Hell of a House/Central District/Tuesday May 2/2:07 pm: Officer Owings: "A call was placed stating that a woman was giving birth. When the SPD arrived, they observed the woman sitting on a couch with the obviously deceased fetus attached to the umbilical cord lying between her legs. The woman told them that she had been suffering from vaginal bleeding since the night before and that the bleeding became increasingly worse. Due to some unknown cause she went into labor, and delivered the [dead] baby. The woman does not have a permanent residence for herself or her children. She had been staying with a friend for the past week.

"The entire residence was in a state of disrepair inside and out. The bedrooms were full of miscellaneous trash and were unclean. Officers were informed that there were large rats living in and about the house. The home is owned by an 85-year-old woman who has dementia, and who was unaware that these children were even in the house.... Crime Scene Investigation detectives responded to the scene regarding the incident and took photographs of the scene and residence."

To illustrate the vast economic disparity between cities in overdeveloped countries and cities in underdeveloped ones, urban theorist Mike Davis writes in his new book, Planet of the Slums: "[T]he household per-capita income differential between a rich city like Seattle and a very poor city like Ibadan, Nigeria, is as great as 739 to 1—an incredible inequality" (page 25–26). For Davis, who lives in San Diego, Seattle is the prime example of a rich city; and statistically, the average person living here is astronomically better off than the average person living in the prime example of a poor city. But through Officer Owing's report we witness a level of wretchedness that one might expect to find in the slums on the edge of impoverished Ibadan (a city that cannot offer its poor and mentally ill any kind of social assistance), but instead exists in the heart of affluent Seattle. The shock and shame of it all is that conditions of this kind can so easily penetrate, and find a home in, a city that counts as its citizens some of the richest persons in the known universe.

Crime of Our Times/Green Lake/Wednesday May 3/4:40 am: As gas prices continue to climb, we can expect to see more of the type of crime reported by Officer Williams: "I drove the victim down to the 26th Avenue Northeast address. The victim positively identified the suspect vehicle. Victim then stated that he recognized the suspect vehicle as living in the neighborhood and that the chrome accents and red stripe around the vehicle made it very recognizable. Victim and his wife both recalled seeing the suspect vehicle driving through the neighborhood on multiple occasions. I drove the victim back to his residence and collected the gas hose that was still inserted into the gas tank of the victim's vehicle. Victim checked his gas tank and stated that the suspect may have stolen a quarter of a tank of gas or less. Victim did not give the suspect permission to tamper with his vehicle nor take gas from his vehicle. I gave the victim a case number." Quick closing note: This line ("he recognized the suspect vehicle as living in the neighborhood") proves once and for all that to the American mind, cars are not machines but creatures. recommended