Sound Politics: Vehicles burn; I suspect human error

March 26, 2007

Vehicles burn; I suspect human error

Twelve city vehicles are charred ruins after they deliberately were set on fire early Monday morning in a city lot on South Royal Brougham Way, Seattle fire and police officials said.

I'm confused. There's no suspect to indict. No smoking gun. (okay, 12 smoking vehicles, but no smoking gun). No suspiciously redacted e-mails claiming attorney-client privilege. No informants, confidential or otherwise, accusing anybody of willful misconduct. No e-mails asking subordinates to cover their tracks. No false statements to the news media. There is zero evidence to attribute this conflagration to a human being, let alone to a criminal act. Why should the police even investigate?

All of this innuendo about felony arson when it was obviously an innocent mistake or an act of God is just not the way things are done around here.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at March 26, 2007 09:55 PM | Email This

Comments

1. Careful Stefan.
David Postman or The Stranger might read this and write another tersely worded blog entry about how you lost it.

Posted by: Reporterward on March 26, 2007 10:01 PM

2. Woohoo! Love it! And Reporterward is right. Some folks just don't recongize sarcasm.

Posted by: katomar on March 26, 2007 10:12 PM

3. Very funny. But surely an analytical guy like you studied Bayes' Theorem back in high school or college? As it applies here, you need to know how many such events are caused by crimes and how many by other causes. That's why I've repeatedly asked on this blog how King County Elections' 2004 performance compared with previous years and with other counties. You've yet to answer.

Posted by: Bruce on March 26, 2007 10:33 PM

4. Hot vehicles are non-partisan. Hot elections in King County are ....

Posted by: Jeff B. on March 26, 2007 10:38 PM

5. Burning cars?? Did we win an NBA championship or something?
Perhaps we have a few transients from Detroit on the loose here in the Emerald City.

Posted by: PC on March 26, 2007 11:05 PM

6. Am I missing something? I know that Seattle is famous for Stealing cars... but is this the first major Burning???

Posted by: ljm on March 26, 2007 11:28 PM

7. Indeed, the motto for the "new" King County Elections should be "Nothing to See Here, Move Along".

Perhaps McKay could have subpoaened all of the departments emails to see if they were purposely counting the fatal pend ballots when they knew them to be ineligible. I guess we'll never know.

Posted by: Palouse on March 27, 2007 07:47 AM

8. I didn't know we had French youths living in Seattle.

Posted by: JCM on March 27, 2007 07:55 AM

9. The TV news coverage was hysterical.

'12 cars were on fire, and it might be suspicious'

_might_be_?!?

Posted by: Al on March 27, 2007 10:07 AM

10. So, it begins.

I wish.

Posted by: REBEL on March 27, 2007 10:36 AM

11. Visiting disaffected French youth perhaps?

Posted by: km on March 27, 2007 11:12 AM

12. King 5 news: "...12 vehicles on fire and I'm not..." - "Jesse Jones KING 5 News reporting"

Posted by: sokala on March 27, 2007 11:39 AM

13. 5--LOL--the perps will get counseling, anger management classes and will write apology letters to the taxpayers.

after 24-hour release, they will be issued NASA-quality fireproof suits after winning a HUGE (settled) lawsuit against the County for storage of gasoline in cars, in a tempting and entrapment-oriented way.

Posted by: jimmie-howya-doin on March 27, 2007 02:23 PM

14. What's really amazing is that twelve city cars were in the lot at the same time and not parked at civil servants' homes. You know, city cars like a junior assistant city arborist's who's "on call."

Posted by: Who signed off on that 6 unit condo complex on a single family lot? on March 27, 2007 03:16 PM