May 2021

Big Seattle City Council meeting on Tuesday June 1!

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Seattle News

We have a big Seattle City Council meeting coming up on Tuesday, June 1. Both the bill moving forward participatory budgeting and the bill that will lift some provisos on SPD’s budget this year, giving over $10m of additional spending power to SPD and an additional $2m to participatory budgeting, are on the agenda. Now is a good time to contact your council members about these bills and consider making public comment at the June 1 meeting; comment starts at 2pm, with sign-ups at noon. #DefendtheDefund is arranging a campaign to read first person accounts of SPD violence that are currently part of the ACLU lawsuit against SPD into the record during public comment at this meeting on Tuesday; you can sign up to be a part of that effort here.
SPD Chief Diaz followed through on the pink umbrella case by demoting Assistant Chief Hirjak to Captain. He also clarified that there was no additional evidence in the case, but, in his words, that “my assessment included more broadly concerns raised by OPA in management action recommendations stemming from related cases, on-going analyses generated through the Office of Inspector General’s Sentinel Event Review, and my consideration of the totality of the events beginning on May 29th, 2020, when the Chinatown/International District was the target of destructive protests, and continuing over the days thereafter.” 
DivestSPD, a Twitter watchdog account, made a public disclosure request for the Incident Action Plan for June 8, the day the SPD abandoned the East Precinct. This plan seems to contradict former Chief Best’s recent interviews about how events unfolded on the day in question. You can see the plan yourself here.
Students at UW and Seattle University have been organizing to change how policing works on their campuses. So far, UW has cut its police department staff by 20%, launched a new online reporting system, and begun a new campus safety responder team. Students are now pressing for more significant changes.
Crosscut has an excellent article reviewing where we are with Seattle’s consent decree and the police reform process, saying:
At a time of tremendous grassroots organizing for change, the consent decree is heavy from the top down. The decree, a preferred tool of former President Barack Obama and possibly President Joe Biden, has a singular goal: to ensure that local policing is constitutional. But it doesn’t go deep enough to meet the demands of people advocating systemic change.

Election News

If you’re curious what an abolitionist City Attorney would look like, you might want to take a look at The Stranger‘s recent interview with candidate Nicole Thomas-Kennedy.
The Seattle mayor’s race is heating up, with the Daily Kos speculating whether Andrew Grant Houston, as the furthest left candidate, might be well positioned to get The Stranger’s endorsement and make it to the final two candidates. Meanwhile, Jessyn Farrell’s campaign has released news of a poll showing Bruce Harrell as the frontrunner of the race, while Lorena González’s campaign says their polling shows a frontrunner tie between Harrell and González. Each of these polls has a margin of error of more than 4 percent.
And Compassion Seattle, the homelessness initiative that many opponents are saying would codify sweeps, has been claiming endorsements from organizations that have not in fact endorsed it. The campaign listed FIVE organizations on its website as endorsers who have since confirmed they haven’t endorsed it. Oops!

Elsewhere in Washington State

 

Some big news this week was the rare charging of three Tacoma police officers in the killing of Manuel Ellis.
The South Seattle Emerald is continuing their series on OLEO, detailing some of the ways the King County Sheriff’s Office obstructed the accountability agency and the allegations of discriminatory and bigoted comments against former Director Jacobs.

National News

In discouraging news, nearly seven out of 10 Black Americans say police treatment has gotten worse in the past year. Just four out of 10 Black Americans say they have favorable views of police and law enforcement, while 75% of white respondents say they have favorable views.
Meanwhile, The Root reported that according to a review of pledges of corporations to donate money to social justice organizations, less than ONE PERCENT of that money was actually donated. Support of Black Lives Matter has also plunged since last summer, with Republicans and white people actually being LESS supportive now than they were before George Floyd was murdered. A lot of the talk about fighting against racial inequity last year was unfortunately just that–a lot of talk with little substance. All the more reason for us to step up!
And Simon Balto writes in the Guardian:
It strikes me that we are now living in an era defined not so much by “racial reckoning” but more so by the desperate, gasping grasps at reclaiming white innocence from the perils of such a reckoning. Do not teach us or our children honestly about our past or our present, the opponents of racial justice demand. Do not question our allegiance to an openly white supremacist political leader. Do not impugn the institutions that uphold white supremacy and do violence to those not like us. But most of all, they ask that we absolve them of their sins for having made all those demands. Affirm our innocence, they ask. We are not racist, men like Arnold Schlei demand we understand in spite of the evidence.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for staying engaged and committed to making a difference. Thanks so much for reading, and have a great weekend.

Participatory Budgeting Could be a Seed that Brings Lasting Change

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The Latest on Participatory Budgeting

Amy Sundberg
The Seattle Community Economic Development committee meeting has begun, and they are currently hearing comments.
The Community Economic Development committee finally heard an agenda item about participatory budgeting this week. Because the draft legislation hasn’t yet finished going through legal, CM Morales is hoping to vote on it at a special committee meeting on June 3, to be followed by a vote of the full Council. The legislation would release about $1m to the Department of Civil Rights to hire three staff members and start the process, including by issuing an RFP to hire a third-party administrator for the program, as well as releasing further funds (although not all of them) for the process.
Sean Goode from Choose 180 was present at the meeting and spoke eloquently in support of participatory budgeting. He sees the program as an opportunity to construct something new for the community that seeds lasting change and also spoke in favor of equity over expediency. His entire speech (about ten minutes) is worth listening to and can be found here starting at the 1:40:00.
The timeline on participatory budgeting has been moved back, with CM Morales expecting the Office of Civil Rights to hire a third-party organization by the end of the year and hopefully voting to begin around next summer.

Police Contract Bargaining and Accountability

 

Carolyn Bick has released the second part of her investigative series on OLEO and the experiences of its former Director Jacobs, the middle section of which will be of particular interest to those of you following the obstructions inherent with including accountability provisions as working conditions at the police contract bargaining table. Similar to what has happened in Seattle with the OPA, OLEO was granted oversight authority that it then had to bargain for, essentially maintaining the appearance of accountability without the power to provide actual accountability. I am going to quote extensively from the relevant section:

Much of the Guild’s alleged initial treatment of Jacobs appears to have stemmed, at least in part, from Jacobs attempting to bargain with the KCPOG for the oversight rights voters had already afforded OLEO in 2015 via ballot measure. Jacobs said that she had to work with Bob Railton, KCOLR’s deputy director and labor negotiator, who Jacobs said constantly made her feel as though she was a troublemaker and a nuisance and who routinely talked down to her in a sexist and demeaning manner.
This collective bargaining agreement (CBA) was not finalized and signed until April 2020. Its language has made it retroactive from Jan. 1, 2017, but it will expire in December of this year. It was necessary for OLEO to bargain for the rights voters had already afforded the oversight entity, because state law requires bargaining for anything considered “mandatory,” including wages, hours, and working conditions. OLEO’s oversight duties fall into this category.
“The Office of Labor Relations bargainer’s main concern was getting a bargain and not going to arbitration. That did not align with OLEO’s interest of having the voters’ will brought to fruition with the implementation of independent investigations conducted by OLEO,” Jacobs wrote in her email. “There was constant pressure on me to compromise, and some of it was manipulative and, to my mind, unethical.”
Topaz said that Jacobs’ recollection of the dynamic at the bargaining table tracks with what he remembers. Topaz worked as a labor negotiator with the KCOLR from 2014–2020 and was briefly assigned to help negotiate the CBA. Topaz said that from his point of view, for the period of time he worked to help bargain the contract, OLEO was little more than “a political thing that the [King] County Council did that they never really gave the support and authority needed to be successful.
“They created something, gave it limited resources and limited authority, and then expected it to produce something that I am assuming would have given them cover for people to complain about,” Topaz said.
“I don’t think [the Council] really backed [Jacobs] up very well to get done what she needed to,” Topaz continued. “Honestly, I think they have more or less set up anybody who would be in that role [of OLEO director] for failure.”

Other News of Note

 

The MLK Labor Council held a Seattle mayoral forum last night, ushering us into election debate season, and it seems like there were at least a few illuminating (and entertaining) moments, including a rapid-fire Yes/No round in which Bruce Harrell felt the need to quibble with the definition of “sweeps”.

Joe Mizrahi
Live tweeting here @MLKLabor mayoral forum starting now. It’s also on Facebook live. But that won’t have my color commentary so I recommend you stay here
In the end CP González won the labor group’s endorsement.
Meanwhile, Crosscut reported on the SPD’s court-mandated (because of the consent decree) early intervention system, designed to predict bad behavior among police officers. “Despite near-universal acknowledgment of its failings, the system remains, largely because a federal judge has not given the green light to ditch it.”
A new system is currently under development, one that focuses on recognizing and addressing past trauma in an attempt to prevent future misconduct rooted in that trauma, which sounds interesting. However, because of the consent decree mandate for the prior ineffective system, both systems will have to run concurrently, meaning both will need to be funded and money will be wasted.
Thank you for your continued support, and I hope you enjoy the end of the week!

Chief Diaz’s reversal of the Pink Umbrella case decision continues to cause concern

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Seattle: Participatory Budgeting News

 

CM Morales has said the partipatory budgeting program is now clearly delayed until next year. An updated agenda for the Community Economic Development meeting taking place tomorrow at 2pm was released this morning, re-introducing a participatory budgeting discussion as an agenda item, where we will hear from a NYC Councilmember as well as Sean Goode from Choose 180. You can read the related draft legislation lifting the PBP proviso here, which I believe is still being reviewed by the law department.
At the Council Briefing this morning, CM Morales said the plan is to give around $1m to the Office of Civil Rights to hire three people to issue an RFP to an outside administrator for the PBP process, as well as to provide various support functions. Kevin Schofield said on the Seattle News & Brews episode released today that the OCR is quite a small department budget-wise so this is huge for them, and CM Morales hasn’t been talking to the Office of Civil Rights to see if they want to do this work.
Nevertheless, CM Morales is pushing forward and said she hopes this proviso lift can be voted on during a special meeting of her committee on June 3, leading to a Full Council vote. Both tomorrow’s meeting at 2pm and the June 3rd meeting would be good times to plan to give public comment in support of this participatory budgeting process.
CM Herbold signaled she might be adding an amendment to the legislation to move the 911 call center and PEOs out of the SPD to allow the PEOs more time to resolve differences and figure out which department would be best suited as their new home.

Seattle Scandals

 

Controversy surrounds Chief Diaz’s recent decision to overturn the OPA finding regarding the pink umbrella case. At this morning’s Council Briefing, CM Herbold, the Chair of the Public Safety committee, spoke about her correspondence with the Chief over this matter, including the bombshell that there is new evidence that has surfaced that wasn’t in the OPA investigation. CM Herbold says she is holding her judgment until she finds out more about what happened up the chain of command, but CM Lewis asked some pointed questions about whether this new information had been turned over to the OPA and whether the Chief is taking it upon himself to continue this investigation or whether the OPA will be doing so, as well as concerns that norms aren’t being followed. You can find all the related emails of this exchange over at SCC Insight along with a summary of the issues involved.

The most caustic article yet has been published on the scandal involving the missing text messages of Mayor Durkan, former Chief Best, and Chief Scoggins, saying:
…the context suggests a coverup. These suspicions are bolstered by the fact that five members of senior command at the Seattle Police Department also deleted their text messages. That means the question of who ordered the abandonment of East Precinct hasn’t been definitively answered, with both Durkan and former Police Chief Carmen Best denying they gave the order. It’s possible a subordinate made the call independently as they claim, but without the text messages to confirm this story, it’s a very convenient explanation.

Meanwhile, in King County…

 

The South Seattle Emerald has started an excellent series of investigative journalism by Carolyn Bick on the pushback and internal pressure faced by former OLEO Director Jacobs, OLEO being the Office of Law Enforcement Oversight for King County. She appears to have faced a years-long campaign against her by the King County Sheriff’s Office and the King County Police Officer’s Guild. Here are a few key quotes:

They said that this culture of law enforcement pushback against civilian oversight and closing ranks had always been present but has grown much more pronounced under Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht. These same sources also said that the KCPOG had been particularly hostile towards Jacobs over a similar period of time.
The pressure and roadblocks Jacobs faced during her tenure aren’t unique to Jacobs and the KCSO, according to civilian law enforcement oversight experts who spoke with the Emerald. Even former Sheriff Urquhart, who sat down with the Emerald for an interview on May 10, 2021, agreed that Jacobs faced an internal campaign to oust her and said that “there’s something about a reformer … they just don’t last long here [in King County].
and
In other words, the new contract appears to prevent investigators from consulting or commissioning reports from any expert whose findings KCSO determines are critical of findings by an expert KCSO consulted in its original administrative investigation of a matter, such as a police shooting. The contract seems to block OLEO from including rebuttal experts in their investigative reports or testimony.
The entire article is worth a read and puts into clear relief why an elected sheriff can sometimes be unfortunate , leading to internal politicking and backstabbing and getting in the way of much-needed reform. In an interview with Publicola, King County Executive Dow Constantine says, “I think that the ability of the executive and the council to hire and fire the sheriff dramatically increases accountability. Having the sheriff be elected creates deep rifts within the sheriff’s office, it creates these political camps that continue to war long after the election is over. And that is profoundly unhealthy. So I think this is a real step forward.”
As a reminder, King County’s Sheriff is supposed to change over to a new appointed Sheriff (as opposed to an elected one) at the beginning of next year because of a measure that passed in last November’s general election.

Seattle City Council Unlikely to Release SPD Provisos Just Yet

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Seattle Public Safety and HSD Meeting

 

Let’s start with Tuesday’s Seattle Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting, shall we? The meeting had two agenda items. The first, regarding moving the 911 call center and parking enforcement officers out of SPD and into the new Community Safety and Communications Center, had disagreement because the management of the PEOs believe they should instead be moved to SDOT, while the rank and file parking enforcement officers prefer a move to the new Center. The CMs passed the bill with a divided report, meaning its discussion and vote in full Council is delayed until May 24, in the hopes the two sides of the issue might reach some consensus by then.

The second agenda item was the substituted bill that originally was regarding a $5.4m cut to the SPD for overspending in 2020. It’s worth noting current estimates say there will be $13m of SPD salary savings due to attrition this year, and if attrition rates remain the same as they have been the first four months of the year, that figure could increase. However, after the Federal Monitor sent a letter to Council opposed to any cuts whatsoever, CM Herbold introduced an amendment she hoped would appease him and the Court, releasing a different SPD proviso of $2.5m regarding out-of-order layoffs to lay off SPD officers on the Brady list. The Council has determined that because of existing state law and current SPD hiring policies (they hire laid-off officers first and are currently hiring), out-of-order layoffs are not feasible at this time. This amendment passed with a 3-2 vote (Herbold, Lewis, and González yes, Morales and Sawant no) and was added to the bill.

The amended bill was brought to a vote, and CMs Morales, Sawant, and González all opposed it, although for slightly different reasons. The bill is moving to full Council on May 24 with a recommendation not to pass. If the bill doesn’t pass, the status quo would be maintained regarding the budget passed last November, and these provisos could be revisited later in the year.
For those keeping track, that means the full Council meeting on May 24 will include a vote on moving the 911 call center and PEOs to the Community Safety and Communications Center; a vote on whether to lift these $5.4m and $2.5m SPD provisos; and potentially the vote on releasing the participatory budgeting funds. It’s definitely a date to mark on your calendars!

Election News

 

Hacks & Wonks continues their electoral interview series with an interview with candidate for Seattle City Council, Position 9, Sara Nelson. In the interview, Nelson says she opposes the Jumpstart tax and wants to focus on jobs and helping struggling small businesses, but then was unaware that the Jumpstart recovery package includes $18m in small business recovery investments. When discussing public safety, she says, “Yeah. I think that we need to bring back the Crisis Intervention Team. Because – that – that, you know – I think his name was Derek – that was a situation that was tragic.” I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions here.
We also have yet another Seattle mayoral candidate, Art Langlie, whose main qualification for the job appears to be that his grandfather was once the governor of Washington. As the Seattle Times reports, “State Public Disclosure Commission filings show he has donated to incumbent Mayor Jenny Durkan and King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, as well as the late Republican state Sen. Andy Hill of Redmond, and GOP candidate Jinyoung Englund, who lost a 2017 race for Hill’s seat.”
Finally, Publicola reported SPOG asked its members to participate in signature-gathering events for the Recall Sawant campaign last weekend. If we weren’t clear about whose interests are served by this campaign, this news might elucidate the issue.

Other News of Note

 

Campaign Zero and Tableau have released police department scorecards for municipal and county law enforcement offices across the country, based on the following data: “We submitted public records requests to local police departments and combined the data obtained from these departments with federal databases tracking crime, arrests, financial and personnel records from thousands of municipal and county governments.”
Of ranked Washington state counties, King County has the worst ranking at 36%. Seattle has the worst score of all ranked Washington state cities at 33%. A few key findings for Seattle: SPD has more police funding per capita than 89% of departments. 50% of all arrests made from 2013-19 were for low-level, non-violent offenses. A Black person was 5.7x as likely and a Latinx person was 2.2x as likely to be killed by police than a White person in Seattle from 2013-20. You can dig through the site to find further illuminating statistics.
Interested in some of the problems that have been plaguing implementation of Seattle’s participatory budgeting process? KUOW did an in-depth piece highlighting some of the issues:
The city employee said the issues currently surrounding participatory budgeting implementation aren’t unique.
“This is fundamentally a sort of a pattern that the city has engaged in when it comes to communities of color: not having viable conversations and putting the community in the space of being stuck between the mayor’s office and the council whenever there’s a conflict. And holding up resources that ought to be moving forward.”
Meanwhile, SPD Chief Diaz overturned the OPA’s decision about the pink umbrella protest clash of last summer, deciding not to discipline the officer in question. Unfortunately this decision is likely to continue to erode community trust in the police department and the accountability system that is currently in place.
The saga of Mayor Durkan’s missing text messages continues, as it has been revealed one of her phones was set to delete text messages after 30 days, the quickest delete setting possible.

Recent Headlines

 

King County Council delays vote on facial recognition ban | The Seattle Times

King County Council delays vote on facial recognition ban | The Seattle Times
The Metropolitan King County Council delayed a vote on a groundbreaking facial recognition ban, citing a need to do additional outreach and research on the policy’s effects.
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Seattle 911 response times climbed in summer 2020. Now, police and activists debate what comes next. | The Seattle Times

Seattle 911 response times climbed in summer 2020. Now, police and activists debate what comes next. | The Seattle Times
Seattle police response times spiked amid the pandemic and last summer’s demonstrations for racial justice. Now, the question is how the 2020 uptick in response times should be interpreted, as…
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Is Participatory Budgeting in Seattle Finally Moving Forward?

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Missing Texts of Mayor, Police Chief, and Fire Chief

The big scandal of the weekend was the Seattle Times breaking story about key texts from Seattle city officials in a period that includes June 2020 being unavailable for public disclosure. This news follows Thursday’s news of a whistleblower investigation of improper handling of public records in the mayor’s office. As Daniel Beekman and Lewis Kamb write:

Perez similarly didn’t know about the whistleblower investigation until Thursday, he said. He said he now expects to raise the issue in the lawsuit over police violence.

“Evidence must be preserved,” he said. “Obviously, the city didn’t preserve this evidence and that’s a big deal. And then, the city has covered up the fact that it didn’t preserve the evidence, and that’s an even bigger deal.

Perez is representing the Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County organization in their lawsuit against SPD.

In response to this scandal, at this morning’s Council Briefing Council President González said she’d been contacted by City Attorney Holmes and they’d agreed to launch a new effort to increase public trust by potentially launching a new public disclosure entity for the Mayor’s office.

Participatory Budgeting in Seattle

Also at this morning’s meeting, CM Morales announced she is going to introduce legislation to release the proviso on the $30m for participatory budgeting at her next Community Economic Development committee meeting on May 18 at 2pm. This legislation will instruct the Office of Civil Rights to write an RFP to look for an organization (either local or national) to manage the participatory budgeting process. Her hope is this legislation will be voted on by full Council at their May 24 meeting.
This is good news for those frustrated by the stall in this process moving forward, and CM Morales’s rejection of the process being run by the Department of Neighborhoods means more adherence to the Black Brilliance Project’s recommendations. David Kroman wrote an excellent piece highlighting the tensions that have arisen between the Mayor’s office and the City Council around implementing this ambitious project.
 

Other Seattle News

Tomorrow morning at the Public Safety and Human Resources committee meeting, CM Herbold and her colleagues will once more discuss the SPD budget legislation pertaining to that pesky $5.4m overspend of last year. CM Herbold says the Police Monitor is concerned about even the $2m cut (to go to PBP) introduced in a compromise amendment last time the committee discussed this. She sounded frustrated with the Police Monitor’s response, saying she doesn’t understand why he thinks more money will solve the SPD’s staffing problems when their 2021 staffing plan is already fully funded. Even so, she is suggesting compromising still further by releasing another SPD proviso related to out-of-order layoffs.
Out-of-order layoffs were a frequent talking point last year, with the Council investigating whether they could lay off officers on the Brady list first, but CM Herbold says the legal department has determined this is unlikely and maybe even impossible, due to both state law and the fact SPD is currently hiring so anybody laid off would be first in line to get rehired.
The committee will also be discussing the transfer of the 911 call response department and parking enforcement officers from SPD to the new Community Safety and Communications Center.
Meanwhile, in election news, Deputy Mayor Casey Sixkiller has joined the Seattle mayoral race. The filing deadline to run for office this year is next Friday, May 21.
 

Other News of Note

King County Police Officers Guild calls for Sheriff Johanknect to resign
King County Police Officers Guild calls for Sheriff Johanknect to resign
The King County Police Officers Guild is calling on Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht to resign after a survey of union members.
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A year later, more questions than answers over Seattle council's stance on defunding SPD
A year later, more questions than answers over Seattle council’s stance on defunding SPD
After reaching out to all nine Seattle councilmembers for clarity on their positions on defunding SPD, we were left with more questions than answers.
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Police, Protests & Public Safety
Police, Protests & Public Safety
David Kroman’s interview last week with former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best.
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Police Reform Bills Passed by the WA Legislature this Session

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I am back from vacation and wow, do we have a lot to catch up on.

First, I’d like to share an insight from The Stranger reporter Charles Mudede:
There are two ways of dealing with policing at this point in American history. One way is to deeply defund the institution (which is an internal solution), and the other is decriminalization (which is an external solution). The former, to me at least, seems to be, politically speaking, a long shot. However, the latter, which basically gives the police less to do in our world, has serious political potential, as exemplified by the legalization of pot.
And now onto the news!

 

Washington State Legislature News

Where did the end of this year’s session leave us?
To address the Blake decision, the legislature passed bill ESB 5476 re-criminalizing low-level drug possession by making it a misdemeanor and requiring local jurisdictions to provide treatment options for drug users; people who violate the new law are to be directed to “assessment, treatment, or other services” for the first two violations; after the second violation, a violator can be referred for prosecution and, potentially, a fine or jail. The bill has a two-year expiration date, which is potentially good news for those dissatisfied with the re-criminalization of simple drug possession.
Here is a list of police reform bills the legislature passed:
  • HB 1054 regulating police tactics
  • HB 1267 establishing a new Office of Independent Investigations that will investigate all police uses of deadly force in WA
  • HB 1310 setting new standards for police use of force
  • SB 5051 the decertification bill
  • SB 5055 the arbitration bill that collects arbitration data and reforms the process
  • SB 5066 the duty to intervene
  • SB 5259 collection of data on police uses of deadly force
Relatedly, a bill banning open carry of firearms at public demonstrations and at the state Capitol passed, as did a bill requiring judges to re-sentence anyone facing life in prison under Washington’s three-strikes law if one of their “strikes” was a second-degree robbery charge.
Bills that didn’t pass included one reforming collective bargaining for law enforcement to not cover accountability; removing qualified immunity to make it easier for police officers to be sued for misconduct; and the recently-introduced bill limiting police traffic stops.

Seattle News

This morning’s Seattle Council Briefing was nice and short.

Amy Sundberg on Twitter: “I am back from vacation and it’s time for this morning’s Seattle Council Briefing!”
“I am back from vacation and it’s time for this morning’s Seattle Council Briefing!”
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CM Morales announced she was unable to reschedule the Community Economic Development committee meeting, which she had postponed due to the verdict coming in on the Chauvin trial, and that it will therefore meet at its next scheduled time on May 18. As the participatory budgeting process was slated to be discussed at this meeting, this means a further delay in its discussion and eventual implementation. This inability to reschedule may reflect a lack of urgency and prioritization for this project.

 

CM Juarez reported on the status of the Equitable Communities Initiative recommendations for the expenditure of their $30m. They will be putting together a spending plan with the hope of the proviso on those funds being lifted by the Council by July.

 
At last week’s Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting, the committee heard a presentation on “Reimagining Public Safety,” which covered updates on unit transfers and the Seattle University Public Safety Survey among other topics. They also heard a report on Q1 SPD Budget and Staffing, which showed Q1 overtime was down compared to 2019 and 2020 and there were 58 separations of sworn officers during the quarter versus 30 hires during the same period. Salary savings from attrition may reach as high as $13m in 2021. You can also take a look at a slew of SPD exit interviews since last summer.

Election News

 

Seattle’s candidates for the 2021 elections have filed their financial disclosures, leading to several pieces including this one comparing the finances of several mayoral candidates. In the Sawant recall campaign, the judge has set the signature collection deadline for October 19; the recall campaign must collect a little over 10,000 signatures from District 3 residents by this date.
State Senator Joe Nguyen has announced he is running for King County executive, challenging Dow Constantine, who is running for his fourth term in the position. You can read more about it here and here.

Other News of Note

 

Compassion Seattle has a plan for a tent-free city. Does it hold up? | Crosscut

Compassion Seattle has a plan for a tent-free city. Does it hold up? | Crosscut
A new campaign to address the city’s homelessness crisis says existing funds are all we need. That’s doubtful.
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