News Club Crackdown: And There’s More
posted by on September 11 at 15:49 PM
The Seattle Nightlife and Music Association, the industry group that’s been lobbying against Mayor Nickels’s nightlife license, believes its membership was targeted by “Operation Sobering Thought” (the Bush lite name for the city’s undercover sting).
SNMA’s spokesperson Tim Hatley would not release its membership list, but confirmed for me that all but one or two of the clubs that got hit were members.
Members believe the city is retaliating for bucking the mayor’s proposed scheme.
The mayor’s office told me they had nothing to do with the sting operation.
Hatley, citing the last few months of the “Mayor’s systematic public affairs strategy against clubs” (his “5 Worst Clubs” list, his televised tour of Pioneer Square) that “has created an atmosphere to vilify clubs,” says the mayor’s denial of involvement in a giant sting conducted by the city’s police force is just semantics.
The other interesting thing is that the Saturday night arrests were made for "failure to appear" in court.
Notices that warrants had been issued were sent to various mailboxes Saturday afternoon.
No notices seem to *ever* have been sent out informing people that they needed to appear in court in the first place.
Which would seem a forgivable, if extremely curious administrative oversight, had not the police been gathering home addresses for two weeks prior.
In short, it looks like everyone was set up by either the SPD or Tom Carr.
What a bunch of crap. This can not be legal. At minimum, it seems like grounds for a lawsuit. I hope the SNMA does just that.
Heard City Attorney Tom Carr on the Dave Ross show. He said
1) these crimes were shocking, an outrageous threat to public safety (bouncer taking a bribe to let a gun into a club, hell yes that’s a threat I agree), but
2) they wait a week or two to arrest these people, all at once, on a Saturday night, the busiest time of the week for clubs
3) but no, the timing isn’t political
My bullshit detector just exploded.
Hey, it was fine to have the guy who took a bribe to let a gun into a club continue to work there, no public safety threat, right? If it’s a public safety threat, cuff them then and there, or
1) shut your trap about doing this for public safety, and
2) shut your trap about the timing not being political
So there's no possible correlation between clubs that pull stupid shit on a regular basis and clubs that don't want additional regulations?
@3:
Hard to say when the Nickels, Carr, and Kerlikowski have such a fucking single-minded agenda.
How much time and money did they spend on this stunt? How about spending those resources doing real police work around those clubs at closing time?
When you consider that no one besides an undercover cop is going to pay a bouncer $100 to bring a gun into a club, even the bribe arrest is total bullshit.
The mayor’s office told me they had nothing to do with the sting operation.
OF COURSE they were gonna say that! What do you expect? "Oh, yeah, we totally targeted SNMA clubs in retaliation for dissing the Mayor's plan. I hope the city's not mad at us for that!"
You're dealing with a bunch of opportunistic, agenda-driven pathological liars. Asking this question is almost a waste of breath.
Comments Closed
In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 14 days old).