[clouds z]

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/C...?oid=541750&hp

if seattle is the emerald city then toto is a slug-a 30 year old bumper sticker



When Robert Eickmann noticed that his laptop, which had been stolen along with his car, had been broadcasting a signal from the same location for several days, he passed the information on to the Seattle Police Department. Eickmann hoped this information—this clue—would help the SPD track down his missing 1993 Saturn as well as his MacBook. Instead, the cops told Eickmann that he should invest in software to remotely wipe his hard drive.

On Christmas Eve, a young family was taking a late-night carriage ride through downtown Seattle. As they turned off of First Avenue onto Pike Street, a BMW plowed into the side of the carriage. The driver of the BMW backed up and sped off. But the people in the carriage wrote down the driver's license-plate number and called the police.

"They're not going to charge the guy with hit-and-run," Joanna Graf, owner of Angel Horse Carriages, angrily grumbles three months later. "They didn't even contact the guy." The police didn't even write the driver a ticket, and Graf had to pay for the $5,000 worth of damage done to her carriage. "A hit-and-run—that's pretty serious for the police to just say, 'Oh well.'"

The most frightening example of our police department's inability to police comes from Les Sandusky. In February, Sandusky was celebrating a friend's birthday at a house on Capitol Hill, when a group of uninvited guests crashed the party. "Some guys showed up and we asked them to leave," Sandusky says. Instead, the men went outside and began writing homophobic slurs on the house. Sandusky went to confront the six men and was attacked.

"They surrounded me. One of them smashed a 40 ounce bottle over my head," he says. Then one of the men pulled out a knife and stabbed Sandusky in the chest and throat. Sandusky spent a week in the hospital.

"There were eyewitnesses who knew their names and where they worked," Sandusky says. "One of the suspects even dropped his cell phone [outside the house]." But no arrests have been made and Sandusky says the detective on the case told him he would be "putting [the] case on the back burner."

Andrew Taylor, president of the Miller Park Community Council, has fought prostitution and drugs in his neighborhood. He believes officers in the East Precinct just can't keep up with crime in the area.

"I get the impression that when it's life-threatening, [the police] are there," says Taylor. "But they're basically running from fire to fire."

The SPD has been getting hammered lately in the dailies as well as in The Stranger ["Tase First, Ask Questions Later," Dec 13, 2007; "Head Banger," Nov 29, 2007; "Gil's Boys," July 5, 2007; "Raw Deal," June 7, 2007]. However, the department has hit a number of high-profile cases hard.

Solid detective work led police to 48-year-old James Anthony Williams, who was arrested and charged for the brutal stabbing death on New Year's Eve of Shannon Harps. A month later, SPD swarmed 23rd Avenue and Union Street and launched a citywide manhunt after a man shot and killed Degene Barecha and wounded another man inside of the Philadelphia's Best Cheesesteak restaurant. Within 24 hours, the Seattle Police Department apprehended the alleged shooter, Rey Davis-Bell, at a house in Beacon Hill.

High-profile manhunts and investigations put a heavy strain on the department's resources, which forces the SPD to prioritize. This might explain why folks like Eickmann and Graf—victims of crimes that aren't dominating the front pages of newspapers—are having trouble getting the cops to return their calls. But it's not indifference and it's not incompetence—it's staffing. Seattle simply doesn't have enough police officers to do the job.

"The staffing [situation] is getting very, very dangerous," says Seattle Police Officers' Guild (SPOG) president Rich O'Neill.

Seattle has 1,307 sworn officer positions,

yeah you just gotta love that new age" liberal" city

they spend the money on art and stadiums i guess

had to edit to toto