A BLOODY AFTERNOON IN KAH TAI PARK

A BLOODY AFTERNOON IN KAH TAI PARK

by | Jul 1, 2018 | General

A 911 call:  assault in progress, Kah Tai Park.  On their way police listen to an open line, a second call originating from inside the park.  A man screams for help.  Then another voice comes on and shouts, “Give me that phone!” The line goes dead.

A jogger who made the 911 call meets the officers at a park entrance.  The attack was underway when he ran past.  It was underway while he called and waited.  He points.  They can see the attack still underway.  A shirtless man  kicks a person on the ground.  Another man, a large man, throws punches.

Officers stop the attack.  The victim is 60 years old.   Blood covers his face and head.  He is choking on it.  An eye is swollen shut.  Blood soaks the ground around him.

This is the heart of Port Townsend, Washington.  Wednesday, June 6, 2018.  Just before 3 in the afternoon.

The assailants turn their fury on police.  Handcuffed, they can hurl only profanity and threats.  Heavily intoxicated and hard to understand, they complain about being arrested.  In between threatening and resisting the officers, they justify their violence.  They were serving “street justice” on a “rapist, pedophile.”

They also helped themselves to the man’s backpack and cell phone.

The “alleged” assailants, William Anthony Ingalsbe, 30, and John Rayford Fleming, 33, were arrested on charges of robbery 1st degree, assault 2nd degree, intimidating a public servant and obstructing a law enforcement officer.

Ingalsbe and Fleming are half the victim’s age.  Ingalsbe is taller and outweighs the victim by seventy pounds.

The attackers wear his blood on their shirts, pants, shoes.

“KNOWN TRANSIENTS”

News reports have described Fleming and Ingalsbe as “known transients.”  Their story is not much different from the other “known transients” on Port Townsend’s streets who occupy much of our police department’s time and make life difficult for businesses, their employees and customers.  We started looking into this story before another act of extreme violence on our streets occurred.  That incident, on July 1 in downtown Port Townsend, left one suffering terrible stab wounds and another “known transient” in jail on attempted murder charges.  (A booking error listed the charge as murder and we had initially reflected that error in this story).

 

Sign for open air drug market in Kah Tai Park

 

In a previous report, we wrote about a young man presumed to be dead in Kah Tai Park.  Click “Lights in the Darkness” to read that story.

The following account of the brief time Ingalsbe and Fleming have been in Port Townsend comes from police reports and court records. Every incident and charge of wrongdoing is technically “alleged,” though documented in public records.

Ingalsbe had 34 contacts with police in less than a year before he “died” and returned to life in a burst of violence. Fleming has had 17 contacts with police since he arrived in Port Townsend three months ago.

 

John Rayford Fleming

Fleming first appears in Port Townsend police records in March of this year. He had been harassing staff and threw a wooden pallet down the stairs at a Water Street business. He apparently arrived here from Montesano, WA, where there were reported to be outstanding warrants. Fleming was issued a “no trespass” warning to stay away from that business for one year. Violation would result in a citation. Fleming expressed his attitude by refusing to sign the “no trespass” notice.

The next night he was found illegally sleeping in Kah Tai Park. Police were now able to confirm that Fleming had multiple warrants from out-of-county and out-of-state. Those jurisdictions, however were content to let Port Townsend have him. He ignored a warning against sleeping in the park. He was back the next night and told if it happened again he would be cited for trespass.

Five days later police found him and another man drinking in the park. Fleming verbally abused police and was banned from the Kah Tai for 90 days. That night he was found sleeping in his own vomit outside a Sims Way business.

A few days after that he went to sleep inside a business on Sims Way and became belligerent when awakened. He was “issued a trespass” and banned from that business.

Police saw him shortly after that, passed out on the sidewalk.

Washington has no public intoxication law, a failing that prevents first responders from helping habitual drinkers unless they are so poisoned with alcohol they are in imminent danger of dying.

On April 13, 2018, Fleming was arrested for burglary. By now he was known well enough that police could identify him from a verbal description. A bouncer of a downtown bar said Fleming had been harassing female customers. After a search of the area he was found to have broken into another business. He lashed out at police, verbally and physically. He grabbed the officers, kicked, and threatened them. He attempted to bite an officer. He was found to have in his possession items taken from local businesses, including, oddly enough, a fire extinguisher. He was given a suspended sentence and assessed a fine he could not pay.

Within days, Fleming was again on Port Townsend’s streets.

On April 21, he was arrested for shoplifting from Henery’s Hardware. He was walking down the street in Carhartt overalls security cameras had caught him stealing. He was again given a suspended sentence.

The City Prosecutor’s records show he was sentenced to forty days in jail. But three weeks later police found him passed out on the beach near the mill as the tide was rising.

Two weeks after that he wore the blood of a man he had attacked in Kah Tai Park.

William Anthony Ingalsbe

William Anthony Ingalsbe first made contact with Port Townsend police on August 7, 2015 after arriving here from Colorado, where he had a troubled history. He and a girlfriend were living in a van without plates. From then on, his contacts with police grew more serious.

Ten days later it was a domestic violence call. A month after that an officer checking public trails had to pull his taser against an aggressive dog Ingalsbe claimed to own. A few months on, Ingalsbe was outside the Pennysaver on Sims, slumped between two boxes, management reporting him for harassing customers. He’s “trespassed” and told to stay off the property.

The same day he’s reported at another property, with a guitar over his shoulder, panhandling. He’s also “trespassed” at that business because his behavior had been “an ongoing issue.” A day later, he’s reported trespassing and drunk at a residence.

It is now February 2016. He has been banned from more businesses because of his behavior. He is found sleeping, bloody and covered in vomit and taken to the hospital. He refuses to leave after being discharged and is disrupting the emergency room. He tells police, “arrest me.” They grant his wish, but he’s not in jail long.

Two days later he refuses multiple requests to leave the Food Co-op. Police issue a trespassing admonishment. Not long after, he trespasses at a store from which he’d been banned and receives a warning about an arrest next time it happens. Later in the day he’s warned about having an open container and drinking in public.

Then follow confrontations with employees and customers of businesses along Sims Way and Water Street, public drinking, and a citation for trespassing at a business from which he had been banned. Ingalsbe crumples up the citation.

March 24, 2016, a report comes in of Ingalsbe punching a man in the face, but the victim could not be found. An hour later he is found drunk and cited for trespassing at a business on Sims Way.

The next night he is found illegally sleeping in the park. The officer let him sleep rather than “wake him and have to deal with him all night long because he would be mad at us.”

Two days later he is cited for an open container and consumption of alcohol in the park. He was with two other transients from out of state. From time to time, he has met and consumed alcohol with other transients.

Having ignored the trespass citation, Ingalsbe was arrested on a warrant a couple weeks later while trespassing at yet another business from which he had been barred. His blood alcohol level is .205. But he is again quickly on the streets and cited for trespassing at the same business. He promised to appear in court and was released from police custody. He was seen later laying on a patch of gravel on Water Street. A couple days after that he was found sleeping on the sidewalk outside a building, drunk. The police provided him with water because he said he had had none in several days. Later, he was found in his vomit on the sidewalk at the door to a Water Street business. He refused to clean up his mess and was instructed to move along.

Ingalsbe did not honor his court summons and a warrant is used May 16, 2016.

A month passes with no contact. Then a call is received from his girlfriend. He had been at her place looking for his belongings but left on foot.

And then Ingalsbe died.

Or so police were told by a relative. He dropped out of sight and was not seen in Port Townsend for a year until the assault in Kah Tai Park was interrupted.

In the intervening year, as his probation officer learned, Ingalsbe traveled the country and racked up arrests in Nashville and Lebanon, Tennessee; Lawrence, Kansas; Pennington, South Dakota; and Arvada, Colorado. The arrests were for disorderly conduct, except the Arvada incident which involved an assault charge.

Ingalsbe has admitted that he initiated the Kah Tai attack on a man who was a stranger to him. He admitted kneeing the man in the head several times. When asked if he realized the extent of the injuries he and Fleming inflicted, Ingalsbe said, “he’s a 60 year old [expletive] man I beat up for no [expletive] reason.”

He told police he had returned to Port Townsend to party and then to turn himself in and go to jail to sober up.

He is probably getting more time to sober up than he expected. Therein lies the other tragedy in this story that is all too similar to that of other “known transients.” It took a crime of violence to get two habitual drinkers off the street and away from easy access to alcohol.

Unfortunately, the high price for their ticket to sobriety–for however long it may last–was paid with someone else’s blood.

The Victim

The man they attacked was airlifted for emergency medical treatment. He is Lawrence Merrell Alan. He gave police an address we traced to a rental mailbox. The cell phone number he gave police is no longer in service.

 

Alan has been known to police since at least 2012 when he was arrested for assaulting a bus driver. A year later he entered a conditional guilty plea to driving under the influence, while reserving the right to challenge the legality of his arrest. The charge was dismissed after a judge ruled the traffic stop had lacked probable cause.

In 2017 he was arrested for possession of methamphetamine and/or hydrocodone. The charges were dismissed by the prosecution without prejudice.

He was beaten to a pulp in Kah Tai Park while awaiting trial on his latest charges, which include two counts of selling methamphetamine in a school zone. His trial has been postponed because of “medical issues.”

Police have found nothing to indicate that the victim has in any way been connected to any sex crime as alleged by his attackers.

GOVERNOR INSLEE RESPONDS

GOVERNOR INSLEE RESPONDS

by | Jun 21, 2018 | General

Do Black Lives Matter When It Comes To Green Cars?

Electric cars run on the suffering of Black children living like slaves.  Dangerous, toxic mining conditions in the Congo cause death, disease and birth defects at alarming rates.  The cobalt from Congolese mines is necessary to meet the demand for the large quantities of cobalt needed in batteries powering the “green” transportation revolution.

There’s no getting around the racial injustice behind every green car:  Affluent Western whites drive around in vehicles paid for by Black African suffering on a horrifying scale.

We reported this in our first installment on this topic.  You can read it all by clicking here.

We learned that electric car users and their advocates want to avoid discussing this painful topic.  Not one person we contacted for comment–from Jefferson County EV owners and the Jefferson County Electric Vehicle Association to the City of Seattle’s Green Fleet program to the group pushing this year’s carbon tax, I-1631–responded to our simple question:  How do you handle buying, driving and advocating for the increased use of electric cars when you know the racial suffering that goes into every vehicle?

After our story ran, we received a response from the administration of Governor Jay Inslee.  We had been in contact with them before the story ran and stated we had yet to receive a response.  Now we have.

Washington’s Green Fleet Initiative

In our first report we wrote:

“While attending a climate change summit in Paris in 2015, Governor Jay Inslee unveiled an electric fleet initiative to ensure that at least 20% of all state vehicle purchases are electric by 2017.  So we reached out to the State of Washington with our questions about the morality of buying electric cars that rely on child and slave labor.

Off the record we learned the state is buying mostly Chey Bolts.  The batteries are made in Michigan.  So far, so good.  But our research showed that the batteries in Chey Bolts come from LG Chem of South Korea, which buys its cobalt from the same Chinese outfit implicated in all the reports starting with Amnesty.  In the Amnesty investigation LG Chem admitted using cobalt from the mines where the horrible conditions were found.  The Washington Post asked LG Chem where they got their cobalt.  They claimed their cobalt comes not from the Congo, but from New Caledonia.  However, minerals experts consulted by The Post concluded that could not be true, as LG Chem uses more cobalt than New Caledonia’s entire national production.”
Here’s the statement we received from Jennifer Reynolds, Communications Consultant in the Governor’s Department of Enterprise Services:
Thank you for your inquiry regarding the state’s purchase of electric vehicles that may contain cobalt mined in the Congo.  While the state does not have purchasing screens in place, we are engaged in efforts to find sustainable materials to fuel electric vehicles. For example, this year, Governor Jay Inslee led efforts to fully fund the Joint Center for Deployment and Research in Earth Abundant Materials (JCDREAM), a collaborative effort between the University of Washington and Washington State University to stimulate education, research and innovation in new battery technology that uses materials that are more environmentally and economically sustainable. The Governor has also engaged with the World Economic Forum’s Global Battery Alliance, an industry-led coalition to support development of an inclusive, sustainable and innovative battery value chain. In addition to advancing a sustainable supply of raw battery materials and unlocking innovation along the value chain, this effort seeks to create a circular economy for batteries that reuses and recycles materials and avoids more mining.
So what does it mean?
1.  The State of Washington is not screening its electric vehicle purchases to exclude vehicles containing cobalt that cannot be certified as not coming from mines using child or slave labor.
2.  Governor Inslee, a strong advocate of increasing dependence on electric vehicles, knows there is a problem.
This is consistent with all the electric vehicle manufacturers contacted by media organizations and Amnesty International, as detailed in our first report.  They know they can’t certify their products as ethical, they know the cobalt they are using almost certainly is produced by African suffering and injustice, and they are taking steps to do something about it.
But as CNN and CBS revealed, most of what they’re doing is just talking.  Nobody yet has an alternative to the 60% of the world’s reserves of cobalt found in the Congo.  If serious, uncompromising steps were taken to stop the flow of “blood cobalt” into their supply lines, companies would have to cease production of many products.
The Scales of Justice
Let us hope the State of Washington, as it increases its purchases of electric vehicles, uses its power, its status and its influence to correct this horrible injustice.
Let us hope there is a miraculous scientific breakthrough that discovers or creates a material to match cobalt’s unique properties that make it absolutely essential to electric car batteries.
Electric vehicles run on the suffering of Black African children.  That is the reality for the foreseeable future.  This is the dirty little secret of green cars.
But it is not little.  UNICEF says at least 40,000 children, some as young as four years old, give their health, freedom and lives for cobalt for the Western world’s high tech cars.
It is not secret.  We can no longer say we don’t know.
Many people view purchasing an electric car as a moral decision.  Now that we know what goes into those cars, there is more than a belief in the theory of anthropogenic global warming tipping the scales.
Do Black Lives Matter When It Comes To Green Cars?

Do Black Lives Matter When It Comes To Green Cars?

by | Jun 10, 2018 | General

Electric cars run on the suffering of Black children living like slaves.

Amnesty International exposed this painful truth in 2016.  You can read their report by clicking on its title, “This is What We Die For.” Most of the world’s cobalt comes from the Congo.  Lots of cobalt is needed for electric car batteries. Its production is controlled by warlords and corrupt government officials.  They are getting rich off children who dig and haul and wash cobalt in hellish conditions.

A subsequent Sky News television report (click here) is heartbreaking and infuriating.
A handful of Chinese corporations control Congo’s cobalt production.  These Chinese corporations supply Chinese and South Korean battery makers who produce most of the world’s rechargeable lithium batteries.  Those batteries are used in cell phones, lap tops and scores of electronic devices.  But electric cars need 10 to 20 pounds for their batteries whereas a cell phone requires 5 to 10 grams and a lap top one ounce.

Cobalt mines outside the Congo might be able to meet the demand from manufacturers of smaller devices.  But so much cobalt goes into electric car batteries that the Congo’s 60% share of the world’s reserves must be utilized.

Amnesty International’s findings were confirmed by UNESCO, CNN (see below), The Washington Post(a comprehensive multi-media report, 9/2016), The Daily Mail, (8/2017), and Al Jazeera (12/2017).  This is just a sample of the reporting.

The mines cause other dire problems.  As reported by The Daily Mail:

Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.
Four-year-old Monica found by the Daily Mail
to work in cobalt mines.

Battery makers, car manufacturers, Apple, Microsoft and the Chinese companies buying Congolese cobalt promptly decried the brutal situation uncovered by Amnesty, declared their supply  free of cobalt mined by slaves and children and pledged vigilance to ensure humane conditions in the mines and to exclude “blood cobalt” from their products.  A Responsible Cobalt Initiative was launched by the Chinese cobalt middlemen and Chinese battery makers.

Two years later, the conditions Amnesty discovered persist.

CBS News reported March 5, 2018, it found children still working the cobalt mines:

CBS News found what looked like the Wild West. There were children digging in trenches and laboring in lakes — hunting for treasure in a playground from hell.
The work is hard enough for an adult man, but it is unthinkable for a child. Yet tens of thousands of Congolese kids are involved in every stage of mining for cobalt. The latest research by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates 40,000 children are working in DRC mines.
More than half of the world’s supply of cobalt comes from the DRC, and 20 percent of that is mined by hand, according to Darton Commodities Ltd., a London-based research company that specializes in cobalt.

In a May 2018 report CNN updated Amnesty’s 2016 findings that car makers cannot determine the source of the cobalt in batteries.  They exposed the Congolese certification system as a sham.  The certificates are supposed to assure upstream users that their cobalt was not mined by slaves and children.  CNN showed that the certificates are issued by the same people responsible for inhuman mining conditons.  They found that the Congo’s Presidential Guard protects the facilities trafficking in “blood cobalt.”

Despite the pledges and denials, CNN concluded that no car manufacturer can assure buyers that their electric car does not run thanks to cobalt mined by African children.

Now We Know.  What Do We Do?

We sought to determine how area owners and advocates of electric cars deal with this knowledge.  What we learned is that they don’t want to talk about it.

We started with the Jefferson County EV Association.  They participated in this year’s Rhody Festival Parade, silently rolling past the crowd in electric cars with signs declaring their vehicles’ virtues.  We first contacted them without revealing the subject we wanted to pursue.  Their spokesperson was willing to answer questions.  But since we asked the specific question of how they handle knowing about the suffering behind their cars’ engines we have received no response.

We put the same questions to the four electric vehicle owners who tell their story on theassociation’s website.  One of them is an elected PUD commissioner.  None responded.

We reached across Puget Sound and put our questions to the woman who runs Seattle’s Green Fleet Management.  The City of Seattle holds frequent press conferences and issues press releases touting its ever-increasing fleet of electric vehicles.  We received no response to our questions.

We reached out to Coltura, a Seattle advocacy group whose mission is seeing the United States rapidly transition completely to electric vehicles.  A recent report by Coltura lamented the failure of local governments to meet the Legislature’s directive to run all vehicles on electricity or biofuels “to the extent practicable.”  Coltura did not respond to our questions.

While attending a climate change summit in Paris in 2015, Governor Jay Inslee unveiled an electric fleet initiative to ensure that at least 20% of all state vehicle purchases are electric by 2017.  So we reached out to the State of Washington with our questions about the morality of buying electric cars that rely on child and slave labor.

Off the record we learned the state is buying mostly Chey Bolts.  The batteries are made in Michigan.  So far, so good.  But our research showed that the batteries in Chey Bolts come from LG Chem of South Korea, which buys its cobalt from the same Chinese outfit implicated in all the reports starting with Amnesty.  In the Amnesty investigation LG Chem admitted using cobalt from the mines where the horrible conditions were found.  The Washington Postasked LG Chem where they got their cobalt.  They claimed their cobalt comes not from the Congo, but from New Caledonia.  However, minerals experts consulted by The Post concluded that could not be true, as LG Chem uses more cobalt than New Caledonia’s entire national production.

We are still waiting for a statement from the state.

Another Seattle activist organization, the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy, is pushing I-1631, a ballot measure which would impose an annually rising charge on gasoline and other carbon-based fuels.  Their goal is to force people out of their gas-powered cars into electric vehicles or mass transit that would also run on electricity.  Their equivalent of a carbon tax, they claim, is based on social justice and racial ethics.

Months ago we asked them to respond to the findings of the racial injustice inherent in the cobalt supply system that leads straight to the electric vehicles they advocate.  They never responded.

Electric Cars Are Great–Except for the Racism Part

In the United States, it is whites with enough money to pay the premium prices who buy electric cars.  Yet it is poor African Blacks who pay the highest prices in terms of their freedom, their health and their lives.There may be white people in the US and Europe who might defend this human suffering in Africa as necessary in the fight against what they consider a greater concern–climate change.  But they are never going to volunteer themselves or their children to take the place of Blacks in the cobalt mines.  They prefer someone else doing the  dangerous, miserable jobs in the struggle for climate justice.  And it’s not someone who will ever have the money to enjoy owning an electric car.

Consider this: Most of the high-paying jobs in the oil and gas industry in coming years will go to Black and Hispanic workers.  (Women are also snagging a big chunk of those lucrative jobs).  Unlike warlords and corrupt officials who exploit Black laborers, the US oil and gas industry gives workers in the US a very good life.

Efforts are underway to find a substitute for cobalt.  There are also calls for including cobalt in the US law that targeted blood diamonds and rare minerals controlled by African warlords.  Developing technologies promise carbon capture on a scale that will let people keep their internal combustion cars.  Mazda is rolling out gasoline-powered cars next year that promise lower carbon emissions than electric vehicles.

Some very intelligent people, such as environmental economist Bjorn Lomberg, contend that electric cars don’t do that much to reduce carbon emissions and may actually be detrimental to the environment and broader social justice causes.

Electric cars may not be all that green.  As reported by the National Review:

In 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency described these batteries as having the “highest potential for environmental impacts,” with lithium mining resulting in greenhouse-gas emissions, environmental pollution, and human-health impacts. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that specializes in “science for a healthy planet and safer world,” agrees: For long-range electric vehicles such as Tesla, manufacturing emissions are 68 percent higher than for conventional cars.

It may be more ethical to hang onto your gas-powered car as long as it keeps running.  You avoid the carbon emissions and pollution that come with manufacturing a new one.  You won’t be rewarding people who profit from inhumanity.  And you won’t find yourself in the hypocritical position of shopping for free trade goods in a car that runs on human suffering.

Lights in the Darkness

Lights in the Darkness

by | Jun 10, 2018 | General

The young man was dead.

He lay on his back, eyes open, skin the color of ash, no sign of breathing.  It looked like he had fallen off a new Cannondale road bike.  The bike–carbon fiber, electric transmission, high-end wheels–was on his chest.   He wore earbuds for a cell phone tucked inside his clothing.  What looked like prison tats scrolled from his wrists and disappeared under his shirt.

A bottle of Jim Beam Apple Whiskey nested in the backpack’s side pocket.

The Port Townsend police officer shone a bright light into the young man’s eyes.  No reaction.  No blinking, no change in the pupils.

The young man under the expensive bike wasn’t breathing.

“Hey!” the officer shouted.  “Are you all right?”  He shouted it again.

No response.  The young man was dead.

I said a silent prayer.  Sadness crossed the officer’s face.

“Whah?”

From death the young man spoke and the officer moved in to sit him up and check him for weapons.  Slowly, the young man regained consciousness.  His speech was slurred, but he was coherent.  He said he was having a bad time.  Four friends had died from heroin overdoses in the past six months.  He’d been closed in a room with one of them.

He reached for a cigarette and asked the officer, “You ever perform CPR on a corpse?”

Port Townsend’s Dark Side


I’ve twice gone on patrol with the Port Townsend Police .  The first time, the officer behind the wheel educated me about the troubles most of the city never sees–the drugs, the violence, the aggressive transients that come to Port Townsend from Seattle, California, the East Coast.  They’d heard it was a cool place to hang and get high and get lots of free stuff and tender care.

But that night the only call was about a stolen battery from a vehicle impounded at All City Towing.  Nothing else to do, both units on duty responded.  The police officers recognized the truck.  They knew its owner, a troubled woman suffering from mental illness made worse by meth abuse.  She came out of the darkness and they greeted her by name.  The call about the missing battery was a ruse.  She wanted them to recharge her cell phone.

This night, June 9, 2018, I walked with two officers along Water Street.  People participating in the Steampunk Festival passed in outlandish costumes armed with fake swords and ray guns.

We were notified that a man “in a fetal position” occupied the floor in the handicap stall in the men’s room at the public bathrooms at Pope Marine Park.   He had locked himself in.  A bag with cans of fortified beer and other possessions was pushed against the wall.  He did not appreciate being disturbed.  He said he was trying to get some sleep.

The officers knew this man.  He had been harassing women at the bus stop at Haines Place earlier that day.  He had a long history of arrests for violence against the homeless.  He had threatened the life of one of the officers.  He had threatened the officer’s family.

He was placed under arrest for disorderly conduct. When notified he had the right to an attorney, he told the officers exactly what they had the right to.  It did not involve appointed counsel or keeping their mouths closed.  He bragged how the judge would let him out and be angry at them.  “You know Judge Landes will turn me loose and be pissed at you.”  More profanity, more mocking, more bragging about a court system he felt confident would put him back on the street after he got a good night’s sleep.  “Thanks for a free bed,” he said.

He looked at me.   Reeking of alcohol, front teeth gone, clothes filthy, he snickered, “They wish they had me for more than disorderly conduct.”

A minute later, the mean drunk became an assailant.  He kicked one of the officers and was now under arrest for assault.

These officers had spent years trying to help this man.  They had bought him food and once showed him respect to lay a foundation for trust.

“My guys are going to get you,” he said to the officer whose life and family he had previously threatened.

At the shelter under the American Legion we were told this man “cold cocks you.  That’s his MO.”  He carries a knife, as do most of the transients on Port Townsend’s streets.  He had used it to threaten the shelter’s manager.

Over a break for food back at the police station, officers talked about the city’s transients.  They’ve bought food for almost all of them.  The man arrested that night had destroyed a guitar that gave joy to another man who frequented the Boiler Room.  Officers collected funds to buy a replacement and hunted for the guitarist until they found his camp and delivered his new instrument.

All the money spent on clothing, food, and coffee comes from the pockets of police officers who get to know these people by name, arrest them, call for ambulances to get them help, or find them dead.

Back to that young man with the bike.  He looked familiar to the officers but they couldn’t be sure.  He gave his name and they learned those tattoos were in fact prison tats.  He claimed he had a wife with a good job.  An EMT crew from Jefferson Healthcare determined that, despite his high alcohol blood level (.333), he was not in danger of dying.  He did not want to go to the hospital.  The police could not force him off the street.

Washington does not have a public intoxication statute.

He had collapsed where camping was not permitted.  But if they forced him to move, there was a good chance he could become a victim.  His shiny, expensive bike would be a magnet for predators.

The police talked to him as a human being, not a pitiful drunk.  They did not want to see him hurt.  They wanted him to get help.  They worried about what he was doing to himself, but there was only so much they could do.

They gave him a blanket, Gatorade, and let him hide in the dark. They would check on him later that night to see how he was doing.  They poured out the whiskey because just a few pulls more could kill the young man.

I returned the next morning and took the photo shown above.  The bottle of whiskey the police had emptied was there.  The young man and his bicycle were gone.  A large, wild-looking man in the bushes screamed at me about money and being on his turf.  I got out of there.  I warned an elderly couple with a fluffy dog who were starting on a walk what lay ahead.  They got in their car and left.

Lights in the Darkness

They’re tough.  They’re firm.  They are imposing with their physical presence and the impressive weaponry they carry.

Inside those vests loaded with extra bullet magazines and a second gun, hearts beat for the broken souls these police officers meet every day.  We may avert our eyes, walk away and ignore strangers who might frighten or repulse us.  Police officers go looking for them to make sure they will live through the night.

They get spat and puked on, insulted, punched, kicked and attacked with human waste and blood.  Their lives and those of their loved ones are threatened.  They face guns and knives and never know what to expect of that person who won’t get out of their car or who won’t take their hands out of their pockets.

But they don’t stop.  They don’t quit.

For people living on the streets, on the beaches, under trees, huddled against dumpsters, in cars littered with used needles and filth, their nights are a little less black because of these compassionate, powerful men and women in uniform.   They are lights in the darkest corners of our town’s nights.