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What the Pigeon Point police response was all about

March 13, 2012 9:16 am
|      15 COMMENTS
 |   Pigeon Point | West Seattle news | West Seattle police

Though we apologize for not having heard about it while it was happening (not everything’s on the scanner, so your text/call to 206-293-6302 is always helpful!), we DO now know why a sizable police response spent a while on Pigeon Point yesterday afternoon: Seattle Police media-relations Det. Mark Jamieson looked it up for us. Someone reported a suspicious item in a mailbox in the 4100 block of 20th SW (map). The police report says it was described as a plastic milk container with a screw top and foil, and it appeared “burnt.” Officers called in Arson/Bomb Squad specialists to have a look. The eventual determination, according to Det. Jamieson: It was “a device used to smoke marijuana.”

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15 Replies to "What the Pigeon Point police response was all about"

  • chroni March 13, 2012 (9:27 am)

    Gravity bong strikes again!

  • marco March 13, 2012 (10:58 am)

    Awesome use of police resources.

  • Sue March 13, 2012 (11:28 am)

    Don’t you mean the Arson/Bong Squad? :)

  • bebecat March 13, 2012 (11:31 am)

    My first response “HaHaHaHaHaHaHa”

    • WSB March 13, 2012 (11:46 am)

      It does sound funny in retrospect, but for context’s sake, the inquiries we received afterward indicated that people were spooked because for one, Pigeon Point was hit pretty hard by burglars not that long ago, and for two, what we now know was the Arson/Bomb Squad’s vehicle – unmarked, I’m told – apparently looked fairly ominous. On the city’s time-delayed incident-response map, this was labeled only “suspicious circumstances” when a line-item finally came up late last night. – TR

  • Sue March 13, 2012 (11:31 am)

    Just to clarify that “Sue” above is not me. I’ve been going by Sue here for years, so didn’t want anyone to get confused. Or more confused than I did, thinking “I don’t recall typing that.” :)

  • Sue March 13, 2012 (11:44 am)

    Sorry, Sue – I’ll change my name.

  • Vanessa March 13, 2012 (12:02 pm)

    Sue, it does sound like something out of a Cheech and Chong movie, with the Bong Squad instead of the bomb squad….

  • Lynn March 13, 2012 (12:14 pm)

    This made my day!

  • coffee March 13, 2012 (1:34 pm)

    To marco better to have been safe than sorry….
    And the bomb/bong comments are funny..

  • goodgraces March 13, 2012 (3:27 pm)

    Just wanted to chime in here that Tracy was so great in helping us figure out what the heck went on up here yesterday. Thank you WSB! I’ve programmed the ‘breaking news’ number into my phone so next time something weird is going on we’ll be able to loop WSB in earlier.

    The “bomb-that-was-really-a-bong” is amusing in retrospect, but I have to say that there was absolutely no way to know what was happening during the event, and it went on for well over 90 minutes. The police were tight-lipped (confirming only that it was not a burglary and saying that they’d had a report that “a neighbor might be in some trouble”). After the unmarked “X-files-like” black vehicle arrived and blocked the street, the plot thickened. Was it a SWAT team? Homeland security? A paddy wagon sent out to support a summons arrest? The coroner?

    It was definitely disconcerting to the few of us who braved the monsoon-ish weather as we tried to suss things out. I appreciate that SPD was there to handle matters. But I must say that it would have been great if a few of the officers who simply waited in their squad cars reading the newspaper as everything went down had thought it important to inform neighbors about matters. Simply a statement to the effect of “suspicious package” would have sufficed and gone a long way to calm folks without inciting panic. The “strategy” (?) of communication blackout during the event seems (at least to this uninitiated observer) unnecessary.

  • metrognome March 13, 2012 (7:03 pm)

    hmmm … I could really use some HiHo’s and Ding-Dongs right now …

  • breezygirl March 13, 2012 (7:22 pm)

    What I find even more amusing is that so many people realized that it was a bong just by reading this… :-P

  • Delridge Chick March 14, 2012 (10:32 pm)

    Does anyone happen to know what happened near Holden & Delridge on Sunday (3/11/12) around noon? There were about 6 cop cars lining Holden to Delridge, with a man and his kids sitting on the curb talking to police.

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