 to determine the finalists for mayoral review will likely be just a formality. Here's the tip sheet:

Interim Police Chief John Diaz is one of three candidates from the Seattle Police Department, who obviously have a leg up. His local competition is Clark Kimerer, Deputy Chief of Police and a classics and philosophy student in his Great Books-y St. John's College days, and Jim Pugel, also Assistant Chief of Police and an English major--I feel like these guys may have just tossed their shields in because you need to show interest in advancement. Diaz seems to have the broader command background, but if you pick him, Kimerer and Pugel feel sad, which is not the Seattle way.

Anne Kirkpatrick, possible ardent anti-communist

That's why smart money is on Anne Kirkpatrick, Spokane's Chief of Police, who "maintains a home in Seattle." Pluses: Spokane hasn't burned down, and she may get a subliminal boost from a name that's similar to Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the "ardent anti-communist." 

Our next group is made up candidates who would bring "experience" and are motivated to leave their present post: Rick Braziel, Chief of Police from Sacramento; Adam Burden II, former Assistant Chief of Police from Miami; and Ronald Davis, Chief of Police from East Palo Alto. If you subscribe to the Seattle Times view that we are a city under siege, you would look hard at this bunch (except I think Capitol Hill has more people than East Palo Alto). They've seen la guerre. Sacramento, man. That's in the shit.

Finally, the pack has some auslanders, which may make culture clash a significant issue. Seattle is a city second only to San Francisco and Berkeley in terms of requisite pothead-hugging, Officer Friendly-ness. There's the climate, some people just don't take to it. And finally, we don't like outsiders.

So these are wild card choices: Judy Bradshaw, Chief of Police from Des Moines, Iowa; Rick Gregory, Chief Administrative Officer/Acting Public Safety Director from New Castle County, Delaware; John Romero, Chief of Police from Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Lisa Womack, former Chief of Police from Elgin, Illinois. I feel sorry for police chiefs from Iowa and Illinois looking for jobs elsewhere. They may well have mean streets, but honestly, your first thought is "Corn thieves?"

City Hall, as seen by our Flickr pool's Slightlynorth

Next Monday, the full City Council will vote on council member Tim Burgess's revised aggressive solicitation ordinance (pdf). Last week, the ordinance passed out of committee by a 3-1 vote (Burgess, Conlin, Bagshaw, aye; Licata, nay). Argued Nick Licata at the time: "Aggressive panhandlers are regularly convicted under Seattle's current law." That's not good enough, says Burgess, who invokes Malcolm Gladwell in declaring that Seattle's street disorder is near "a tipping point."

It's a controversial ordinance, but after the initial questions have been raised--Will this target the simply homeless? How precisely and fairly will it be enforced?--what you're struck by is that ex-policeman and detective Burgess (1971 to '78) is trying to reinvent policing style from outside the precinct walls. He writes on his blog:

At a broader level, there are two policing strategies that I hope our police commanders will embrace wholeheartedly--concentrated deterrence and re-asserting community norms against violence and disorder.

Concentrated deterrence is built on the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, popular in business. There, it suggests that 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your clients. Burgess would simply substitute "crime" and "criminals" for business and clients. He notes that when Seattle police targeted the most active car thieves locally, car theft fell by 66 percent between 2005 and '08.... (more)

Seattlepi.com's correspondent in Italy for the Amanda Knox trial(s), Andrea Vogt, has just filed a story on the 427-page ("front and back") judge's opinion, which sheds light on the jury's verdict. Vogt says Judge Giancarlo Massei's document "leaves ample room for a number of criticisms that will likely feature prominently in her upcoming appeal." For her defenders, that day can't come soon enough.

Though the jury came to the conclusion that Knox was involved in the murder, they "disagreed with the murder dynamic that prosecutors put forth," reports Vogt. They believed Guede started the sexual violence and that Knox aided in it to some degree. The forensic evidence against Knox was compelling for the jury.

ABC News says that Massei wrote that Knox "killed her roommate 'without any animosity or feeling of resentment,' and that the grisly homicide was the result of 'casual contingencies.'" That puts the judge in disagreement with the prosecution's theory that Amanda Knox murdered Meredith Kercher because of differing hygienic standards. For Massei, the best explanation is that things got out of hand.

Despite arriving at a substantially different accounting of events, the judge wrote that the prosecution "presents a comprehensive and coherent picture, without holes or inconsistencies."

An "innocent" trash can, courtesy of zenobia_joy.

On February 13th, a metal, bus-shelter trash can exploded near NE 45 Street and 42nd Avenue NE in Laurelhurst. Police said the can was "totally destroyed" by the explosion, though nothing in the area was damaged, and a heavy rain prevented a fire.

Then yesterday, February 14, someone blew up a five-gallon cooler at the corner of NE 55th Street and 31 Avenue NE. This detonation left a 25-foot debris field, and the Bomb Unit is investigating.

So far no one has claimed responsibility for the can or cooler. Given the physical proximity between the two sites, it seems likely that the same person or persons was involved. Still, the question remains: Why Laurelhurst?

The Laurelhurst Blog is clueless about what motivation anyone might have for disturbing the sleep of wealthy people. Seattle Times commenters are equally at a loss, except for Snowcapped, who offers this critique: "In Laurelhurst, this is news? Where I roll there is gunfire every other night and it's not in the news!"

One of our Instivate network partners is Seattle Crime, the work of the indefatigable Jonah Spangenthal-Lee. Besides his reporting on crime around Seattle (Ex. A: "The Worst Jack in the Box in the Country"), another arresting feature the site offers is a Google map view of the city's 911 log.

This, not coincidentally, is what greets you when you open the new free Seattle Crime iPhone app. When you want to find out what the flashing lights down the street are about, this is the app for you. Version 1.1 lets you zoom in on your location, and also remembers where you were. Three tabs in total let you view the map, peruse the live 911 log feed, and skim crime headlines.

And yes, it looks like The SunBreak will be joining the iPhone app revolution soon enough. Now, in fact, is a good time for you to hit us up with features you'd like to see. We're kicking around events maps and listings, but if you have bright ideas, we, like President Obama, are listening.

Seal Sitters reports two California sea lions and two harbor seals were found dead on the beach this week, but not from natural causes. They were shot. According to the West Seattle Blog, at least five sea lions have been found shot: "One, Gorman says, was a federally protected Steller sea lion--a species not commonly seen in Puget Sound." Necropsies performed by a Department of Fish & Wildlife biologist turned up the bullets, but officials have not released information on whether it's the same gun.

One day in seventh grade, I was waiting for the #14 bus across from Washington Middle School when three teenage gang members approached this kid in my class. One gang member, who was wearing brass knuckles, suddenly punched the kid in the temple, knocking him cold.

A few teachers came out to check on the kid, who soon came to and staggered down the alley leading to Odessa Brown Childrens' Clinic, vowing revenge. No Metro security guards were there. No hidden cameras caught the scene. And so KING-5 didn't cover it. The Seattle Times was likewise silent.

Which is why you haven't heard about that beating until now, unlike that of a teenage girl in the bus tunnel, which occurred in the presence of Metro security people who did nothing to stop it, and a surveillance camera which caught the whole episode on tape. That sickening beating has sparked a fresh round of city-wide Metro-targeted outrage.

But consider this--if Metro hadn't deployed security to the bus tunnel, would a fight between teenagers even be a story? If Metro didn't have video surveillance, would the TV news be reporting it? The bad publicity Metro's getting stems from the agency's attempt to do the right thing.... (more)