Our partner site SeattleCrime.com is reporting tonight on a large police and Metro sheriff response at Bellevue and Pine around 8:15 PM.
According to a Seattlecrime.com tipster, there are about 20-25 police officers, and sheriffs deputies at Bellevue and Pine with guns drawn. A man is lying face down on the pavement, crying.
CHS hustled down there to find the scene breaking up and the bad guys already taken away. A deputy at the scene said the incident involved two men ‘making bad decisions’ in a Metro bus shelter but wouldn’t elaborate.
“Kind of a big response,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s how things are,” the deputy said. I also asked the three deputies huddling in the bus shelter where their jackets were on this rainy, windy night. In their cars, turns out.
We’ll have to wait for more info from SPD or the sheriff on this one. The public information officers will be part of the memorial procession and event at Key Arena tomorrow and likely won’t be available for comment until next week.
I’m extremely sad about the loss of the SPD officer, and rightly so I think we’re all a little frightened about stuff going on right now. I looked out my window tonight and saw the intersection lit up…was hoping they caught the guy from the officer’s murder.
But we deserve a better answer to what happened. This is a neighborhood, not some industrial district with no residents. The kind of huge response I saw (6 cop cars) was alarming to me.
I’m definitely working on it and I know Jonah at Seattle Crime continues to dig in also.
I feel the same way as you about every incident on the Hill. It’s a big part of what drives me. We continue to push on SPD to make their reports and information available in a more timely, open manner. Progress is slow — things like just getting their PDF reports to be text searchable are a big deal.
From what I can tell, this incident drew an outsized response.
I walked by this before the police got there, and watched until the police got there (and then it got boring). It was just 2 drunk bum-ish looking guys who were being arrested by two transit police officers at the bus shelter (maybe they got kicked off a bus?). However they were resisting arrest and being aggressive, which I think is what led to the large police response.
Transit police had one of the guys pinned to the sidewalk for about 10 minutes, and the other drunk guy was standing about 10 feet away and posturing and yelling. He then tore all his shirts off and started throwing his arms above his head like an ape. The transit police told him multiple times that if he came any closer they would taze him. He didn’t come any closer, so it didn’t end up coming to that. He seemed to be thinking about taking his pants off too, but fortunately did not.
4 or 5 police cars then arrived all at once and got the 2nd drunk guy on the ground. 1 or 2 of the arresting officers did have guns on him. He was somewhat non-cooperative – they had to yell at him to loosen up so they could get his hands behind his back to cuff him – and a few minutes later he started yelling/crying as if in pain, or maybe just a drunken stupor.
I left at this point because there were about 15 police officers that had surrounded the scene and were standing guard, and there wasn’t much more to see.