consent decree

The City of Seattle is watching you

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Surveillance News:

First off, I’ll share my piece on Seattle’s surveillance expansion. City Council passed the legislation to implement this expansion on a 7-2 vote on Tuesday. Yesterday I heard about a website that some concerned citizens put up with a good round-up of media coverage of the vote.

Lavender Rights Project, Seattle Pride, and the Seattle DSA have made social media posts against the expansion. Lavender Rights Project wrote, “Lavender Rights Project is located directly within the zone of this projected surveillance expansion. Yet no impact analysis was conducted, nor was robust effort made to engage with our staff, or the communities we represent–those who will be most affected by these decisions. This disregard highlights exactly whose safety is prioritized, and whose lives are put at risk.”

This flier was also spotted in Capitol Hill:

In other surveillance news, DivestSPD found that state and federal law enforcement officers are sharing license plate data on obscure Seattle police email lists. 

The Intercept reported on how the company Fusus connected City of Seattle officials, including Claudia Gross-Shader from the Auditor’s Office, to a man, Marshall Freeman, who they introduced as the deputy chief administrative officer of the Atlanta Police Department. What Fusus neglected to tell the City was that Freeman is a member of their board and owns a small share of the company. The City didn’t find out until recently; in the meantime, Seattle bought Fusus’s real-time crime center software for an estimated price of $1.8 million. 

The kicker? “Gross-Shader also noted that the city had not seen research demonstrating the ability of Fusus’s technology to play a significant role in reducing retail theft, the issue that originally brought her to look into the company.”

Flock Safety, known for its extensive nationwide network of license plate readers, has rolled out a new feature that analyzes driving patterns to determine “suspicious” behavior and flag people as potential participants in organized crime. The ACLU writes about several reasons why this is concerning.

Forest Park, a city in Illinois, gave U.S. Customs and Border Patrol access to their license plate data. This example is noteworthy because Forest Park doesn’t use Flock Safety license plate readers, which have been garnering a lot of press recently. Their license plate readers are provided by Motorola Solutions, showing the dangers of this technology aren’t a matter of a single problematic vendor. 

Finally, Waymo self-driving cars are now being tested in the Seattle area. I know self-driving cars are a controversial issue and there are many big fans of the technology out there, but I would be remiss not to point out the surveillance capabilities of these vehicles, with LAPD and other police departments obtaining surveillance footage from these cars and using it as evidence. You can read 404 Media’s reporting about that here.  

Seattle News:

Earlier this month, I wrote about the opening of the new post-overdose stabilization ORCA center across from the King County courthouse. DESC, the organization that runs the new center, is also pioneering a different medicine treatment protocol for opioid addiction that thus far seems to be easier for people to tolerate. 

Last week, Seattle’s long-lasting consent decree finally came to an end. Mayor Bruce Harrell also announced he expects to finish negotiating a new contract with SPOG by the end of the year, about which he is very optimistic. We’ll see what he trades away to keep the CARE responders in existence. 

Harrell announced that as of the first day of school, the City has now hired more than 40 additional mental and behavioral health professionals across Seattle Public Schools (SPS) middle and high schools, for a total of over 60 mental health staff. You can read the press release about safety measures at SPS here.

Speaking of SPS, there will be a key board meeting on Wednesday, September 17 at 4:15pm where school board members are expected to vote on a pilot bringing a police officer back into Garfield High School.

Today Harrell announced $1.7 million in awards to expand services for survivors of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE). Organizations that received awards are the Organization for Prostitution Survivors, the Seattle Indian Health Board, Real Escape from the Sex Trade (REST), and Consejo Counseling and Referral Service. Notably absent from the list is one of former Councilmember Cathy Moore’s favorite providers, The More We Love.

King County and Washington State news:

This week, the King County Council voted in favor of moving forward the process of buying and opening a crisis care center in Capitol Hill. 

Washington Supreme Court Justice Mary Yu announced her retirement at the end of the year. Governor Bob Ferguson will appoint a replacement to serve until an election next year, where candidates will run to finish Yu’s term, which goes until the end of 2028. 

Washington Supreme Court justices are required to retire the year they turn 75 years old. Associate Chief Justice Charles Johnson will be turning 75 in 2026, and Justice Barbara Madsen will be turning 75 in 2027. With three Supreme Court seats up for grabs in the next few years, these upcoming judicial elections will shape the future of Washington state. 

Recent Headlines:

The City of Seattle is watching you Read More »

Seattle budget season is oh so political

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Seattle News:

It’s been a busy week, and I have three new stories to talk about. 

First off, I wrote about Seattle’s proposed surveillance expansion for The Urbanist, which would give SPD access to 365 SDOT cameras as well as permission to purchase many more cameras to place in three more areas of the city. That the City is trying to push forward with this plan right now, given what’s happening at the federal level, is particularly concerning. 

The public safety committee will be discussing this expansion again (and voting on it)  on Tuesday, August 12 at 9:30am. There will be the opportunity to give public comment at the beginning of this meeting. 

Next up, as I reported at The Urbanist, the Seattle Shield Initiative passed this week, which means Seattleites will be voting on the B&O tax restructure in November. While the council watered the proposal down, it passed with an unanimous vote, which is something I wouldn’t have expected as recently as a month ago. The fact that Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck was able to get this passed in time to be put on the ballot in spite of not having any strong allies on the council is notable. It seems like having Mayor Bruce Harrell on board helped to smooth the way. 

The city received another revenue forecast this week, which was a bit less bad than the one in April. However, the Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts’ interim director Jan Duras said it’s likely the next revenue forecast, due in October, will be worse.  

This is interesting maneuvering on the part of Harrell, who now gets to base his proposed budget, due at the end of September, on a better forecast than is likely to be true by the time the council actually has to pass the budget. Since his budget team is assuming the Seattle Shield Initiative will pass in their formation of the budget, it’s possible he won’t have to make many unpopular cuts in his proposed budget before the election at the beginning of the November. 

This also means the council will be left with the football when it comes time to grapple with any necessary budget cuts later in October, should the revenue forecast worsen. 

It seems like Harrell might not be overly eager to introduce the public safety sales tax hike after all. If the City doesn’t need the revenue to bridge a deficit gap, he can play it safe with public opinion and postpone implementing such a regressive tax. Even if a councilmember decides to go for it, it will leave Harrell with clean hands.

Councilmember Rinck was also able to add $300,000 to the city’s supplementary budget this week to pay for legal defense for unaccompanied children facing detention and deportation. This money was taken from underspend from Seattle’s much criticized SCORE jail contract. Councilmembers Rob Saka and Martiza Rivera were the sole “no” votes.

My third piece, at Bolts Magazine, covers the renewal of Seattle’s democracy voucher program this week. The City is supposed to convene a workgroup in early 2026 to look into possible improvements to the program, including strategies to better deal with independent expenditures in local races. This will be an opportunity for stakeholders to participate in figuring out what’s next for the program. I’ll also be very interested to see how the combination of democracy vouchers and ranked choice voting in 2027 pans out. 

More Seattle news:

We had a primary! Progressives in Seattle did very well. There is a ton of analysis available to read, none of which I am going to link to. My observation, for what it’s worth, is that many more people appear to pay attention to national news than to local news, so I tend to think the Trump effect is one of the main factors at play here. 

As I was writing this, the news dropped that Katie Wilson, who is running against Harrell for mayor, has broken 50% of the primary vote. Wilson is more than 15,000 votes ahead of Harrell at this time. 

The next consent decree hearing has been set for Wednesday, September 3. This could be the last hearing of Seattle’s consent decree. 

Seattle is paying $3 million to settle the lawsuit brought by SPD’s Deanne Nolette, who alleged wage, job and gender discrimination. She also alleged that former Chief Adrian Diaz had retaliated against her since she had also been up for the Chief job, and that he “has a history of misogyny.” 

Housekeeping:

I’ll be out on vacation the next few weeks, but never fear, I’ll be back at it before the end of the month. Close followers of local news know that the fall tends to be a particularly busy time, and this year should be no exception. 

Recent Headlines:

 

Seattle budget season is oh so political Read More »

Local surveillance is ramping up in tandem with federal surveillance

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Seattle News:

First up, I wrote about the new proposed crisis care center site in Capitol Hill. 

One detail I hadn’t remembered is that the King County crisis care levy doesn’t provide any funding for involuntary treatment. Now, there is an important distinction here, because the first crisis care center, Kirkland Connections, does have involuntary beds, and when I interviewed them earlier this year, that involuntary capacity was mostly full. So it’s not impossible for crisis care centers to have involuntary treatment space, but none of that is funded by the crisis care levy dollars. 

New SPD Chief Shon Barnes was sworn in last week. PubliCola reported that Barnes was out of town most weekends during his first four months as SPD Chief. A side note from that reporting is that Barnes met with Sound Thinking Technologies on March 17, when he’d been chief for less than two months. Sound Thinking is known for their Shotspotter gun shot detection technology that Harrell has proposed a couple of times, only to have community reject it. 

Mayor Bruce Harrell and Chief Barnes are celebrating SPD’s real time crime center (RTCC) so I finally got to enter the room where it happens. It did not, in fact, feel like I’d entered the control center of a science fiction movie. The RTCC is staffed by two analysts 19 hours a day, seven days a week. 

The cameras SPD are installing include five cameras in each deployment: a 360 camera with a pan tilt zoom camera mounted below. So each camera actually gives out five feeds, four of which are static and facing all four directions, the last of which is a pan tilt zoom that can move and focus. The cameras record for five days at a time. They don’t use facial recognition or gait analysis, but they do have an AI overlay within the camera systems that allows the police to look for things such as “blue shirts, black pants,” to use SPD Captain James Britt’s example. 

57 cameras have been installed so far in the three zones: Aurora North, the downtown core, and the CID. 

Britt said, “​​We’re looking to add a couple of new locations in coming legislation, which will include the Capitol Hill nightlife area, the area around the stadiums, and the area around Garfield High School. We’re working with council right now to work on that legislation. The ability for the real time crime center has also to pull in private video from businesses and other places that are willing to give their video. We’re working on getting that rolled out, but we’re not quite ready to go there just yet. We’re also working, as part of the legislation, to be able to pull in other government-owned cameras, which would include DOT cameras and cameras from other city facilities around the area.”

By DOT cameras, Britt is referring to traffic cameras operated by SDOT. 

Britt assured me that the RTCC doesn’t connect with any federal agencies with its data or equipment. SPD is also planning to have random audits of their analysts to make sure they’re following policy. Britt said it would be illegal to use RTCC data to assist ICE. However, in recent months we have been seeing many of these protective laws being bent or broken across the country, including close to home in Pierce County.

You can read articles about the RTCC center from The Seattle Times and PubliCola. The Times article in particular does a good job covering some of the civil rights concerns related to the use of these cameras and the RTCC.

At the same press conference, Harrell announced that SPD has hired almost 100 new officers as of July 1. 

Seattle is also asking to leave its federal consent decree after more than 13 years. My guess is that Judge James Robart will schedule a hearing in the fall, possibly in September.

This week the city council passed new graffiti and nuisance property legislation, which I will be writing more about in the near future. 

The applicants for Cathy Moore’s council seat have been made public, and rumor has it that former Councilmember Debra Juarez might be a shoo-in for the position. The final vote on the councilmember appointment will be on July 28. 

Surveillance news

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking and reading about surveillance since President Donald Trump signed his big budget bill on July 4. The bill gives ICE a whole lot of money, and as a result, we can expect to see large investments in building out surveillance systems. These will be nominally for the purpose of helping to deport illegal immigrants, but there is always the potential for an existing surveillance system to be used for other purposes. 

Right now, here’s some of the data we know is being shared with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP):

I’d recommend caution when thinking about laws such as Washington’s Shield Law that are designed to protect immigrants or California’s law regulating the sharing of ALPR data. While it is good to have these legal protections, we are currently seeing the limit of these laws in action, including in California, Illinois, and here in Washington. Assurances that a surveillance behavior and/or data sharing would be illegal are not sufficient to ensure safety at this time. 

Recent Headlines:

 

Local surveillance is ramping up in tandem with federal surveillance 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 »

Seattle is the only large city in the US that hasn’t had a homicide in 2025

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Seattle News:

Seattle is the only large American city that has not yet experienced a homicide this year. 

There was a public safety committee meeting on Tuesday where councilmembers discussed the new less lethal weapons legislation. I wrote about that meeting for The Urbanist. Warning: at times it got rather colorful!

Today, the Council narrowed down the list of candidates for the open D2 council seat from 20 applicants to 6 finalists: Chukundi Salisbury, Mark Solomon, Adonis Ducksworth, Thaddaeus Gregory, Edward Lin, and Hong Chhuor. There will be a public forum for these finalists on Tuesday, January 21 at 5:30pm at Columbia City Theater, hosted by Seattle CityClub. Current councilmembers will make their final selection on Monday, January 27. 

Pedro Gomez, who served as Mayor Bruce Harrell’s director of external affairs, has resigned after facing rape allegations from someone with whom he was having an after-hours business meeting. Marcus Harrison Green interviewed the woman pressing charges who was torn between her views as a prison abolitionist and her desire to protect her community and hold Gomez accountable.

This week PubliCola followed up on the 30×30 pledge made by SPD to have 30% of their sworn staff be women by 2030. In 2024 86% of the 84 new officers hired were men, a number reflective of gender breakdown in applicants more generally.

PubliCola also reported that Kevin Dave, the SPD officer who was fired last week, two years after hitting and killing Jaahnavi Kandula, has appealed his firing. The Public Safety Civil Service Commission held an initial hearing on this appeal on January 16, but the case could take a long time to be decided.

King County News:

King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay was just unanimously chosen by his fellow councilmembers to be the Chair of the King County Council. He is also running for the County Executive position in November, as is fellow Councilmember Claudia Balducci. 

King County Council has a vacancy due to Dave Upthegrove’s recent election to Public Lands Commissioner. Councilmembers will have to select someone to fill Upthegrove’s spot, and committee assignments are expected to be made in February. 

WA State News:

Last week I went down to Olympia for a special media event before the legislative session began this Monday, January 13, which I found very enlightening. As a result, I wrote a piece for The Urbanist: Ferguson Pushes Budget Cuts as Washington Legislature Seeks New Revenue. 

As my readers doubtless know, I cover Seattle’s budget season in some detail every year, and I was pleased to be able to apply some of that budget knowledge to understanding what’s going on with the state’s budget right now. I posted on Bluesky that the state budget that gets passed this year will have reverberations for years to come. We’re still experiencing consequences from the austerity practiced at the state level from the Great Recession, so that gives you an idea of how impactful lawmakers’ choices are this year: how much and where will they cut, what programs will they delay (and what will their plan be for making sure the delay isn’t permanent?), and will they pass new revenue options to help ease the difficulty? 

Even the legislature’s decision as to whether to raise the property tax cap for local municipalities (cities and counties) will have strong ripple effects either way, as King County, for example, continues to struggle with its budget as its revenues have had no way to keep up with expenditures due to the high inflation a few years ago. 

On Wednesday, our new governor, Bob Ferguson, gave his inaugural address, which seems to have made Republicans happier than Democrats. You can read a recent interview with Ferguson here. Ferugson also signed three executive orders on his first day: one to work to protect reproductive rights in Washington and two related to housing regulations and permitting. 

Nick Brown, the new Attorney General taking over the office from Ferguson, is unhappy about the cuts Ferguson has said he wants the office to make. The Seattle Times reported that Ferguson protected the office’s funds while he was Attorney General but as governor has changed his tune. Brown opposes the cut, saying it will impact the office’s ability to take on civil rights and anti-trust cases.

In Praise:

I was thinking over the winter vacation about how to incorporate joy, hope, and a positive vision into the work I do. For those of you who know me personally, it will come as no surprise that these are part of my daily project of living, and yet it is also true that in my journalism work, I am most often covering very serious topics that can be emotionally taxing and discouraging to engage with. 

I also think that political thought does not need to be inherently bleak and depressing, a statement which I realize is especially bold on this particular weekend. But perhaps it is more important now than ever to remember this. 

For an example, I offer up the novel I’ve been working on for the past year, the second in the Satori Chronicles series, entitled Stars, Hide Your Fires. The first novel in that series was distinctly a dystopia, but this new one is not. This new one imagines how a society could be better: not perfect, not a utopia. Indeed, one of the main themes of the book is that societies cannot be static and perfect but must be continually invested into and engaged with or risk falling into complacency and potential injustice. But better. 

In the process of writing this novel, I’ve realized that what seems on the surface to be a simple act–to imagine a world that is a bit better than this one or the dystopia portrayed in the first book–can feel subversive. It was, it turns out, not always easy to imagine such a world and how to set an interesting story within it. It was certainly more difficult than following the tried and true path of the dystopia. In spite of its challenges, it has been a rewarding experiment, trying to create this more positive vision. 

In that spirit, I am experimenting with adding this “In Praise” section to the newsletter. I have been waffling about it, not wanting to create more work for myself, but this morning I was reading Orwell’s Roses, a book by Rebecca Solnit, and I came across this quotation from George Orwell and realized I’d made up my mind:

“A correspondent reproaches me with being ‘negative’ and ‘always attacking things.’ The fact is that we live in a time when causes for rejoicing are not numerous. But I like praising things, when there is anything to praise, and I would like here to write a few lines–they have to be retrospective, unfortunately–in praise of the Woolworth’s Rose.”

What a wonderful thing to publish in a column! Orwell wrote this at the beginning of 1944. Now here, at the beginning of 2025, some of us might also feel like the causes for rejoicing may not be numerous. But that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to take some time to appreciate the roses. 

Recent Headlines:

 

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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 »

The End of the Consent Decree is Tied to the Next SPOG Contract

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Seattle News:

The push for a new war on drugs continues. Publicola reports that DESC will be running the new overdose recovery center from its Morrison hotel building on Third Avenue. King County has committed $2 million to renovating the second floor of this building for this purpose, and Seattle will spend $2 million on construction (out of the $7 million total the Mayor said he’d be using on capital projects related to the fentanyl crisis). What the remaining $5 million will be spent on is currently unclear. The slightly more than $1 million Mayor Harrell has been talking about investing every year for services would not be able to fund operations at this overdose recovery center 24-7. This response seems inadequate given King County is about to surpass 2022’s number of overdose fatalities with four months remaining in the year. 

The Public Safety and Human Services committee is scheduled to discuss and vote on the new drug war legislation at 9:30am next Tuesday 9/12, and there will be an opportunity for the public to give public comment at that time (one script is here). If the legislation passes out of committee, it could be voted on by the Full Council as soon as September 19. If, however, the legislation were to stall in committee, the upcoming budget season could potentially delay a final vote until after Thanksgiving.

Speaking of, budget season is coming up fast, with Mayor Harrell’s proposed budget expected on Tuesday, September 26. Solidarity Budget is having their launch event this Saturday from 1-3pm at Rainier Playfield in Columbia City, where attendees can enjoy food, music, a photo booth and more while learning about the city’s budget process and Solidarity Budget’s demands for nine guarantees. For those who wish to volunteer with Solidarity Budget, there will be a volunteer orientation on Thursday, September 14 from 6-7:30pm over Zoom. 

One of the hot topics we can expect to be discussed during budget season is the upcoming gap in Seattle’s General Fund and how and whether the city should pursue additional progressive revenue to fill this gap. Real Change offers a few different opinions on this issue here and here.

A hearing for the consent decree was held on Wednesday, with a written ruling released on Thursday morning. Judge Robart opted to terminate many sections of the consent decree, but not all; he wrote: “As a result, the court finds and concludes that the City and SPD must meet additional milestones to demonstrate sustained full and effective compliance with the use of force and accountability requirements of the Consent Decree and to achieve final resolution of this matter.” He is specifically concerned with use of force as it pertains to crowd control after SPD’s actions in 2020. 

The ruling goes on to lay out a timeline of various tasks that must be completed in order for the consent decree to be fully and finally terminated. Several of the deadlines fall in December 2023, with additional deadlines in the first few months of next year, culminating in a report from the Monitor due March 29, 2024. 

Pivotally, it sounds as though Judge Robart’s willingness to end the consent decree rests on the contents of the next SPOG contract, how it deals with issues of accountability, and specifically whether it enables the 2017 Accountability Ordinance to finally go into full effect. This is an interesting twist, as both Mayor Harrell and SPD are highly incentivized to close out the consent decree, so this warning on the Judge’s part could have ramifications at the bargaining table. In his comments on Wednesday, Judge Robart mentioned that he doesn’t believe issues of discipline and accountability should be a part of bargaining in the first place.

Judge Robart also took another shot at the defund movement, blaming it for Seattle’s struggles to recruit more police, even though police departments across the country are having the same problem. As The Stranger’s Ashley Nerbovig reports, “Defend the Defund organizer BJ Last called it “extremely disingenuous” for the judge to blame the defund movement as the reason why people don’t want to join a profession that increases a person’s likelihood of suicide by 54%.” She also mentioned the Judge’s comments that cop TV shows are “the worst enemy of good police work.” 

For more analysis on how the consent decree has failed in its promise, you can read my op-ed at The Urbanist, where I discuss the high cost of the decree, its removal of community agency, and its failure to address biased policing, including a reminder of Dr. Sherry Towers’s analysis that 1 out of 10 killings in Seattle are committed by a police officer.

King County and Washington State News:

The Seattle Times published a positive piece on the Office of Law Enforcement Oversight (OLEO)’s director Tamar Abouzeid, calling him “an unapologetic reformer who thinks America’s criminal legal system is racist and broken, and needs to be radically changed or scrapped.” OLEO recently released its 2022 annual report. There was a 22% drop in complaints for the year, with the bulk of the drop being for complaints initiated by Sheriff’s Office employees. The number of investigations OLEO declined to certify more than doubled from 2021 to 13% (OLEO certified 101 investigations and declined to certify 15). Deputies with three or more allegations account for approximately 5% of the sworn force, but approximately 40% of all allegations. The number of allegations of excessive force rose from 58 in 2021 to 73 in 2022, but none of the allegations that were closed were sustained.

Meanwhile, over at King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD), the staffing issues are so bad that sometimes corrections officers must work up to 16 hours a day for multiple days, with one officer registering 1000 hours of overtime last year. 60% of officers have doctor’s notes that protect them from having to work overtime, up from 15% in 2018. As Ashley Nerbovig reports, “The jails have what amounts to a 29% job vacancy rate due to the number of actual open positions combined with the number of officers restricted to “light duty.””

In state redistricting news, a federal judge ruled Washington must redraw one of its legislative districts in Yakima Valley and set a progress report deadline of January 8. This deadline means the state legislature would have to convene a special session in order to vote to reconvene the state redistricting commission; if they do not, the court can decide on a new legislative map instead. At present it is not even certain whether the legislature would have the necessary votes to reconvene the commission, even if they were to hold a special session. Therefore, a court decision on a new map seems likely.

Recent Headlines:

 

The End of the Consent Decree is Tied to the Next SPOG Contract Read More »

Real Change Reporting Reveals Federal Monitor Oftelie Getting Cozy with SPD

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Seattle News

In a fascinating piece of reporting in Real Change, Glen Stellmacher wrote about how SPD and the City of Seattle controlled the media narrative around the 2020 protests and the Defund Movement. I highly recommend reading the entire article, but here are some key points:

  • In a June 19, 2020 survey, SPD leadership recommended at least 12 areas of service within SPD that would be better with civilian employees.
  • In the face of defund demands, SPD claimed they would have to cut the SW precinct, SWAT, or traffic enforcement if cuts went too far. However, this narrative was shown to be false by both the June 19, 2020 and June 27, 2020 surveys of SPD leadership.
  • By August 2020, SPD and the City were aware that 45% of SPD patrol service hours didn’t require an officer. However, Mayor Durkan requested a second IDT; the results, not available until June 2021, also said nearly half of calls could be handled by a civilian response. At that point, you may remember SPD insisted on a risk managed demand report, which wasn’t completed until September 2022.
  • SPD played with the numbers to make the loss of diversity in the force, should there be layoffs, seem as bad as possible.
  • It appears then-SPD Chief Strategy Officer Chris Fischer may have ghost-written a Crosscut op-ed for Antonio Oftelie; Crosscut says they didn’t know SPD was involved and has since removed the op-ed from their site. Two days after publication, SPD’s Executive Director of Legal Affairs was pushing for Oftelie to be named the new Monitor of the consent decree. He was named the new Monitor the next month, beating out several qualified candidates. 

This Sunday, July 23 from 12-7pm in Othello Park, there will be a Participatory Budgeting cookout to launch the idea collection phase of participatory budgeting. You can also submit a proposal here.

In a court ruling this week, a judge ruled the City of Seattle has been using an overbroad definition of “obstruction” to justify its sweeps activity, writing that it constitutes “cruel punishment.” The definition was expanded in 2017, increasing obstruction removals in the City. The lawsuit is scheduled for trial in September.

On Tuesday, an SPD officer shot a man downtown. SPD is supposed to release video footage of what happened within 72 hours.

The Office of Police Accountability (OPA) is investigating the incident of the mock tombstone of a man killed by SPD police displayed in an SPD breakroom. Chief Diaz has ordered inspections of precinct HQs for other potential inappropriate displays. At a CPC meeting this week, Chief Diaz had very little information to share.

And finally, it’s supplemental budget time! The proposed supplemental budget includes around $815k in additional funding for SPD, including increasing overtime to pay for more downtown emphasis patrols, paying for additional online crime reporting, and hiring six civilian positions, including four new public disclosure officers. It also adds an additional $19 million for the City to pay for lawsuits, many of which are related to police misconduct. The City already added $11 million to the 2023 for lawsuits last year, but apparently that wasn’t enough.

In addition, the supplemental budget funds a graffiti clean-up team, and because the contracts have already been executed, the Mayor’s Office has potentially forced the Council’s hand into cutting other Seattle Public Utilities programs to pay for this. More money is also being requested for the CSCC for its dual dispatch pilot and updating its call center technology and for OIG to take over the consent decree’s Monitor duties. 

There is a vote scheduled on the supplemental budget on the morning of August 2. 

Recent Headlines

Real Change Reporting Reveals Federal Monitor Oftelie Getting Cozy with SPD Read More »

SPD Responsible for 1 out of 10 Killings in Seattle, Data Scientist Says

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Seattle News

First up, I wrote an article for The Urbanist about the proposed drug legislation being voted on in Seattle next week. If you’d like to email your councilmembers and/or give public comment at the City Council meeting next Tuesday June 5, you can find a quick email submission here, and scripts here and here. It looks like the vote will be a close one.

Late last week, City Attorney Davison informed the Seattle Municipal Court she will no longer be participating in their community court, effectively shutting it down. Those people on the High Utilizers Initiative list were already barred from using community court, which was a court for people who had committed certain low-level crimes. This step is likely to significantly add to the caseload of the City Attorney’s prosecutors. It will be interesting to see how the office’s case clearance rate, rate of dismissals, and attrition rate will be impacted by this change in the months to come. CM Lewis has been vocal in defense of community court, tweeting, “Misinformation about Seattle Community Court success rates is circling in the media, so let’s get a few things straight. Approximately 75% of people who enter Community Court complete the program, and 80% of them go on to commit no new criminal law violations.” 

It has come to light that during the 2020 George Floyd protests, SPD called for help from at least 23 different law enforcement agencies. Officers from these agencies were not ruled by SPD policy relating to use of force, reporting, and accountability, and used weapons such as “Stinger” rubber pellet blast grenades, 12-gauge beanbag “shotgun” rounds, military style SAF smoke, HC smoke, and Aerial Flash-Bang devices. As Glen Stellmacher reports:

“If SPD holds a backdoor policy that allows for the use of these weapons, that policy is not available to the public, nor are the conditions for the use of these specific weapons. If SPD solely relied on communication with these agencies to prevent the use of certain types of weapons, that dialogue appeared chaotic and indecisive.”

There were at least 547 uses of force by these other agencies during the 2020 protests, and it doesn’t look like any of them were investigated by the OPA. The OIG is performing an audit about SPD use of “mutual aid,” but no results of this audit have yet been made available to the public. It also appears that SPD orchestrated their infamous Proud Boy “ruse” because they didn’t know how to deal with crowd control without their mutual aid partners.

Meanwhile, Seattle has spent a whopping $20.1 million on outside legal fees for four lawsuits related to the 2020 protests.

The 2020 protests are also haunting Bob Ferguson, who launched an exploratory campaign for governor at the beginning of May. He announced the endorsement of former SPD Chief Carmen Best on Twitter this week. His base in Seattle didn’t take kindly to this news, as Best admitted to deleting text messages and was in charge of SPD during the tear gassing of Seattle neighborhoods during the 2020 protests. 

On the Consent Decree

This week, Judge Robart held a hearing in response to the DOJ and City of Seattle’s request for reduced oversight and an imminent end to the consent decree that has been in place for over eleven years. While it is unclear when the judge will issue a ruling, he signaled he will be rewriting parts of the proposed order but that overall he is proud of the work SPD has done under the consent decree. Not everyone agrees with this assessment:

“Ultimately, Seattle’s experience shows consent decrees to be a trap — one that results in more expensive police departments, but which leaves untouched the violence at the heart of policing. Consent decrees first offer communities validation for the harm police have caused them, along with a promise of someone else coming in and “fixing” the police. In practice, they cut off community voices, inflate police budgets at the expense of everything else, and legitimize the very police force that continues to harm the community.” 

Meanwhile, data scientist Dr. Sherry Towers wrote to the judge before the hearing to share some alarming findings, saying, “During my examination of police shooting and homicide data from 2015 to 2021[*] in my research, I found that the rates of police killings per homicide in Seattle were significantly higher than in other areas of the US (nationwide around 3% to 4% of all homicides were due to police killings, whereas in Seattle during that time period that number was 11%, well over twice the national average – to put this in perspective, one out of ten people killed in Seattle since 2015 was killed by a police officer).” 

She went on to say, “I found that by all measures I examined, fatal police violence and racial disparities in police shootings became worse after the consent decree, both in total number and per homicide.  In addition, significantly more police officers were involved in each shooting incident after the consent decree (2.5 on average), compared to before (1.5 on average), and police shootings became significantly more likely to be fatal.” 

Finally, a particular wrinkle of police union contract bargaining was discussed at the hearing. In general, if the negotiations between the City and the police union reach an impasse, the next step is to go to interest arbitration. However, the only issues that are allowed to go to interest arbitration are those that were included in the list of contract issues to be bargained that is created at the start of negotiations. So if a new issue comes up in the middle of negotiation, that can’t be forced into interest arbitration. This had huge implications for the 2017 police accountability ordinance, which hadn’t been included on the list of contract issues for the SPOG contract that was approved in 2018. 

Recent Headlines

 

SPD Responsible for 1 out of 10 Killings in Seattle, Data Scientist Says Read More »

Disproportionate Incarceration is Alive and Well in King County

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Seattle News

Judge Robart has set the next consent decree hearing for Tuesday, May 30 at 1pm. Buckle your seatbelts because this one should be interesting!

Seattle’s Public Safety and Human Services committee heard a presentation from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) on Tuesday regarding the work that office will be doing should the new consent decree agreement be approved. The Monitor’s oversight work will be transitioning over to OIG, which will also review other parts of SPD beyond those mandated by the consent decree. OIG will be producing a use of force assessment to be delivered to the court by the end of July, which will include force used in crisis incidents, use of less lethal devices, and force used during crowd management, using data from 2021 and 2022. Note this data is provided directly by SPD. They are also hoping to analyze data on traffic stops that aren’t Terry stops, the data of which has been fairly inaccessible up until now. 

OIG’s fourth and final Sentinel Event Review (SER) covering the 2020 protests should be released in the next few weeks. In total, OIG has made more than 400 recommendations to SPD based on these SER reports, the implementation of which they’ll be monitoring. They are also considering utilizing the SER model in the future for officer-involved shootings in crisis incidents. In addition, they will be investigating whether SPD has the appropriate systems to comply with the new state decertification law. 

OIG has made a number of comments designated as “matters of consideration,” which don’t go as far as recommendations. CM Herbold asked about the matter of consideration pertaining to the fact that historically SPD police chiefs have chosen to apply the lower end of recommended discipline when there has been misconduct; Director Judge replied this was a good time to refresh that data and see what Chief Diaz’s trend has been in this regard. OIG is looking at several other issues, including limiting deception during interrogation and reviewing SPD’s “ruse” policy; work around traffic stops with the Vera Institute; case closure rates in the investigative bureau; and a report to be released in Q2 analyzing SPD’s compliance with the city’s youth rights ordinance that requires youth be allowed to consult with counsel before waiving their rights. 

OIG has a new Deputy Director, Bessie Marie Scott, who worked previously for the Public Defender Association and as the Interim Director of the CPC. OIG is currently hiring for three additional full-time positions, including a team lead and two policy analysts. 

This week the Seattle City Council also received an economic forecast report, including a revenue forecast, which shows the core general fund revenue sources are not expected to keep up with inflation. Actual revenues from the Jumpstart tax fell from $293m in 2021 to $253m in 2022, and are expected to be $263m this year, revised significantly downwards from the previous estimate of $294m. The REET revenue forecast for 2023 has also significantly dropped; in November, these estimates were revised from $95m to $68m, and that number has dropped even further to $55m. The REET revenues aren’t expected to recover fully until 2027.

All of this is to say that the Council will be looking at an even smaller pot of money than expected during this fall’s budget season, and the results of the progressive revenue task force have become even more critical.

King County News

This week seems like a good opportunity to dig into the recent booking data from the King County Jail. In the last two weeks, there have been 148 total bookings; 38.4% of bookings have been misdemeanors, of which 50.2% were booked by SPD. If you remember, the King County Council mentioned Executive Constantine can enact booking restrictions for misdemeanors. That being said, 88.6% of the total jail population were booked for a felony. And 21% of the population have been imprisoned in the King County Jail for more than a year.

If you look at how race correlates with charge type, 34.2% of those misdemeanor bookings were Black people, whereas for felony bookings, 27.7% were Black people. Looking at the total jail population, Black people constitute 38.6%. For comparison, Black people make up around 7% of both Seattle and King County’s populations. As we learned in the last few King County Council meetings, many of those in the King County Jail are there because they cannot afford to pay bail or are waiting for competency restoration. 

Thus we can see how disproportionate incarceration is alive and well in King County, and how systemic racism, the racial wealth gap, and underinvestment in marginalized communities continue to cause harm today.

charts showing percentages discussed in text
KCJ bookings showing misdemeanors 4/12/2023
Chart showing percentages discussed in text
KCJ bookings showing felonies 4/12/2023
Chart showing percentages discussed in text
KCJ Population by Charge Type, Race, and Length of Stay

WA State News

While this year’s legislative session has been very productive in some ways, it’s been a disappointing year for police accountability. None of the major bills designed to improve police accountability made it through the legislative process, and SB 5352, the bill that rolls back reforms to lethal police pursuits made in 2021, was passed by the House this week in a vote of 57-40, in what Representative Julia Reed called “the most bizarre debate experience I’ve had to date.”

On Tuesday night the House voted on the Blake bill, SB 5336, which passed 54 to 41. The Senate version set drug possession as a gross misdemeanor, and the new House version changes that to a simple misdemeanor. The potential jail time for a gross misdemeanor in Washington State maxes out at 364 days, whereas for a simple misdemeanor it maxes out at 90 days. You can read more about this bill here, which will now move on to negotiations between the House and the Senate.

Two gun control bills have also now passed both houses. The one getting the most press is the assault weapon ban, which now goes to the governor for a signature and is expected to be the subject of a future lawsuit. The other bill would require potential gun owners to get trained, screened, and wait for 10 days before being able to purchase a weapon. 

Meanwhile, Austin Fields criticized the recent capital gains tax ruling by the Washington Supreme Court for falling short of making a case for a more equitable economy:

“The Court’s cautious path was predictable—and widely predicted—but that doesn’t excuse the justices’ failure to endorse a more democratic, equitable tax system. Of course, the state desperately needs the estimated $500 million from the tax to fund early childhood programs. But the Court could have gone further and acknowledged the State Legislature’s existing authority to directly tax the incomes of Washington’s mega-rich to pay for thousands of affordable homes, a health care system capable of treating everyone, and everything else a truly progressive state would guarantee its residents.”

Recent Headlines

Disproportionate Incarceration is Alive and Well in King County Read More »