I met with Kitsap County Sheriff’s detectives yesterday morning about three robberies that have occurred since April that have more than one thing in common. In fact, they have the detectives thinking there’s a strong possibility they were committed by the same two people.

The first, an armed robbery at the Silverdale Dollar Tree store in April, reads like this (as published in the Kitsap Sun on April 17):

Deputies were called to the store, at 10300 Silverdale Way NW, shortly after 9 p.m. Employees there said two men, wearing dark clothing, hooded sweatshirts and bandanas over their faces, entered the store and demanded money. One of the men had a gun, reports said.

The second, another armed robbery at Great Clips hair salon in South Kitsap Sept. 22, went this way:

Both (suspects) were wearing dark glasses and black-hooded sweatshirts, witnesses reported. Both suspects wore bandannas covering their faces and “puffy down-style jackets,” (sheriff’s spokesman Scott) Wilson said.

The suspects, carrying metallic or chrome-colored semiautomatic handguns, entered around 8:40 p.m. and ordered people in the building to the floor, Wilson said. They ordered one employee to the register and demanded cash. It is unclear whether they actually got any money, he added.

Five days later, two armed men held up the Auto Zone store in East Bremerton. Here are those facts:

One of the suspects was reported to have been armed with a sub-machine gun that resembled an Uzi.

The clerks were taken to the rear of the store and tied with duct tape while the perpetrators removed an undisclosed amount of money from the store’s safe

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The shenanigans of defining a “60-day supply” for card-carrying medical marijuana patients may actually be over.

I’m not holding my breath, though.

Still, the Department of Health, a few months past its deadline, has put forth this limit for patients: 24 ounces of finished product, 15 plants. That rule will go into effect Nov. 2.

I asked Kitsap County Prosecutor Russ Hauge this morning what his thoughts were on the new limits. He answered simply.

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(Blogger’s note: Back to help us untangle our often complex legal system is Stan Glisson, a local Bremerton defense attorney. You might remember his last segment explaining the legal woes of Paris Hilton. Here’s his take on the recent stop-and-ID checkpoints the U.S. Border Patrol is conducting on the Olympic Peninsula.)

Since 9/11, Americans’ civil liberties have been limited in the name of national security. Is additional safety worth minor intrusions into our personal lives? Or as Benjamin Franklin said, is a society that trades liberty for safety deserving of neither?

For several months, the U.S. Border Patrol has been increasing its use of  checkpoints on the Kitsap Peninsula as a mechanism for seeking out illegal — and possibly terrorist — border crossers. All along the peninsula, residents are reacting with a mix of surprise and outrage: If I haven’t done anything wrong, why am I being stopped and questioned by the police?

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Turns out that the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints that have ruffled some residents’ feathers on the Olympic Peninsula aren’t unique to our area.

The border patrol is conducting them in Vermont, Louisiana, New York and elsewhere, reports USA Today. And they’re not limited to stopping cars — they’re boarding buses, ferries and trains too.

Federal law allows the border patrol to stop anyone in transit, up to 100 miles from any international border crossing, in order to search for illegal immigrants. If other crimes are found to be committed — and no illegal aliens are found — the border patrol can investigate those crimes.

Starting today, Washington’s level 3 sex offenders will now be hooked up with GPS locators for their first month outside of prison, according to Department of Corrections spokesman Chad Lewis.

Corrections officials began using the monitoring devices in Sept. 2007, following Gov. Chris Gregoire’s recommendation to do so. Gregoire’s opinion was based on findings by a task force headed by our own Kitsap County Prosecutor, Russ Hauge.
“We only expand programs that we believe help improve public safety,” Department of Corrections Secretary Eldon Vail said in Lewis’ press release. “These GPS locators give our officers another tool to supervise the highest-risk sex offenders.”

After 30 days, some level 3 offenders will have to continue to wear locators. Those offenders either:

• lack stable housing;
• lack steady employment;
• have failed to comply with mandatory programs, such as chemical dependency, mental-health treatment, sexual deviancy counseling.

More from Lewis:

“As of Sept. 12, all 89 sex offenders who met the criteria for the locators were wearing them. More than 200 offenders have either worn locators or are still wearing one. State statutes only allow DOC to place locators on sex offenders who were sentenced after July 1, 2000.

The expansion is expected to more than double the current number of GPS locators being used.

“We’ve found that the first 30 days is the period when an offender is most likely to violate his or her supervision,” Program Administrator Anmarie Aylward said. “They’re just returning to their community and it takes time for them to find a stable environment. That’s the period when they need the most enhanced supervision.”’

Vail says the electronic-monitoring system, which includes tracking computers at local DOC offices, is labor intensive but has been a valuable addition.

“No single piece of equipment can guarantee an offender won’t commit a new crime,” Vail said. “But GPS locators provide our officers with valuable information.”

In other DOC news, the prison system has recently recalled all its inmates they’d outsourced to private prisons in Arizona.

Across the water from Kitsap, two people have died from injuries sustained in boating accidents since Saturday, the Coast Guard pointed out today in a release.

A woman was killed on Lake Washington Saturday and a man was killed on Lake Tapps Monday. Both were collisions.

The coast guard gives these safety tips:

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Bremerton’s Municipal Court will close during the week of Oct. 6-10 for a roof replacement, according to court administrator Theresa Ewing.

The Pacific Avenue court, which handles all misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor crimes in Bremerton’s city limits, will delay its caseload for a week. The exception, Ewing said Monday, is for arraignments and initial court appearances, which will be held instead at Kitsap County District Court during that week.

The court has been subject to recent scrutiny by Bremerton’s city auditor, Gary W. Nystul. In a recent report, he said the city had not acted on a $13 million bond passed by voters to improve both the police department and the city’s court.

The plan was to house both cops and the court at Sixth Street and Pacific Avenue. But the police eventually got the old credit union building at 1025 Burwell Street, while the court didn’t get much in the way of improvements, Nystul said.

I guess, in that way, a roof’s a start.

I am often amazed at the antiquity with which our criminal justice system functions.

Dictating reports by telephone. Continuously running fax machines. Even dot matrix printers. From my view, a trip to the courthouse can sometimes be a fairly anachronistic experience.

That’s not to say it’s the fault of anyone working in the criminal justice system. And even in the time I’ve been at the Kitsap Sun, vasts improvements have been made. (I haven’t seen the tiny holes that line the sides of paper required for dot matrix printing in some time, for instance.)

My suspicion is that the volumes of data — year after year of chunky case files and criminal histories — has been hard, to compile digitally. Couple that with the official, constitutionally sacred nature of this data — each page must be scanned — and you’ve got a remarkably cumbersome process. But the Kitsap County Clerk’s Office, the storer of all superior court cases, seems to be accomplishing this monumental task, slowly but surely.

It’s ironic that in a system where information can be a law enforcer’s most important tool, that criminal justice often lags in said technologies. It’s only been about a decade, from what I’ve heard, that all law enforcement in Kitsap County has joined a shared information network called “I/Leads.” Most every cop in Kitsap County has finally gotten an MCT, or mobile computer terminal, which allows them to access information such as car registrations.

One area of old-fashioned police work I still can’t grasp is the idea of dictating a report over the phone to be typed later. Seems to me that everyone would save a lot of time by typing on the first go around, which more and more of our cops around here do. I can’t imagine the idea, for instance, of writing a story for the pages of the Kitsap Sun but first talking it into a phone to be transcribed.

Some of the work in criminal justice seems to require certain antiquity. When an officer signs a statement of probable cause for someone’s arrest, for instance, they need a signature on a tangible page. That means lots of faxing each day between law enforcement and the prosecutor’s office. Perhaps a “digital” signature will one day be accepted, a move that would save reams of paper.

Here’s a battle of two evils only the good people at the Great Britain-based Transport Research Laboratory could come up with: texting while driving versus driving under the influence. Which is worse?

Turns out, researchers found texting is more dangerous than driving drunk. (That’s not to say either is good, we should keep in mind.)

I guess it’s really not rocket science. A person texting may be sober, but they’re not even looking at the road. In fact, they’re not even thinking about the road.

I suppose the researcher’s thinking is a drunkard is at least attempting to steer the car in the right direction (not that it always works out).

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ll sleep better at night knowing this study’s in the books.

As often happens in this business, other newspapers are examining the same trends we are. And as big as our country is, I’m often reminded that our little Kitsap corner of this universe is more like, say, Kenosha County, Wisconsin than we realize.

In this case, it’s Florida that shares something in common with Washington, its farthest away lower-48 counterpart. The St. Petersburg Times reported Monday that concealed pistol licenses in the last three years are up 50 percent.

You’ll recall that Washington’s CPL permit applications are up 43 percent. It looks from the Florida story as if the reason for the respective spikes are similar, with one notable exception: we don’t have the influx of hurricanes that might lead one to think about the idea of lawlessness following such a disaster.

There’s one thing the Times did in their story that I wished I’d done in mine: the probability that a Washingtonian has a CPL. The Florida, they reported the number to be one in 35.

Doing the math — 258,000 CPL holders in Washington, population 6.3 million — I find that in our state, the number is about one in 25.