Dominic Holden

Winning the War on Drugs in Columbia, South Carolina.

A Richland County woman is being charged with dealing drugs after her husband was killed by a sheriff’s deputy in a drug raid Wednesday.

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott says April Bosket was fully aware of her husband’s actions, and is therefore responsible. “There’s no doubt she knew those drugs were in her bedroom. There’s no doubt she knew what he was doing.”

A deputy was wounded and the suspect killed in a shooting off Laredo Drive near Broad River Road and I-20 on Wednesday morning.

Richland County Coroner Gary Watts identified the shooting victim as 34-year-old Larry Darnell Bosket.

Investigators say a photo taken March third shows Bosket caught in the act of selling pot to a couple of teenagers near Broad River Road. Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott says deputies seized a bag of marijuana from that sale….

That same uncertainty is why April Bosket says her husband fired first. “We have had our home broken into before. That’s the purpose of being that ready when someone intrudes.”

“If you hear that noise and it wakes you up out of your sleep, what’s your first natural instinct is to protect your family and your home. He reached for his gun and he shot.”

Each time I post one of these Winning the War on Drugs pieces over on Slog, there’s a mixed reaction in comments of rage at the officers, rage at the drug dealers, and rage at me. The theme in most of the posts – that someone is shot and killed in a drug raid – is enraging. No doubt. But there’s a reason I keep posting them, even if, although they are verbatim news clips, they seem a little sensationalistic. It’s to pose a question.

But the question, as per this story, isn’t whether selling drugs to kids should be a punishable offense. Of course it should be. The question isn’t whether cops should return fire at people who are shooting at them. They must. The question also isn’t whether armed raids are among the tactics cops should use. Sometimes they are. And it’s not whether drugs should be outlawed. That’s a bigger ball of wax. This is it: Is raiding a private residence in the middle of the night with guns drawn the right way to enforce suspected nonviolent drug-law violations?

Now, I imagine some people would say that this guy shot a cop and so obviously he’s violent. Thus, a violent raid is justified. But the house wasn’t being raided to enforce a suspected violent crime, according to this news report, and Bosket became violent only when woken up in the middle of the night by an armed stranger charging down his hallway. In this country, it’s legal for most folks to have a gun in their house, and a lot of completely law-abiding citizens will fire their gun at anyone who trespasses in the middle of the night—cop or not.

Some would also say an armed raid is necessary to avoid a violent confrontation on the street. And that is always a possibility. But that doesn’t seem likely here, Bosket was suspected of selling marijuana. Besides, hundreds of thousands of arrests are made each year, of nonviolent and violent offenders, without resorting to armed raids. Normal enforcement practices seem to work fine. Suspected drug offenses are often singled out for armed drug raids.

There’s just too much collateral damage to cops, bystanders, and suspected nonviolent offenders to justify armed raids unless it’s necessary. Innocent people are shot and/or killed—like this one-year-old baby and his mom. Officers are killed, like this officer, who was raiding a house that turned out to have a maple tree that looked like pot. And other times, like in this case, a suspect who probably could have been apprehended by more civil means and possibly rehabilitated, is left dead.

Although police suspected him of selling drugs, the transaction didn’t happen at his house.

Police could have arrested him when he committed the crime in the first place. Or police could have knocked on the door and arrested him, which is how many arrests are made. Police knew what he looked like and Bosket left his house regularly; police could have apprehended him in his front yard as he was leaving his house. Or stopped him while driving and taken him into custody. But raiding his house made the problem worse, left a cop injured, and a man dead. This scenario has repeated countless times before and will continue. We should stop armed raids on the homes of people suspected of nonviolent crimes, save for exceptional circumstances. It’s a matter of saving lives.

This collaborative work was made at our kitchen table and hung in the dining room.

Uh, olive branches are vegetables.

My iPhone’s camera exposure settings are automatic, and in the overcast lighting this afternoon, the images would only balance when I pointed the camera away from the sky. So I turned it down to the sidewalk and flipped it back up to snap a picture before the exposure could reset. The result was good color and a warped image.

The distortion is a bit like certain arguments over the demolition of this block of Pine Street between Belmont and Summit Avenues. The proposed new development is a net loss for the neighborhood, I think. It will bring more density. But the sorts of small independent shops and bars formerly on the block have no affordable alternatives in the area, and they won’t be able to afford the new development’s larger retail spaces, either. It permanently displaces unique amenities that made the block a valuable, vibrant contributer to Capitol Hill, with something ordinary.

This is Kincora, Manray and Bus Stop, rendered into fibers.

I really like you.

For about a year you were my candidate. Sure, the biggest spike in arrests of non-violent drug offenders happened while you were the First Lady. And in that time, you talked a lot about health care but didn’t connect it to the major problems of drug abuse and addiction. Then, recently, you decried that America’s incarceration rate has landed 1-in-100 Americans in jail, while skirting how that problem is largely caused by strictly punitive drug laws, but your central issue of better health care would be the solution.

But drug policy is my pet issue. And I understand a good politician can’t satisfy everyone. So I was happy to put my agenda aside and support you.

You are competent. Smart. Savvy. Shrewd. You are the most practical leader this country has seen in my lifetime.

I even had dreams about you becoming president. Like, that one about your election night victory party, going out for a snowball fight, because that’s how you celebrate in dreams… And getting hit by snowball by one of your young female staffers, and pelting her right back with a snowball–because women can dish it out and take it. That’s one of the things your victory would means to me. A paradigm shift that affects the way men and women relate. And, God, is that ever overdue.

But your victory, once seemingly possible, ain’t happening. When people started associating your name with the word “deathwatch” this week, it was definitely time to call it quits. If you ask me, the time to quit was in February, when you had fallen past recovery in the polls and I caucused for Obama.

But you wont quit. Today I opened up the New York Times and there you were, talking about what you would do with health care if elected. Tragic; you won’t be elected. Even Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania endorsed Obama today, in his state–where you have the lead in polls, but not enough to save your campaign. But you plod on and drag your party with you, like a megalomaniac and a masochist to yourself, and a maverick and sadist to us. Your are continuing your crusade at the cost of your credibility and potential. Ralph Nader comes loosely to mind.

It’s time to put on your strong suit, Hillary. Park the campaign bus. Run the Senate. Pull the strings of the marionettes. Do what you do best. Be practical.

Truly yours,
Dominic

I found this photo when I downloaded the pictures from my old BlackBerry onto my computer.

It was lunch hour, and everybody walked clear around this glove. Noticing it. Leaving it there. For such a small item, it got a lot of respect. But nobody wanted to move it. This was the most visible place for a little girl to find her lost glove at a downtown intersection.

This is yesterday’s news.

I would have thought Seattle was immune to Mr. Springsteen, too. But as I recall, when I was a babysitting teenager, one family’s CD collection was, like, nearly half Bruce Springsteen albums. I think they even possessed two copies of Born to Run. And at the time, CDs were still newfangled sorts of things. So that meant these albums weren’t holdovers from college days, not youthful musical indiscretions. Oh, no. They purchased them as parents. I feel bad for their kid. I feel bad for the economy that the article’s about, too. And, uh, I feel bad for the editor for the unfortunate juxtaposition that photo and headline on the Sunday newspaper.

I’ve seen the bumper stickers everywhere and I’m beginning to think it’s false advertising…

What’s happening over there is heinous. And I’m a little concerned that, because the “Free Tibet” cause seems an issue relegated for decades to the back of VW buses, the turmoil there now seems less mainstream, less urgent… less indicative of human-rights violations. Boldly, the opinion writers of the NYT tackle the issue and provide some directive in today’s paper.

Speak Out on Tibet

China has cracked down on Tibet and neighboring provinces. It sent more troops into restive regions and made scores of arrests in Lhasa. It acknowledged firing on demonstrators in Sichuan. Yet, the response of the international community — and of the International Olympic Committee — has been tepid. Beijing must be called to account, especially since it will host the 2008 Games.

We are just learning details of what happened. China has blocked most news coverage despite a pledge to give freer access to journalists in the run-up to the Olympics. Tibetan exile groups say about 100 people died in violence that followed a week of peaceful protests. Beijing puts the toll at about 20. In any case, the violence is neither acceptable nor particularly surprising.

The State Department says Tibet — taken by force by China in 1951 — is “one of China’s poorest regions.” Authorities have increased controls over the practice of Buddhism and committed serious human rights abuses.

The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, has shown remarkable restraint against what he calls “cultural genocide.” Despite the bloodshed, he reaffirmed a commitment to nonviolence and greater autonomy — rather than independence — for Tibet. In return, Beijing called him a “devil.”

…

The United States and other major countries must go beyond anemic statements urging Chinese restraint. They must make it clear that such repression violates the promise Beijing made to improve its human rights record when it won the Olympics bid. It mocks the Olympic Charter, which extols “human dignity.” It mocks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes “equal and inalienable rights of all.”

…

Boycotting the Olympic Games does not work; we know that from experience. But the idea of Bernard Kouchner, France’s foreign minister, about not attending the opening ceremony is worth considering. What message does it send if Mr. Bush and other dignitaries lend their prestige to China’s coming out party as if nothing happened in Tibet?

The rest is over here. It’s a good editorial, but like so many calls to action, the media give directives to leaders and lets the readers off the hook. The NYT and other publications need to give clear instructions to ordinary citizen about how to affect change without becoming marginalized. So this isn’t just an issue for hippies.

Nevertheless, the timing is perfect. This morning’s paper reports the suspicious absence of police and paramilitary at the scene of extended riots in the Tibet capitol Lhasa. In a nation with one of the strongest military forces, the void of enforcement makes me wonder what sorts of tactics China may employ. China has made it clear they won’t tolerate such an uprising. No doubt the government has something far more insidious in mind than a spate of arrests and slaps on the wrists… and perhaps officials are simply waiting for the media storm and the Olympics to blow over before teaching the uprising’s leaders and participants a lesson. Calls to action, like the one above from the New York Times and these activists who disrupted a flame-lighting ceremony, are the best hope for keeping this issue in the public eye, saving Tibetans from torture and incarceration.

True, some of these folks in Lhasa are simple looters (and some activists may be attention whores), but the problems stem from deeper abuses of the Tibetan people and an unselfish struggle for rights, culture, and dignity. The respectable majority should not be dismissed for the actions of a reckless few.

A stopwatch is counting down until the Olympic Games: If Tibet’s struggle for autonomy and dignity can capture the hearts of the world before the gold medals are awarded, there may be hope. Not only for Tibet, but all the people at the mercy of China dark side. This may be their last chance to speak out. It may be ours, too.

I took this photo at the conservatory in Volunteer Park on the first day of spring.

Whenever I see a poster that was obviously crafted at Kinko’s by a paranoid schizophrenic, I take a picture. The conspiracy theory that such notes contain, or, in this case, mocking of the Internet, inspires simultaneous guilt and delight. As for guilt, this poster is an unsettling reminder of my own fragile grip on sanity… the author understands much in the world–he or she knows the language, how to write it, what dot com is–but some little arena of mental chaos renders the author unfit for normal life. It’s not their fault. They don’t deserve to be mocked by fags with fancy cellphones. But, the problem is, the poster is funny.

It screams of conspiracy, threats over a quasi legal medical marijuana cooperative, and (I’m not clear if it’s intentional or just…) sentences are punctuated with a whole satisfying “.com”

The best part: this poster is where my beats collide. Pot conspiracy on a land use action sign. Maybe I should have posted this on the Slog.

American holidays, even those that originated elsewhere, fall under three basic categories: eat-meat holidays, devour-candy holidays, and quaff-liquor holidays. We will call the last category—which includes New Year’s Eve, Cinco De Mayo, and St. Patrick’s Day—the “alcoholidays.” Most Americans associate these days only with drunkenness.

Drinking is a ritual associated with other holidays, of course. But the drinking is secondary. For instance, Independence Day is a drink-liquor-and-eat-hot-dogs holiday; Valentine’s Day is a drink-liquor-and-cry-into-your-pillow holiday. Memorial and Labor Days are foremost about working, dying, and barbequing.

But the true alcoholidays are all about getting wasted. And drinking on St. Patrick’s Day, usually on March 17th, is even accommodated by the church. But so much does the Catholic Church, which must own all holidays with the word “Saint” in it, care so much for our privilege to consume green beer that, to avoid conflict with the holy week (Easter is this Sunday), they moved St. Patrick’s Day back before the holy week began. That’s right… it already happened. On Saturday.

But you’re not Catholic, are you? And you don’t conform to arbitrary edicts from way over there in the Vatican City, do you? Us Yankees got us a parade in New York today. And we got booze here in Seattle, so you can drink like your Irish—tonight. Cheers.

Yellow Cab: (206) 622-6500
Orange Cab: (206) 522-8800

This is where Shannon Harps was murdered.

This is the front of Philly Cheese Steak, where an employee was shot and the owner was murdered.

Notes and offerings show both victims were loved by friends and family. But Harps’ memorial bears extra candles and shelter to burn them. it is maintained by someone or everyone. Her memorial is warm.

Harps’ murder prompted self-defense classes, neighborhood discussion, and established the social networks that protect people and make them feel protected. The result of organizing was this: looking forward to the neighborhood’s bright future.

But the memorial at 23rd and Union lingers no empowerment. There is fury at guns. There is anger, blame, disgust. If there were neighborhood meetings about a community response, and I live two blocks away, I heard nothing of them. The memorial is mostly gone now. The future seems bleak.

A side note before proceeding. Of course, there are differences between the crimes and victims: white/black, female/male, knife/gun, random victim/motive. The last is a possible explanations for why Harps’ murder is a rallying point. She was killed randomly, which we all fear. In the other case, we were told the victim was killed for some unspecified role in another couple’s domestic violence dispute. We tend to believe that if, within private lives, someone has a beef someone else and shoots him or her, that the victim may have brought their fate on themselves. Thus, the owner of the sandwich shop cold be a less sympathetic figure than Harps. Or, in another explanation, the gun used on 23rd and Union is indicative of a problem too big to solve at the neighborhood level.

But I don’t think the anger and helplessness in the Central District stems from the nature of killing nor the murder weapon. I wonder instead about the state of 23rd and Union and the neighborhood around it. I wonder whether divisions in “the community”–between the wealthier white homeowners and the younger non-white folks–has something to do with the response.

Because, for the Central District to organize around the Philly Cheese Steak shooting, as Capitol Hill did around the Harps murder, would realistically be to convene black neighbors in one group and the white neighbors in another, to make the area “safer” by vilifying the hoodlums, further gentrifying the neighborhood. That result, gentrification, is one the sensitive white homeowners are leery of visibly accelerating and a prospect that makes long-time residents angry. The solution is thus the problem. That is, to combat death in the neighborhood, at the expense of essentially admitting the death of the neighborhood. I may be wrong, of course. But how would a community respond to the shooting at Philly’s without creating more division, without gentrifying? What is the scenario that gives this man a remembrance as warm and empowered as Ms. Harps?

Apparently lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride are now only half the pitfalls that could send you straight into the fiery maw of hell. Via Fox News.

After 1,500 years the Vatican has brought the seven deadly sins up to date by adding seven new ones for the age of globalization. The list, published yesterday in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, came as the Pope deplored the “decreasing sense of sin” in today’s “secularized world” and the falling numbers of Roman Catholics going to confession.
…

“You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos,” he said.

Bishop Girotti said that mortal sins also included taking or dealing in drugs, and social injustice which caused poverty or “the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few.”

Jeepers, Jesus in Jerusalem! With 14 sins tempting secular wanderers around every corner, hell’s gonna be crowded as… uh, hell.

But watchdogs of liberal bias in the media claim this mainstream coverage, such as the above by those lefties at Fox News, is a smear job on the church. “The list [of sins] actually didn’t come from any official Catholic Church document, but from an interview of a bishop that was published in L’Osservatore Romano, the “semi-official” newspaper in Vatican City,” writes Matthew Balan at NewsBusters. Well, in the name of being fair and balanced on Fox News’s coverage, I shall report and you can decide. Here’s an excerpt (.pdf) of Bishop Girotti’s interview.

In your opinion, what are the “new sins”?

There are various areas today in which we adopt sinful behavior, as with individual and social rights. This is especially so in the field of bioethics where we cannot deny the existence of violations of fundamental rights of human nature – this occurs by way of experiments and genetic modifications, whose results we cannot easily predict or control. Another area, which indeed pertains to the social spectrum, is that of drug use, which weakens our minds and reduces our intelligence.

…

Regarding the abortion issue, it seems that the Church does not take into account the difficult situations women have to deal with.

It seems that this is an excessive concern, especially since it is the Church that constantly seeks to protect and safeguard the rights and dignity of women. There are many courageous and intelligent initiatives led by Catholic organizations and Church movements. They endlessly and efficaciously support single mothers and fight today’s social and cultural tendencies to the contrary. They even take responsibility to raise unwanted children and facilitate their adoption.

Off the hook, for now, are drunks quaffing the blood of Christ, like me. As are women who don’t deal with the “difficult situations”of pregnancy by resorting to abortion, such as the 536,000 women who die each year from pregnancy complications.

What do you bet the good bishop has taken aspirin before, thus indulging in drug use? And after his sanctimonious little interview, I’m sure he’s proud of himself. See him in hell.

This morning’s NYT has an article on the impact unusual names have on kids. The thinking goes, either, that boys named Sue grow up to be stronger for their misery (as Johnny Cash wrote) or it leads to a life of delinquency (as researchers formerly believed). Modern findings show that people are more influenced by factors of greater significance than the name, like how pretty someone looks, and, thus, Cash was right—kids named Dee Cline can rise into adulthood better at handling criticism than their peers and are proud of their fucke-dup names.

This is all good. My middle name is Grace, you know. (I have another middle name, too—Wilson—they both come from me maternal lineage. )

But Grace was shameful as a child, it was pejoratively-gay in middle school, and then, magically, it was my pride and joy as a fully-fledged faggot. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, okay, asshole? Do criticisms roll off me like water off a duck’s back? Clearly not. Maybe they would if I’d grown up with Grace as my first name, instead of my middle–but this is not Folger’s Crystals and I am definitely not switching. The article was over and that was to be the end of my funny-name reading for the day…

So no sooner did I finish the thoroughly researched yet trivial article, however, than I crossed the page to an even more thoroughly researched but non-trivial article on the fate of our fair planet: In a nutshell, everything we love will be sucked into the sun. Cheers. The article mentions a scientist at the University of Texas. His parents gave him a doozey of a name: Manfred Cuntz.

Mr. Cuntz. Sounds German, but he’s in Texas. I’ll bet he’d rather be named Grace.

Arson almost always sucks. Most notably of late, in the dept. of things sucky, the gate to the walled city of Seoul, Korea was torched by some disgruntled douchebag.

Less then one month later, however, Seattle finally joined the ranks of cities with grand gates to China Town. The polished granite bases were recently finished and the masterpiece was officially unveiled earlier this month. I took this swank picture of it today.