Police responded to a reported street robbery Friday night/early Saturday morning on E Pike. According to food truck operator @fusionontherun, two people were mugged in front of the Wildrose the night of their 27th anniversary party:
watched 2 women get robbed for their phones in front of the rose tonight. 4 men involved . Let pep know 2 be cafeful 2night
We have not yet confirmed details with police but the SPD incident response site indicates officers did respond to a strong-arm robbery at the location. The Fusion on the Run Twitter account also said there may have been arrests associated with the mugging.
UPDATE: Here’s an account from another witness at the scene. Again, we have not confirmed details with SPD. The information about the suspects being seen at Big Mario’s has been posted via social media elsewhere online this morning so we are not redacting the information here. But, again, we have no official word on the circumstances surrounding the robbery report. Here’s the account:
We got to the rose around 10:15 pm. I met my friends to celebrate XXXX and her going away for a new job we got a seat right next to the window. By the time we got our second round of drinks around 11 I saw a large group of men dressed in big jackets and obviously dressed like thugs.
One of the guys was in a large white Jacket one in a red hat and one other in a dark jacket wearing pants around his mid thigh no one knows what the other guy looks like. The rose was packed for its anniversary I believe. There was a group of women outside and a lot of people inside. The guys kind of hung around outside for a min and then all of a sudden I see them hunched over a girl who is now on the ground and the group of men split and go running. 2 ran up the hill and 2 from what I was told just kind of walked to Marios. The 2 that ran up the hill grabbed a girls I phone in commotion. Our immediate reaction was to bolt out the door and chase the guys we ran for about 4 blocks but couldn’t find them anywhere. One girl found 2 of them at Marios hanging out I walked down and to see for my self and pointed them to police. The owner of the Rose followed the men after police talked to them and let them go. She contacted police for a second time after she found them with the other 2 men that got away. The girl that they jumped was too intoxicated to be cooperative with police and the rest of the witnesses didn’t get a good enough look at them. I was told that they swapped cloths before the line up so it threw off the witness. I was also told the suspects hang out on the hill often and frequent Marios. After the lineup instead of running off and thanking their lucky stars they aren’t in jail they came back to the bar to try and intimidate the owner and patrons by walking by staring at us all several times. I have no idea if this was a drug deal gone back with the girl they jumped and the phone was just chance or if they just saw a large group of women and decided to rob them. One of the witnesses was scared to get involved because she sees them out at bars often. I know crime happens often on the hill I have just never seen such a blatant act of it out in the open like this.
Hope this helps I just want women to know to be safe this weekend and if your on the hill there are people attacking others for phones so be careful.
UPDATE x2: And another account posted to our Facebook page from a woman who says she was one of the victims:
I was one of the women. Group of black males walked past the rose a couple of times then grabbed my phone right out of my hand and took off running. This was around 11:30pm. The other girl’s phone was taken as well but she was too drunk to cooperate. Police searched for the one that took the phones and never found him, but did identify the rest of the group. Be careful out there ladies!
Full disclosure: Big Mario’s is a CHS advertiser.
Crime stats for the entirety of 2011 won’t be available until early 2012 but we recently looked at trends through the first nine months of the year here.
UPDATE x3: SPD confirmed the robbery investigation but the preliminary information available at this time is pretty slim. According to police, a woman was robbed outside an E Pike tavern around 11:16p Friday night by two assailants. No injuries were reported. SPD said the two suspects involved in the case were described as black males in their 20s. One was 5′ 6″ with a thin build and wearing a black jacket with a white hoodie at the time of the robbery. The other was described as 6’1″ with a thin build and wearing a white jacket with dark, baggy jeans. SPD had no additional information at this time.
These thugs stalk the sidewalk and the police can do nothing? They are known to hang out near the Rose and it seem OK somehow?
Wow, what happened to solidarity on the Hill? Pizza dollars are more important than the long time Lesbian bar?
The site had two first hand reports … those are the facts. This is as bad as it gets,need to organize, get more police power involved and take this seriously.
I’ve seen so many reports of snatched iPhones that I rarely even take mine out of my pocket on the sidewalk anymore. If I do I don’t walk 10 ft without looking around me. Not only do we need to be more careful, we could all do with being a little less obsessed with our f**king phones.
People who have expensive gadgets such as smartphones need to be smart themselves. Do not have your head buried in your smartphone when you’re out on the street at night or at least be aware of what’s going on around you. It’s not the smartest thing to have your head in your smartphone in sketchy areas on the hill or downtown. Smartphones are a big target now that many people aren’t strolling around with lots of cash. Be careful where you use your smartphone.
It’s not that the police *can* do nothing, but they *choose* to do nothing. What a shitty PD this city has; corrupt and incompetent. Multiple eye witnesses and a local business owner contacting the police *twice* in the same hour and physically pointing out 4 people as criminals? It sounds like some of the people witnessing the jumping weren’t 100% positive (especially if the clothes were swapped), but someone must have if these are recognized thugs on the hill.
Although it’s not clear: did they arrest anyone? The second update says they “did identify the rest of the group”. And…?!
But yeah, how do 4 guys continue to hang out on the Hill with impunity? Shouldn’t someone plaster their faces on every single telephone pole in the Pike/Pine corridor? As Jake asks, where’s the solidarity? And while I certainly never take my phone out when a large black man asks me to borrow it, or make a call for him (yeah, so what- it’s racist, and it’s rational. They aren’t always in conflict), with the ubiquity of camera phones their pictures should more prominent than Andrew Meyer’s.
Apparently this city’s hipster community will slander the wrong guy halfway across the country, but won’t take pictures of people who are mugging revelers right in their own neighborhood.
Other cities like SF use decoys who are female undercover officers with undercover cops nearby to arrest the thugs. These four thugs could be put behind bars pretty easily.
In this town if a group of young guyes looks like thugs assume they are and act accordingly especially in the Pike/Pine area where there have been several muggings lately.
If the police do do anything they will be accused of racial profiling and overuse of force. They way they have been treated by the press as of late it is no wonder SPD doesn’t step to the plate.
Besides in non-felony cases the police pretty much have to witness the crime or get a confession in order to make an arrest.
But in the end the police are not responsible for your safety, their job is to investigate crimes and arrest suspects, not to watch after you. Stay off the phone, pay attention to your surroundings and get the tools and training to defend yourself as needed.
First, their treatment in the press is deserved: it is a good thing for the public, and the press, to keep a vigilant and critical eye on the police, because of the extraordinary power and latitude they are granted. And when you read things like the excerpts from the SPD’s internal newsletter that the Stranger published a while back, you understand why: the police in this city actually seem to *hate* the city and its inhabitants, so it’s more than a bit sketchy we give them guns, a license to kill, and tell them to go run around our neighborhoods.
“But in the end the police are not responsible for your safety, their job is to investigate crimes and arrest suspects, not to watch after you.”
Well that’s just absurd. No, they can’t obviously Nerf the whole city so no one is ever victimized, but keeping people safe is why we have a police department! That includes responding to crime reports- such as this one- and being a visible presence on patrol. How is this even a question to you?!? When someone is attacked on a street, with witnesses, taking a “Well, what can you do, that’s not our job anyway” approach is insanity. And yeah, I’ll call bullshit on the “we can’t do our job because we’ll be accused of racial profiling”. No, you won’t, not if you arrest the suspects identified by multiple people on the street.
Investigating crimes is what detectives are for- as a subset of the police department- and making arrests doesn’t require a gun. So why do police get on bikes or in cars or on foot and patrol areas, if it’s not to be visible and keep people safe?
Oh, and I reject this notion that we’re supposed to be “smart” and keep our phones in our pockets. I do this, as should you, but the idea that this is the end of the story- that we shouldn’t even hope for a neighborhood safe enough to take out your phone on a sidewalk- is defeatism and lunacy.
It was a assault. They punched the first girl in the stomach. She was on the ground by the time we got out the door to chase them. As far as I know that is a felony in this state I could be wrong. There wasn’t much they could do because they girl they chose to attack was wasted. But I know people from the Cha Cha had to have seen this happen and did nothing.
The police should have had more of a presence after they let the assailants go. For them to come back to the rose and for everyone to be told to leave in groups after and fear our safety is not okay. I know it was a busy Friday night and they have a million things they have to do and calls to respond to but at least having a cop car on the block after they let them go would have been nice.
Actually as per US Supreme Court case Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005),the police do not have a constitutional duty to protect and individual. In this case a woman and her children were murdered by her husband whom she had a restraining order against. She reported to the police that he was in violation fo the restraining order but they did not respond.
Per Warren v. District of Columbia the police have no duty to respond to calls or protect an individual. In this case Two women were upstairs when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were told that the police were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate’s yelling had ceases , they assumed the police had arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police did not , but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: “For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers.”
The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.’s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a “fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.” There are many similar cases with results to the same effect.
Yea the police are fucked up, that is the nature of the job. I don’t know if you have lived outside of Seattle but my experience with our local police force has shown them to be one of the most courteous and professional departments I have ever dealt with. Go to LA, NYC, New Orleans, SF or even Portland, not to mention numerous backwater towns and countys.
Also visible police patrols are generally based on the law enforcement of “prevention vs apprehension” basically the halo effect, those cops are not primarely there to arrest peopel they are there to make people behave because there’s cop watching them.
Also I agree that we should live in a neighborhood where we can use out phones and not get robbed, but that is not just up to the city and the police, it is up to all of us as individuals to look after ourselves and our fellow citizens.
In WA assault is usually a misdemeanor unless the assault is against a police officer, public officer or official (including school teachers) or a healthcare worker, assault is also a felony is involves a deadly weapon or causes grievous body injury.
This incident was most likely misdemeanor simple assault, however it could be first degree robbery if the victim sustained injury during the robber. However if for example the if when asked if they are injured the victim says “I’m fine” and refuses medical treatment it could be assumed in teh eyes of the law that the victim sustained no injury. Or not finding the stolen property would change the crime from robbery to an assault. But I am just making assumptions as I wasn’t there.
Also good on you for chasing them down, we need more neighbors like you. and you are right the police should have maintained a presence in the area, and it would have been great to arrest the perps. I know a good amount of the east precinct some are great officers but there area a few jerks that tend to not do shit due to “paperwork.” Personally I would like to see street trash like this get a good beatdown at the hands of the patrons of the rose.
Anyway have a happy new year
Remember how everyone was all ‘oh no SPD are masters of brutality!!!!’
Well, here’s your wages. Now the police won’t do a goddamned thing. Nice going, hippies.
MaybeIshouldMoveToBellevue: It’s not “racist” to not loan your phone to a black man who is not known to you….it’s simply a rational response to the facts of all the recent muggings. It’s a smart decision to not invite trouble.
That does seem ridiculous. It’s sad it’s come to this, but really everyone would do well to carry pepper spray on them. I’m not a small guy and I can take care of myself, but I carry it with me all the time now. Too much shit going on on CapHill now, it’s foolish not to. You can buy it lots of places, or on eBay for super-cheap. It’s just good sense, unless you’re willing to be go along with being frightened enough to stay home.
Where’s can you buy decent quality pepper spray on Cap Hill?
I don’t know. I just bought it online, it was way easier and ridiculously cheap on eBay. I have no idea how expensive it is, if you can buy it on CapHill. As for “decent quality”…well, I can tell you what I bought online definitely works. In trying to chase a defiant, trespassing raccoon out of my house, I moronically ran into my own cloud of it. It works, trust me. :-Þ
Can you tell me the brand or model number? I’ve been considering getting some of this for the past year. I think it may be better to use this stuff instead of a .40 caliber on fools trying to rob me. Then again, some of these neighborhood terrorists could use a good shooting/beating.
Got mine on amazon. Still carry my 380 though in case the thugs are used to spicy food.
Regretfully I think the bad press Spd has been getting and the lack of support from the mayors office will lead to blue flu. Time to keep the heat close, we’re on our own for a while.
The officers that responded were professional and sooooo hot…I think his name was Jones. He had a slight upstate new york accent, and a booty that won’t quit. His hair is laced with silver….reminds me of mountains shimmering in the cold alaskan fall. His glasses were simple yet framed a dashing but modest face. Im in love. His partner, the female, was mean and dismissive.
Ernest,
I tried to post a link to this but it wouldn’t take.
Search on item #230574206928 on eBay. The ones I bought look just like these. This seller looks reputable.
Thanks JimS. Looks like I’ll give eBay a try.
I don’t recommend carrying the random pepper spray from ebay.
Go with Fox Labs, it is a bit more spendy but it is the best of the best, the brand most police departments use. You can oeder it from plenty of places online.
http://foxlabs.com/pepperspray.shtml
I really like Mario’s pizza but I’m done going there by myself because of the thug element. The sidewalk in front of that place feels like Belltown now. I went there on a recent Thursday around 10 pm, the sidewalk was packed and these guys got all around me, saying disgusting sexist stuff and trying to intimidate me. It’s the second time I’ve felt threatened walking in and out of that place. I’m not saying it’s Mario’s fault, but like the other commenter said: What ever happened to solidarity on the hill? Why don’t the employees and regular customers at Cha Cha, Paradiso and Mario’s report these jerks? I can’t be the only person who has experienced this kind of harassment there.