Seattle prosecutor drops all public marijuana tickets

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ā€¦almost all of them were issued by a single cop, who hates legal weed and subjected his victims to humiliating rituals like flipping a coin to see which ones would get the ticket and which would walk away free.

Christ, what an asshole.

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Now, can the asshole cop please be publicly censured?

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Jokela? What ifā€¦ what if the reporter is Japanese? Maybe itā€™s The Joker!

Nah - the Japanese for ā€œJokerā€ would be ā€œJokaā€.

The Japanese language doesnā€™t have non-vowel-based syllables other than ā€œnā€, so they simply try to rebuild the same sounds as close as possible with the syllables they do use.

For example, ā€œSteakā€ becomes Su-te-ku (resulting in a bit of extra length on the beginning and end, since you never use the ā€œsā€ or ā€œkā€ sound without a vowel along with it), while ā€œHamburgerā€ becomes Han-ba-ga, keeping same length, but distorting the sounds slightly.

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Jo-ka-.

"Chief Oā€™Toole and (Office of Professional Accountability) Director Pierce Murphy conferred and believed that nothing in the ongoing investigation precluded him from returning to his patrol duties," said SPD spokesman Drew Fowler.

If willful and egregious violations of his oath of office are hunky-dory with the SPD, why bother having an oath at all?

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Um, the people cited actually did break the law, by smoking weed in public. The issue here is that, unlike the officers who gave out the other 20% of tickets, this one wasnā€™t using normal discretion and was giving out citations as much as possible, because he didnā€™t like the law and wanted to pick some petty fight with a prosecutor. Thatā€™s not egregious violation of his oath, itā€™s just being a jerk.

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Suteku

Constable Savage.

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Of course not. Heā€™s back on patrol.

The phrase ā€œhates legal weedā€ makes me think he had a good contraband business going before legalization.

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Could the question of whether or not he went back on patrol at least have been decided by a coin flip?

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Might be City Attorney Pete Holmes has personal reasons for wanting these tickets droppedā€¦

http://blogs.seattletimes.com/pot/2014/07/11/city-attorney-pete-holmes-apologizes-for-taking-pot-to-work/

Iā€™m still confused, though. I thought there was a city initiative that meant marijuana possession was meant to be the policeā€™s lowest priority, so how was the cop allowed to write those tickets?

Interesting part of downtown where those tickets were written, though.

http://www.twitter.com/3rdAndPike

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Gotta get rid of all that ā€˜confiscatedā€™ contraband somehow. It would be a waste of scarce police resources to clog up valuable evidence room space for stuff like thatā€¦

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This is a reference to Michael Savage, right? Iā€™m asking because Dan Savage makes his home in the Seattle area (I think - if he doesnā€™t now, he left quite recently) and he was the first person I thought of after your comment. Dan Savage and Officer Jokela have somewhat different opinions on the legalization of marijuana.

Or perhaps I missed the reference completely - my brain ainā€™t working so hot today, so thatā€™s quite likely, actually.

Yes, of course, you are correct - I had a senior moment.

I did check the necessity of a direct link, and my constable savage came first in my googleage. But of course ymmv if youā€™re not searching anonymously. So Iā€™ve learned to do better at referencing a certain single-minded bobby.

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You canā€™t have a ā€œgood cop/bad copā€ scenario without retaining some bad cops.

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I just wrote ā€œI will always Google the entire term Iā€™m trying to figure out and not just one wordā€ a thousand times on my whiteboard. And thanks for the link - I hadnā€™t seen it before.