Seattle's Night-Owl Law Couldn't Make a Man Explain Himself
A police-court ruling struck down the city's after-hours suspicion ordinance — after a red-haired stranger from New Westminster wandered into a Bell apartment house looking for a fire.
Judge Glasgow decided yesterday afternoon that the ordinance making it a crime for a person to refuse to give a satisfactory explanation of the reason why he is abroad after 11 o'clock at night is unjust and void. What one officer might consider a satisfactory explanation another would not. The officer had the power, with reason, to arrest on suspicion, but not because he did not think a man gave a satisfactory explanation of his business.
The case came up through the arrest of E. M. Wilson, a red-headed, freckle-faced man who came to the city recently from an insane asylum at New Westminster, B.C. He got into the Bell apartment house at 2 o'clock in the morning the day before yesterday, and asked Miss Florence Russell, whom he had roused, to make a fire in F. M. Allen's kitchen. Neither Mr. Allen nor Miss Russell, who is a very pretty girl with a charming complexion, believed Wilson was a burglar when he was discovered, but they might have thought so. After Mr. Allen persuaded Wilson that he was in the wrong place, he went down one floor below and went to bed in a vacant room, where Officer Grant found him. Wilson's explanation of his conduct was that he felt groggy.
“What one officer might consider a satisfactory explanation another would not.”
In 1895 Seattle could arrest someone for failing to explain why they were out after 11 p.m.; Judge Glasgow called that standardless and void. The case is a reminder that vagrancy and 'suspicious person' laws have long given police wide discretion over who belongs on the street at night — a debate that still shapes urban policing.
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