According to the P-I, traffic is currently blocked off on Third between Cherry and Spring as police search for the man who robbed a bank near the Columbia Tower an hour ago. They're looking for a white man in his 30s (read: half of downtown's daytime population), but Seattlest wishes them luck! We'll keep you posted, and let us know if you hear anything more or what you're seeing if you work near the area.......

Georgetown by Seattlest Flickr photog smohundro The Belltowner is the bearer of wonderful and awful news. The very, very good? H&M opens in downtown Seattle on Thursday...as in tomorrow! The not at all good news? A policeman on bike was attacked with a surgical instrument in Belltown this Saturday. A West Seattle "Thriller" dance team is practicing to participate in a dance-off to beat the world "Thriller" record.Blogging Georgetown wonders if there's a real estate......

If Mayor Greg Nickels can cut youth crime in half, as long as we give him $9 million, shouldn't we just give him $18 million and get rid of youth crime all together?......

A future firefighter, of course. Or rather, someone who had hoped to become a firefighter, because this guy can pretty much kiss his firefighting and law enforcement career goodbye. An 18-year-old trainee with the Bucoda Fire Department stole and totaled the small town's only ambulance early Saturday morning. A volunteer firefighter spotted the joy-riding teen in the stolen ambulance on a rural road in the small Thurston County community. According to thief's would-be future firefighting......

First things first: Brett Paulson, barman at Txori, responds to recent violent incidents in Belltown by circulating a petition that asks Governor Gregoire to send in the Washington State Patrol "to help eradicate the open air drug trafficking." Txori is two doors from Wally's, a convenience store that's a magnet for low-lifes, and Paulson's beginning to think it's safer to walk through Belltown's alleys than its sidewalks. Councilman Tim Burgess is on the case......

Oh, stupid criminals...you may have a new low to aspire to. A 22-year-old was arrested Tuesday in South Seattle for attempting to burglarize his own mother's house. The kid's mom and other family members confronted him and his 15-year-old accomplice in the midst of the would-be armed robbery and caused the kids to flee the scene. The pair were quickly arrested and await charges. We imagine this is one case where Mom won't be bailing......

Robert L. Jamieson has a big, big problem with the way things are down in Belltown and a pretty strong idea of who's to blame: If the fates had cast Greg Nickels as mayor of New York City when Times Square was the pits, overrun with crime and grime, the renaissance of the one-time eyesore would have stayed a dream. "One-time eyesore," huh? Apparently Robert Jamieson hasn't been to New York recently. Jamieson's been on......

At 3 a.m. last Sunday morning, Daniel Stoy, a Microsoft employee from Fargo, in town for a conference, was beaten by five or six men "outside a bar" in the "Belltown neighborhood." digg_url = 'http://digg.com/world_news/Belltown_in_Beatdown_Crisis'; That's the P-I, with their view-from-30,000-feet-style coverage. Stoy was in a coma, but emerged from intensive care on Tuesday. A more forthcoming commenter says the attack happened: ...on 1st Ave, between Bell and Blanchard, in front of Bell Tower (which......

(Or their caretakers.) What to do when someone is impeding the flow of evening traffic so he can water some flowers in a traffic circle? Take care of it Rainier Beach-style: Punch him! Lessons learned: 1) Let the traffic circle garden die, because your fellow citizens obviously don't give a shit. 2) Don't squirt people with your hose, even if they're moving traffic cones. 3) Don't send 60-year-old men to the hospital just for blocking......

"Bail Bonds Neon" by Flickr contributor spike55151.Further proving there really is a Flickr group for everything, we found this in the Flickr Bail Bonds Group. Seems to be a big day for bail bonds and crime stories, and little else, in Seattle today. First comes the story of Tammy Gibson, who attacked a new neighbor with a baseball bat last week. The new neighbor? A 7-foot-3-inch registered sex offender. After the assault, both Gibson and......

"SPD Patrol Cars" by Slightlynorth, from the Seattlest Flickr Pool. Thanks! Ooooh—the Seattle P-I has launched their new crime blog, Seattle 911. It's a resting place for the flotsam and jetsam of the city's police and fire departments, where morbidly fascinated readers can take in side stories, breaking crime news, and details from daily reports. The site promises "news both fresh and forgotten," which we hope means that there will also be info about......

We understand you're upset, Belltown. What, with all these drug deals going on right outside your high-rise condos. You've video-taped and photographed the deals going down, you've created a YouTube channel and taken your complaints to local blogs and newspapers...and still it doesn't stop. Maybe that's because the drug dealers and users in Belltown were there long, long before the condos and well before the neighborhood was given its trendy name. What you all......

It's only Monday, but we can assure you the following will be the best local news headline you read all week: Man Watches as One-Legged Thief Steals His Truck It has everything you need for a funny local news headline: absurdity, oddness, a slapstick quality, and nobody was seriously injured. Everyone wins! Except the fellow who watched from a roof he was repairing as his truck was stolen by a wheelchair-bound, one-legged man. Not so......

Photo of Ezell's by our very own Seattlest Contributor, James Ezell's Famous Chicken, a Seattle institution of deep-fried goodness, has been victim to a number of burglaries in the past six months. The most recent burglary happened this Saturday and was caught on surveillance cameras. The grainy footage shows a man breaking in through a side-window of the restaurant early Saturday morning after Ezell's closed for business. This is third burglary in six months at......

Seattlest may be more attuned to these reports, since we spend the greater portion of our day browsing local news sites...but what is going on with the spate of stabbings in Western Washington? Every time we refresh the local news sites, it seems they are reporting a new fatal or near-fatal stabbing. A quick perusal of Komo 4's local news site found the following recent headlines: Roadside Argument Leads to Deadly Stabbing Auburn Teen......

There's a 36-year-old senior surgical resident with the University of Washington who's in the hospital as a patient this week. Police are still looking for his assailants. If you were wandering around Belltown at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning and remember seeing a fight, or a group of meatheads running away from one, call the Seattle Police Department's Homicide and Assault unit at 206-684-5550. The way we read it, one group--the Korean victim, his girlfriend,......

We always knew that Tyra Banks and her train wreck of a reality TV competition, America's Next Top Model (ANTM), was an acquired taste. You either love it (and like Seattlest, you only mention that to your closest friends...and you guys), or you hate it. But a Seattle woman took that disdain for Tyra and Miss Jay's crazy glitter eyebrows a little too far, when she stabbed an acquaintance for watching ANTM too loudly.......

The University District was plagued with violent assaults this weekend. Within a 36-hour period four students were assaulted in what were thought to be related attacks, a man was seriously injured in a stabbing, and another University of Washington student was robbed at gun point. All of the attacks occurred within blocks of the University of Washington campus. The four students injured in the related assault were attacked with bricks by an estimated 10 assailants.......

The Seattle Weekly's Rick Anderson pointed us to what may be the greatest unintentional comedy festival in Internet history. Following a series of nearly thirty break-ins, Magnolia residents have turned to the internets to catch the burgular, through a series of extremely misguided tips.—We had a young white male with a green hooded sweatshirt knock on our door and ask if we would like to sign up for evironmental action support. He walks with a......

We may have the lowest crime rate in 40 years, but it sure doesn't feel like it. Depressing crime news item #1 The guy cops thought might have killed Shannon Harps did not kill Shannon Harps. At least, his DNA didn't match samples found at the scene. He'll likely be released today. Once again, cops are suspect-less in the murder which happened three weeks ago now, and the terrifying possibility that Harps was murdered at......

Following the announcement that Seattle's crime rate is the lowest it's been in 40 years, Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur has an article about how it doesn't feel that way, given the the shooting at the party downtown, the shooting of DéChé Morrison, the stabbing of Shannon Harps, the schoolteacher who got beat into the pavement on East Pine, and the woman hit in the head with a hammer. I was glad to hear about......

While out and about the other day, we ran across these items. Now, seeing shoes hanging from wires is nothing new, of course. Like you, gentle reader, we've been seeing them everywhere ever since we can remember. What is new, though, for us is seeing a pair of boots up there. We're kinda surprised we haven't seen this much sooner. Also, we are thankful that the utility crews hadn't gotten around to taking them......

Ah, football. We love it. It’s easily our favorite sport to watch as it gets our usual docile selves all fired up and yelling at the television every week. Basketball, even with its fast pace and high scoring, is a bore. And baseball? Baseball is almost as fun to watch as golf or the Lifetime channel. But for all of football’s glory, there remains its biggest upset. Which is that it’s one of those high-testosterone......

In this corner, we have the accused, Amanda Knox, Seattle's girl-next-door and alleged participant in the murder of one. Google News hits: about 1,811. In the other corner, Risperdal aka risperidone, one of the most widely used anti-psychotics in the world, approved for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and marketed off-label for the "irritability" associated with autism, Asperger's, ADHD, and being teen-aged or elderly, and related to the deaths of at least 1,000 people (according the......

Here are three vaguely computer-related crimes taken from recent headlines in Seattle, Chicago and New England. Seattle: "Man pleads guilty in cybertheft case." A 35-year-old Seattle man has pleaded guilty in federal court to mail fraud and aggravated identity theft in a scheme that utilized peer-to-peer file-sharing programs to gain access to private information from dozens of victims. Gregory Kopiloff admitted during a plea hearing Monday that, through LimeWire and other file-sharing programs, he used......

1. Things We Lost in the Fire. There are a few things we liked about this (supposedly based here, though there is nothing to indicate that it actually takes place here) movie---mostly that the heroin junkie played by Benecio Del Toro lives in a flophouse in Renton and that Halle Berry plays a Seattle woman named Audrey, leading to a scene where Del Toro runs after her calling, "Audrey, Audrey, Audrey, Audrey, Audrey!" Call......

Gluck's operatic masterpiece, the much-neglected Iphigenia In Tauris, premiered this weekend at Seattle Opera. Inexplicably, it's only been staged once at the New York Met, and that was some 90 years ago. In Seattle, never. But it's suddenly hot: San Francisco and Chicago did a co-production with Covent Garden last year, and the Met, looking to spread the cost and risk of staging new productions, asked Seattle to co-sponsor a new Iphigenia, enlisting the......

First of all, we haven't read the book. We've read other Dostoevsky novels, but not this one. On the other hand, we're not stuck in that dreadful Harry Potter situation where we're gonna tell you all the stuff they left out. What they left in is the poverty, fear, gory ax, greed, and other good stuff that makes for theater you leave talking about. That Theater Under Ground's Crime and Punishment is a different take......

Seattlest's favorite crime (just edging Identity Theft) strikes again, this time in one of Seattlest's favorite places. A copper theft at Snoqualmie Pass temporarily disabled highway signs and safety lighting, which had to suck for people navigating the pass in the middle of the night. Don't mistake the fact that copper theft is Seattlest's favorite crime with Seattlest being in favor of the crime. It's bad and dangerous and taxpayers lose. Why is it our......

Kim is off to see Susan Werner at the Triple Door Sunday night. This weekend is a toss up for Matt between going down to Portland for the final days of the Body World 3 show at OMSI or heading out west to the The 26th Annual West Coast Oyster Shucking Championship and Washington State Seafood Festival. As previously noted, Seth is going to take The Grand Tour with George Jones at the Paramount. Friday,......