Seattle Crime Reports : Seattle Crime Blog : Seattle, Washington

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At a post about the recent Critical Mass debacle at Big Blog, P.I. commenter J.P. Patches Pal succinctly sums up the two-wheeled terrorists:

Let's be honest. A lot of these riders are just passive-aggressive twits trying to make drivers mad. The riders I've talked to who believe in the concept of CM usually go along for one or two rides and then get so turned off by the idiots in the group they don't go out with these toads again.

One thing is certain: the next time these jokers go out on a ride, there will be probably be more cops in the crowd than actual bicyclists.

Couldn't have said it better myself. One can only hope that last Friday's stupidity marked the beginning of the end for this misguided group of local "activists."

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Not a crime in the traditional sense, but still downright criminal:

Beginning in January, shoppers must pay 20 cents for each plastic or paper bag they use at grocery, drug and convenience stores in Seattle.

The Seattle City Council this afternoon also passed a ban on foam containers at food-service businesses that also will take effect in January.

The stupidity of people in this supposedly educated city continues to amaze me: so afraid that they'll miss the trendy "going green" bandwagon, local busybodies are willing to put aside all common sense and dictate the shopping habits of those in their community, justifying it with claims that such meddling is acceptable because it's the "right thing to do." The idea that protecting the environment starts and ends with you has been twisted by these individuals: rather than the reasonable approach ("OK, our household will just stop using plastic bags") they're taking an unreasonable one ("We don't like plastic bags in the grocery stores, so we want to make sure anyone who uses them has to pay the price") and have somehow convinced the Seattle City Council to agree with them.

Well, the City Council, and its president Richard Conlin in particular, should be ashamed of the decision they made today. The only solace a reasonable man can take is knowing how foolish these folks will look when it's three years from now and the "positive impacts" of the tax that so many people are counting on will have proven to be nonexistent.

By the way: there's plenty more research into the ill effects of such a policy at the Northwest Economic Policy Seminar's site Seattle Bag Tax.org, which features information put together by a nonpartisan group of individuals who don't have an agenda beyond offering up the facts and examining the potential outcomes a bag tax could have on our city. The treehuggers rallying behind the tax should take some time to look over the site and see what impacts similar approaches have had in the rest of the world. But of course, I wouldn't expect them to. After all, what good are facts - and there are plenty of them here - when they prove your flimsy argument faulty?

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The City of Seattle, along with Tacoma and the state of Washington, has agreed to pay $11 million to the victims of Ronald Young, a sicko who brutally sexually assaulted his foster kids and posted pictures of the abuse on a pedophile website.

It seems the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children informed SPD of Young's demented postings in September 2003, yet he was not arrested until March of the following year. Seattle cops say they passed the info along to Tacoma police, yet Tacoma says they didn't get it for a while..and, while all of this is happening, Young's victims were still being abused.

I don't even need to comment on how horriblly they botched this one. Knowing for six months and doing nothing because you thought it had been passed along is inexcusable. Now, eight victims suffered another six months of abuse and now the city has to cough up a portion of that $11 million to make everything go away.

I feel like the city slips into these situations far too often. Guess who really pays when the city settles like this? Taxpayers. If the city could just use some of that money they pay out in lawsuits to simply imrpove the way things are run, I can almost guarantee things like this would virtually cease to exist.

People like Young will always be around. An improved system would make it possible to limit the effects of demented mind's like his.

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Idiots:

A Gold Bar man's text messages to his new girlfriend on the day her ex-boyfriend was killed -- including one that allegedly read "it's done" -- helped lead to murder charges against both of them.

When will people realize that technology and crime do not mix? Time and time again we see this: from MySpace rapists to YouTube gangbangers, the uneducated seem unable - or perhaps just unwilling - to see that our cell phones, the Internet, streaming video...all can do just as much harm as they can good. In the digital age, even a seemingly innocuous two word text message can be your downfall...and "survival of the fittest' seems to have taken on a whole new meaning entirely.

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Starting Tuesday, an act most all of us have been guilty of became a crime in Washington State: in accordance with a law passed in early 2007, Washington drivers are now forbidden from using cell phones while driving.

Can't say I'm horribly against the law for any other reason than the principle of government intrusion on our lives, but the law itself is a total joke. Why? Because drivers can still talk on their phones while driving...they just can't be holding the phones at the same time.

Isn't the idea to eliminate distractions while driving?  Sure, that free hand may help with reaction times, but folks talking on the phone are going to be distracted whether or not they're holding a device up to their ear.  If I'm yelling at someone on my Bluetooth headset while driving in rush hour, am I really that much less distracted than if I had been talking directly into my cell phone?

On top of that, it's only a secondary offense, meaning you have to get pulled over for something else in order to get ticketed.  So as long as you still use your blinkers, you're good. From the P-I:

But 76-year-old Barry Jackson was disappointed to hear the new law allows headsets. He said the conversation is the distracting factor and allowing people to continue talking is more of the same.

"Why have the law, then?" Jackson said.

Thanks go to Barry Jackson for pretty much summing up my argument. Ultimately, it appears that Washington's lawmakers have done it again: they've managed to pass a law that sounds tough but really accomplishes nothing. 

So remember, Washington drivers: feel free to pick up your iPhone and rehash last night's escapades to your best buddy...just make sure you have both hands on the wheel while doing so. Drive safe. 

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Check out these posters I've been finding taped all over around the city lately. Only in Seattle would fighting for the "underdog" be taken to such extremes:



I'm almost convinced that the people who espouse this nonsense are folks from outside the downtown core who never venture into the city itself...if they did and could bear witness to the impact homelessness has on all aspects of local urban living, they'd realize that painting Seattle's homeless population as an innocent bunch of helpless heroes being persecuted by the big, bad politicians at City Hall is little more than fantasy.

Then again, maybe that's why their message of making "practical and realistic help a reality" is regulated to lamp posts and street signs, sure to be washed away and forgotten about as soon as the next rain storm has passed.

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It feels good to be back in the blogosphere...and it looks like I haven't missed much over the past few weeks. Why, over at SLOG, Dan Savage and his band of cronies are still debating an issue that should have been laid to rest months ago: the foolish, overreaching, never-gonna-happen ban on pit bull ownership.

In his post today, Dan - who seems to rely on sob stories about dead children to prove his point - makes a hasty statement:

A breed ban is a blunt instrument, and it’s imperfect—just like a handgun ban. But I support the latter for the same reasons I support the former.

But here's the problem: handgun bans aren't just "imperfect"; they're completely ineffective. If this prohibitionist had been paying attention to the political climate over the past few months, he'd know that handgun bans have been a hot news item as the U.S. Supreme Court makes up its mind on District of Columbia v. Heller.

A March article from the AP offered some (un)surprising statistics on the effectiveness of Washington D.C.'s handgun ban, which took hold in the mid-1970s and is the center issue in District of Columbia v. Heller:

Since the [D.C. handgun ban] was passed, more than 8,400 people have been slain in the district, many killed by handguns. Nearly 80 percent of the 181 murders in 2007 were committed with guns.

When it comes to bearing arms, there are two kinds of Americans: those who view handguns as a last resort tool of defense, and the more knee-jerk crowd that sees them primarily as a means of committing violence. The latter seem unwilling to accept that guns aren't bad, even when the statistics prove otherwise.

I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that "banning" anything - drugs, alcohol, guns, dogs - is at its core a lazy way of solving problems that simply does not work. We've seen it in the past with Prohibition, and we're seeing it today with the War on Drugs and the D.C. handgun laws.

Though perhaps enticing to individuals unwilling to take the extra steps toward only penalizing those who've done something wrong, make no mistake: a breed ban is a clunky approach advocated by busybodies uninterested in supporting more effective methods. Instead of calling for an all-out ban, Dan Savage should do the responsible thing: focus his efforts on punishing people who have violent dogs. What breed those dogs happen to come from is utterly inconsequential.

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On March 25, a 50,000-gallon tank holding toxic water as caustic as lye exploded in South Seattle.

Seems like a pretty big event, right?  Only you haven't heard of it until now because no one bothered to tell the public.  And it's not because the problem was under control:

It looked like a tornado hit the thing. It didn't just collapse -- it blew up the back of the building," said Peggy Rice, a King County industrial waste inspector. "It looked like a natural disaster had hit.

It wasn't a natural disaster that cause the spill, but the contents of what came out of the exploded tank threaten to create another kind of disaster:

Most of the waste was caught behind berms around the facility. But thousands of gallons are thought to have escaped to the bay or gone down the sewer to the county's wastewater treatment plant, said the company's owner, Marc Wislen.

Thousands of gallons of water as caustic as lye is no small problem. But the biggest problem associated with this situation is how all parties involved handled the situation. The owner of the company that operated the tanks did not contact authorities until the following day, failed to report the possibility of any of the toxic material reaching sewage pipes, and had been illegally storing different chemicals in the tank.

"What was in the demolished tank?

Good question.

It was highly caustic. King County inspectors' testing showed it also contained cadmium, which is toxic; as well as copper, which is toxic to salmon; and nickel, another byproduct of the metal plating business.

The Department of Ecology was not even notified of the explosion until three days later, so it released no official statement, despite the fact that the spill was one of the biggest in state history and the largest this decade.

Peggy Rice of the King County Industrial Waster Inspectors office will be handing out citations for the laws that were broken.

My only question is, who's handing out citations to the King County government, who handled this situation so egregiously?  The excuse of "we didn't know" doesn't work on this one.  Let's hope no further damage is caused by this spill.

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This week brings yet another sex scandal for my alma mater Seattle University...and this one not involving members of the clergy:

Andrew Douglas Franz, an associate professor of military science at SU, was arrested Friday by the Canon City Police Department after he flew into the Colorado town about an hour away from Colorado Springs.

Franz, 41, believed he was meeting an underage female he had corresponded with online, authorities said. He didn't know he had been communicating with investigators from the Fremont County Combined Investigative Response Team.

If the details provided in this King 5 broadcast are any indicator, Andrew Franz is in some serious hot water.

Using the username sugardad4u33, the suspect apparently began chatting last December with an undercover agent posing as the mother of a 13 year old girl. After the meeting was arranged, Franz told the "mother" that he'd bring muscle relaxants and alcohol for the girl (and that's not all...when arrested, he also had a necklace adorned with cherries, some Viagra and lingerie). Doesn't take much to guess he what he was planning.

Oh...and If that wasn't creepy enough, Franz also supposedly commented that the girls at Seattle University were "too old" for his interests. Because everyone knows that 18 is the new 40.

After the jump, check out the full e-mail that Seattle University's outgoing provost John Eshelman sent to the student body shortly after news of Franz's arrest broke. Not much new information in Eshelman's letter, but the message is clear: SU wants to distance itself from this suspect as much and as quickly as possible:

Dear Students, Faculty and Staff,

A Colorado media outlet has reported that Andrew Franz, an assistant professor in the ROTC program has been arrested and charged in that state in an incident last week that allegedly involved intended sexual contact with a minor.

Franz was appointed to the ROTC program by the U.S. Army as an employee of a Virginia company called Communications Technologies, which provides personnel to the Department of Defense for ROTC programs around the country.

Franz first taught at SU in 2000 and is scheduled to return to active duty status June 1 for deployment with his National Guard unit to Iraq.

The university is cooperating with Colorado law enforcement authorities in their handling of the case.

I have directed the Army to end Franz’ assignment with the university.

Our university policy is clear: we have zero tolerance of any sexual abuse of a minor.

Sincerely,

John D. Eshelman
Provost

According to SU's student newspaper The Spectator, Franz will be formally charged on May 27. More on this as it develops.

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Back on Veteran's Day, notorious FOX News commentator Bill O'Reilly offered his take on the "suspicious" ferry passengers we covered earlier this morning. Here's the clip (discussion of the P.I. comes in at around 50 seconds):



Before proceeding, let's be clear on a few points:

• We at Seattle Crime Blog have a collective loathing for Mr. O'Reilly and his supposed "no spin zone";
  
• the tactics of ordering cameras upon Roger Oglesby after he had already declined to comment is an extremely sleazy thing to do;
  
• Jesse Waters' questions are certainly not "fair" or "balanced"; and
  
• bringing in D. Parvaz's totally unrelated statement that "church is a repressive institution" when it has nothing to do with the matter at hand just makes you look like a bunch of ideology-driven assholes...which, of course, you very well may be.

First of all, the men were photographed by the ferry captain, not a fellow passenger. And it wasn't because they "looked Middle Eastern," as the author is so quick to suggest. It was because of what the Times calls "unusual behavior — namely that they were taking pictures below deck, in areas that don't hold much interest for most tourists."

But at this point the author is too far into his epiphany for it to matter...after all, we're just reaching the thesis:

Should a newspaper — in a free country, proud of its history as a melting pot — be stereotyping people as "suspicious" by the pigment of their skin?

Joel is missing the point completely. The newspaper isn't stereotyping at all; they're reporting (or, more accurately in this case, failing to report) on relevant local news, news that people in the community are talking about and that impacts them directly. Ultimately, such reporting should be the central focus of a respected daily paper...no matter what the political leanings of their editorial board.

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Over at the P.I., they're already gloating about this:

The FBI has called off a global manhunt for two men who looked Middle Eastern and were spotted snapping pictures and demonstrating "suspicious behavior" on a Washington ferry last summer.

[...]

Photos of the pair, taken by Washington State Ferries employees, were released to the news media in August in an effort to identify and locate them, after an investigation found that they "showed an inordinate interest in the operation of the shipboard systems," the FBI said at the time.

Turns out the duo was really just a pair of businessmen from the EU, who visited Seattle last July and wanted to take photos of the boat's interior (since their home country supposedly doesn't have car ferries). So much for an "inordinate interest."

As you'll recall, the P.I. - unlike the Times - refused to run the photo of the men, due to "civil liberties and privacy concerns, which editors felt outweighed the newsworthiness of the images." We're all for those same concerns here at Seattle Crime Blog. Problem is, this isn't a civil liberties issue.

These men were photographed in a public place. There were no names associated with their faces, nor even any information as to what country they hailed from. It's no secret that the Puget Sound's ferry system is a shockingly vulnerable terrorist target, and - rightly or wrongly - two Middle Eastern men taking photos in an obscure location of the boat is going to raise questions. Such is the world we live in.

And in their haste to earn praise as a good liberal paper, editors at the P.I. got ahead of themselves: if you'll recall, the FBI wasn't saying that they knew the men were terrorists. They never claimed that if found, the pair would be locked away at Guantanamo and waterboarded 'til the cows come home. They just wanted to talk with them...and if what happened when the pair came forth two weeks ago is any indication, it would have been determined that the men's actions were innocent enough to warrant them walking free.

Sure, the P.I. was right this time. But it would be foolish to underplay the threat of Islamic extremism in the name of political correctness. And, like a certain neighborhood blog we recently called out for not doing their job, the P.I. failed to serve the public's interest by not publishing the photos in question. More concerned about the feelings of two foreigners than the safety of the community, the paper's editors allowed their political biases to impede on good editorial judgment.

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Talk about wasted resources:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced today it is offering a $2,000 reward for information on one or more shooters involved in impaling pigeons in downtown Seattle with metal darts.

Several Seattle residents have called PETA in the past two weeks to report seeing three injured pigeons fluttering around with needle-like projectiles — about three to four inches long — piercing their heads, said Tori Perry, cruelty case worker for the Norfolk, Virginia-based organization.

[...]

The darts were fired from a blow gun, lodging directly behind the birds' eyes without penetrating their brains, Perry said.

Perry and her brainwashed PETA cohorts are living in a dreamland, one where it's okay to throw $2,000 down the drain to make a political statement about the value of every single life (because even the life of disease-ridden winged rats is worth saving). Apparently for these folks, the never-ending list of injustices being perpetrated against human beings on a daily basis - even just here in Seattle - is worth turning a blind to. But somebody's messing with the pigeons? They gotta go.

 I won't even comment on the absurdity of Perry's other quote in the Times blurb:

This is just a horrifying case," she said. "Someone who would do this to an animal is a short step away from doing this to a human being."

Sort of speaks for itself, doesn't it?

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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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A quick post here. According to today's P.I., some wanna-be thugs were accosting people at bus stops in Redmond and robbing them of simple items, such as jackets and purses. Police caught the thieves when one of them ran past the cops while they were interviewing one of the victims, then got in the car that had been described in similar cases and tried to drive away:

A 53-year-old Redmond woman waiting for a bus in the 4200 block of 148th Avenue Northeast told officers that her purse had been stolen. The woman said one teen distracted her by talking to her when a second teen ran up to her and snatched her purse.

As the woman was talking to officers, she saw the teenager who had spoken to her run by and pointed him out to police. Officers found the teen getting into an SUV matching the description of the one used in the earlier robbery.

Smart moves, guys. You've made the pantheon of dumb criminals.