The woman was a mess. Because she was shaking and crying so hard, she was barely coherent enough to answer questions about the events of the last hour. And it had been a pretty nasty one.

As the details finally emerged, I learned that four armed men had entered her residence and threatened harm to the woman and her sleeping children. They took cash, property and, she added almost as an afterthought, her marijuana. Specifically, they had taken her medicinal marijuana grow operation, about fifteen plants in all. It soon became plain that the home invasion had occurred because the …

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In December, 1997, I was visiting family in California. My thoughts at the time were reserved for the imminent birth of my second child and thus far away from my Puget Sound area home that was being blanketed with record snowfall.

Unfortunately, the snow that accumulated in my driveway for a week proved a tempting target for two roving meth addicts looking for empty houses. The tweakers loaded up their vehicle (and my car), and took everything. With apologies to Dr. Seuss, the twitchy grinches took  more than just pop-guns and pantookas – the burglars found my gun safe, pulled …

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Over the last few weeks several people have asked me pointed questions about what they perceive as a disturbing phenomenon in Seattle. The issue they were pondering was what, exactly, is going on with the Seattle Police Department.

In the last year or more SPD has been the target of an ongoing series of allegations involving excessive force and unprofessional behavior by rank and file officers. These incidents, most of which have been captured by cell phone video cameras, have drawn the attention of department critics, the media, and more recently, federal investigators at the Department of Justice.

These factors …

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Never did I think it would come this quickly.

When writing the last column of 2011, wherein I juxtaposed the nationwide decline in crime versus the sharp increase in violent cop-killing, I never would have imagined that one of the first headlines of the new year would read: “Mount Rainier ranger slain; killer escapes into woods”.

National Park Service Ranger Margaret Anderson, a federal law enforcement officer working at Mount Rainier National Park, was gunned down New Year’s Day by a subject already sought in an earlier shooting that left four …

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