News

Police Beat

by Charles Mudede

Death In the Maze/Freeway Park/Fri Jan 18/10:15 am: Today, a group of women entered a public restroom near the cosmopolitan gardens of the Convention Center and found on the floor the body of a woman with her pants pulled down and stab wounds on her torso. The women screamed and ran out of the restroom. Once outside the restroom, they saw a white middle-aged man with brown hair. The man quickly pulled his blue trench coat over his head and ran north through the maze of the park. The women then ran to a nearby panic button and pressed it. A moment later, a Washington State Convention Center security officer arrived, checked the body for a pulse (found none, but the body was still warm), and called 911. Officer Tietjen was dispatched to investigate the crime and secure the crime scene. While Officer Tietjen secured the crime scene for the homicide detectives, a K9 unit arrived to hunt down the person of interest. The police dogs attempted to sniff him out of the maze but failed to pick up his trail. The person of interest got away. But this is hardly surprising: It's easy for a white middle-aged man with brown hair and a blue trench coat (a lawyer? a banker? a dentist attending a conference in the convention center?) to give the authorities and their trained hounds the slip.

Race Treatment/Downtown/Thurs Jan 17/11:30 am: When Officer Diaz contacted a man who was causing a disturbance near the bustling Pike Place Market, the suspect told him that if Bill Clinton bombed Afghanistan one more time he would destroy the marketplace, with same ferocity that Jesus--another lawbreaker--destroyed a prosperous marketplace 2,000 years ago. Officer Diaz tried to reason with the suspect, to calm him down, to explain that Bush was now our president. "You, nigger, are going to die for talking to me," the suspect threatened, with his fists raised. Soon after saying the "N" word, the suspect was placed in the back of an ambulance and transported to the hospital to receive "treatment."

Remains On the Roof/Downtown/Sat Jan 5/2:46 am: A security guard for Northwest Protective Service, Inc. was checking the roof area of the business he protected when he found a human femur bone. Nothing else was found on the roof. The security guard called 911 and Officer Bolton was dispatched to investigate the mini-apocalypse on the downtown roof. "The security guard gave me the bone," reports Officer Bolton, "and I took the bone to medical investigator Donald Halberg. Halberg also believed it was a human femur."

My Girlfriend's Guns/Mount Baker/Thurs Jan 10/10:06 pm: A Mount Baker man walked in the South Precinct and gave Officer Diamond "two double-barrel shotguns" that were owned by his emotionally unstable girlfriend. He wanted the police to "dispose of the weapons," and Officer Diamond agreed to do so. One of the submitted shotguns was made by "Ithaca NY," which happens to be the name of the town where Cornell University is located. And Cornell University happens to be where, in the 1950s, the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov taught literature.