Remember those poison-spitting dinosaurs from Jurassic Park? If you’re a paleontologist, you might be more familiar with them as Dilophosaurus. Seattle’s crime scene was recently graced with the presence of a blood-spitting, human-Dilophosaurus hybrid. Sadly, no photos of his crest exist and perhaps even more sadly, he did not rid the world of Wayne “Newman” Knight.

According to a Seattle police report, an officer allegedly saw a man trespassing in the 800 block of E. Harrison Street in the predawn hours of October 12. The officer contacted the man and told him he was investigating a trespassing case. The man reportedly said that he did not live on that block but was visiting a friend. When the officer asked him for his friend’s name and address, the report states that the man “looked very confused.” Pressing further, the officer asked the man for his name and date of birth. After the man gave the officer two false DOBs, the officer warned him he was risking False Reporting charges. The report states that the suspect gave correct information at this time.

With this new-found information, the officer ran the man’s record and found that there were two outstanding warrants issued in Seattle Municipal Court against the suspect. He then arrested the suspect on the outstanding warrants and the new charge of False Reporting. According to the officer, the suspect “was angry that I arrested him and he started cursing at me.”

The officer put the suspect into his car and began conducting a search of his bag. Then things began to get interesting. According to the officer’s testimony: “I heard [the suspect] banging his head in the back seat of my patrol car. [The suspect] banged his head against the prisoner cage, and he started bleeding from his head.” The officer stated that he “saw a red substance that appeared to be blood flowing down [the suspect’s] face” and that the suspect “spit blood towards me. [The suspect] was trying to transmit his blood on me.”

The report says the officer quickly closed his door, only to have the suspect reportedly continue to spit blood on his rear passenger-side window and door. More officers arrived, at which point the reporting officer placed a “spit sock” over the suspect’s head.

More spitting after the jump.

If you ever wanted a spit sock, you can get one for only $2.85. I’m already looking forward to when the first one of you weirdos calls in to Savage Love to tell us all about your new fetish.

The suspect allegedly told the backup police officers that the reporting officer injured him, but reportedly later told medics responding to the scene that he injured himself in the backseat.

The report states the suspect was taken to Harborview Medical Center to attend to his injuries, where he threatened the officer guarding him there in a way that the officer felt was credible (sadly, the threat was redacted from the police report—they redact all the best stuff). Call me crazy, but I struggle to empathize with any gun-toting cop who feels “threatened” by an unarmed and likely handcuffed man.

29 replies on “I Spit on Your Squad Car”

  1. I’m right there with ya’ Matt. There’s no possibility of carrying out any sort of threat so long as the suspect remains unarmed and likely handcuffed.

    Enforcing public order is a hard enough job, Matt, even for paid professionals. And (according to our mutual friend Mr. Locke) it’s the fundamental a role of government.
    Sometimes, I know, those professional enforcers of civic order shoot unarmed whittlers who are facing a different direction, which is bad, but sometimes they do a really good job and just want to go home to families and not worry about erratic people with a grudge.

  7. You hate Wayne Knight, and apparently have no idea that things like hep b, hep c, and HIV, can all be easily transmittable when blood is exposed to the eyes, mouth and mucus membranes. I wonder, would you not feel threatened if some stranger beat their own forehead open and started spitting blood all over you?

    You’re not crazy, intern, but you have proved yourself again to be a fucking idiot.

    Someone please, please, please fire this imbecile.

  9. I think the “spit sock” site you link to does a pretty excellent job of explaining why the officer felt threatened by someone whose medical history is unknown spitting blood on him. Most likely, the officer did not feel as though the suspect was going to break out of the cuffs and snap the officer’s neck. More likely, he was concerned about the threat of communicable diseases.

    You really are pretty fucking stupid, Matt.

  10. Hey guys, the report might be redacted but it indicates the threats made to the officer were verbal–i.e. icky blood-spitting probably didn’t play a role in it. Please don’t hesitate to jump to conclusions, though.
    @ 1 — Haha!

  11. Matt, I’m sorry, but I have to repost a question I asked in your taxation piece about 1098 because I don’t think you’ll read it what with 5,000 additional comments….sorry for the blogspam

    Hey Matt!

    I’m actually a fairly conservative “liberal.” At least as far as this publication is concerned, but I wonder what your thoughts are on the more positive coercive nature of taxation versus the more negative coercion.

    If you don’t pay taxes, you will go to jail, yes. But if I don’t pay taxes, some kid in Georgia (where they take in more Federal funding than they dish out) won’t be able to eat or go to the doctor.

    Now, nevermind the moral argument, I’m saying, to what extent do you think people are positively motivated by the goodies that come from central taxation and redistribution rather than the fear of violence from the state?

    Does taxation and increased centralized authority come from the threat of violence so that they can wax the federal coiffers like some kind of feudal tax collector, or is it a more insidious ability to smooth out the down side of the dynamism inherent in a more community oriented legislative and taxation system?

    Honestly, this isn’t a leading question. I’m just curious what you think.

  15. Nevermind, you already answered my question. Also, where do you go for intellectual discussion that isn’t the comments thread of slog posts? I can’t seem to find anywhere with people willing to discuss issues on any level beyond knee-jerk regurgitation of worn out political talking points.

    Ideas?

  18. @15
    Thank you.

    @16
    Little condescending, but I understand your point. If you have any specific locations/times in mind, let me know.

  19. @ Gloomy Gus — You make a fair point. This is the sort of thing that will make me a better writer.

    @15 — If you’re still in school, join as many clubs as you can. I was lucky enough to be in some really weird and marginalized student groups at university. Check out meetup.com, too–I know Seattle has great anarcho-capitalist and voluntaryist groups. But really, the most important thing is reading and, once you feel up to it, writing.

    @16 — Awesome find on the anarchist book fair. I’ll be going to that for sure. If you can’t wait for the next Slog Happy, you might be able to find me at the fair.

  21. Even if he’s unarmed and cuffed, if a self-injuring blood-spitting crazy man said, “When I get out of here I’m gonna hunt you down and kill you like I’m Maurice Clemmons,” I might consider that a credible threat. Or if he threatened to infect someone with HIV. And a big man can do a lot of damage with just head butts, body slams, and kicks. If a crazy guy arrested for outstanding warrants threatens me, I think I`ll err on the side of calling it “credible,” cuffs or no cuffs.

    Question for the collective wisdom of Slog commenters: When cops say a threat is credible, does that mean “The threatened action could be carried out” or does it mean “This person is potentially serious about attempting to carry out this threat?”

  23. @7–Since when should expressing wrong-headed opinions on a fucking blog be cause for terminating a “hard working” intern who “writes well”? Shitfuck, man! That really is an unfair standard.

    Whatever I may have drunk-typed about the intern’s bullshit taxation position, in this particular case, I’m with the him. Cop was playing fast and loose with the Constitution. I don’t like to see that, no matter who that cop’s playing it with, be it Father Tucker, child fucker or Uncle Tommy of Tommy’s Fine Glasswares. I hold cops to higher standards of professional conduct than I do priests. Priests don’t as a general rule carry lethal weapons.

  24. You know, when you make being a police officer in this town impossible, all the decent cops quit and the worst ones stay, becoming more isolated and paranoid by the day. Which leads to worse abuses by the police. Which is why the Stranger’s agitprop on reforming the SPD is always so counterproductive.

  25. It sounds like someone posted a link about spit socks, but I didn’t see it anywhere.

    For those of you who don’t know a spit sock is a mesh hood. They are also used in hospitals to prevent patients who are spitting at the staff from doing so.

    @24 So complaining about the the fucked up state of our police force and suggesting it be improved is off the table because it somehow hurts the poor poor police officers?

  26. @23 — Love to see that people aren’t holding my politics against me. I just want to report good stories.

    @24 — This is such a ridiculous comment. Hey guys, stop writing negative restaurant reviews on Yelp! All of the good restaurants are going to leave, guys! And guess what? When a restaurant fucks up your order, it doesn’t shoot you.

    @25 — The spit sock link is after the jump, but yeah, you know your spit socks already!

  27. Blood is one of those things you don’t mess with. This officer had no idea what this guy could have been trying to transmit, for all he knew the guy had aids. I know officers are sworn to protect and serve, but getting bled on when no blood was expected is probably a huge shock.

  29. Matt, the problem with your police coverage is not that it is “negative” — that it reports facts even if they reflect poorly on the police. The problem is that the only “solutions” The Stranger offers are thinking up ways of making life as miserable as possible for the cops, with no regard for their safety or sanity. What you want is as little policing as possible except every once in while when you pick out one particular special crime that affects you and yours, and then that crimes solved toot sweet. You’re like a lot of angry 14 year olds hanging out at the mall grumbling “fuck the police”.

    This is not like visiting somebody’s restaurant and then leaving and going to some other restaurant. These are the only cops we have, and these cops aren’t somebody else. The cops you’re talking about are us. We created the police, we pay for them, we run the police force and we need them.

    Whenever anybody tries to explain this shit to you people you have fit and run crying to your room because you’re sooooooooo angry about it all. You’re babies and you’re not qualified to speak on this subject.

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