"O heaven over me, pure and high! That is what your purity is to me now, that there is no eternal spider or spider web of reason; that you are to me a dance floor for divine accidents, that you are to me a divine table for divine dice and dice players." —Nietzsche, Before Sunrise

Lost Boys/Portland/Fri Nov 6/2 am: The crimes for this week's Police Beat were committed in and around Portland, Oregon—the city that recently lured and captured one of our fine reporters, Amy Jenniges. It is also the city that I'm visiting at the present moment, for reasons that are mostly professional. Because it's hard for me to find sleep in the land of strange beds, the largish window of my smallish hotel room—which is on the fifth floor of a brick building located not far from Powell's Books—has revealed to my insomnia street activity that's clearly not in accordance with the law. Regrettably, the reports for these low- and medium-intensity crimes (one being the exchange of blows between two men who had just walked out of a boisterous gay bar) are not available from the police department, and they don't make the pages of the daily papers. What preoccupies Portland's press at the moment is a rather ordinary murder that took place on September 25 and involved three male teenagers.

This is what happened: At around 5:00 p.m. at North Emerson Street and Haight Avenue, which is in the north part of the city, a 17-year-old boy named Michael Lavern Jasper allegedly shot to death another 17-year-old boy, Richard A. Minnifield Jr, over a girl ("some young lady whom Minnifield called his 'little sister,'" the victim's father said). The suspect, a high-school dropout, had a reputation for "shooting dice on street corners." The firearm he used in the murder was allegedly obtained from another 17-year-old boy, Mark Millage. Both the suspect and his accomplice will be tried as adults by the State of Oregon.

The important detail in this report is "shooting dice." No other recreational activity better represents the street tough than shooting dice. Playing bones and shooting pool come very close, but they don't reach the criminal essence of this combination: squatting on a city sidewalk, clutching dollars in one hand, and throwing dice against a concrete wall.

The Look of Crime/Vancouver, WA/Fri Nov 5/4:20 am: Early this morning, three men who wore nylons over their faces broke into an apartment on 7317 NE Hazel Dell Avenue and attacked a man who, unlike me at the time, was sleeping. The Oregonian reports: "One suspect beat the [victim] with a pistol while another stabbed him four times. The men, all described as in their 20s, took his wallet and fled." If violent crime of the sadistic order has a face, it is that of a man wearing a nylon over his head. Those who are executing an elaborate heist wear ski masks; highway robbers, street gangsters, and political agitators prefer bandanas. Nylons are for the sorts of criminals who pistol whip and stab their victims for a wallet.