RC Blog

Where the cops have gone

Homelessness - posted by Adam Hyla on Friday, June 11 at 3:40pm

Alert readers of Real Change know that we have not run Streetwatch, our weekly catalog of police incidents involving the homeless, for a few weeks now.

Here’s why.

Charles Mudede, the grandaddy of all police-blot watchers, notes with perfect accuracy that SPD’s new policy broadcasts only a teeny sliver of the massive volumes of paperwork generated by the department’s staff. The incidents posted online “represent an ideal of police work: cops and robbers.”

Our Streetwatch column, in its 10-year run, has been a place to air some of the various happenings, tragic and banal, that transpire for people on Seattle’s streets. One of its items germinated assistant editor Rosette Royale’s nationally award-winning three-part series. It’s seldom been pretty: in them, the homeless are victims of rape and assault. They are perps – most frequently, they beat or hit each other. And they are victims if not in fact than in circumstance: they are trespassed, trespassed, stopped on suspicion of lurking, and trespassed again. And the accounts provided are of course one-sided: they are the stories the police have set down.

For all that, Streetwatch has been the product of an open and progressive policy: the police would simply make recent incidents available on compact disc (they used to print it all out) for viewing by computer at the local precinct. I acknowledge the use of putting incidents online – but not of drastically narrowing the scope of what’s available.

We won’t publish a column culled from only a portion of the police’s work – it’s akin to looking for your lost wallet under the streetlamps.

Staff in the department’s Media Relations unit have assured me that more information would be posted over time. That’s not a satisfying response. What? When? Who’s responsible? What are the minimum standards for what gets posted and what is left offline?

For now, the new system has rendered Streetwatch untenable. I’m determined to bring it back again. So I’ll continue to request that the police re-open the filing cabinet.

Stay tuned for more.

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