gun violence

The Political Wheel is Turning

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Seattle News:

Remember the Stop the Sweeps case at Seattle Municipal Court last week? The judge declared a mistrial after the jury was unable to reach consensus. On Monday morning, an Assistant City Attorney announced they would not retry the case, “citing a need to save city resources.”

Soon thereafter, the news broke that the head of the Seattle City Attorney’s Office’s criminal division, Natalie Walton-Anderson, announced her resignation after only two years in the position. Interesting timing, no? She will leave at the end of February, and this position will not be subject to the city’s hiring freeze. 

In the Jaahnavi Kandula misconduct case against Officer Auderer, SPD’s command staff has recommended he either be suspended without pay for one month or fired. About Auderer, they wrote:

“The disgrace you have brought to the department on a global scale will undoubtedly stain SPD’s reputation for years, and your insensitivity tarnished some observers’ perceptions of all SPD officers.”

However, they disagreed about the OPA’s finding that Auderer showed bias (ageism) and say they are worried that keeping that charge will make any discipline easier to overturn. They instead want the focus to remain on the professionalism charge. 

Auderer will have a disciplinary hearing with Chief Diaz on Monday, March 4. In addition, the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission is considering decertification of Auderer because of his comments. Were he to be decertified, he would no longer be allowed to work as a police officer in Washington State. 

CM Hollingsworth of D3 held a well-attended public safety community meeting on Tuesday evening. She said she expects a new SPOG contract to be ready potentially in March or April of this year. Capitol Hill Seattle’s article also mentions “talks of major hiring bonuses” for SPOG members, in spite of the fact hiring bonuses still haven’t been shown to actually work. 

The meeting focused especially on gun violence. CM Hollingsworth has worked with Black Coffee Northwest to hopefully  activate the area around 23rd and Jackson when it opens in a few months. It sounds like she mostly spoke about hiring more police and trying to increase their morale. But some attendees had other ideas, like this student:

“A senior at Garfield High shared how they saw a person die from gun violence on Sunday, and that police presence seems to be ineffective. They asked how or if the city works with mental health services in schools, because teachers are taking on the mental health load of students and adding more police officers doesn’t accomplish much on the mental health aspect.”

Apparently SPD had both enough staffing and enough morale to conduct inspections at four LGBTQ+ bars and clubs last weekend. Officers told managers they observed lewd conduct violations because a few people were wearing jockstraps and they saw a bartender’s nipple. After public outcry, the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board said they would suspend enforcement of its lewd conduct rule.

House Our Neighbors will be holding a press conference on the morning of Tuesday, February 6 to announce a ballot initiative to raise new progressive revenue to fund the Seattle Social Housing Developer.

Finally, in a nice catch of rhetoric shift, David Kroman noted that City Hall is now calling the JumpStart tax the PET, or payroll expense tax. The name JumpStart is very aligned with the much discussed JumpStart spending plan memorialized legislatively, which allocates funding as follows: 62% affordable housing, 15% small business, 9% Green New Deal, and 9% Equitable Development Initiative. There has been speculation the Mayor might push for an end to the JumpStart spending plan in the 2025 budget. 

King County News:

Renton is currently voting in a special election to determine whether the minimum wage will be raised. Ballots have been sent out, and voting ends on February 13.

Executive Dow Constantine announced his plan going forward to ultimately shut down King County’s youth jail. He originally promised to close the youth jail by 2025, but his new plan both definitively nixes this timeline and doesn’t present a new proposed closure date. More on this soon.

WA State Legislature:

HB 1062, which would prohibit the use of deception in interrogation, had a hearing in the House Appropriations Committee yesterday. You can read more about this bill here.

You can read here about the status of various bills now that we’ve passed the first cut-off date. One noteworthy survivor is Rep. Dariya Farivar’s HB 1994, which would allow some misdemeanor cases to be dismissed if a defendant meets conditions set by the judge. HB 2331, which would stave off school book bans based on discrimination, also survived, as did HB 1513, a bill reducing low level traffic stops.

Recent Headlines:

 

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Shake-Up at the Mayor’s Office

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Seattle News:

In some of the biggest local political news of the week, Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell is stepping down from her position in the Mayor’s Office. As the Seattle Times reports: “Sources close to the situation, who requested anonymity because of their relationships to the city, said the decision was reached after Monisha Harrell and others in senior leadership had several differing viewpoints on public safety issues in the city.”

Monisha Harrell was generally considered to be a more progressive voice in the Mayor’s office, and some hoped she would exercise a moderating influence to counter others in the Office, such as Director of Strategic Initiatives Tim Burgess. Erica C. Barnett reported that “we’ve also been told there’s a general “boy’s club” element within the mayor’s office that has shaped its internal dynamics.” 

Harrell’s portfolio included public safety, and there is concern her departure could result in a shift further into “law and order” rhetoric, more emphasis on being “tough on crime” and less attention to public safety alternatives. Harrell reported to the City Council more than once about the progress of an alternative emergency response, including the term sheet that specified a timeline for the project. The first deliverable for the project was supposed to be a white paper due by the end of 2022 that is now six months late and counting.

I wrote a piece in the Urbanist last week on how gun violence is affecting Seattle-area high school students that also covers King County’s regional approach to gun violence prevention, which is highly innovative but also deeply underfunded. Seattle actually had a youth gun violence prevention program begun in 2009, but after several years that program was stalled and eventually disappeared, in part due to lack of support from then-CMs Bruce Harrell and Tim Burgess. This is particularly unfortunate given that otherwise we might have a more mature and scaled-up program today.

In the wake of the shooting and murder of Eina Kwon in Belltown, SPD has announced a new task force, including federal resources, focused on quelling gun violence in four areas of Seattle: downtown, Aurora Ave, south Seattle, and the Central District. Chief Diaz has said the task force will consist of around 50 officers. Unfortunately, the police are more likely to respond after gun violence takes place as opposed to preventing it, which is why investing in gun violence prevention programs, mental health treatment, safe consumption sites, housing, and even physical improvements such as adding green spaces and lighting is so important.

Erica C. Barnett reported that SPD Officer Kevin Dave was driving 75mph in a 25mph zone when he struck pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula. He hit the brakes less than a second before impact and was only chirping his siren at intersections. As Barnett wrote: “Seattle law allows an officer responding to an emergency to “exceed the maximum speed limits so long as he or she does not endanger life or property, but says that exemption doesn’t “relieve the driver of an authorized emergency vehicle from the duty to drive with due regard for the safety of all persons using the highway nor from the duty to exercise due care to avoid colliding with any pedestrian.””

Recent Headlines:

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Seattle to Decide Whether to Launch a New ‘War on Drugs’

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Seattle News

As a result of the new state level drug legislation, the Seattle City Council is on track to vote on a bill giving the City Attorney the authority to prosecute drug possession and the new crime “public use of drugs” as soon as Tuesday, June 6, without running the legislation through committee. Drug possession is currently prosecuted by the King County Prosecutor, and in practice, King County has stopped prosecuting cases involving the possession of small amounts of drugs. Criticized by opponents for reigniting a new War on Drugs in Seattle, this legislation would further criminalize poverty while turning away from evidence-based strategies of drug treatment. Furthermore, because this is the first time Seattle would be prosecuting such crimes, the City currently has neither a drug court nor prosecutors and judges with experience in these matters. There is also the open question of how much putting new structures in place, as well as increasing prosecutions and jail use due to the new legislation, would cost the City. 

Opponents of the bill, including the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, ACLU Washington, SEIU 925, Real Change, Collective Justice, and VOCAL-WA,  are hosting an Emergency Teach-In virtually on Tuesday, May 30 at 6:30pm. You can register for the webinar here to learn more about the legislation and how to take action.

Carolyn Bick has uncovered yet more SPD chain of command confusion regarding the use of tear gas during the 2020 George Floyd protests.

SPD has announced they are beginning their pilot use of the BOLAwrap, also described as a high-tech lasso, a less-lethal weapon that “uses a Kevlar rope aimed at the legs or arms of an individual to detain them.” Its design was inspired by a hunting technique of nomadic peoples in Latin America and has been criticized for being cruel and dehumanizing. Guy Oron at Real Change News reports that we don’t know how much these BolaWrap weapons cost and writes: “In a 2020 Human Rights Watch report, researchers found that the BolaWrap and other weapons like stun guns could result in increased police violence against populations who are stigmatized by society, including mentally ill, poor, Black, Brown and Indigenous people.”

The OPA released its 2022 Annual Report this week. Some highlights: 454 cases were opened (compare this to 929 cases opened in 2019), and 13% of investigations had sustained allegations. Force allegations were down 36%. 411 SPD employees had at least one complaint in 2022, 94% of whom were sworn officers (385), and 142 employees received more than one complaint. 945 sworn officers were in service during Q4 of 2022, which means about 40% of sworn officers received at least one complaint.

This week’s Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting featured a presentation about overdose trends and harm reduction programs in the city and the Q1 2023 SPD staffing and overtime report. In the first quarter, SPD had 26 hires and 28 separations, with 2023 estimates of the force having 928 deployable sworn officers out of 1028 total sworn officers (the difference are those on long-term leave, such as disability, parental, etc.). CM Herbold reported that police hiring is picking up across the country but still not able to keep up with the number of officers leaving. That being said, the rate of separation at SPD does appear to be slowing.

SPD is expecting around $3m in salary savings this year, and they’re also expecting to exceed their overtime budget, possibly by more than their realized salary savings. Not very much of the money allocated (with much fanfare) for recruitment and retention has been spent, but the Mayor’s Office says they’ll start spending much more in the second half of the year, probably mostly for their big new marketing campaign that is supposed to launch around August. Stay tuned!

King County News

The quarterly King County Firearm Violence Report is out, showing gun violence in King County is continuing to decrease from its high in mid-2022:

“Compared to the average of the previous five quarters of data, shots fired incidents in Q1 (348) were down around 3% (-12) and the number of shooting victims (50) were down 34% (-35). More specifically, the number of fatal shooting victims declined almost 17% (-3) and nonfatal shooting victims declined 41% (-35) over those averages.”

Recent Headlines

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WA Legislature Discusses Rollbacks to Last Year’s Public Safety Progress

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WA State Legislature News

With the exception of HB 1756 regarding solitary confinement, most of the potentially helpful public safety bills are dead at this point in the session. Instead, advocates for more equitable public safety are having to fight against serious rollbacks to policy improvements won during last year’s session.
Perhaps most concerning of these is HB 2037, which would broaden the circumstances and lower the standards for when police can use force when someone flees the scene of a Terry stop. Among other things, this would likely increase police violence and racial profiling by police officers in Washington State. As the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability’s (WCPA) one-pager on this bill states:
Even under the standard that existed before HB 1310, there was too much police violence. Police got  away with harming people, and have killed people when they were not even committing a crime – when  they were in crisis, or when officers assumed criminality without evidence. HB 2037 would be a step  backwards from the prior standard. Thousands of people throughout Washington marched in the streets  to demand accountability in policing, not to give officers more leeway to harm people.
People Power Washington – Police Accountability is joining with WCPA to urge you to contact your representatives as soon as possible to urge them to reject HB 2037 unless it includes amendments approved by the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability (WCPA) that would protect vulnerable residents from police violence. You can find more details, scripts, and contact information for this action here.
Other bills currently still being discussed that would roll back hard-won progress in public safety are HB 1788 and SB 5919.

Seattle News

Journalist Erica C. Barnett shared another glaring breach of transparency during the Durkan administration yesterday. During a PDR request, she became aware of a “secret” seattle.gov email address former Mayor Durkan was using to conduct government-related business. Why this email address was never disclosed in the large amount of previous PDRs requested is an open and troubling question, and once again shows how deep a problem Seattle city government has with transparency to the public.
Last Friday Mayor Harrell held a press conference about public safety. He discussed the city’s “hot spot” strategy for reducing crime–nothing new for Seattle–and increasing the number of police officers in SPD. Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell spoke again about alternate safety responses, and it sounds like the new administration is in the middle of making plans for how these alternatives are going to be set up. Mayor Harrell also cited a specific book his public safety policy is influenced by: When Brute Force Fails, by Mark A.R. Kleiman. You can read more about the press conference here.
Also discussed was the increase of violence in Seattle last year, and especially of gun violence. This increase has been seen throughout the country over the past two years, in both blue and red areas and regardless of amount of police funding. This underscores the need for consistent and sufficient funding for community-based violence prevention programs in Seattle and King County; to learn more about what these programs can look like, you can read more in these recent articles here and here.
The CPC is continuing its community engagement meetings with consent decree Monitor Oftelie. The next one is tonight, 2/8, from 6-8pm. The subject is traffic stops, and you can find the full agenda and Zoom link here. While SPD has moved away from certain routine traffic stops such as stops for cracked windshields and expired tags, there is more progress that can be made in this area. You can find some suggestions for additional policy improvements in SB 5485, including halting stops for driving with a suspended license in the third degree, failure to dim lights, and failure to keep to the right.
In February of 2021, two officers fatally shot 44-year-old Derek Hayden, who was carrying a knife and threatening to kill himself. This continues a pattern of confrontations between SPD officers and people in crisis with knives that end in the death of the person in crisis. (You may remember, for example, the killing of Terry Caver by an SPD officer in 2020.) The two involved officers have been suspended for failing to de-escalate, but only for three days and one day respectively, even though, according to Paul Kiefer’s article in Publicola:
Both the officers’ supervisors and the OPA, however, determined that the officers made a series of disastrous assumptions and miscalculations that made the shooting almost inevitable.
The article went on to discuss the reaction of CM Lisa Herbold, the chair of Seattle’s Public Safety and Human Services committee:
Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold criticized both the OPA’s ruling and the relatively minor punishments for Butler and Jared on Wednesday, arguing that one or both decisions exposed a dangerous gap in the city’s police accountability system. “When an officer’s out-of-policy actions contribute to the circumstances leading to someone’s death, our accountability system must hold them accountable,” she said of Myerberg’s decision to not fault Butler and Jared for the shooting itself.
Myerberg, of course, has left the OPA and gone on to become the Director of Public Safety for the City of Seattle.

King County News

We have a new candidate in the race for King County prosecutor: Stephan Thomas, who plans to bring a full-scale restorative justice framework to his work in the prosecutor’s office, aided by his experience and relationships with local groups like CHOOSE 180 and Community Passageways. In his recent interview with the South Seattle Emerald, he describes a clear vision of building new processes and systems based on the work of such groups. As he says, “What does moving forward look like? It looks like investing in the things that right now are in their infancy. Things like Community Passageways, things like CHOOSE 180, things like treatment on demand, things like housing first. Those are the things that we know work.”

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Opinion: Restorative justice can help America shed cycle of violence

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Prosecutors Who Want to Curb Mass Incarceration Hit a Roadblock: Tough-on-Crime Lawmakers | The Marshall Project
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