Vivre à Seattle est généralement synonyme de paix et de sécurité. Depuis quelques semaines, la ville est cependant victime d'une des pires vagues de violence de son histoire. Dans ce contexte faut-il redéfinir le rôle des services policiers? On en discute. Au coeur de toute cette situation, l'utilisation des armes par des citoyens...
"The timing of the crime wave is almost as jarring. It comes in the middle of a complex political dance between the city and the Department of Justice over how the Seattle Police Department should change its practices and policies after a series of high-profile incidents that showed what federal investigators called “a pattern or practice of excessive force.”
With the killings last week — four in a coffee shop and another across town in a carjacking by the same man, who later shot himself when surrounded by the police — the number of homicides in just five months in Seattle reached 21, as many as in all of last year. What connects the dots — in the community debate about overhauling the Police Department, and now in the sense of vulnerability in a city that usually feels tidy, if not a tad smug, behind its liberal ramparts — is a riptide of guns.
In Wednesday’s rampage, a man who had been kicked out of Café Racer near the University of Washington campus, denied service because of his erratic behavior, returned with a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol.
“If you look back over the shootings we’ve had this year and the prior year, you can see many of them are related to the belief that it’s O.K. to carry a gun somewhere to solve a dispute,” Mayor Mike McGinn said at a news conference on Thursday. “We have to look at what we can do to redouble our efforts in this regard.”
Jennifer Keys, 41, a human resources manager who lives near Café Racer, was more succinct.
“The neighbors are freaking out,” said Ms. Keys, who has long been involved in local politics. And with anxieties running so high, she said she expected a blizzard of back and forth about what should happen next on everything from gun control to police patrols. “Some responses are going to be irrational,” she said.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire