UPDATE: A crew was reported entering the building around 1:15 PM (Image: Seattle Fire)
Seattle Police and Seattle Fire closed down the streets and cleared the QFC of customers Tuesday to investigate reported damage to the building involving a possible hazardous material response at the Broadway Market shopping center.
Police were called to the shopping center in the 400 block of Broadway E for the reported property damage possibly targeting the center’s Wells Fargo this morning. Just before noon, SPD called Seattle Fire to the scene to investigate an industrial gas canister apparently thrown through a window during the incident.
Seattle Fire arrived on the scene and SPD expanded its locked down area around the QFC and Broadway Market. Seattle Fire was also reportedly clearing customers from the market.
Broadway was reported blocked to traffic during the response.
There were no immediate report of injuries and the area remain blocked as the investigation continued past 12:30 PM.
UPDATE: As of 1:20 PM, SFD reports the area has checked out safe and said it was handing the scene over to SPD to continue their investigation of the property damage.
UPDATE 9/17/2024: SPD says a metal canister thrown through the bank’s window triggered the scare:
On Tuesday shortly before 8:00 a.m., 911 Dispatch (CARE) received a report of an object thrown through a bank window in the 400 block of Broadway East. Employees stated that overnight a metal canister was thrown through the window creating a large hole. Police arrived and setup a perimeter and Seattle Fire Department HazMat team was called. During the investigation, the area was evacuated and streets shutdown, as a precaution. Seattle Fire Department deemed the object as non-hazardous and cleared the scene. The streets were reopened, and the broken window will be investigated as destruction of property.
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lame
HEY!
What is up with all the deranged lunatics lately? Full marks on I guess.
There’s hazardous material everyday in front of that store lately
Wait. What? I’m so confused. Are we now not wanting first responders again?
It’s impossible to keep up. It’s exhausting
I wonder how long qfc is stuck with these locations. uVillage seems like the place they’d want to keep, the Broadway locations have to be a nightmare.
I’ll ask again, why is there never any police presence on Broadway? There is illegal crap going on right out in the open and drug crazed people yelling threats at strangers every time I walk down the street, which is pretty much daily, yet you never see a single cop unless they’ve been called to investigate something, and by the time they arrive, they can’t even find the dude. It’s ludicrous.
SPD is seriously understaffed — for example, Boston. a city slightly smaller, has over twice as many officers. However, my sense is that this is not only reason. I believe that the police just don’t care, and that this attitude comes from department leadership and a city unwilling to force the leadership to care.
There’s strong anti-cop in most places that aren’t lily-white suburbs, unless those suburbs have strong traffic laws, in which case people there hate the cops too. People tend to hate authoritarian figures that get up in their business on a daily basis.
SPD says it’s seriously understaffed. We accept SPD’s statements as fact, whereas most people question every other government agency’s efficiency if they claim they’re understaffed. I’d imagine most of the cops express those kinds of views of government waste, too many government workers, etc.
Per capita police is one way to measure police, but effectiveness isn’t tied to that number. You don’t guarantee a reduction in crime with an increase in police force size. You can look at every per capita police force size and the crime rates in every city and there’s no real obvious patterns because crime rates are largely tied to economic indicators.
Like Chicago has double the per capita rate of police than Seattle, but a significantly higher crime rate. Washington DC has one of the highest of all, and one of the highest crime rates; check out Baltimore too.
If we were to believe SPD and double their budget and hire that many more cops, what is the expected outcome? People expect every penny spent on homeless to have measurable, obvious impacts and constantly call for defunding when it doesn’t; they don’t do that for cops.
100% correct; number of police has been demonstrated repeatedly to not have a strong relationship to crime rates or reduction in most types of crime.
HOW cops do their job matters.
We also need to recognize that the Police Department is a political entity that engages in political activities; it chooses to behave in particular ways to support particular narratives. They want more money and more staff, and therefore will behave in a way that highlights that.
Possibly they feel threatened by the emerging alternatives to police responses for welfare checks and other non-violent response situations?
It may well be the case that Seattle DOES need more cops, but it doesn’t need more cops who simply drive around, fail to run crime scenes and investigations intelligently (I have seen up close and personal how poorly they run a scene multiple times), collect as much overtime as possible by sleeping in their cars while on shift, disrespect citizens, and routinely violate peoples rights, etc.
We COULD probably use cops that go “if there’s an open air drug market routinely operating in this area, we should set up operations to arrest and/or surveil the dealers and then try to make our way up the distribution chain to target the sources of these drugs” instead of just complaining about it. Perhaps they are doing so quietly, but if so they do not appear to be effective.
In the mean time the city desperately needs to invest in public sanitation and other basic services that make a city actually livable for everyone, no matter their income. It’s telling that the Participatory Budgeting priorities align with these things, while the priorities of the council do not.
We probably don’t need to double the number of SPD officers, but we should at least get back to pre-pandemic (pre-BLM anti-police thought) levels.
SPD officers will drive around the area at random times. I’ve observed them making a random stop to clear a few drug addicts off of the sidewalk since they were literally sprawled across the sidewalk blocking the path. I walked past the officer and thank her for doing that. I wish more SPD officers would do so.
But to answer your question, there is a strong anti-cop sentiment from the small but very vocal residents of Cap Hill.
Let’s make Seattle cops the highest paid.
In exchange? We want the union out and accountability in.
Staffing plain and simple.
No follow-up of when the store will re-open? Journalism, people!
Gronks