DV One convicted
The conflicting testimony from police didn’t bother the jury: On Oct. 26, Toby Campbell was found guilty of assaulting a Seattle officer after a football game at Memorial Stadium.
Campbell, a 35-year-old Black DJ known as DV One, says it was the police who tased and kicked him on Sept. 15, 2006, after Officer Daina Boggs stopped him from walking to an area where his 14-year-old daughter was being handcuffed. A scuffle ensued that Campbell says Boggs started.
He is now facing one to three months in jail for the third-degree assault conviction, but plans to appeal. Assault has to be intentional, he says, but the jury wasn’t told that. “The outcome was amazing,” Campbell says. “It was so insane.”
Non-citizens sue U.S.
For some people, the American Dream is to be granted U.S. citizenship — something that four longtime Seattle-area residents are suing the federal government to get.
On Oct. 29, the four filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Seattle, arguing that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has illegally stalled their citizenship applications while the FBI runs “name checks” that are redundant — the bureau has already cleared all four applicants, according to lawyers pursuing the case at the American Civil Liberties Union, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project and private law firm Stoel Rives.
By law, the ACLU says, legal residents who have passed a citizenship exam are owed a decision in 120 days. But the plaintiffs — from China, Iran, and Somalia — have lived here legally since at least 2000. They’re not alone: The Immigrant Rights Project says it knows of nearly 100 cases of stalled naturalization.
Suds up
Bigger, better — and a bathroom for women! That’s what manager Ronni Gilboa and her staff at Seattle’s Urban Rest Stop celebrated Oct. 25 during a grand reopening ceremony for the downtown laundry and shower facility at 1924 Ninth Ave.
The $660,000 remodel doubled the number of washer/dryer units from five to 10, added extra dryers and an extra room, and provided the facility with a women’s restroom — ending the need for staff to call into the men’s room to make sure the coast was clear.
The laundry and showers are free for the facility’s homeless users, who currently total 23,138 individuals — 60 percent of whom have jobs, Gilboa says. “We’re reaching a group that hasn’t been reached” by other programs, she says, and “these numbers aren’t going down.”
—Cydney Gillis