Beacon Hill/Thurs July 29/1:31 pm Officer Nathaniel Upton reports: "When I arrived, the victim explained that he was smoking outside his apartment when he saw two white adult females walk by his apartment building on the sidewalk. One female was taller than the other. The shorter female walked toward him and gestured that she would like a cigarette. He gave her one. The two smoked for a couple minutes. During that time, the taller female was walking around and eyeballing the victim. The shorter female started asking to use his bathroom. He repeatedly told her no. At some point, the taller female was behind him and hit him on the head/neck two times with a BB gun that looked like a real gun. He started to fall down. She went to hit him again, but he knocked the gun out of her hands with his elbow.

"The two females started to run off W/B on S Cloverdale St. The victim then realized that the shorter female had stolen a mobile DVD player while he was engaged with the taller female. He told me he thinks the females targeted him because he was Mexican."

I will address this report with the one below.

West Seattle/Fri July 30/12:55 pm Officer Adley Shepherd reports: "The victim reported the following: He takes the same route home every day from school and suffers from shortness of breath. So today while walking down the long stairway that leads from 20th Ave SW down to Delridge Way SW, he decided to take a break. While sitting on the stairs, he took out his PlayStation Portable game system to look at the time when he noticed three black male teens walking up the stairs. The black males initially walked by without incident. A few seconds later, the older-looking of the three approached from behind and asked to play a game on his PSP. He refused to give the black male his PSP and started to place it back in his pocket. Before he could place the PSP back, the black male attacked by punching him. His attacker took the PSP from his hand and walked up the stairs."

At the core of these crimes are products that are popular with thieves for no other reason than they are portable. This is what the suspects really want: something that is easy to grab and carry. They most likely did not notice the color of their victims. Yet the reports have a racially strong tone. In the first report, the victim makes a direct association between his race and the crime; in the second, the color of the suspect is repeated several times. Why? A possible answer: When the crime is transferred from the terrain of a simple robbery (the petty) to that of racism (the genetic, the social), it no longer has the aspect of the accidental. Instead, these victims could do nothing because they were victims of something much larger than themselves; they were victims of history.