The Sunday, January 5 edition of The Seattle Times had a front-page cover story on racial profiling and the Washington State Patrol. The State Patrol has been keeping track of traffic stops for over two years now, including the race of each person stopped, the reason for stopping them, whether they were searched, and the outcome of the searches. The Seattle Times analyzed 1.7 million of these stops over a period of 27 months and found that, yes, the State Patrol has a problem with racial profiling: minorities are searched 2-1/2 times more often than whites, yet whites are found with contraband more often than minority drivers.

Patrol Chief Serpas said that he wants to find out why this is happening, including identifying individual officers who may be a problem. He said: "It's the right thing to do." Is the Seattle Police Department listening? Mayor Greg Nickels and City Councilman Jim Compton, who chairs the council's public safety committee, should also take heed. It's time to stop resisting the demands of Seattle's minority population and get a meaningful racial profiling study going here in Seattle. Vague assurances that "it's already illegal" are not enough.--Maria Tomchick

On January 7, Washington State Sen. Patty Murray was named as one of four Democrats to sit on a special committee to advise Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle on policy priorities and political strategy in the Senate. Given that the House is heavily Republican while the Senate is almost evenly split between the two parties, most of Bush's worst initiatives--his current tax-cut for the rich, his proposal to privatize Medicare, huge budget increases for the military, etc.--can only be stopped by a filibuster in the Senate. Washingtonians are in a unique position to influence the battles that Tom Daschle and the Democrats choose to wage in the Senate in the next two years. Now is the time to fill Patty Murray's mailbox with your list of priorities. Hand-written or typed letters are okay, but can take three weeks to get to her office because of "security reasons" related to the anthrax attacks. It's better to send a fax or e-mail, and phone calls are great when time is short: e-mail senator_murray@murray.senate.gov, fax 1-202-224-0238, phone 1-202-224-2621, or 173 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.

Patty Murray's web page has a typically wishy-washy statement on the President's execrable tax-cut plan. She praises him, while mentioning that the plan is unfair, but manages to avoid saying whether she'll vote for or against it. Hhmm. Meanwhile, Maria Cantwell's web page sings the praises of Maria Cantwell, of course, and cheerily takes credit for the extension of unemployment benefits that Bush signed into law last week. But it makes no mention of Bush's tax-cut plan at all. E-mail or write them both with your thoughts about a tax-cut for the rich: Maria Cantwell, e-mail senator_cantwell@cantwell.senate.gov, phone 1-202-224-3441, fax 1-202-228-0514, 717 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.--M.T.

Will the last person leaving the U-District please shoot out the pretty new street lamps? After an unpublicized two week break in which nobody knew to come back and shop, the U-District's construction mess on The Ave is under way again in the new year. And the sick joke is that the city millions being spent to "revitalize the U-District" are going, to all appearances, to ordinary underground maintenance, repaving, and the widening -- for the second time in about four years -- of a couple of sidewalks. That's it.

That's all that your millions of tax dollars are buying. It's not even corporate welfare for the already-struggling businesses left on The Ave.; instead, they've been decimated by months of disruption by construction dirt and noise, no access, terrible traffic rerouting, and even less parking. Many have either laid off staff or closed entirely.

The whole scene is the brainchild of Greg Nickels and of the U-District Chamber of Commerce -- which is to say, the University Bookstore, the only remaining large business on the Ave. The mess has the effect of making its parking more valuable, but otherwise, does nothing to address the once-vital street's real problems: crime, parking, competition from the ritzier University Village, and business leaders horrified by the notion of a University District that welcomes (gasp!) young people. Instead, the small independent businesses get forced out of business and the public's tax money gets pissed away on yet another useless reconfiguration of The Ave's sidewalks. What a farce. And if you like it, you'll love the dozens of new Sound Transit light rail stations being planned... --Geov Parrish

Amidst the media coverage over the identification, via DNA testing, of a suspect in the 1993 murder of local punk musician Mia Zapata, a lot of nonsense is being broadcast and written about how the murder -- Zapata was a well-known local celebrity -- marked the end of the age of euphoric innocence in Seattle's music scene, blah blah blah. Of course, people looking for trends can always find or invent them. But if you're looking for the cultural impact of Zapata's death, you'd do a lot better to look at the 10-year history of Home Alive!, the local self-defense and anti-violence group founded as a result of Zapata's death. Home Alive! hasn't been about lost innocence, or victimization, or any other trite media construct. It was about a community coming together to protect its own, share skills, and ultimately, teach thousands of women (and men) to negotiate our urban streets more confidently.

As legacies go, that's a far more significant way to have honored a woman who in life was well-loved and admired. It's a shame our local media mandarins are so removed from the actual community they're describing that they literally don't recognize the significance when ordinary people, confronted by crisis and grief, come together to create something extraordinary. --G.P.

The Sound Nonviolent Opponents of War (SNOW) coalition continues to grow, with 48 member organizations and a host of affiliated neighborhood action groups. As this issues calendar attests, the coalition's members are active, and coming up with new ideas for getting the anti-war word out to the people, and getting the people involved against the war, like running ads on Metro Buses (donations actively solicited), coordinating banner hangs over major regional highways and potlucks for peace. The coalition's web page (www.snowcoalition.org) contains a wealth of contact info., from the local group in your neighborhood to links across the nation as well as everyday action ideas.

One action that hopefully won't become necessary is the Emergency Response to an abrupt escalation of the war in Iraq. The trigger for the Emergency Response will be one or more of the following, (1) A declaration of war is made; (2) U.S. bombing of Iraq increases significantly (presumably this means the bombing is reported live on CNN); or (3) U.S. troops are deployed in Iraq. Should any of those things happen, there will be a gathering at the Federal Building at 915 Second Avenue at 5:00 PM, with a march to Westlake at 7:00 PM. The plan for the following day calls for a noon gathering at the Federal Building and a march to Westlake Park for a rally at 4:30 PM. Several independent feeder marches will be organized by students & different groups to meet at Westlake for the Day 2 rally. Plans are also under way for day-time vigils at the Federal Building for the first 7 days of war.--Troy Skeels

I was doing my ETS! paper route one day last summer when I rather abruptly discovered that the Peace and Justice Alliance had closed down, and taken their Peace Cafe with them. On my way into the Cafe to drop off some papers I saw it was all cold and dark inside. A hand-lettered sign in the window claimed that the Cafe had lost its lease. Losing a lease and abruptly closing shop in the middle of a month seemed a little odd. I soon learned that the Board had reached a state of sudden panic over the organization's finances and fired the quite effective fund raisers along with the rest of the staff. The problems that caused the board to abruptly terminate an active organization of 18,000 members didn't seem insurmountable to many of the staff and members. And the timing couldn't have been worse, coming as it did in the opening months of what the Bush administration intends to be a decade or two of active worldwide warfare. Some members and staff vowed that the organization was fundamentally sound and that it would in fact rise from the ashes. And making good on that promise, P&JA is holding a membership meeting at 7PM, Thursday January 16, at the University Baptist Church, (see calendar for more details) to nominate and elect board members, clear the air, and otherwise dust itself off and head back into the struggle for peace and justice. They say new members, and their friends, are encouraged to attend.--Troy Skeels