The story around the Pike speakeasy and the government’s drug allegations against the man who ran it and the people he became entangled with is fleshed out in this week’s Stranger – House of Cards: A Speakeasy, a Drug Bust, and One Cunning Undercover Cop. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee puts his crime reporting experience to full effect building on the details of the document prosecutors presented in charging Richard W. Wilson, Marshall Reinsch and three Honduran men, Carlos Zavala-Bustillo, Cesar Canterero-Arteaga and Edwan Fletes, with breaking federal drug and weapon laws.
There is some new information in the article — Wilson and Reinsch are currently out of jail but under GPS monitoring, for one — and a lot of color about what was driving Wilson and just how ‘cunning’ the undercover detective was who had infiltrated his circle:
One evening, one source says, Owens began telling them about being arrested at a May Day rally in 2008. “He said he came upon this protest and was crossing the street, and the cops were hassling him,” the source says. “He started mouthing off and they arrested him. He [said he] never thought about being against the police until then, and then from that point on he wanted to fuck cops up. He really played up the ‘fuck pigs’ thing,” the source says. Indeed, Seattle police bolstered their undercover detective’s story by filing a fake report for the incident, in case someone went looking for it.
Next time the police tell us there’s no money for a fully-funded bicycle patrol unit, beat cops, or more than a dozen officers patrolling the East Precinct at night, and when they tell us that they’re understaffed and doing all they can, let’s remember how much of their resources are devoted to investigating victimless crimes.
Given limited resources, police have to prioritize. It seems that violent crime and property crime is not at the top of their list.
What effect did this multi-year sting ending in a another flashy SWAT team deployment have on problematic drug use, or more directly, upon the availability of substances we’re not allowed to possess? What we had instead spent all this time and money on improving pedestrian or bicyclist safety, or investigating auto theft and violent crime?
Sorry, the drug issue (non marijuana)makes this a decent use of police resources. So many people are so willing to criticize their use of resources, when they are puppets of politics, community leader, and everybody knows there job better than they do.
ProstSeattle, could you please elaborate? I’m very skeptical of the idea that costly busts like this have any effect on the supply of banned substances or, more importantly but harder to evaluate, on problematic use of those substances.
Police are enforcers of the law, they don’t write the laws. They have to use their best judgment about which laws to concentrate on, but shouldn’t make subjective judgments like the one you’re suggesting. Ie, they shouldn’t decide to not combat drug trafficking/sale because you don’t think that busting drug distributors does any good. If you think there should be a legalized market for drug distribution/sale, that’s fine, but take it up with legislators, not the police.
Jdavin, you wrote: “[Police] have to use their best judgment about which laws to concentrate on, but shouldn’t make subjective judgments like the one you’re suggesting.” How could using “their best judgment” not be subjective?
Until we have a surplus of resources devoted to our police, they can, will, and must, prioritize and deprioritize different crimes. I and many other people believe that crimes against people should get top priority, with property crimes coming next, and with time and money left over devoted to other issues as appropriate.
We know darned well there are plenty of unlicensed pets around, for instance, and we don’t expect our police to do much about it, because they have better things to do. If police devoted massive amounts of resources to busting people for jaywalking, it would be reasonable to complain that more serious crimes were going unsolved. When it comes to arresting and prosecuting adults for posession of cannabis for personal use, priorities were so out of whack that we had to pass a citizen’s initiative to force the police to devote the funding we give them to more significant issues, and it’s now clear that such efforts are to be their lowest priority. It doesn’t mean they can’t enforce the law that says adults can’t possess the cannabis plant, it just means that as long as there’s something else for them to do, they should let it slide.
Would anyone care to argue that this latest bust will have any significant effect on the supply of banned substances or on the rate of problematic use of those substances? If it won’t, then was this really a good expenditure of the money we give our police to protect and serve?
by your logic, because you can never prevent people from being hit in the crosswalk, having their car stolen, or being assaulted, it’s a waste to do anything that would mitigate these issues.
For example, people on this board who seem to think that this is a waste of resources.
Or people who complain when they get a traffic ticket when there’s ‘murderers out there to catch’. Its a very common idea that the laws we break are silly, the laws others break are serious.