Recent Stories with tag assault

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.... (more)

Firefighter G.F. Sevilles visiting classroom at Halloween, 1966 (courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives)

A month or two ago I was chatting with a schoolteacher friend of mine who was running through a litany of underfunding woes. Near the end--this was some time after the 30-year-old textbooks--she mentioned that her school had only one security guard on staff. First of all, she said, when you need security, you tend to need security there, not running across campus.

But also, what happens if two things go wrong?

Two things did go wrong at Seattle Public Schools last week, when two teachers were assaulted at Cleveland High School in south Seattle and Nathan Hale High School in north Seattle on the same day. In both instances, school officials were tardy about informing police, and have refused to go into detail about their handling of the incidents, citing student privacy.

The Seattlepi.com has a story on both teacher assaults. In the Cleveland case, the teacher "suffered a laceration with bleeding, minor swelling and had to get four stitches from the hospital." At Nathan Hale, the teacher was struck by a student beating up on a 14-year-old, when she tried to break it up....

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