The Police Machine/Rainier Beach/Tues Dec 18/2:00 pm: When Officer Hendry asked the suspect in an assault incident to explain why he committed the crime, the suspect offered, via an SPD language line interpreter, this answer: "The Seattle Police Department has a machine that continually hits me on the head. The machine began hitting me on the head in August 2001, and has continued to do so [even to this day]. The only way I can escape the machine is to go to the mountains.... Once I made a trip to Portland, Oregon, and while there, a Portland police station's machine hit me on the head for an extended period of time. The constant hitting on the head causes me to become angry [and commit crime]." Regrettably, Officer Hendry did not ask the suffering suspect to describe this head-hitting police machine.

Criminal Transmissions/Greenwood/Wed Dec 19/5:30 pm: At 3:00 this afternoon, two girls who were having fun by talking back and forth on Motorola walkie-talkies in a Greenwood apartment were suddenly interrupted by an unknown male voice. "Where do you live?" asked the man inside their walkie-talkies. "By the Space Needle," answered the girl who owned the walkie-talkies. The man told her that she was lying. He knew, by the quality of their radio transmission, that she was nearby--that she lived in Greenwood. The girl turned off the walkie-talkies. When her friend departed two hours later, she turned her walkie-talkie on again. The man resumed his criminal inquiry: Where did she live? What street? What home? This time, the girl's mother heard the stranger in the communication machine, and told her daughter to turn it off. The girl told the man that she had to quit talking, because her mother told her so. The man said that her mother was brainwashing her. Outraged by the intruder's audacity, the mother grabbed the walkie-talkie from her daughter's hand and ordered the man in the machine to stop talking to her daughter. The man called the mother a bitch. The mother turned off the walkie-talkie and called the police, who arrived a few minutes later, listened to the story, and wrote up this disturbing report.

No Answers from the Answering Machine/Burke Ave N/ Thurs Dec 20/12:19 pm: This afternoon, a woman was looking for an old message on one of her answering machine's cassette tapes when she discovered a threatening message she did not remember receiving. The message was left on October 18, 2001, by a man whose voice she did not recognize. She called the police, and Officer Digalis responded to her call. After listening to her story, he listened to the menacing message: "A male voice was on the tape," reports Officer Digalis. "He said, 'Do not contact the authorities or your mail gets it.' He also said, 'Bring a large paper or plastic unmarked bag to Northeast 45th Street.'" The man then threatened to "get the mail" again, and hung up. Officer Digalis could do nothing about these obscure threats, and so he left.

The False Alarm/West Seattle/Thurs Dec 20/10:00 pm: A man knocked on the door of a house. The owner of the house answered the knock. The man who knocked on the door was a stranger to the homeowner. The stranger introduced himself as a security representative for ADT. The security representative gave the homeowner a brochure. The homeowner, however, was suspicious of the man for four good reasons: (1) he had bad teeth, (2) he had a long ponytail, (3) he did not wear an ADT uniform, and (4) the brochure was handwritten. The man with bad teeth asked if he could inspect the house and make an offer for a security system that would protect the house with the latest satellite technology. Indeed, the stars would watch over you! The homeowner declined this fantastic offer. The man with bad teeth returned to his vehicle, which was parked in front of the homeowner's lawn, sat in it for 10 minutes, and left.