More on the Seattle Soldier Beatings

The story continues to unfold here. The Seattle Times reports the Seattle PD now disputes a claim by a relative of one of the victims that a police officer watched the attack but did not intervene. The claim was first reported in an interview on KOMO-TV. The police did not immediately dispute the claim in the KOMO-TV interview:

The victim's family says there was one police officer very close by while the beating was in progress. They claim that officer did not try to help.

Pruitt did not address that claim specifically, but he did say it's up to an officer to decide if he/she feels safe confronting an angry crowd alone.

"If the crowd is large, if they can't see beyond the outer crowd and see what's happening, there may be some instances where an officer doesn't necessarily want to go running into a crowd and possibly make conditions worse," he said. "We didn't know if weapons were involved and we didn't know the conditions of anybody inside that crowd," Pruitt explained.

Meanwhile, Seattle P-I columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr. comments on what he seems to view as some good news: not only were the assailants black, but so were the victims! From Mr. Jamieson:

But the beating victims and their female companions are -- surprise! -- black as well, police tell me. News reports failed to mention the race of the beating victims or the women.

. . . .

Police say race was not a factor in the July assaults, and point out that race should never come into play unless it is part of a crime, such as a hate crime.

That last quoted sentence is a neat piece of tautology: race should not be mentioned as a factor unless it is a race crime, which is a crime in which race is a factor. This should highlight once again the silliness of such a designation: would this be a more serious or heinous assault if the victims had been white? Do the victims feel some relief that their assailants were of the same race and were not attacking them because of their race? Did the attack feel less hateful? Was it a "dislike crime" rather than a "hate crime"?