Seattle Crime Reports : Seattle Crime Blog : Seattle, Washington

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A recent "Party Patrol" operation executed by the King County Sheriff's office picked up some truly bright individuals for some truly stupid violations of the law.

While the Party Patrol's are explicitly launched to arrest and cite underage offenders, this weekend's operation managed to nab some of those supposedly smart enough to fully understand the law.

"One parent who was called to pick up her son was nearly arrested after she arrived and tried to get deputies out of the home, declaring, "her husband was an attorney," the Sheriff's Office reported." - Seattle P-I

Nice, lady.  Your husband is an attorney, so your child and his friends have the right to break the law?  Tell me if I am missing something here.

But that woman seemed positively bright compared to another group of partygoers that managed to achieve a spot in the "people who should not reproduce" pantheon.

"In one case, two adults, ages 33 and 43, were arrested on felony drug charges after deputies caught them holding a party for teens in the 4700 block of Ames Lake-Carnation Road in northeast King County. Police found ecstasy in the home and sent in an undercover detective who bought marijuana from an unsuspecting 18-year-old, the Sheriff's Office reported."

Those adults should be punished severely.  When will some parents realize it is not their job to be cool, it is their job to set examples.  Hosting a party where ecstasy is present?  I'm going to go with bad example on that one.

But while those parents made a truly poor decision, what that teen that sold the officer marijuana did was almost impossibly stupid.

"The teen brought the marijuana from his car and sold it to the detective despite seeing several uniformed officers already outside the home, Urquhart said."

Nice.  I'm guessing there's a bright future for that young one. 

The Party Patrol was meant for dumb teens.  Looks like dumb adults take the cake on this one. 

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Abortion of justice. That's the term that has been making headlines since it was first uttered yesterday by the Reverend Al Sharpton, outraged after a judge acquitted three NYPD officers charged with murdering Sean Bell on the night before his wedding.

Personally, I don't agree with Al (the circumstances of the case show that these officers were in the right, and it seems the more vocal segment of New York's African American community are turning a crime issue into a racial one). But Sean Bell isn't what this post is about.

Instead, we're talking about justice. And when I saw this article in today's Times on a man sentenced to death by the University of Washington Medical Center, "abortion of justice" was the first thing that popped into my mind:

Timothy Garon's face and arms are hauntingly skeletal, but the fluid building up in his abdomen makes the 56-year-old musician look eight months pregnant. His liver, ravaged by hepatitis C, is failing. Without a new one, his doctors tell him, he will be dead in days.

But Garon isn't getting a new liver. He's been refused a spot on the transplant list, largely because he has used marijuana, even though it was legally approved for medical reasons.

[...]

The Virginia-based United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation's transplant system, leaves it to individual hospitals to develop criteria for transplant candidates. At some, people who use "illicit substances" — including medical marijuana, even in states that allow it — are automatically rejected. At others, such as the UCLA Medical Center, patients are given a chance to reapply if they stay clean for six months. Marijuana is illegal under federal law.

Let me get this straight: we still use taxpayer money to provide social services for a homeless population that - at least in Seattle - is made up largely of drug addicts with no incentive to get clean. We allow welfare recipients to continue receiving their checks without ever questioning whether drug use is keeping them from getting back on their feet. But we're effectively ending a man's life because he smoked pot to relieve pain on his doctor's recommendation (and under the laws of Washington state)?

Dr. Jorge Reyes, a liver transplant surgeon at the UW Medical Center, said that while medical marijuana use isn't in itself a sign of substance abuse, it must be evaluated in the context of each patient.

"The concern is that patients who have been using it will not be able to stop," Reyes said.

Who does Reyes think he's kidding? We aren't all caught up in the fears of Reefer Madness still being propagated by the DEA. The idea that marijuana use puts you at serious risk for addiction is laughable to anyone who sees through the nonsense. Plus, the article points out that steady marijuana use after the transplant would be absolutely forbidden due to the potential health issues that could arise. Does the UWMC really think that if they gave Garon a new liver, the craving for a weed fix would cause him to disregard his recent surgery and put his life in danger?

This is despicable situation. Reyes and the rest of the folks at the UWMC, apparently willing to bend over and take it in the rear from draconian federal drug laws, should be ashamed of themselves.

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Turns out the government is finally trying to level the playing field between races when it comes to the court systems...though they're using a questionable method to go about doing so.

According to the P.I., the U.S. Sentencing Commission apparently voted in December to reduce the sentences of thousands of criminals in prison for crack cocaine offenses, including 29 in Washington state:

In December, over the objections of the Justice Department, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to ease the way courts meted out penalties for drug crimes to rectify disparities in the way judges have treated crack crimes versus those involving powder cocaine.

It seems 80% of crack cocaine offenders are black, while most powder cocaine offenders are white. And the penalties weren't adding up. I'm not quite sure how giving special treatment to both races helps solve the problem of sentencing disparities, but apparently the government thinks it is worth a shot.

But rest easy, drug fearing citizens....marijuana offenders are still getting the maximum sentence in cities across the country. And everyone knows that's the "gateway" drug. 

Right?

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For those who have followed the emergence of home pot-growing industries in Washington State (literally enormous weed growing/selling operations run out of mostly suburban homes), the final stats from "Operation Green Reaper" - a 13-month investigation launched by local police and federal agents - should prove quite interesting:

At a news conference this afternoon, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Bartlett, flanked by DEA Special-Agent-in-Charge Arnold Moorin, said the 13-month investigation involved seizure of more than 15,000 marijuana plants.

To put that into perspective, the average cannabis plant can produce up to a pound of marijuana, which sells for an average of $2,000 on the street. That's $30 million of weed seized in a little over a year, all from home-growing operations.   

Pot is already a top-10 cash crop in Washington state...and that just reflects the amount of weed seized during raids, without accounting for that which gets traded behind the backs of watchful federal agents.

The funniest thing about these raids is that they have proven in the past to do very little in terms of curbing the trade of marijuana. There's a lot of potheads in this state of ours, and something tells me they'll remain determined to get their fix no matter what the government does to stop them.

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It can't help but make an American proud to hear that our country's borders are being guarded by fine, upstanding young men like Desmond Bastian:

Bastian, 31, a U.S. citizen who lived in Surrey, B.C., and worked as a U.S. customs and immigration inspector, allowed [a British Columbia prostitute] to drive through the Blaine crossing while carrying large loads of marijuana and other drugs.

According to the woman's testimony at Bastian's trial, she would lift her skirt and bare her breast while being waved through the border station, and then would often meet Bastian afterward for sex.

Now, Bastian has been sentenced to 32 months in prison, where we're guessing his sexual experiences are going to be a might bit different than what this international playboy got used to at his old job.

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From The Seattle Times:

Four men who told police they'd moved to Seattle because they thought it was legal to smoke pot openly here were detained this week by police for marijuana-related offenses.

[...]

The men told police they had moved from Wyoming to Seattle because a friend of theirs told them it was legal to possess and smoke marijuana here.

It reminds me of an episode of COPS I once saw (and I paraphrase...it was a long time ago): in some neolithic state like Tennessee, police pulled over a man who they found to be in possession of a partially smoked marijuana cigarette. As they proceeded to arrest him, the pathetic suspect made a comment to the officer along the lines of: "Man, out west they just write you a ticket for this."

Indeed...and often less than that. The West Coast has developed a reputation that calls to pot smokers near and far: a utopia for open drug use in epic Summer Of Love proportions, where everyone's so stoned that they sit on the beach listening to reggae all day, and police officers who catch you in the act offer up a high five instead of a jail cell.

A literal pipe dream. Unfortunately, utopias don't exist (San Francisco is probably the closest we're going to get to one anytime soon). Sure, the drug laws out here in Seattle are progressive...but not that progressive. If these geniuses had taken the 10 seconds to Google "Seattle marijuana law," they might not have been driving on a busy downtown street in broad daylight, violating traffic laws and smoking weed...and they almost certainly wouldn't have moved more than 1,000 miles across the country to do so.