National

Is there a budget bloodbath in the offing?

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Personal News:

I’ve been a bit quieter than usual lately because my beloved little dog Nala died last week. I took several days off to spend some quality time with her beforehand, and I’ve been slowly gearing back up. I miss her terribly, of course, and am also very grateful that she lived such a good, long life (she was nearly 18!) and that everyone is being so kind to me as I adjust to this huge change.

Amy in a coat, hat, and scarf holding a cute little dog in a red jacket, the sandy beach and sunset behind them

Seattle and King County News:

I wrote about the Seattle Public Schools school board vote last week on a year-long pilot to bring a police officer back to Garfield High School. Things didn’t go the way I thought they would, as the board rejected the pilot proposal.

I wrote about Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal to use part of the new public safety sales tax money (which Council just passed in an 8-1 vote, Councilmember Maritza Rivera the sole nay vote) to double the number of CARE alternative responders. The CARE alternate response teams have been struggling since their inception due to an overly restrictive MOU with SPOG. I also wrote about a “mysterious” and sudden drop in police referrals to the CARE team, which coincidentally happened right after SPOG members had trouble with their paychecks due to the City using faulty new payroll software. Hmm. 

The Seattle Times published a similar story with this great lede: “Leadership with Seattle’s new police alternative has become increasingly frustrated with what they view as “a pattern of subversion” by street-level officers who seem to be routinely rejecting or ignoring assistance from civilian responders, records show.”

Relatedly, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) just released a report on the CARE team.

And I wrote about the new SPOG contract that Harrell has said he is almost done negotiating. Will it drop before or after the election? I’m fascinated to find out. 

SPD and Chief Shon Barnes have been engaging in some questionable promotions, as PubliCola has reported: Marc Garth Green, who was demoted after making offensive comments about sex workers, was promoted to commander of the West Precinct, and Mike Tietjen, who has several worrisome disciplinary actions on his record, including allegedly harassing a trans woman, was promoted to be in charge of the East Precinct. Barnes later walked back Tietjen’s new assignment, seemingly due to PubliCola’s coverage, blaming “internal leaks” and “a lack of comprehensive input from those involved in employee assignments.”

The King County Council approved the plans for the new crisis care center in Capitol Hill at the old Polyclinic building. 

I have been industriously listening to both Seattle and King County budget meetings. King County has successfully bridged their deficit for the 2026-2027 biennium with the new public safety sales tax, although they’ll be struggling to deal with federal impacts on services. Seattle will be receiving its revenue forecast on Monday, which might lead to a bit of a bloodbath for the budget depending on how bad the forecast turns out to be.

Surveillance news:

The Seattle Metro Chamber recently conducted a poll with this statement: “Recently passed laws, such as installing closed circuit cameras to capture real -time information about crime on our streets and keeping people out of areas where they have previously committed crimes are making Seattle safer and reducing crime.”

51% of respondents agreed (with only 17% strongly agreeing), while 46% of respondents disagreed. 

In local journalism circles, SPD is known as a place where you send public record requests to die. However, recent reporting from Hardpressed reveals that SPD is fulfilling public record requests for ICE in less than four days. The article further states:
“The initial six pages of records provided by Mayor Harrell’s office show that ICE is requesting information on people the SPD has charged with lowly crimes such as drug possession and fourth degree (gross misdemeanor) assault, which can be charged with no injury and for something as simple as a push. It is unclear based on the limited information and redactions made by Harrell’s office within the released records if the individuals SPD arrested were ever convicted of a crime.” 

404 Media has followed up on their reporting about Flock Safety and their ALPR database. Flock’s database was searched by law enforcement in Texas looking for a woman who had self-administered an abortion. It turns out that said law enforcement had considered charging the woman they were searching for with a crime.

Meanwhile, 404 Media discovered that ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy’s criminal investigation unit all had access to Flock’s huge data network. This news prompted US Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon to write a letter to Flock, in which he said, “I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable, and that Flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them. Cities around the country, including in Oregon, are currently reevaluating their decision to install Flock cameras. I commend and support this reexamination. In my view, local elected officials can best protect their constituents from the inevitable abuses of Flock cameras by removing Flock from their communities.”

The City of Mountlake Terrace, which voted to purchase Flock automated license plate recognition (ALPRs) back in June, has been continuing to discuss the issue. Councilmember William Paige, Jr. originally voted in favor of the technology, but he has changed his mind and now wants to cancel the contract. It’s possible the most recent news, along with the letter from Wyden, might sway more councilmembers.

The Flock cameras haven’t yet been installed in Mountlake Terrace. 

A few more recent articles about surveillance you might be interested in checking out:

Recent Headlines:

Is there a budget bloodbath in the offing? Read More »

SPOG President says DC is a “blueprint” of Trump’s future public safety actions across the nation

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Surveillance News:

Seattle’s public safety committee passed its surveillance expansion proposal out of committee before the council’s summer recess. We are expecting a final vote on the proposal on Tuesday, September 9 at 2pm. As usual, public comment will be heard at the beginning of this meeting. 

I went onto Hacks & Wonks to discuss this surveillance expansion further, as well as how it ties into the greater federal surveillance expansion, so keep an eye out for that episode later this week. 

For now, I’ll give you a little preview. President Donald Trump announced the federal takeover of the Washington DC police department the day before the Seattle committee vote on the surveillance expansion was taken. Reporting shows that there is now most likely federal control over DC’s real time crime center. Right now that surveillance can help the feds with their immigration crackdown in DC, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what this surveillance data can be used to accomplish, particularly for a federal government that is rapidly moving into authoritarianism. That Seattle might somehow be uniquely immune to this attempt is wishful thinking at best.

Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) President Mike Solan recently had the D.C. Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton on his podcast to discuss the situation in DC. Pemberton said the police in DC welcome the intervention by the feds, and Solan clearly supported Trump’s actions in this regard as well. 

Solan said, “Pay attention to what’s happening in the District of Columbia because it is the blueprint of what you’re going to see nationwide when it comes to the Trump administration’s public safety actions.”

Solan is elected by a majority of SPD’s rank and file to represent them.

In Seattle, CCTV security footage (private cameras in this case, as opposed to the cameras owned by SPD) led to the incorrect arrest of an innocent man for an arson in Wallingford. He was held in jail for a month before his case was resolved. His defense attorneys called the SPD’s actions in this case a “rushed and racist misidentification.”

In other surveillance news, it turns out US Customs and Border Patrol has had direct access to Flock Safety’s license plate reader database through a “federal pilot program.” Flock says it has now paused all federal pilots. 

Over at Cascade PBS, Nate Sanford is doing a deep dive on local governments’ usage of ChatGPT. The two stories focus on Bellingham and Everett, as they responded more quickly to public record requests than other cities such as Seattle.

Seattle News:

A new pilot bringing a police officer back to Garfield High School might be beginning soon. The school board is expected to vote on the issue at their September 17 meeting. 

Mayor Bruce Harrell provided the necessary letter of support that allows the crisis care center in Capitol Hill to move forward. 

SPOG has donated $350 to Ann Davison’s reelection campaign for Seattle City Attorney. New reporting at PubliCola says that Davison has failed to live up to her campaign promises made when she first ran back in 2021. 

Real Change reported that SPD spent almost twice as much on legal settlements as had been budgeted between 2014 and 2024. The amount SPD has gone over budget has increased a great deal since 2020. 

DivestSPD reported that almost 400 SPD officers made more than $200,000 in 2024. 76 officers made more than $300,000. 

King County News:

King County is significantly expanding its youth mobile crisis teams from two teams up to nine. 

Candidate for King County Executive (and current Councilmember) Claudia Balducci said she’s planning to introduce a measure to use part of the county’s recently passed 0.1% public safety sales tax bump in order to create a retail crimes task force. Kroger recently decided to shut down a Fred Meyer in Kent (and also one in Lake City), a decision that some people are attributing to shoplifting. Balducci’s opponent Girmay Zahilay, along with UFCW 3000 (the grocery workers union), question whether this is really the primary reason for the store closures.

The King County council passed the county’s public safety sales tax, which is a regressive tax that hits poorer people harder, in order to deal with the county’s upcoming budget deficit. However, there might be a bit of money left over from the tax, and a big question during the county’s budget season will be how this extra money will be spent. King County’s public health programs and clinics, as well as its behavioral health services, are expected to be hard hit financially by federal policy changes. One possible use of any extra dollars could be bridging some of these new and expected funding gaps.

Recent Headlines: 

SPOG President says DC is a “blueprint” of Trump’s future public safety actions across the nation Read More »

Yes, surveillance technology IS helping ICE and allowing law enforcement to hunt abortion seekers

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Seattle News:

First up, I published an article this week on the debate over bringing police officers back to Seattle Public Schools…and the related debate as to whether the forthcoming FEPP levy should help pay for it. The next school board meeting to discuss the district’s proposal around police in schools, including a potential new Memorandum of Understanding between the district and SPD, will take place on Wednesday, June 4 at 4:15pm at the John Stanford Center. There will be a rally ahead of time at 3:45pm. 

Meanwhile, the City Council’s Select Committee on the FEPP Levy met on Thursday morning and discussed many possible amendments. Several councilmembers signaled that they would like to see police back in schools. 

There has been lots of concern over what data ICE may be accessing in its quest to deport people. Recent record requests show that data collected from Flock’s license plate readers has been shared with ICE for immigration purposes. Uncovered data also shows police in Texas used Flock data to perform a nationwide search for a person who had an abortion. 

Many local municipalities are giving information to ICE in return for funding from the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP). The United States government has collected the DNA from 133,000 migrant children and stores the data in a criminal database.

Locally, Mountlake Terrace City Council is deciding next week whether they should sign onto purchasing Flock’s surveillance services as well. One can only hope someone shares the news of Flock’s data being used to assist ICE and hunt down people who received abortions with the councilmembers prior to the vote on June 5.

The Northwest Progressive Institute released a couple of widely discussed polls this week and last week. One poll showed the mayoral race, and Katie Wilson’s candidacy in particular, is more competitive than some people assumed. Another poll showed how unpopular Seattle’s elected officials currently are. 

Perhaps recognizing the especial unpopularity of the recent proposal to weaken the city council’s Code of Ethics, Councilmember Cathy Moore announced this morning that she withdrew the bill. However, she signaled that she might well revisit the issue again in the future.  

There were a few great investigative pieces this week. Real Change discovered that both SPD and the FBI used confidential informants during the George Floyd protests of 2020. The FBI was also conducting surveillance during that period. As the article says, “Technologies used by the FBI to surveil Seattle protesters could be seen as a way to circumvent Seattle’s surveillance ordinance if the output of that surveillance was fed directly to SPD.”

And in reporting at The Urbanist, it appears that the City was trying to bury an independent report on allegations raised against the OPA and OIG about obtaining and disclosing a protester’s private medical records. According to the Urbanist, the report found that Andrew Myerberg, who was the head of the OPA at the time and now works for the Mayor’s Office, “improperly disclosed the protester’s private medical information, and improperly interpreted the meaning of those medical records, despite not being trained to do so. Improper disclosure means that Myerberg violated state medical privacy laws, and therefore violated City policy.”

However, Jeremy Racca, who works as Mayor Bruce Harrell’s chief of staff and general counsel, in consultation with Pacifica Law Group, LLC, as outside counsel, formed a second opinion that actually what Myerberg did was fine.

Finally, SPD delivered its quarterly sworn staffing, overtime, and performance metrics report to city council this week. SPD is estimating it will need an additional $6.8 million to $10 million by the end of the year to pay for all the extra police officers they are hiring. 911 call response times have gone down because last year CARE and SPD had a project to re-prioritize call types, which moved a bunch of Priority 1 call types down to Priority 2. 

Recent Headlines:

Yes, surveillance technology IS helping ICE and allowing law enforcement to hunt abortion seekers Read More »

Seattle and King County on a bumpy road due to Trump administration chaos

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What I’ve been working on:

I’ve had four articles out at The Urbanist in the last two weeks, which is more than usual, hence the delay in this edition of Notes from the Emerald City. 

Top of mind for me, I’ve been working on two pieces covering local impacts of the Trump administration thus far.

 Seattle and King County Grapple with Federal Disinvestment and Threats primarily covers the financial and budgetary impacts of the federal administration on Seattle and King County. Long story short, we’ve got a rough ride ahead. 

Seattle Gears Up to Fight Back as Trump Eviscerates Funding, Rights primarily covers the impacts on civil rights and vulnerable communities, including coverage from Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s first meeting of the Select Committee on Federal Administration and Policy Changes. I also cover the danger to the Pacific Northwest’s electricity supply and how the University of Washington is being impacted (although there is more recent news on that in the recent headlines below as well). 

I hope these two articles can get people up to speed on what’s going on and prepare for the struggles ahead. 

I wrote a piece about new SPD Chief Shon Barnes, who appeared before the City Council’s public safety committee for the first time at the end of February after being on the job for one month. 

Finally, I covered Mayor Bruce Harrell’s recent proposal to renew Seattle’s democracy voucher program, going over the program’s successes as well as reforms that might be needed. This program is the first of its kind in the country, and after 10 years, we have some idea how it is working. 

Other Seattle news:

This week, there was new coverage of the surveillance pilot starting soon in Seattle, and it includes a map with the proposed locations of 20 CCTV cameras in the CID. 

The CARE department presented to the public safety committee this week. In a testament to how busy I’ve been writing, I haven’t yet watched it, but I heard some councilmembers were criticizing the program. More on this when I’ve had a chance to catch up. 

The City Attorney’s Office is requesting to add more staff to their Federal Response Team in response to President Donald Trump’s chaos. No details yet on how many staff or how much this might cost.

PubliCola reported on a $40,000 two-day media training held by SPD in March and June of 2024, saying, “This is how-to-boil-water stuff: At some point, someone probably has to tell you how to do it, but it probably doesn’t require hiring a $40,000 consultant.”

Prism reported on the backchannel coordination between Seattle’s Federal Monitor for the consent decree, Antonio Oftelie, SPD’s general counsel Rebecca Boatwright, and SPD’s then-Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives Chris Fisher. The article cites conversations between the three at some length. As the article states, “While the Seattle Police Department (SPD) struggled with accountability in 2020, the federal monitor tasked with overseeing police reform was privately seeking input from the very department he was meant to regulate, according to documents obtained by Prism.”

New media analysis

A new Media Matters analysis of online shows found that 9 out of the top 10 online shows they assessed were right-leaning. Right-leaning online shows had nearly five times as many followers and subscribers as left-leaning online shows. 

Over a third of the shows said they were apolitical, but when analyzed, 72% of those “apolitical” shows were found to be right-leaning. Of the top nine right-leaning shows (only one left-leaning show makes the top ten at all), four are identified as news and politics, with the other five being instead called comedy, education, and society and culture. 

As an increasing number of Americans rely on these online shows and podcasts for their news, we can expect the impacts of this disparity to continue to grow. 

Recent Headlines:

Election Season:

 

Seattle and King County on a bumpy road due to Trump administration chaos Read More »

AI as game-changer, AI as a tool of political control

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Seattle News:

This week I had an article at The Urbanist about a state bill that is trying to circumvent SPOG and free the CARE alternative response teams to do their jobs. I was able to talk at some length with both the sponsor of the bill, Rep. Shaun Scott, and CARE Chief Amy Barden about their thoughts on why this bill is necessary.

Since the article’s publication, there have been updates. The bill was heard in executive committee on Tuesday and replaced with a substitute. The substitute changes the applicable population for the bill from cities of more than 500,000 to any political subdivision (cities, counties, towns) of 200,000 or more. It passed out of the committee on a purely partisan vote, and so onwards through the legislative process it goes.

Seattle Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who called for the formation of a Select Committee on Federal Administration and Policy Changes to monitor how the actions of the Trump administration and Elon Musk might impact the City, spoke at a protest on Monday.

Here is a quote from Rinck’s speech: “Local government is the last line of democracy. The city has a role to play, and it is time for our city to step up to safeguard our democracy and protect this city. Continue to call upon your local leaders to be stepping up to this challenge, to make sure we’re continuing to fund and find ways to protect these programs that people know, love, and depend on. To protect our civil liberties, it will need all of us. We know that we don’t need billionaires. We need each other.”

The first meeting of that select committee is on March 6, and I will be covering it. In addition to impacts for kids and adults seeking gender-affirming care and immigrant and refugee communities, there is a real danger of budgetary impacts at every level of government, including the City. King County will be meeting next week to review potential budgetary impacts on an already gaping budget hole for their 2026-2027 budget. 

In election news, Eddie Lin, who currently works as an Assistant City Attorney at the Seattle Attorney’s Office under Ann Davison, is running for the open D2 city council seat. Lin had applied for the vacant D2 seat at the beginning of the year and became a finalist, but ultimately the Council chose SPD’s Mark Solomon to fill the vacancy until the November election. 

You can read a summary of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s State of the City address here, or just go ahead and read the entire transcript. People on the internet seemed really upset about Harrell’s joke about the Sonics. 

Both KUOW and The Seattle Times reported on an arrest on Harrell’s record back in 1996, which he says was a result of racial profiling. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing here is that this incident only came to light now, after Harrell has gone through several election cycles since 2008, first for city council and now for mayor.

The co-chair of the City’s Community Surveillance Working Group, René Peters, had an op-ed in The Seattle Times last week, in which he shared his disappointing experience reviewing AI-enabled CCTV cameras last year, a process which he’d hoped would be collaborative with the City Council and Mayor’s Office. His takeaway? “We need young, well-informed thinkers, especially those from underrepresented communities, to engage in technology policy at every level.”

Burien and WA State News:

Last week I mentioned that the lawsuit brought against Burien by the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness and several homeless residents was having a hearing on February 14. PubliCola wrote about how that hearing went.

InvestigateWest and Cascade PBS reached out to all 39 sheriffs in Washington State to ask how they were planning to deal with conflicting state and federal laws in enforcing immigration law. Washington State is a sanctuary state with a law on the books that restricts how much local law enforcement can participate in federal immigration enforcement activities. 

Responses were mixed, with many sheriffs either not responding or returning a canned response from the Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs. 15 of the 39 emphasized they’d be following the state sanctuary law, including King County’s Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall. 

The Communications Office at the King County Sheriff’s Office provided a statement, which said in part, “As to specific policies and actions, King County adheres to the Keep Washington Working Act, which limits cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and prohibits county departments, including the King County Sheriff’s Office, from assisting ICE without a court-issued warrants. Additionally, the county council passed an ordinance in 2017, which limits the immigration-related information that county employees can share or collect. It also restricts ICE’s access to this data, and ensures employees aren’t required to share data unless legally necessary.”

Unfortunately, Sheriff Keith Swank of Pierce County wrote the following: “The Pierce County Sheriff Office will abide by all enforceable US immigration laws and legal mandates. Law enforcement agencies are obligated to honor applicable federal detainers. I believe there will be more legal guidance in the near future.”

As you can see, he made no mention of the Keep Washington Working Act. 

Meanwhile, Washington is bracing itself for potential budgetary impacts from the federal funding freeze and potential retaliation against a Blue state from President Donald Trump, a situation not improved by the $11-15 billion deficit the state is already facing over the next four years. 

The state received $27 billion in federal money in fiscal year 2024, which was 32% of the fiscal state budget. While $13 billion of that was in Medicaid reimbursements, which aren’t impacted by the freeze, they could be affected if Republicans take a knife to the federal Medicaid program, as is currently being discussed. Washington State has approximately 2.4 million total Medicaid enrollees whose health care could be impacted by any cuts. 

Potential cuts that would be impacted by the federal freeze add up to at least $3.4 billion for 2026, and would impact transportation projects; child care and education, including special education and school lunches, foster care, allergy and disease research, and substance abuse treatment programs, among many other programs.

National:

I’ve been taking an interest in AI, at least partly because we can expect to see AI expanding further into the public safety space in the future. Last year Seattle approved AI-enabled surveillance cameras, for example, and that’s just one of many possible (and concerning) use cases. 

As such, it seems appropriate to share this discussion of AI and the part it’s playing in Elon Musk’s current plans regarding the federal government, with more about it here. It looks like Musk may be seeking to make government systems reliant on AI technology. This would be great news for big tech, who would then profit from lucrative government contracts. It would also be good news for those, like Musk, who wish to consolidate political power, displace labor, and exercise tighter government control. 

It would be bad news for those of us who value democracy, a dedicated nonpartisan public service workforce, and robust public services. 

From Eryk Salvaggio’s piece: “AI then becomes a tool for replacing politics. The Trump administration frames generative AI as a remedy to “government waste.” However, what it seeks to automate is not paperwork but democratic decision-making.”

From there, one can engage in a thought exercise about what decisions these AI algorithms could potentially be making. There is already a lawsuit against UnitedHealthcare, a large health insurance company; the plaintiffs allege that UnitedHealth was using an AI program instead of medical doctors to make decisions about denying claims, which sometimes led to declining health and the deaths of the involved patients. Imagine if similar AI systems were used to make decisions regarding Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, or, Heaven forbid, the criminal legal system.

If we narrow our focus down to Seattle and King County, many of the programs and services we’ve discussed in Notes from the Emerald City have the potential to be negatively impacted by the incorporation of AI. Last year’s CCTV cameras and real time crime center could be just the beginning. 

Harrell currently sits on the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board. Geekwire reported in November that “Harrell said he’s looking at ways AI can help his city, from protecting infrastructure to more simple tasks like filling out police reports. He pointed to existing AI-related projects, such as Google’s traffic light project. “You all know AI is a game-changer, right?” the mayor said….”

As I was writing this, a new piece about AI arrived in my inbox that is also relevant. Brian Merchant writes about J.D. Vance’s speech last week at an international AI summit in Paris: “But the speech, with its saber-rattling, its calls to end oversight and regulation, its declaration of intent to further concentrate power, and its equating of American might with industrial AI supremacy, stuck with me. It echoed what was (and is) unfolding back home, where Elon Musk and the DOGE boys are at work excitedly gutting the federal government under the auspices of an “AI-first strategy.”

Merchant went on to interview Kate Crawford, who is a leading AI scholar, and she had this to say: “You’re aware of the alignment problem, as it’s referred to in the AI world, which is that an individual AI system might become misaligned with human values and ethical values and intentions. What we saw at the summit was a different type of alignment problem, which was a misalignment from very concentrated corporate power and the interests of civil society in general.”

Combine those two alignment problems, and I think you can see why current developments are concerning. This, of course, doesn’t even take into account the severe environmental impacts of AI.

(Side note: Brian Merchant used to be a tech columnist at the LA Times and has now struck out on his own with his newsletter. If you appreciate independent journalism in the AI space, you might consider supporting his work.)

As with any new technology with the potential for huge impacts, it behooves us as a society to think carefully about in what ways we are comfortable deploying AI and what kind of guardrails and fail safes we want to adopt. This includes us in Seattle and King County having a deliberate discussion about the potential benefits and dangers of any AI technology. René Peters above was exactly right in calling for folks to engage with tech policy, with a focus on ethics and equity, as we move forward into a future shaped by what Kelly Hayes has called “the AI industrial complex.” 

Recent Headlines:

 

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Murder numbers dropped dramatically across the nation in 2024

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Seattle News:

First, SPD interim Chief Sue Rahr decided to fire Kevin Dave, the officer who hit and killed Jaahnavi Kandula two years ago. You can read all about it in my article for The Urbanist.

The Seattle Times is suing SPD for alleged public record violations. This is great news, as it is intensely difficult to get public records from SPD, and Seattle Times is a local outlet with deep enough pockets to fund a lawsuit to try to address the issue. 

The Mayor’s Office sent out a press release celebrating 2024 as the first year SPD has hired more officers than it lost…by one. Given Dave was then immediately fired at the start of 2025, they pretty much broke even. It’s also worth noting that an increase in the number of applications to become an SPD officer does not necessarily translate into a higher number of officers who are ultimately hired. In fact, before he left, former Chief Adrian Diaz mentioned at a committee meeting that the department often has to reject lateral applications because the candidates aren’t suitable for SPD. 

Next week there will be a public safety committee meeting on Tuesday, 1/14 at 9:30am. The sole item on the agenda is the less lethal weapons legislation first discussed in December. There are ten proposed amendments to the base bill, and a committee vote is expected. There will be public comment at the beginning of the meeting. 

King County, WA State, and U.S. News:

The King County assessor, John Wilson, who is now running for King County Executive against King County Councilmembers Claudia Balducci and Girmay Zahilay, was accused of stalking and harassment by his domestic partner and now-fianceé.

In spite of a significant state budget deficit, Governor-elect Bob Ferguson wants to find $100 million over the next biennium to provide grants to local municipalities to hire more police officers. The idea of helping hire more officers has bipartisan support, but there is an open question as to where exactly the money will come from.  I’ll have more about the state budget situation and legislative priorities for this session coming soon at The Urbanist.

Nationally, murders and other violent crime have dropped dramatically. The New York Times looked at data through October 2024 and reported that “if the drop in murders continued at the same rate for the rest of the year, 2024 had the largest percent decrease — nearly 16 percent — ever recorded nationwide.”

Other violent crimes also fell, as did overall property crime. These latest numbers suggest what I’ve been suggesting for some time already: namely, that the Covid-19 pandemic and the chaos it wrought was a root cause for the higher crime numbers we saw nationally from 2021-2023.

Data analyst Jeff Asher also wrote about this trend, saying, “America’s crime trends in 2024 were remarkably positive with an enormous decline in murder, a continued small but steady decline in violent crime, and a sizable decline in motor vehicle theft on the heels of several years of surges. The nation’s murder rate has largely erased the post-COVID surge and was roughly around or [at] 2019’s level while reported violent and property crime were likely amongst the lowest rates recorded since the 1960s and 1970s.”

Recent Headlines:

 

Murder numbers dropped dramatically across the nation in 2024 Read More »

License Plate Reader Expansion Moves Forward in Seattle; if Approved, Will Represent the Largest Deployment of the Technology in Washington State

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Seattle News:

At the public safety meeting on Tuesday, councilmembers voted to pass the legislation to greatly expand license plate readers (ALPRs) out of committee, with Councilmember Moore abstaining. In a blast from the past, I live tweeted much of that agenda item of the meeting. 

The legislation will now head to full Council for a final vote. CM Moore indicated she would be putting forward separate legislation that would limit the license plate data storage to 48 hours. As the legislation currently stands, SPD would retain the data for 90 days, which would be a reasonable timeframe for outside entities to subpoena for the data from Axon, who will be storing the data. It is unclear how much support this legislation will garner from her colleagues.

One of the more bizarre moments of the meeting was when Chair Bob Kettle stated that if there were going to be any privacy problems with the license plate data, mainstream media such as the LA Times, Seattle Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN would have reported on it. Data provided by the ACLU and UW appeared to be unacceptable. This seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding about how the mainstream media and university research operate. 

He also stated Seattle has the best accountability system in the country, which is a bold thing to say given this very system has been crippled since its founding by the SPOG contract.

Andrew Engelson of PubliCola conducted an interview with new interim Chief of SPD Sue Rahr last week. Some key points:

  • Rahr said it breaks her heart that SPD officers don’t feel they’re being embraced by the community: “The officers were—I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t want to say hurt, that sounds a little bit melodramatic. But they want to work with the community and they feel like the community is rejecting them.”
  • She said she wasn’t making command staff changes right now, but would make them if she felt it necessary. She didn’t appear to hold much credence for accusations that command staff were retaliating against officers or weaponizing OPA complaints.
  • She said that because we live in a sexist society, of course our police department is sexist, but didn’t acknowledge any particular issues that might make police departments more susceptible to misogyny than any other institution. She said she wants to focus on the staffing crisis.
  • She doesn’t know what her decisions regarding Officers Auderer and Dave will be, and she said she hasn’t read the reports yet.
  • She said she would support a city contract with another jail (besides King County Jail) if that’s what’s needed to allow for booking of minor misdemeanors that officers feel are necessary.

The death of the student shot at Garfield High School last week, Amarr Murphy-Paine, has rocked the community. There will be a Unity Walk this Thursday at 6pm starting at Jimi Hendrix Park and ending at Garfield High, organized by Pastor Lemuel Charleston and Apostle James Sears. Sears is the Murphy-Paine family’s pastor. 

Other News:

In King County Executive Dow Constantine’s State of the County address yesterday, he proposed “100 Days of Action” to prevent gun violence. The relatively new King County Regional Office of Gun Violence Prevention will be coordinating this work. He said Mayor Bruce Harrell is in agreement and will be making an announcement later this week to advance the collaboration, which would include supporting youth mental health. As always, I am interested in how many resources will be allocated by the county and city to this initiative, as more investment in gun violence prevention is urgently needed.

In a large Washington Post investigation, journalists identified at least 1,800 law enforcement officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse between 2005 and 2022. “​​When pressed by The Post, some police officials, prosecutors and judges admitted that they could have done more to hold officers accountable in the cases they handled. But nationwide, there has been little reckoning over child abusers within the ranks of law enforcement.”

Nearly 40% of convicted officers avoid prison sentences, and many used threats of arrest or physical harm to make their victims comply. A national tracking system for officers accused of child sexual abuse does not currently exist.

Recent Headlines:

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Washington State Has 4th HighestJail Death Rate in the US

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Seattle News:

As one of her first acts as Council President, Sara Nelson has fired Central Staff Director Esther Handy. In her place will be Ben Noble, a denizen of Central Staff from the days of Bruce Harrell and Tim Burgess. Noble most recently served as the Mayor’s Budget Director and then the Director of the Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts. 

The Stranger has this to say about this move:

“Though axing the head of central staff fits within her purview as president, Nelson’s highly atypical move flies in the face of the new council’s “good governance” messaging. Replacing a perceived progressive with a clear fiscal conservative makes a mockery of the purported objectivity of central staff.”

However, Publicola reports that Noble “is widely known for his old-school commitment to neutrality, which is one reason he has survived at the city for 23 years under a wide range of mayoral administrations and council members.” Most of the current Central Staff has not worked with Noble, who left Central Staff in 2013.

The Council’s main piece of business right now is appointing a replacement for CM Mosqueda, who holds one of the two city-wide Council seats. The Council received 72 qualified applicants. They are holding a special meeting tomorrow, 1/12, with a public comment opportunity starting at 2pm. At this meeting they will decide on the finalists for the position, as well as deciding which community organization will host the public forum that will take place sometime next week. The two organizations in the running are the Transit Riders Union and Seattle CityClub. 

The new council members are also busy hiring their staff and getting their offices in order. CM Hollingsworth of D3 has hired Anthony Derrick as her chief of staff. Derrick has served in the past as Communications Director for the City Attorney’s Office under Ann Davison and as Mayor Durkan’s press secretary. She also hired Logan Bowers as her policy director, who you might remember for his unsuccessful primary run for the City Council D3 seat in 2019.

While the Black Lives Memorial Garden in Cal Anderson Park was forcibly removed in late December, it sounds like that area’s legacy of sweeps is continuing, with another sweep occurring late in the evening of January 4. Before the removal of the garden, it had been swept 76 times. 

Bryan Kirschner wrote an op-ed in The Urbanist discussing the inefficiency of SPD. To understand the full thrust of his argument, I suggest reading the whole piece, but here is a sample:

“If you’re seeing a pattern here, it’s that the mayor and police chief kneecapped the department’s ability to investigate serious crime in order to backfill officers handling calls that don’t require officers to handle.

We know with 100% certainty that they did not need to do this, because other police departments are already using alternative responders to handle these types of calls.”

King County News:

Choose 180 has announced a new executive director: Nneka Payne.

CM Mosqueda has been sworn in as a councilmember of King County, and she will be chairing the Health and Human Services committee. Not only does this committee oversee issues relating to affordable housing, but it also has purview over the County’s gun violence prevention programs, which reside under Public Health.

Washington State News:

A Seattle Times op-ed discusses our state’s jail fatality crisis and demands better (and independent) oversight:

“What we found demonstrates that immediate action is required. Even accounting for Washington’s population growth, the Washington jail death rate nearly tripled between 2000 and 2019 — an increase 16 times that of the national average. Outpacing other states, Washington now has the fourth-highest rate of jail deaths in the nation.”

The internal investigation of the officers responsible for the death of Manual Ellis has been completed, but the release of the findings is being delayed until next Tuesday, January 16. Meetings between the officers and the police chief are scheduled to take place this Friday. This investigation will determine whether the officers in question can remain at the Tacoma Police Department.

House Bill 1994, a bill that would “allow defendants in misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor cases to request a dismissal if they complete court-ordered conditions that vary by case,” received a hearing on Tuesday. King 5 goes on to report: 

“The bill’s prime sponsor, Darya Farivar (D) 46th District, said that most people who enter the criminal justice system do so because of their disabilities, and this bill will reduce an overwhelmed prison system and reduce the rate of recidivism. 

“What this bill does is it allows our only neutral party in the courtroom to make a decision that could lead to increased success in a more meaningful way than incarceration has been proven to do in the past,” said Farivar. “This is not a blank check to anyone. This is an opportunity to be creative and to meet people where they’re at, which I think is really missing in our criminal legal systems.””

Unsurprisingly, City Attorney Ann Davison opposes this bill. 

National News:

The Guardian ran a story this week on 2023’s record number of killings by the police in the US: “Police in the US killed at least 1,232 people last year, making 2023 the deadliest year for homicides committed by law enforcement in more than a decade, according to newly released data.

On police killings vs the national homicide rate: “The record number of police killings happened in a year that saw a significant decrease in homicides, according to preliminary reports of 2023 murder rates; one analyst said the roughly 13% decrease in homicides last year appears to be the largest year-to-year drop on record, and reports have also signaled drops in other violent and property crimes.”

On disparate impacts on people of color: “In 2023, Black people were killed at a rate 2.6 times higher than white people, Mapping Police Violence found. Last year, 290 people killed by police were Black, making up 23.5% of victims, while Black Americans make up roughly 14% of the total population. Native Americans were killed at a rate 2.2 times greater than white people, and Latinos were killed at a rate 1.3 times greater.”

Recent Headlines:

 

Washington State Has 4th HighestJail Death Rate in the US Read More »

Seattle Drug User Diversion (LEAD) Will Max Out Its Capacity in Spring 2024

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Year End and Looking Forward:

As this is the closing edition of this year of the newsletter, I want to extend a big thank you to all my readers. I hope you’ve found my reporting this year to be helpful in keeping you updated on what’s happening in the public safety and criminal legal spaces in Seattle, King County, and Washington State. 

Looking forward, public safety will remain front and center as an issue of interest. A short state legislative session will be beginning in January; historically short sessions tend to focus more on policy and less than on fiscal issues. We’ll have a couple new faces on the King County Council and 7 new faces on the Seattle City Council. King County and Seattle will also both face large fiscal deficits for their 2025-2026 budgets, which they’ll hammer out in the fall. We’ll also see more developments with both Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) and social housing.

I’d like to give extra thanks to those who support this work via Patreon for helping make Notes from the Emerald City possible. And I’m making a small request. Donations this year are not quite going to cover the hosting fees for the Notes from the Emerald City website. So if you find this work valuable, now would be a really great time to give a small donation to help keep things running. You can give a monthly donation via Patreon or a one-time donation via Paypal.

Thank you so much, and here’s looking forward to more reporting and learning in 2024!

Seattle News:

At the last Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting of the year (and the last presided over by Chair Lisa Herbold), LEAD gave a report on how they’re doing with the new influx of police referrals following the passage and implementation of the drug criminalization ordinance. They are only continuing to accept community referrals (meaning not from SPD) from three geographic areas: upper Third Avenue, the CID, and Rainier Beach (the latter only because King County is specifically providing funding to provide this service there). Fewer community referrals in general are being made as they are so likely to be turned down by LEAD.

LEAD is predicted to reach an absolute capacity ceiling in late April or early May of 2024. At that time, if more funding is not provided–either from the city, from the state, or from federal grants–LEAD will have to start rejecting not only community referrals but also referrals from the police. 

Lisa Daugaard, the co-executive director, also said that people are coming in at the highest level of clinical need they’ve ever seen, and that there are insufficient resources and options to offer these people. LEAD provides case managers who connect people with the services they need, but if those services are unavailable, the model cannot work as designed. One particular area where more service is needed is wound care as people are losing their limbs, and there aren’t resources to address this that are mobile.

In accountability news, an arbitrator has ruled that a former SPD officer who was fired for “using excessive force and violating the department’s de-escalation policies” was done so unlawfully and should at most have been suspended without pay for 60 days. Because she was fired back in 2017, the arbitrator didn’t order that she be given back her job, but he did order that she receive over $600k in backpay.

A new firefighters contract has been announced, which the local firefighters ratified with an 86% vote. This contract covers the period between December 21, 2021 and December 31, 2026 (meaning it covers two years in the past and three upcoming years). Cost of living adjustment (COLA) increases in the new contract are based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue with increase minimums and maximums that vary by year but are mostly a 2% minimum and a 4% maximum increase. The contract also includes a COLA bank that allows firefighters to bank excess cost of living increases when inflation is higher than 4%.

The back pay for the firefighters for the last two years (2022 and 2023) will cost $22.3 million. Going forward, the contract will cost an additional $21.4 million in 2024. The estimated total additional cost for the contract from 2022-2026 is $106.5 million. 

The Coalition of City Unions has also reached a tentative deal with the city. It hasn’t yet been approved, but it would provide a 5% COLA increase for 2023 and a 4.5% COLA increase for 2024. After that wage increases would be tied to the CPI for between 2-4%, just like the firefighters. 

In her wrap-up Bad Apples column for 2023, Ashley Nerbovig has this to say when summarizing the year:

“And what a year for the Seattle Police Department, even aside from the OPA investigations. Barely a month into 2023, Seattle Police Officer Kevin Dave hit and killed 23-year-old college student Jaahnavi Kandula while driving nearly three times the posted speed limit. Kandula’s death led to worldwide outrage after a video surfaced of Seattle police union vice president Officer Daniel Auderer cackling and mocking Kandula on the night of her death. SPD took another hit in September when The Stranger published audio of Officer Burton Hill hurling a racial slur at his elderly Chinese neighbor. SPD faced broader criticism about racism within the department after prominent Black SPD detective Denise “Cookie” Bouldin filed a discrimination lawsuit in November claiming she’d endured decades of racial and gender bias while working for SPD. Just cop things!”

King County and National News:

Prosecutors began their final arguments in the Manny Ellis trial on Monday. The jury began their deliberations on Thursday.

Meanwhile, even the New York Times is saying body worn cameras haven’t lived up to the hype: 

“The story demonstrates the mixed results of police-worn body cameras: Many people hoped they would help hold police officers accountable for wrongful shootings. But there has been a basic problem, as Eric Umansky found in an investigation for The Times Magazine and ProPublica: Police departments have often prevented the public from seeing the footage and failed to act when it showed wrongdoing.”

Recent Headlines:

 

Seattle Drug User Diversion (LEAD) Will Max Out Its Capacity in Spring 2024 Read More »

Seattle’s Alternate Response Pilot a Far Cry from 2020 Demands

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Seattle News:

Yours truly was quoted in a recent Urbanist article about the recent shakeup at the Mayor’s Office, which reports that Tim Burgess will be promoted to Deputy Mayor in Monisha Harrell’s wake. Former OPA Director Andrew Myerberg will also be receiving a promotion to Chief Innovation Officer, which will put him on the executive team. It appears that current Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell will be staying until the end of the summer.

Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell appeared at Tuesday’s Public Safety and Human Services Department committee meeting to deliver a presentation on the City’s much-delayed dual dispatch response. The City is hiring six mental health professionals and one clinical supervisor; the mental health professionals will be dispatched in three teams of two, with two teams working at a time. When the new program launches, theoretically in October, it will respond to calls such as welfare checks and person down calls, and it will not provide 24/7 response. Monisha Harrell spoke to the potential of alternate response programs to act as preventative measures that address situations before they become emergencies. 

However, this new program ultimately won’t deliver on the hope to have a new non-police emergency response in Seattle, which has been consistently blocked for the last three years by SPD, SPOG, and former Mayor Durkan. As Ashley Nerbovig at the Stranger succinctly summarizes: “A lot of questions about the direction of the program remain, and part of the pilot program includes collecting data to learn what types of calls don’t require police. That data basically already exists, though. The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform’s 2021 analysis showed that 80% of SPD calls for service involved non-criminal matters. The report also found that about half of all calls did not require a sworn response.” 

She reports that the main difference between this pilot program and the already existing Crisis Response Team is that with the new program, police will be allowed to leave the scene if they decide their presence is unnecessary. This might reflect a recent change in the pilot design as in the past, the dual dispatch plan has been described as having police staged nearby in case backup was needed, which is a key difference as police being directly on the scene can have an escalating effect. In any case, it seems clear the new pilot deviates from the model proven by the successful CAHOOTS and STAR programs.

Meanwhile, the overdue white paper was not mentioned.

On Tuesday the Mayor held a press conference to discuss his downtown activation plan, but he was interrupted by a small group of protesters demanding a ban on sweeps during the winter and extreme weather events. According to The Stranger, he got “incredibly flustered” and stated that the press conference “had them outnumbered at least.” Expect local groups to take notice of the Mayor’s discomfort with protestors and increase their direct actions in response.

Publicola reported on the substance of the proposal, which is mostly a repeat of what the Mayor has announced before: “And, of course, it assumes a heavier police presence downtown—a mostly unspoken, but bedrock, element of the proposal. “Make Downtown Safe and Welcoming” is actually number one on the plan’s list of seven priorities, starting with arrests of people “distributing and selling illegal drugs” (and, presumably, using them—Harrell mentioned that a bill criminalizing drug possession and public use will likely pass in July).”

Mayor Harrell’s office has released a memo on OPA findings about former SPD Chief Carmen Best. Because Best refused to participate in the investigation, the OPA said they were unable to find sufficient evidence to determine whether several of her statements in the summer of 2020 were “knowingly false.” The Mayor’s memo acts as a toothless rebuke, as Best will suffer no repercussions for her actions, even as the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reports that “Best’s use of information and inaccurate statements fits into a pattern of disinformation and “improper ruses” used by SPD during the protests.”

SPD Officer Constantin, who was fired for his social media posts, had his appeal dismissed after he failed to appear. Former SPD Officer Adley Shepherd’s appeal (he was suing the City after being fired for punching a woman he’d arrested and handcuffed) has also been dismissed.

County, State, and National News:

The King County Sheriff’s Office has been ordered to reinstate a deputy they fired in 2021 for killing an unarmed man who was wanted for the theft of a vehicle and a poodle. (The poodle survived.) King County later settled with the man’s family for $2.5 million. Deputy George Alvarez, who already had five shootings under his belt at the time of the incident, will return to the department, although he will not be reinstated to the SWAT team. As Publicola reports, Tamer Abouzeid, the director of OLEO, hopes the outcome of this case could lead to changing the burden of proof of administrative investigations to a preponderance of the evidence, which is a lower burden of proof than the current standard used of clear and convincing standard. 

In the last three or so months, nearly 400 inmates in the King County Jail have been moved to the Maleng Regional Justice Center (MRJC) in Kent. MRJC  now houses about 40% of the average daily jail population, up from around 25%, while the population of the downtown jail has been decreased by about a third. Right now, SCORE is housing 30 jail residents for King County. 

Meanwhile, Larch Corrections Center in Clark County will be closing this fall. It is one of twelve prisons in Washington State. Apparently the Department of Corrections is also finally developing a plan to reduce the use of solitary confinement in Washington prisons, after strong grassroots advocacy for legislation that would ban such use entirely, given that solitary confinement that lasts more than 15 days is recognized as torture by the United Nations and various human rights organizations.

Scott Greenstone at KNKX recently published an excellent piece outlining the lack of drug treatment facilities in Washington state and consequences of the new Blake fix drug law. While legislators and the governor insist the new law is meant to help people get more treatment more than it is to increase incarceration rates, there is a serious lack of treatment facilities in the state, and the existing facilities often have wait times of several months. We don’t know the full extent of the problem because “it’s unclear how many beds are actually sitting empty right now in Washington: The system is so complicated and poorly tracked, neither the governor’s office, nor the Washington Department of Health, nor the Healthcare Authority could provide those numbers.” And the urgency of the problem is increasing: while the number of people getting treated for substance use disorder has stayed relatively flat, the number of overdoses has skyrocketed in recent years.

The article also features noted addiction expert Caleb Banta-Green, who spoke to his feelings of discouragement after the new law was passed, as well as his worries that it will “make it easier to shut down clean-needle exchanges, and force people into an ineffective treatment system.”

Nationwide, we’re seeing a drop in the murder rate, as reported by Radley Balko: “If trends continue, 2023 will see the largest percentage drop in murders in U.S. history. The drop will be driven primarily by large declines in big cities. This would seem to undermine the argument that the 2-year rise in homicides during the pandemic was driven by criminal justice reform, George Soros’s favored prosecutors, or policing shortages.”

Housekeeping:

I’ve received a few pledge requests through Substack, so I just wanted to give you a reminder that if you want to support Notes from the Emerald City via subscription, you can do so through my Patreon.

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