Recent Stories with tag shooting

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.

...

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)

Detail from The Stranger's cover art

We'll begin with the "Sneak Preview of the Cover of The Stranger This Week, Created by Dan Savage and Aaron Huffman" as an example of the strong argument for incitement. Click on the artwork to see the whole cover on Slog.

In contrast, at the Seattle Times, Danny Westneat argues that "Words don't kill, killers do," and calls "violence-soaked entertainment" and the sanitization of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn to the stand as material witnesses.

Westneat doesn't have to live in Tucson, though. Danny, meet fellow columnist Jon Talton, who was just talking to a Tucson cop: "The Kooks passed an insane law that says anyone but a convict can carry a concealed weapon. With no background and no training. I treat everyone, especially Kooks and gang bangers, as if they are carrying a 30-round Glock under their shirt."

(Now a quick detour to AZCentral.com: "A nasty battle between factions of Legislative District 20 Republicans and fears that it could turn violent in the wake of what happened in Tucson on Saturday prompted District Chairman Anthony Miller and several others to resign." That's right, Republicans are worried about getting shot.)

At Crosscut, they threw every pundit they had at the assassination (I won't call it an attempt as six people, including a judge, were killed). Knute Berger recalls his own run-ins with the tinfoil hat brigade, and says that at the very least, these people don't need any media incitement to act unpredictably. Anthony B. Robinson, president of Seattle-based Congregational Leadership Northwest, lays out a moral appraisal: ... (more)

Written from within the luxuriously appointed media room at Bumbershoot, stocked with both apple *and* orange juice!

"An agonizing crawl" is how the state's chief economist, Arun Raha, describes the economic recovery in Washington. "Anemic," "risk," "uncertainty," and "weaker" are also keywords. While corporate profits are now higher than pre-recession levels, Raha says:

We have cut our 2011 employment growth forecast roughly in half, from 2.7% to 1.3% (annual average basis). We do not expect to reach our prerecession peak in overall employment until the second quarter of 2013.

On the local front, both Costco and Nordstrom won praise from Barron's for their Q3 results. TechFlash reported on AT&T's boost to the signal at Qwest Field and Husky Stadium. The Storm continue to be awesome. Native Americans are understandably still outraged that a wood carver was shot to death by Seattle police. Keeping the unfortunate streak going, police shot an armed, reportedly suicidal man in West Seattle yesterday. Sound Transit will run one-car light rail during low-demand times to save money.

In Belltown, the Croc is "absorbing" the Via Tribunali space. The CD News had their own armed shooter to report on. Eastlake was plagued by a rash...of car prowls. A medieval country faire is holed up in Volunteer Park this weekend, battling the tide of modernity that is PAX. Blogging Georgetown envisioned Airport Way South on a diet. Watch out for angry Ents: 140 trees are being displaced for the Mercer Street Improvement Project. Yesler Terrace historic?... (more)

The news about the Native American man who was shot to death after being found wood-carving in public continues to "develop," as they say. Now it is not clear that he approached the officer threateningly or otherwise, and his family says he was deaf in one ear.

Mayor Mike McGinn

The Seattle Times says Mayor McGinn, "despite several controversial police incidents this year" is confident in his choice of Police Chief Diaz.

"I think Chief Diaz is the right man for the job," McGinn is quoted saying, which has overtones of "Heckuva job, Brownie," coming the same week as King County prosecutors decided that a police officer who told an innocent Latino man he was going to "beat the fucking Mexican piss" out of him was not guilty of a hate crime. The city attorney could still file charges against Detective Shandy Cobane for misdemeanor assault, further endearing himself to the SPD.

McGinn's political deafness has instigated a completely avoidable kerfluffle with MOHAI. Yesterday the Slog reported that the city was making a grab for state funds allocated for MOHAI's SR 520-prompted move from its Montlake location to the South Lake Union Armory. 

After directing the museum to negotiate on its own for state funds, estimated to be around $15 million, the city's cartoon eyes exploded from its face when MOHAI came back with $40 million. Quoth Carl Marquardt, lead attorney for the mayor’s office: "This is not a time for any one community organization to be taking all that it can get, while others go without."... (more)

A reminder that you need to take 1-90 because 520 is closed for inspection, reopening 5 a.m. Monday.

The Seattle Times says a man was found dead at a South Lake Union construction site early this morning, just three hours after someone called police to report shots fired. Police visited the call's location, a "private event" at the 1000 block of Valley Street, but no one had heard anything. Also, a woman was attacked by what she claimed was a man with a machete in "the Jungle" (11 Avenue South and Beacon Avenue South), though when police found her covered in blood, they suspected a blunt instrument.

This casts into relief the nothing-is-too-good-for-our-homeless advocacy of the City Council's Sally Bagshaw. Real Change reports Bagshaw objected to a housing site offered to Nickelsville residents by the mayor's staff, the former Sunny Jim peanut butter plant in Georgetown, because "[o]ut-of-sight, out-of-mind strikes me as not being the compassionate way we want to treat people." (See our previous coverage of the roving homeless encampment Nickelsville here.)

Publicola wrapped up the primary election results for you. (Yes, there was a primary election.) The mayor announced it was Geek Week in Seattle. More luxury condos hit the auction market; this time it's Olive 8 and the case of the price minimums. Researchers from the Hutch made a big step forward in determining the genetic basis of a form of muscular dystrophy. (More on this once I read their paper.) President Obama came to town and blew things up.... (more)

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....

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."

Two people watch from the western perimeter of the stand-off at 30th & Yesler. Photo: CHS

UPDATE: Maurice Clemmons was shot and killed in the Rainier Valley early Tuesday morning, December 1.

Sunday night around nine, SWAT rolled to Seattle's Leschi neighborhood on a tip that Maurice Clemmons was hiding in a house there. After negotiating with the house for several hours, sending in a search robot, and tear-gassing it, police entered themselves but Clemmons was gone. (Police say they have evidence he was there, and that he was shot by one of the slain Lakewood police officers.) Reports so far this morning have Clemmons appearing in the University District, and then Beacon Hill.

Overnight, the 37-year-old Maurice Clemmons was upgraded from a "person of interest" to suspect in the slayings of four Lakewood police officers on Sunday morning. The murderer appeared at the Forza coffee shop across the street from the McChord Air Force base, buying a coffee and displaying a handgun to baristas who turned and fled, and then turning on the four police officers there, killing all of them, despite their vests.

Suspect Maurice Clemmons

The story has grown sadly reminiscent of the Shannon Harps murder, as the suspect Clemmons has a long trail of felonies and mental instability in his wake, and should have been in prison. A decade ago, he was released from the remaining 47 years of a sentence in Arizona. Publicola has the plea for clemency that Clemmons submitted to Governor Huckabee, who then commuted his sentence. (Huckabee has released a statement.) Later parole violations were not prosecuted.

In Washington this past May, Clemmons was charged with assaulting police officers who were investigating reports that Clemmons was throwing rocks through his neighbors' windows. He was also out on bail after being charged with child rape.

"Seattle fog" courtesy of The SunBreak Flickr pool's Simple Insomnia

It's cold and blustery outside, but Cliff Mass says we're going to stay dry for a few days, with only the possibility of fog. Personally, I'm all for fog. We don't get enough, in my book. If we do get a pea-souper, I welcome any and all fog photos to our SunBreak Flickr pool. Drop 'em in there--you know it's free to join, right?

I know it seems like Black Friday was just yesterday--and it was--but thanks to internet technology, TechFlash can report that Amazon gained significantly on WalMart, so far as Black Friday online traffic goes. Amazon's traffic jumped from a 9.6 percent share in '08 to 12.4 percent in '09. In other online news, the Seattle Public Schools new student assignment maps are up.

In news featuring guns, a Seattle attorney is suing the city for $1 in damages, after being told to leave the Southwest Community Center when he arrived with a permitted Glock. His principled stand suffers from the bad timing of fellow pro-gun Seattleites though.

Last night a man was shot to death near St. James Cathedral on First Hill, just a week after last week's First Hill shooting. And in South Seattle, a motorist had his tire shot out--a group of 10 to 15 teens may have been doing target practice with a .45 caliber handgun.

Here at The SunBreak this week, we talked over the Metro bus service restored by the King County Council, Seattle's parking fine increase, and the likelihood of getting mugged at a bus stop.

Seth NIT-picked Seattle U's basketball team and reviewed Ray Charles singing "Old Man River" (for as yet unknown reasons), and I went downtown to get an enhanced driver's license and shop for booze, which I realize are two things that do not go together. At the movies, Audrey pointed out that "nothing says Thanksgiving like Asian gore."