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Seattle Policing Story Covered on Fox, Not in Seattle Itself
Thursday afternoon, a Seattle policeman was patrolling in his vehicle in the South Lake Union area. A man was walking down the street with a stick on fire in his hand. The policeman yelled at the man to stop, but he threw the lighted stick into the vehicle occupied by the policeman. The article on MyNorthwest.com includes a picture of the vehicle.
The 37-year-old suspect was not hurt.
SPD officer Caleb Pomazon was taken to Harborview Medical Center with non-life-threatening burns.
Pomazon has been with the department for one year. He is currently on paid administrative leave per department policy.
We watched a little segment on Fox News last night about this incident. No mention yesterday on any of the local stations, but today two of three have the same basic story (about PD releasing photo of burned SUV). The most important story today in Seattle is the Covid-19 outbreak at Harborview Medical Center.
Another story is that more Seattle police left the force in September than any previous month. Gee, I wonder why that might be?
Published in Policing
There is something strange about this story. What kind of a “burning stick” would penetrate a windshield? If you struck a windshield with an ax as hard as you could, it would barely penetrate.
The side window was open so the officer could call out to the suspect.
Looking at the picture, the windshield burst because of the heat of the fire inside the car – after the car caught fire. If a window in the police car was open, throwing a lit accelerant-soaked stick into it would not have been hard.
This article looks like bad reporting. Not deceptive reporting but lazy or incompetent reporting.
When I first read it, I thought one the man is carrying a stick maybe three or four feet long lit at the top 10 or 12 inches. It was not a torch or a tiki torch because otherwise the reporter would have said so. Then I read that officer felt it necessary to tell the man to drop the stick, but why? Then the officer drew his gun, but why? Then the man threw his “stick’ through the windshield and I figured the stick was a 5- or 6-foot-long 2×4; that would penetrate the windshield if the guy had a good, strong, fast arm. And then again I wondered how a lit stick, even a furnace-heated 2×4, could set a whole car on fire and not just melt the pleather. Then I saw the photo of the car and knew, yes, the car was set on fire, but how?
There is enough left out of this article to make a fine news article.
Just the new norm.
Was there a call for service? E.g. someone calling 911 to say “there’s an angry man brandishing a flaming torch?” Also, I read somewhere that the guy was shouting “I’m going to kill all of you n——.” Whatever I read did not indicate the suspect’s race, which makes me think he was probably black: A white person shouting the n-word while threatening people with a flaming torch would have made the front page of A Former Newspaper.
In Nazi Germany, as in the Iron Curtain countries, citizens figured out what the news was by interpreting the lacunae in the sanctioned media.
Misbehaving Democrat politicians have their party noted around paragraph 7, if at all.
For Republicans, it is in the headline.
He should have been . . .
It appears that a rag was attached to the 2 by 2 “stick”. My guess would be that an accelerant was used to ignite the rag. It also appears that the fire ignited the interior of the car very quickly, and perhaps the uniform of the officer.
Just another moment in the “I’m okay, and you’re okay” society we live in today. Obviously there is room for everyone in Seattle. One must not judge.
Yes, the article leaves out a lot. The police department video itself provides more information. The video caption says that the officers were responding to a call, and looking for a person carrying a stick on fire. The person was carrying what looks like a 2×2 about 8 feet long with one end aflame. Initially the person runs away from the police car, but then turns around, runs toward the police car with the flaming end of the lumber pointed toward the police car. As the person runs by the driver’s side of the police car, he inserts the flaming end of the lumber through the (apparently open) side window of the police car, with the police officer still sitting in the driver’s seat.
Yes. The lumber went in through the driver’s side window, the assailant ran, and the officer discharged his pistol several times through the windshield, which evidently broke when it was fired through from inside.
There was an article in the Seattle Times on 10/16, which was updated with video issued by the SPD.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/seattle-man-charged-with-2-counts-of-assault-after-allegedly-setting-police-vehicle-on-fire/
The only surprise here is the perp wasn’t shot. Are the cops in Seattle gun-shy now?
Shame he missed . . . or did he?
Oh, no, not at all. The cop shot the car several times.
He was on fire. And the guy was running away.
Yes, he was rather busy trying to get himself out of the car. He has no idea if his attacker has a gun, or any other weapon, and will try to keep him in the car.
I didn’t mean this as an insult. Only that it seemed out of place for the article to state in the first or second line that the suspect was unhurt. I didn’t even know the policeman fired any shots until later.
What does it say about Seattle and its media, when they evidence more concern for the status of the suspect than the status of the officer brutally attacked inside his car?
That the cop needs to find a different job.
In a different city
Maybe a different profession. I have no clue why anybody would be a cop nowadays
One-year policeman patrolling a relatively tame part of town, with bars, restaurants, a college, Amazon, lots of foot traffic. But the City was right to come clean about the officer discharging his weapon, because there might be property damage or injury to uninvolved passers-by or residents. I pass through this neighborhood regularly, but I will make a point about giving the Denny Park a wide berth, now knowing what kind of angry people can wander by. I already make a point of checking that my car doors are locked whenever I drive through Seattle.