elections

Seattle’s Participatory Budgeting Process Moving Forward

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Lots of news to discuss at the end of a busy week!

First off, the Black Brilliance Project presented their final report at the City Council committee meeting this morning. You can view the slide deck here.

CM Morales made a point to emphasize the City of Seattle has been doing participatory budgeting since 2015, albeit on a smaller scale, and that as a result, they have systems already in place to deal with both online and off-line systems for voting etc. The two highest priority focuses to guide the participatory budgeting process were housing & physical space and mental health, and the need for a big push for digital equity was also discussed.

A steering committee will create the rules for the participatory budgeting process. This body will consist of 7 people who meet various criteria that strongly emphasizes lived experience (you can see details of these criteria in the slide deck). The process of choosing the committee will be as follows: first job descriptions will be created and shared, then from the pool of most qualified applicants several will be randomly selected to serve on a jury. This jury will then choose the actual members of the steering committee from the remaining pool of most qualified applicants. There will also be several workgroups working on the PB process.

A potential timeline for the participatory budgeting process has been released. As you can see below, they are hoping the community can vote on proposals this summer, with implementation of the proposals later this year. This is contrary to some commentators’ predictions that participatory budgeting wouldn’t be able to be completed this year.

As you may remember, the City Council has been deeply interested in crisis response systems such as CAHOOTS in Eugene and STAR in Denver. When asked about the potential for a similar system to be funded through the PBP, Shaun Glaze said that community had expressed more interest in many small investments in crisis response and wellness management as opposed to a larger program run by city workers. They mentioned people might still not trust a CAHOOTS-style program that is run by the City.

The next step for the City Council is to lift the proviso on the funds allocated for the PBP, which CM Morales said she’d like to try to do at her next committee meeting on March 16. Right now in the PBP, we are currently in the design phase, and the next step will be brainstorming ideas, which they are hoping to start in March.

In election news, Brianna Thomas is running for CP González’s vacated seat on the City Council. Mike McQuaid is running against CM Mosqueda for City Council, and it has recently been reported that he was charged with assault and harassment over a landscape dispute in 2015. This doesn’t seem to demonstrate the kind of cool head and anger management skills we might hope for in a city council member.

The CPC voted this week to approve a list of recommendations for Seattle’s upcoming contract negotiations with SPOG, in spite of community urging them to collect more community feedback during a community conversation earlier in February:

“The commission generally agreed on the transparency proposals, which included a recommendation to require the city to make public the membership of its negotiating team, its bargaining priorities, and any concessions it makes during negotiations. Commissioners also broadly supported a recommendation that negotiators try to remove the parts of the SPOG contract that allow the agreement to supersede city law; Officer Mark Mullens, the only SPD officer on the commission, was the only member to oppose that proposal.”

The CPC decided against recommending to completely civilianize the OPA’s staff, worried that the police department would then be more likely to hide things from that department. They also chose not to advocate for a section in the bargaining allowing SPD to lay off officers “in a safe and effective manner,” allowing for out-of-order layoffs, citing a concern that this could cause mismanagement.

The new Police Monitor for the City of Seattle’s consent decree, Antonio Oftelie, had an op-ed in the Seattle Times this week. In it he echoes Judge Robart’s warning from earlier this month, basically coming out against defunding the police department, although he is not against finding additional funding for community-driven alternative approaches:

Through the consent decree, the city made a set of binding promises about how SPD will promote public safety. Compliance with the decree requires that the city provide resources necessary to carry out those promises. Stripping away funding from SPD without meaningfully standing up the alternative community resources and social programs necessary to provide for community well-being risks undermining the progress that Seattle has made over the past eight years.

In state legislature news, the Pathways to Recovery Act, also known as the Treatment and Recovery Act, is officially dead. The bill could be picked back up in 2022, although given its status as a “bigger bill” it would be more difficult to pass it during the short session of 2022. Advocates are also considering turning it into a ballot measure in 2022. A similar ballot measure passed in Oregon in 2020.

In related news, yesterday the Washington Supreme Court struck down the state’s drug felony possession law because unlike similar laws in other states, the law didn’t require prosecutors to prove someone knowingly possessed drugs. This ruling could have wide-sweeping implications. The Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys have instructed their members to immediately drop any pending cases for simple drug possession and to obtain orders vacating the convictions of anyone serving time for simple drug possession. State legislators are likely to take up this matter before the end of the legislative session this spring, introducing new legislation, so we’ll see what happens there.

Finally, SB 5051, a bill about decertification of police officers, has passed the Senate and moved onto the House. You can read more details about it at the Seattle Times and at People Power Washington.

Thanks for sticking with me, and have a wonderful weekend!

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An important Seattle Public Safety Committee meeting tomorrow

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Lots of news to cover today!

First of all, we have this morning’s Seattle Council Briefing.

CM Herbold’s report this morning was rather bracing. She spoke about the agenda for tomorrow morning’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee meeting. Included will be the continuation of the discussion about the less lethal weapons draft bill that she’s hoping they can vote to send to the DoJ and Police Monitor to review, as well as a discussion about legislation to reduce the SPD’s 2021 budget by $5.2m to hold them accountable for that level of overspending in 2020. Both of these deserve more discussion.

Kevin at SC Insight does a good job summarizing where we are right now with the less lethal weapons draft bill. Tomorrow the committee will be discussing an amendment to weaken the ban on SPD using tear gas, so now would be a good time to email your CMs to support the complete tear gas ban and/or to testify during public comment tomorrow (2/9) at 9:30am (sign-ups at 7:30am). Amendments both strengthening and weakening the private right of action (the ability of individuals to sue and hold the SPD accountable for misuse of these weapons) will also be discussed.

The CMs agreed to reduce SPD’s 2021 budget by the amount of their overspending in 2020 late last year and seemed generally in agreement about taking this measure to hold the SPD accountable for a long pattern of overtime overspending. However, today CM Herbold signaled that she was waffling on this course of action, mentioning that the SPD has other funding needs; for example, the SPD needs funds to fulfill public disclosure requests, meet minimum requirements for evidence storage, and to hire civilians for CSOs (community service officers) and the CPC. So there might be a bit of a fight over whether this $5.2m should be left in the SPD’s budget after all to cover these expenses or whether it should be removed and potentially allocated into the pool of money for participatory budgeting. It doesn’t look like there’s a committee vote scheduled for tomorrow on this issue, as CM Herbold said representatives from the SPD will be attending a future meeting to discuss further.

CM Herbold also defended the Council’s actions last year after Judge Robart roundly criticized them during last week’s consent decree hearing. During the hearing the new Police Monitor submitted a new work plan for 2021, about which the Judge appears generally favorable. It will be considered for approval on February 19. In the meantime, Judge Robart said that in this time of flux (the pandemic, the upcoming election with the mayor and two Council seats up for grabs, SPD having an interim police chief, and the upcoming SPOG negotiations) it is going to be hard to continue making progress with police reform. He is particularly upset that the Council acted in various ways in the summer (vocally supporting a 50% defund, for example) that contravened the consent decree.

Meanwhile CM Lewis mentioned that STAR out of Denver, a low acuity response program similar to CAHOOTS in Eugene, just released a six month report and has been quite successful thus far. Out of 748 incidents responded to by the program, none ended up needing police involvement.

In election news, Council President González announced she will be running for Mayor this year, creating a wide-open race for her Council seat. So far the most well-known candidate for that Council seat is Sara Nelson, co-founder of Fremont Brewing. Her top issues involve the hospitality industry (big surprise), economic recovery, and restoring public trust in local government. Ouch. You can read more about her here:

Even though the Seattle council seats are officially non-partisan, most members indicate party leanings. On her official website, Nelson — a lifelong democrat — characterizes herself as a “moderate pragmatist,” and many of her positions seem to be to the right of several current city council members (she said she opposed the recent tax on big businesses, for instance, as well as cutting Seattle’s police budget by 50 percent).

The CPC appointed a permanent director last week, Brandy Grant, who had already been serving as interim director. She was the only one of the three candidates who didn’t have a background as a police officer.

The CPC is also hosting a community conversation on the Seattle Police Contracts this Thursday, February 11 at 4pm. The description of the event is as follows:

A chance for the community members to discuss what they want out of police contract negotiations and how we achieve complete police accountability. This event is hosted by the Community Police Commission. City leaders and staff involved in the negotiations will also be there to listen and speak on specific issues.

Finally, some excellent investigative reporting dropped at the South Seattle Emerald today, an article about SPD officials asking King County Jail officials to override COVID-19 restrictions and book protesters facing nonviolent misdemeanor charges.

Expect an update later this week on tomorrow’s Public Safety committee meeting, along with a possible update on the Pathways to Recovery Act decriminalizing drug use and addiction, which may have a hearing in the state legislature on Friday morning.

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What’s going on with the summer investments in public safety? HSD is dragging its feet.

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Lots going on during this last week of January!

First up, there will be a hearing for HB1202, a bill about ending qualified immunity at the state level, tomorrow, January 26, at 10am. You can learn more about it here. If you need help with a script, you can respond to this email and I’ll send you what I have.

There will be a hearing for HB1310, a bill mandating de-escalation by police, on Friday, January 29 at 10am. There should be scripts added to this website before Friday.

We had a long Council Briefing this morning, with presentations by both the national and state-level lobbying teams, about which there are many details in the following Twitter thread.

Robin from the state lobbying team said there are now over twenty bills regarding police reform making their way through the Senate or House. There is a bill on independent investigations that has a hearing tomorrow, as well as a bill about community oversight boards that they are watching with a bit of concern as it might impact our current OPA/OIG/CPC system in Seattle. There is no news yet about SB5055 vs SB5134 (regarding arbitration etc) as to whether these two bills might be reconciled or have amendments added to them.

Tomorrow morning at 9:30am there is a packed Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting. Among other things, they will continue to discuss the bill about less lethal weapon use; hear presentations about some of the money allocated last summer for violence prevention programs and scaling up community organizations; hear updated numbers of SPD attrition for 2020; and go over the promised action of decreasing the SPD’s 2021 budget to compensate for the SPD going over their authorized budget in 2020. I will be attending and will try to write up a report about what is discussed at this meeting in the next few days.

In election news, Colleen Echohawk, executive director of the Chief Seattle Club, has announced her candidacy for Seattle Mayor. She also served on the CPC in the past. You can read a comprehensive interview with her at the South Seattle Emerald. About policing in Seattle, she says:

We need a Seattle Police Department that protects and cares for the people in our city. So, there are a few changes that I would want to make changes in right away. I know this is already happening, but there would be no more sweeps of homeless camps by police officers. Yes, we need outreach and support, and we can take care of the garbage, but the sweeps are not effective. I want to be effective in our work. We also need to move some of the jobs like traffic control and mental health crisis support out of SPD and into the community.

We have to realize it’s going to take time. We’re not going to be able to wave a wand and make all this happen.

She speaks at further length about policing during the interview, as well as issues such as homelessness, public transit, and COVID recovery. My sense from the interview is that while she isn’t an opponent of current reform efforts, she’s walking carefully and mostly following in Mayor Durkan’s and the Council’s lead. I imagine we’ll get a better sense of where she stands on this and related issues as the campaign progresses.

Finally, you can read Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County’s most recent newsletter, which addresses both the recent tragic action in Tacoma with a police officer driving through a crowd and the demand that any officers participating in the insurrection in Washington DC on January 6 be immediately fired (as far as I know, we’re now up to five SPD officers who were in DC at the time of the insurrection, although their actions there are still being investigated).

Best wishes to those of you participating in ACLU Lobby Week, and thank you for your advocacy. I’ll be checking back in sometime later in the week to fill you in on what happens at the Public Safety meeting tomorrow.

What’s going on with the summer investments in public safety? HSD is dragging its feet. Read More »

Lining up the pieces on the chess board of local and state politics

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Happy 2021!

First up, the first Council Briefing of the year was this past Monday.

This week the Seattle City Council passed their legislation granting the OPA and OIG subpoena powers. It’s worth noting these subpoena powers have to be bargained with the police unions before they’d come into effect, making this legislation another move in the City of Seattle’s attempt to come to the bargaining table in a stronger position (similar to their move late last year allowing for more representation for the various oversight authorities and the Council at the closed bargaining meetings).

The SPOG contract has officially expired now that we’re in the New Year, and it sounds like the city is probably going to delay the bargaining until spring in the hopes that legislation might be passed in the upcoming state legislative session that will assist in bargaining efforts. Both sides are currently maneuvering to be in the best possible position.

CM Morales mentioned the Black Brilliance Project’s preliminary report was delivered to her office before the Winter Recess, and she’ll be passing it along to the other CMs sometime this week. She did not say when the report might be made public.

This morning CM Mosqueda announced that this year she’ll be running for her City Council seat and NOT running for Mayor. This leaves the field open for a potential run by CP González, and we can expect more candidacies to be announced in upcoming days. The filing window for mayoral candidates is in mid-May in preparation for the primaries in early August.

The Court is also expected to be discussing the CM Sawant recall case later this week.

Meanwhile, all eyes are turning towards Olympia, with the state legislative session scheduled to begin this Monday, January 11. Many bills pertaining to police reform are on the docket, and Publicola published a good overview about the upcoming session. As the session gets going, there will be opportunities to write/speak to your representatives and give public testimony (remotely) to support some of this important legislation.

Here is a chart of some of the important events happening in 2021. The SPOG contract negotiations is an estimate and could easily start later and/or take longer than five months, but this gives us an idea of what the year might look like.

I hope your 2021 has gotten off to a good start, and thank you for reading!

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Never a dull moment in Seattle politics

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We’ve had a busy couple of days in Seattle politics, so let’s catch up on recent events, shall we? I’m afraid this is a long one!

Mayor Durkan announced she won’t be running for a second term next year. There’s been speculation for months that she might be offered a position in the Biden administration so we’ll see if that comes to pass. After making a big deal about how she was paying her own legal defense fees against a recall unlike CM Sawant, she is now asking for the City to pay her fees, an early signal of this announcement.

What does this mean for Seattle? We’re in for an interesting election season!

At Council Briefing yesterday, the CMs talked about their committee meetings and what they’re discussing this month. In addition to today’s Public Safety and HSD meeting (more about that in a minute), there was an education and governance committee meeting this afternoon to discuss new grassroots lobbying regulations. The interim director of HSD, Director Johnson, is stepping down, as is Randy Engstrom from the Office of Arts and Culture.

There is also a special meeting of the Housing and Finance Committee tomorrow at 1pm. Among other things (including new COVID relief for restaurants and restaurant workers), they’ll be speaking about additional SPD overtime expenses in 2020, and it has the potential to get a bit heated.

The Council also adopted the City of Seattle’s state legislative agenda for 2021.

Remember the lawsuit brought against the City by Black Lives Matter Seattle King County and the ACLU? Well, the judge is holding the city of Seattle in contempt for violating his crowd control injunction. He found four clear instances of the SPD violating this injunction between late August and September; three of these instances involved blast balls. He said he was also troubled by how many instances were inconclusive. The plaintiffs have until Friday to submit their proposal for sanctions and the City will have a week to respond. The City could also choose to appeal the ruling.

There was a Public Safety and HSD committee meeting this morning, with three items on the agenda: the semi-annual accountability report from the OPA, OIG, and CPC; discussion on legislation to give the OPA and OIG subpoena powers; and discussion about the possibility of creating a basic needs defense for misdemeanors. During public comment, 10 people spoke against this basic needs defense and 8 people spoke in favor of it; there were also a few comments on the police accountability system being broken.

I’ll limit my comments here about the OPA and OIG subpoena powers to saying that even were this legislation to pass, it would still need to be bargained with the police unions, so it would take awhile to be implemented. It is, however, a positive change in terms of increased accountability. There has been some speculation that city government is using this legislation to assume a tougher stance for the upcoming contract negotiations with SPOG.

The misdemeanor basic needs defense is receiving a lot of negative attention, which is somewhat baffling as it probably wouldn’t change much in terms of how things are currently being done. The current City Attorney already has a policy of not prosecuting necessity cases as a matter of principle. There is also a lot of misinformation about this proposal being spread.

This proposal does NOT decriminalize misdemeanors. What it does is create an affirmative defense to misdemeanors committed in order to fulfill basic needs (other examples of affirmative defenses are the common law defense of necessity and the “under duress” defense). An affirmative defense requires the defendant to admit to the crime and then present extenuating circumstances, in this case, circumstances of poverty, allowing the judge and jury to hear the defendants’ stories and factor them into their decisions.

A lot of the discussion today was highly technical in nature, reviewing various possibilities of what this legislation could look like. The King County’s Director of Public Defense and a representative from the City Attorney’s Office were both present to answer questions and present their departments’ views on various aspects of this issue. Both departments are generally in favor of this potential legislation but differ in the details of how they believe it should be written. More details can be found in my tweets above if you’re interested in the nitty gritty. This proposal will continue to be discussed in January.

There will be a special Public Safety and HSD committee meeting on Thursday, December 17 at 9:30am. Discussion of the basic needs defense will NOT be on the agenda, although CM Herbold didn’t say what would be discussed.

Kevin Schofield reported on the Black Brilliance Project last week and is concerned about some red flags he found. Because I think local journalism exists to provide scrutiny, I don’t object to this deep dive nor think it differs substantially from the deep dives Kevin routinely does. What he glosses over is that this research project is emphatically not business as usual for the City and seeks to do research in a different way, centering different populations, and by populations that are typically not paid to do this kind of work. As such, it is not surprising that this effort would not look the same as other past research projects, nor is it surprising that rules might be bent in the process. Kevin says:

But taking this kind of approach to surfacing embedded wisdom is high-risk: for the Council as it cuts corners and bends the rules; for KCEN as it pushes the edges of creativity at the expense of rigor; for BIPOC communities as they place their hopes on this effort to deliver solutions for them; and for the city as a whole: if the intent is to downsize SPD across the whole city, then the alternatives stood up in its place will also need to be city-wide.

I do agree this is a high-risk project, and I will go further and say it always has been. There has always been an enormous amount of pressure on this attempt to divest from policing and re-invest in community alternatives to public safety, working against significant resistance. Whatever the details of the Black Brilliance project, the risk was going to be there. That being said, KCEN’s preliminary research report will be delivered on December 21, so in less than two weeks we’ll have a much better idea of the details behind the project.

If anything interesting transpires at tomorrow’s special Finance meeting, I’ll be sending a (hopefully brief) update to keep you in the loop.

I hope you’re staying warm and dry on this rainy December evening!

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