October 2024

More ghost cops found in Seattle’s budget as Council wonders how their “new crimes” will impact expenses

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Seattle News:

On Monday, the budget committee heard issue identification presentations from their Central Staff on SPD (memo), the CARE department (memo), SFD, and LAW (memo), which in addition to the City Attorney’s Office also included issues related to the Seattle Municipal Court (SMC). 

SPD:

It turns out there are more ghost cop positions than SPD’s Executive Director of Budget and Finance Angela Socci admitted to in SPD’s budget presentation a few weeks ago. Who would have thought! A reminder that SPD Captain James Britt also gave extremely misleading statements a few months ago about SPD’s current real time crime center, saying it had never been operational when there is proof it was being used back in 2020. 

Central Staff identified 35 additional ghost cop positions in the proposed budget, which account for an additional $6.5 million per year. In the proposal, SPD has 1076 FTE funded for sworn officers, but based on their hiring and separation estimates won’t be able to get past 1041 FTE. 

Per Greg Doss from Central Staff, 154 FTE from SPD were immediately not funded, 23 FTE were unfunded to put $4.3 million back into the General Fund, and 23 FTE were unfunded to provide $4.3 million for more SPD overtime. This is how the 1076 number was reached.

SPD is also receiving an additional $10 million in overtime for “emphasis patrols” in 2025, but that amount is not yet included in the 2026 budget. Doss suggested Council might want to spend the newly found $6.5 million on providing $10 million in additional overtime in 2026. 

No mention was made of the $1.5 million for hiring bonuses that Socci had indicated in the previous SPD presentation was also being funded by salary savings. 

Council President Sara Nelson said the council has “created a few new crimes” and wondered why overtime wasn’t projected to go up even further as a result. 

The parking enforcement officers (PEO) also have 19-20 vacant positions (out of a total 104). One suggestion was to use some (or all?) of this salary savings to fund two new training positions to help streamline the PEO hiring and training process. 

Council also discussed SPD’s 30×30 initiative, which has a goal to hire more women officers at SPD. There will be a more detailed presentation on this initiative at the end of the year after budget season is over. Possible measures being discussed are more flexible work schedules and flexible round-the-clock child care. 

Councilmember Robert Kettle took the opportunity to once again blame the previous council for current staffing at SPD.

CARE:

Central Staff explained that the CARE dual dispatch has been difficult to implement because the CARE team is designed to respond to Priority 3 and 4 calls, but they have been located in places with a large call load of Priority 1 and 2 calls. This means officers aren’t available to be on the scene for the lower level calls, preventing CARE from doing anything but sitting around and waiting for them, often for so long that they are no longer needed once SPD arrives. 

Thus far CARE has only been dispatched less than twice per month. They are more often requested as a secondary response, often to provide transport. 

However, starting on October 8, CARE made operational changes to proactively drive around and respond to “quasi-medical calls,” increasing their activity. However, Health One will soon begin responding to behavioral health calls so there is some confusion as to the distinction between Health One and the CARE team.

The CARE team has been limited to the dual dispatch model due to the SPOG contract. 

Another policy consideration was related to data collection by CARE, which isn’t as robust as hoped, at least partly because the team is being dispatched so infrequently. The council is considering a state of legislative intent (SLI) to have CARE develop more robust data collection.

A new Seattle Restoration Director position is also being added to CARE. This person, who has already been hired, is coordinating the work done by the Downtown Activation Team (DAT) and might have a much expanded role in future to help re-envision 911 response in the city with the potential for many different services/people to be dispatchable. 

Kettle said the City needs to take SPD from being so central to its public safety response. He mentioned the roles that public health and public services have to play in public safety overall,

LAW and SMC:

LAW is worried because they will potentially be losing two civil attorney positions and one criminal attorney position in 2025. In addition to keeping that criminal attorney, they’d like to hire an additional “floating prosecutor.” 

Central Staff also identified that additional funding for implementation of new policies enacted in 2024 such as SOAP, SODA, the new street racing ordinance, the re-criminalization of prostitution loitering, and the new SCORE jail contract, has not been included in Harrell’s proposed budget. 

SMC has said they will probably need an additional $196,000 in 2025 and $520,000 in 2026 to transport defendants to and from the SCORE jail. Otherwise they would need to spend even more money for a new judicial department that could manage all the virtual hearings for those housed at SCORE. 

Kettle said he is worried about the health of the “criminal justice system.”

Other Seattle News:

The city council also received the updated revenue forecast for 2025, which was mixed. JumpStart and REET revenue looks like it will be slightly up, but General Fund revenues will be down by around $20 million (driven by lower sales and B&O taxes), a further gap for the city council to fill. 

This week the new police officer training academy in Arlington celebrated a soft opening. The facility is expected to be open fully by 2025 and could speed up training times for police officers.

The results of the gender-based violence prevention services investment passed in the 2024 budget have finally been announced. 

The Stranger drills down deeper on the new less lethal weapons legislation being proposed by Harrell, including a lift on the blast ball ban. You can read some of the justification being presented for this proposal in my consent decree article from last week. 

A Washington state defense attorney, John Sheeran, has been indicted for allegedly smuggling drugs into the King County Jail. Drugs he is accused of smuggling include methamphetamine, ketamine, buprenorphine, and THC. He was the defense attorney who initially represented Ed Troyer, the Sheriff of Pierce County, in the suit regarding the Black newspaper carrier. Troyer is not running for reelection this year.  

The Seattle Student Union is asking for more money in the Seattle budget for student mental health services and also wants a student advisory council to be established to have a larger voice in how any money is spent. 

Other Stories:

Austin Field writes about the new public defender caseload standards that are currently being considered by the state Supreme Court. He argues that public defenders are the main line of defense against law enforcement vigilantism. He writes: “To be clear, reducing public defender workloads isn’t about Republicans versus Democrats or even prosecutors versus defenders—some prosecutors acknowledge the need for better public defense. This caseload fight is about democracy versus authoritarianism.”

You can provide public comment to the Court about this matter here. 

Meanwhile, a Washington state watchdog office recently published a report finding that prisoners in solitary confinement in Washington state aren’t receiving basic quality-of-life care and are subject to “dehumanizing and traumatizing” restraint practices. 

Unsurprisingly the Washington Department of Corrections argues that they need more money to make progress on their goals related to solitary confinement. 

The Washington State Standard reports:

 “But Seevers, with Disability Rights Washington, said that there are several easy policy changes that the agency can make to reduce solitary confinement without additional funding, such as raising the standard of proof for infractions, as people are often put in solitary confinement while awaiting a decision on disciplinary action. “DOC has demonstrated that they’re not going to make changes unless there’s a legislative mandate for them to do so,” Seevers said.” 

Recent Headlines:

More ghost cops found in Seattle’s budget as Council wonders how their “new crimes” will impact expenses Read More »

Seattle City Council considers undoing more of the work of their predecessors

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This time their focus is on the JumpStart spending plan, participatory budgeting, and less lethal weapon legislation.

Seattle News:

First off, this week Judge James Robart held his annual hearing to determine the status of Seattle’s consent decree. I wrote about it in detail here. Of note, the Mayor’s Office just transmitted new legislation to the City Council that would replace the less lethal weapons ordinances passed in 2020 and 2021 in response to SPD’s violence during the George Floyd protests. 

This new legislation would remove the personal right of action from people harmed from less lethal weapons, allow mutual aid partners (law enforcement agencies other than SPD who come into Seattle to help out) to use less lethal weapons, and leave it up to the discretion of SPD policy as to which particular less lethal weapons they can use. It complies with the state law about the proper use of tear gas and adds a few additional restrictions. 

During the consent decree hearing, Judge Robart praised the OIG, their work, and their independence. But a recent article in The Urbanist questioned that very independence, as an OIG-planned audit on policies of use of SPD mutual aid was ultimately downgraded to a short review.

This week the Seattle City Council has started their budget issue identification meetings. You can look at presentations about JumpStart, HSD (memo), the Unified Care Team, and Participatory Budgeting (memo), among others. Presentations on SPD, the CARE team, Seattle Fire Department (SFD), and the City Attorney’s Office (LAW) will be given on Monday.

I’ll be writing more about the newly proposed JumpStart legislation soon, but in a nutshell, the new legislation would add the General Fund as an approved use of JumpStart funds (along with the original purposes of affordable housing, Green New Deal, equitable development, and small business, and newly added student mental health). Further, the legislation would do away with any percentage mandates for each category. In practice, what this means is that in future, the Mayor and/or Council could use 100% of JumpStart dollars for General Fund purposes.

For participatory budgeting, the public voted on six different projects that are to receive $27.3 million worth of funding. During this budgeting season, the Council needs to pass legislation to implement the program and allow the funds to be appropriated to the relevant departments. Otherwise, the projects won’t go forward as planned.  

You can read my live tweets of this meeting here. Councilmembers expressed concerns that the chosen projects do not obviously benefit Black communities as much as they think they should. They expressed particular confusion over the presence of the CARE alternative response team expansion as one of the projects, apparently forgetting that one of the reasons advocates originally wanted alternative 911 response was to limit the interactions of BIPOC community members with the police, especially given SPD’s history of biased policing. 

On the other hand, some councilmembers expressed the need to fulfill commitments made to community since 2020. To go back now on projects that the community voted on in a City-approved process would be quite a bold decision that would likely lead to the erosion of community trust. 

However, councilmembers did ask about the possibility of only funding some of the projects voted for by community. Budget Chair Strauss suggested the possibility of adding funds to include more dollars for projects that would benefit communities of color. 

During the HSD presentation, councilmembers had some questions about the $2 million allocated for commercial sexual exploitation interventions. There was a suggestion that the 5 proposed new staff positions within HSD to support survivors and interventions was perhaps too many, although having one position to coordinate the work could be of value. There was interest in instead giving a larger proportion of the money to community-based organizations.

Councilmembers also had a lot of questions about the $4.25 million investment in school-based violence intervention services, the proposal for which originated with the Mayor’s Office’s plans for the $20 million for student mental health passed last year through a tiny increase to the JumpStart tax. A lot of details about these services remain to be decided by HSD, which gave certain councilmembers some pause, even while they all agreed that gun violence in schools is an issue of utmost importance. 

There was also some confusion about the difference between this new program and the Seattle Community Safety Initiative (SCSI) that began in 2020. One of the key differences between the two programs is that the SCSI is community and neighborhood based, while the new program is school-based, with violence intervention specialists and case managers imbedded within 11 chosen target schools. Another key difference is that the focus of the SCSI is more towards response, while the focus of the new school program is more about prevention and interruption, meaning the goal is to stop the violence before it happens whenever possible.

King County News:

King County is also going through their budget cycle. While they usually pass a biennium budget, this time around they are passing a budget for the single year of 2025. 

This week they held their second budget panel on public safety, where the King County Sheriff Office (KCSO) gave a presentation about their budget priorities. KCSO now has 71 vacancies, down from a high of 120 vacancies in the summer of 2022. 

The committee then went through a list of several questions they had from last week’s meeting. You can download the informational packet about various budget questions they were considering here. 

One issue that stood out was that the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD) is planning a gap analysis to better understand the gaps of service faced by juveniles having longer stays in the youth jail. The youth jail was originally designed to be for short term detention only, but the recent trend has been for youth to experience much longer stays at the site. However, this DAJD analysis isn’t due until later next year to be addressed in the 2026-2027 budget, even though these kids have already been suffering and this problem has already been identified for some time. Councilmember Jorge Baròn said he would work with the DAJD to try to move up that timeline because as it stands, any actual action to improve the situation wouldn’t take place until well into 2026. 

Also being considered is the increased funding need of the Department of Public Defense (DPD) given the bar association’s newly adopted standards for public defenders that is reducing the caseloads of attorneys. This drop of allowable caseloads will mean the need for more attorneys to cover the same number of cases. 

The Stranger recently interviewed newly appointed interim director of the DPD, Matt Sanders, who talks about the current public defender crisis in the state of Washington and how you can weigh in as the state Supreme Court considers the matter. 

Recent Headlines:

 

Seattle City Council considers undoing more of the work of their predecessors Read More »

Seattle’s budget looks to be in trouble for years to come

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Seattle Budget News:

First off, we have my analysis of the 2025 proposed Seattle budget over at The Urbanist. I dig into proposed police and other “punitive” spending and compare it to what’s being spent for alternatives, diversion, and upstream solutions. 

PubliCola reports on the Seattle budget outlook for future years, with projected deficits of $78.6 million in 2027 and $151.2 million in 2028. While not as large as the deficit faced this year of around $250 million, these are still large numbers that signal we’re not out of the woods even if we follow Mayor Bruce Harrell’s plan of diverting a large percentage of the Jumpstart payroll tax away from its intended purpose of supporting affordable housing, Green New Deal, and equitable development investments and into the General Fund to pay for things like big raises for SPD officers and the ability to sweep homeless encampments even on the weekends. 

As PubliCola reports: “But Harrell’s 2025-2026 budget also depletes the JumpStart fund balance—essentially, a non-renewable reserve of unspent money—taking $140 million from this pot next year and another $90 million in 2026. By 2026, the total amount of funds left over at the end of the year, after all spending is accounted for, will be reduced from $97 million to $179,000.”

While I know this might sound wonky, what it means in practice is continued budget deficits (and cuts) well into the future unless another source of progressive revenue is identified. 

Other Seattle News:

On Tuesday, the city council voted to pass the crime prevention pilot that includes CCTV and a new real time crime center. It also voted to pass $50,000 hiring bonuses for lateral hires at SPD. 

This week the Seattle Fire Department announced it’s making buprenorphine, a drug that treats opioid withdrawal, available to use by all its emergency crews. According to the press release, “The SFD currently has about 35 paramedics trained to administer the medicine and has begun the process of training the firefighter/EMTs who staff the post-overdose response unit (Health 99) and Health One units.”

PubliCola interviewed interim SPD Chief Sue Rahr last week. While Rahr had previously said she’d only stay in the position for six months (until around the end of the year), she’s saying now that she’s not going to make that promise. Erica Barnett does ask Rahr what went wrong in the backgrounding process of Kevin Dave (the officer who killed Jaahnavi Kandula and had a history of reckless driving and no current WA driver’s license), a question I’ve been asking for some time, but surprising no one, Rahr replies that she doesn’t know. 

I found this exchange to be particularly illuminating:

“ECB: I totally get the problem statement. What you’re describing as the solution, frankly, is kind of Whac-a-Mole.

SR: It is, but doing nothing doesn’t work either. And what we know is that just having social workers go out and talk to people, in and of itself, is not working. If it was working, we wouldn’t have so many people out there. I think you need to have a multi-pronged approach, and if nothing else works, there has to be a backstop.”

One could argue that the reason social workers aren’t effective all on their own is because there aren’t enough services and places to live for them to offer people. But alas, instead of trying that out as a solution, it looks like Seattle will continue robustly funding the backstop that doesn’t get to the root of the problems. 

The Seattle Municipal Court judges elected Honorable Anita Crawford-Williams to serve as Presiding Judge and Honorable Damon Shadid to serve as Assistant Presiding Judge. They will serve a term of two years starting at the beginning of 2025. 

Current Presiding Judge Faye Chess will be stepping down. You might remember that she was elected to that position right after the election of Judge Pooja Vaddadi in late 2022 in what I called at the time “an act of breathtaking pettiness.” In an early vote with no notice, neither Vaddadi nor Judge Damon Shadid were allowed to participate in that vote. 

Articles to make you think:

Last weekend Kevin Schofield wrote about a paper studying bail reform: “The report thoroughly and completely debunks the notion that bail reform causes a rise in crime.”

The Stranger published an article about candidate for the state legislature Andrea Suarez. All politics aside, this article provides one of the best explanations of housing first I’ve read.

Also in The Stranger is a column by Justin Ward calling for a more robust public health response focusing on mental health to increase public safety:

“Instead of mobilizing the vast resources of one of the richest metropolitan areas in human history to solve our housing and mental health crisis, area leaders are doubling down on the failed strategy of criminalization. On top of pointless prosecutions of the mentally ill that waste money and that are frequently dismissed, city officials are escalating sweeps, scaling up surveillance, implementing banishment areas, and raiding housing funds to pay for police raises.

If we want to prevent murders like that of Ruth Dalton, we must get serious about treating mental health problems before they become public safety emergencies.”

And over at South Seattle Emerald, Gennette Cordova wrote about how funding education reduces crime: “Every glaring, shameful example of our city’s leaders overinvesting in police under the guise of increasing public safety, while underfunding the community programs that are proven to reduce crime, must be highlighted again and again until people come to understand that so many of the shortcomings we experience in our communities are a result of our patterns of intentional systematic failures.”

Recent Headlines:

Seattle’s budget looks to be in trouble for years to come Read More »

The budget fight over affordable housing continues as questions surface about 2026

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Seattle Budget News:

This week was filled with budget departmental presentations, including by SPD, HSD, and CARE. Having watched these presentations every year since 2020, I will say I found this year’s batch to be a bit less informative than they have been in previous years.

In a nutshell, SPD and CARE both have increasing budgets, although CARE’s increase is actually quite small in absolute dollars. While the total dollars going to HSD is greater than last year, many programs within HSD are being cut. Many of these programs are quite small and don’t cost much, but their removal will undoubtedly impact those who rely on them for services such as food and meal programs, tax preparation, public benefits legal assistance, home health programs, legal counsel for youth and children, youth and young adults for success, technical assistance for community organizations, and aging and disabilities case management.

One of the main controversies in the proposed budget is the use of JumpStart tax dollars, also known as the payroll expense tax (PET), to fill the General Fund deficit as well as add extra money to SPD’s budget and for increasing sweeps to seven days a week.

PubliCola points out that the estimate used to determine how much Jumpstart money will remain in its original funding priorities (affordable housing, equitable development initiative, small business supports, and Green New Deal) is a deliberately low 2020 estimate that doesn’t take into account the pace of inflation since then. Nor does it take into account that since its beginnings, JumpStart has brought in more money than originally estimated before it was passed.

Meanwhile Ron Davis, former councilmember candidate, calculates that the proposed budget amounts to a $100 million cut to affordable housing. He further says, “We need to be building about 3500 affordable units per year for the next year to catch up. The housing levy was going to support only about 450 of these per year, before Harrell took a hatchet to it.”

Kevin Scofield, formerly of SCC Insight, has also performed some analysis on the budget proposal, and he writes that the 2026 numbers include “some worrisome sleight-of-hand that should make us question whether the budget deficit is truly and permanently fixed.” Yikes!

The next Seattle budget meeting isn’t until Wednesday, October 16, which is also the date of the first public hearing on the budget, which starts at 5pm.

In the meantime, the King County Council will be holding the first of two public safety budget panels for their budget on Wednesday, October 9 at 9:30am.

Other Seattle News:

In other news, SE Network SafetyNet Executive Director Marty Jackson was indicted along with thirteen other people on Wednesday for being involved in a fentanyl drug trafficking organization. It appears she was indicted for allegedly conspiring to commit money laundering.

SE Network SafetyNet is part of the Boys & Girls Clubs of King County, and Seattle contracts with them to provide violence interruption and prevention services. As the Stranger reported, “SE Network SafetyNet recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the Seattle Public Schools (SPS) to provide violence interrupters at Rainier Beach High School, and the City of Seattle had agreed to provide funding for additional case managers at the high school as well through the organization.” 

Jackson pleaded not guilty. The Boys & Girls Club of King County fired her following the indictment. 

In other news, SPD apparently lost 23 firearms. The weapons have been missing since 2017. The Office of the Washington State Auditor is now looking into the matter.

Recent Headlines:

The budget fight over affordable housing continues as questions surface about 2026 Read More »