April 2026

PROTEC17 moves to help the CARE team do their jobs

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Seattle and King County News:

This will be a short edition of Notes From the Emerald City, as I don’t have a lot to say about many of the recent headlines. This may well be because I am in the middle of writing a very intensive piece that is taking up most of my brain bandwidth at present, but in any case, today I’m going to keep things short and sweet. 

I’ve been covering some election news in the past few weeks. I was able to sit down and have a long conversation with Jaelynn Scott, who is running to become a Washington state representative for the 37th LD. If you’re interested in learning more details about Scott and her policy positions, this one is for you.

Also in election news, Toshiko Hasegawa and Rebecca Saldaña–both running for the District 2 seat on the King County Council–released their public safety platforms last week. I spoke with both of them, and while the platforms are similar in many ways, I tried to tease out the differences in both platforms and experience. 

And this week, environmental justice group Got Green released a report alleging that the Seattle Housing Authority’s public housing is “unsafe and unhealthy.” I read through the report and attended the rally about it so I could give you the most important details.

In the latest addition to the CARE team saga, PROTEC17, the union representing City workers, has filed an unfair labor practice against the City and SPOG saying that the section in the new SPOG contract regulating crisis response should be thrown out since the CARE workers’ union was not engaged with about their scope of work. 

The other headline I want to call to your attention is PubliCola’s recent article about the new forensic report on the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), which shows their finances in pretty rough and messy shape. 

Earlier today, Erica Barnett attended the KCRHA meeting discussing the report, and I’d like to highlight some information she posted about the meeting. 

“This presentation, which sheds more light on the concerns the auditors raised, is more devastating than the audit themselves,” Barnett wrote. “What Nurse is describing is what “would be required” for stabilization—a complete overhaul of the entire organization.”

Other important details reported by Barnett: the KCRHA has a negative cash balance of $63 million as of March 2026, and addressing the issues uncovered in the report could take a year or more and cost millions of dollars. There was also no evidence found of corrective action taken by KCRHA after their negative audits from 2023 and 2024. 

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What’s going on with the SPD CCTV camera near Planned Parenthood

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Discerning readers may have noticed it’s been a bit longer than usual between updates. Unfortunately, I suffered from a lacerated finger earlier in March, and the healing has been a process. In the meantime, I was taking as much of a break as possible from typing. But I’m now on the mend, so here we are!

Seattle and King County News:

First off, we have Mayor Katie Wilson’s big announcement about her surveillance plans a couple weeks ago. I wrote about it here, as did many other outlets adding other details about NYU’s Policing Project and Axon’s contracts with ICE, among other issues. 

Wilson met with volunteers from her campaign who are against surveillance on Tuesday evening. Looking at Erica Barnett’s live posts of the event, it doesn’t appear that Wilson’s stance has changed since the town hall she did on March 27, when all but one commenter spoke against surveillance in Seattle. 

Local group Stop Surveillance City received footage from a public record request for the CCTV camera that films a Planned Parenthood in North Seattle. This is the camera Wilson said would be turned off. 

I reached out to the Mayor’s Office, and spokesperson Sage Wilson said the following:

“The cameras the mayor announced would be turned off have in fact been turned off as of March 19th, the day the mayor made the announcement. We have confirmed they are still turned off.

The point of confusion is that the PDR release contained video footage from three other cameras that are fixed, cannot be moved, and do not capture any activity at the sensitive location.”

Basically, each of the Seattle Police Department’s CCTV “cameras” is actually a cluster of five cameras: four that are fixed in a certain direction and one that can pan, tilt, and zoom (PTZ). The Mayor’s Office had the PTZ camera and the camera facing in the direction of the Planned Parenthood turned off, but not the other three fixed cameras. 

A possible problem with this approach is that the remaining cameras are still filming people and vehicles who might be going to or leaving from this Planned Parenthood location. There wouldn’t be footage of folks actually entering the building, but footage could still place them in its vicinity.

I also wrote about some public record request results I received pertaining to the siting of the new crisis care center in the old Polyclinic building in Capitol Hill. It appears that a few property and business owners located in Capitol Hill lobbied hard against the new location. One of them was developer Liz Dunn, who Capitol Hill Seattle reported sparked the new safety plan at Pike and Pine last fall. Several of the involved parties were also involved in trying to remove the bus lane in Capitol Hill last year.  

King County Assessor John Wilson is awaiting trial on two charges of violating a no-contact order obtained by his ex-fiancee. In the meantime, he has to wear an ankle monitor. Wilson has thus far refused to resign from his elected position of assessor even though the King County Council demanded his resignation last year. If nothing changes, he’ll stay in office through the end of the year. Meanwhile, all the County employees who work under him continue being forced to have him as their boss if they want to keep their jobs. 

Immigration and Other Surveillance News:

I’d like to share three recent headlines about federal immigration enforcement in Washington State:

What’s going on here and how can all three of these headlines be true? 

The answer is the time frame of the data being discussed is quite important! In my piece, I was writing about the University of Washington Center for Human Rights’s data from October through December of 2025, when detentions in the state were definitely increasing. The Washington State Standard was writing about data from October 2025 through March 2026. And The Seattle Times was specifically calling out data from January and February 2026, when the national number of detentions fell. 

The Washington State Standard noted that detentions here in Washington State appeared to drop after Alex Pretti’s murder in late January. 

The Seattle Times also reported on a new data point provided by Rep. Suzan DelBene, that the Tacoma detention facility’s population has dropped and is at 919 as of Friday, April 3. This is in spite of a new contract between the GEO Group, who operates the facility, and the federal government. The contract began in late March and runs until October 27 and increased the total number of detainees the facility can house from 1,575 to 1,635. Given how bad conditions were at the old maximum, I don’t like to think how an additional 60 detainees could further deteriorate things. 

Meanwhile, the GEO Group is still doing its utmost to prevent Washington state health inspectors from getting inside the facility and conducting an inspection. 

In surveillance news, Seattle isn’t the only jurisdiction that had to shut off its license plate readers due to the new state law regulating their use. Renton had to do the same.

The UW campus is getting more security cameras installed, according to the Daily UW: “Wilson confirmed that UWPD plans to install more cameras in public areas throughout campus, but that the Montlake Cut is not planned to see new surveillance footage.” 

(Note: The Wilson in the above excerpt refers to the UWPD Chief Craig Wilson, not Seattle’s Mayor.)

The Newcastle City Council voted to terminate their contract with Flock this week due to concern over potential liability from the state’s new license plate reader bill. Newcastle is one of the King County Sheriff’s Office’s (KCSO’s) contract cities, and there is worry the City would hold liability instead of the County. This is a legal issue that would probably only impact cities who are contract cities, meaning they outsource their law enforcement services. 

WA State News:

The millionaires tax passed the state legislature and was signed by Governor Bob Ferguson, and of course I wrote all about it. 

Last week, the Washington State Supreme Court granted Brian Heywood’s request to review his case in trying to file a referendum against the millionaires tax. The Court is expected to consider the question on April 30. 

A lawsuit against the tax was filed yesterday.

Last week, Ferguson signed the new state budget, which relies on a heavy withdrawal from the rainy day fund and includes cuts, cuts, cuts. There will be another $878 million deficit to deal with during the next legislative session for 2028. Proceeds from the millionaires tax are not expected to be collected until 2029, assuming it survives all the challenges against it. 

The Stranger had a write-up this week about the importance of the Washington State Supreme Court races this year. I did include a short discussion of this race in my millionaires tax piece above, but I really can’t emphasize enough what a big deal it is that the court will have five seats (out of nine) on the ballot this year. I hope to write more about this sooner rather than later, and I encourage you to watch these races closely. 

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