Dear Reader,
The Seattle Police Department has moved to a web-based system for publishing their incident reports. While the online publishing format ensures that the information posted is almost universally accessible, the department is only posting reports on the most high-profile incidents.
The web postings only show serious crimes like assault, burglary, homicide, robbery, and theft. The less consequential, far more frequent incidents from which we've compiled this column, however, are not being posted.
In its 10-year run, our Streetwatch column has been a place to air some of the various happenings, tragic and tedius, that transpire for people on Seattle's streets. One of its items was the germ for our nationally award-winning 2008 series, "The Man who Stood on the Bridge."
The events recorded in this column have seldom fit the archetype of cops-and-robbers policing. More often, they form a chronicle of pathos that's banal in its squalor. The homeless have been subject to assault by people who are never caught. They have been offenders, most often beating or stealing from each other. Arrested for returning to parks from which they'd been trespassed, they have been victims in circumstance if not in fact.
For 10 years, Streetwatch has been the product of the Police Department's progressive policy: the police would simply make recent incidents available on compact disc for viewing by computer at the local precinct. Before this, they left paper copies of the incidents in a binder at the front desk. It may be more useful for some high-profile incidents to be published online