Kevin Dave

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:

 

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

Murder numbers dropped dramatically across the nation in 2024

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Seattle News:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Headlines:

 

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

“Prince” Diaz out, Barnes in, and the outgoing governor wants to tax the rich

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Housekeeping:

As we reach the end of 2024, I’d like to thank you for joining me for another year of local news, politics, and analysis. And a special thank you to my financial supporters on Patreon, who help to cover Notes from the Emerald City’s hosting fees. 

I’ll be taking the next two weeks off to rest, rejuvenate, and get ready for whatever 2025 brings! I hope all of you have a wonderful end to 2024. 

Seattle News:

I had two stories out in The Urbanist this week: one is an interview with Seattle City Attorney candidate Rory O’Sullivan, and the other is an analysis of the new less lethal weapon crowd control legislation being voted on by Seattle City Council next month.

Big news this week is that Mayor Bruce Harrell fired former SPD Chief Adrian Diaz, who was removed as Chief earlier this year and given a “special assignment” within SPD, continuing to collect his generous salary. You can read about the whole sordid saga at The Stranger, PubliCola, two articles at The Seattle Times, two articles at KUOW, Cascade PBS, or you can go straight to the source and read the Office of the Inspector General’s investigation report.

Diaz had “an intimate or romantic relationship” with his chief of staff, Jamie Tompkins, who he hired and directly supervised. Tompkins didn’t have previous law enforcement experience. A romantic card written by Tompkins featuring an Ewok was found, in which Tompkins compared Diaz to a Disney prince and talked about his kiss. 

How to express true love

Investigators also found multiple SPD employees who said Diaz often talked and bragged about having a sexual relationship with Tompkins. 

The relationship and Diaz’s denials of it violated several SPD policies. Harrell fired Diaz as a result of the investigation’s findings. 

In June, soon after he had been demoted, Diaz went on Jason Rantz’s talk show and said he was “a gay Latino man” to defuse rumors of the romantic relationship with Tompkins. Diaz is now denying allegations of the affair with Tompkins and saying the investigation was flawed.

KUOW also published an interesting piece on how they broke and developed this story.

In another SPD shake-up, SPD Deputy Chief Eric Barden, interim Chief Sue Rahr’s second in command, announced his retirement last Friday, effective immediately. Rahr said Barden is leaving after 38 years to take care of his sick mother. You might remember Barden from a controversy earlier this year when it came out he’d been accused of domestic violence and had allegedly asked a Pierce County deputy to lie about it, a move that resulted in him being placed on the Brady list for dishonest police officers. 

Rahr is appointing Assistant Chief Yvonne Underwood as acting deputy chief and will soon appoint Capt. Lori Aagard to be the acting assistant chief over professional standards.

In MORE big news, Harrell has announced the new permanent SPD Chief: Shon Barnes, the police chief of Madison, Wisconsin, who got some press this week after a shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison left three dead. Barnes will need to be confirmed by the City Council before assuming leadership of SPD. You can read more about it at The Seattle Times, Cascade PBS, KUOW, and the City’s press release. 

I will note three red flags that go along with this news. First, there was no public process that went along with the selection of the new Chief. While the public process has often seemed performative to me in the past, I think not having it at all is an unfortunate step in the wrong direction. 

Second, it sounds like Barnes is a proponent of police in schools. In fact, Barnes was at one time a history teacher, and talking to the school resource officer at his school at the time played a role in his decision to enter policing. School resource officers were removed from Seattle Public Schools in 2020 in response to the George Floyd protests. 

Third, Erica Barnett of PubliCola found a 2022 article from Madison about its disparity of arrests: “Less than 7% of Madison’s population is African-American, but Blacks made up 47 percent of those arrested during the first quarter of this year.”

In other news, the CARE alternative response expansion is running behind schedule. Originally CARE was supposed to be covering the entire city by the end of the year. Now it sounds like they won’t be covering that much area until the end of June.

There is more news in the case of SPD Officer Kevin Dave, thanks to The Stranger: “On Wednesday, Seattle Police Officer Kevin Dave admitted to driving negligently when he struck and killed 23-year-old college student Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk last year. In exchange for Dave admitting to the citation, agreeing to pay a $5,000 fine, and attending driving school, the Seattle City Attorney’s Office (CAO) asked the court to waive a 90-day license suspension for Dave.”

The Office of the Inspector General released an audit this week of “Disciplinary Determinations for SPD Sworn Personnel.” PubliCola reported it found that the majority of the time, officers receiving discipline have punishments at the minimum or below of recommended punishment, due to Diaz’s decisions. The same finding was in the 2021 audit, meaning previous Chiefs leaned in a similar direction discipline-wise. It will be interesting to see if Shon Barnes bucks the trend in this regard. PubliCola reports: “The audit also found that there is still a massive backlog of 106 officer appeals awaiting arbitration, with most of those (82) still unresolved since the 2021 audit.”

Washington State News:

Governor Jay Inslee is going out with a bang by proposing a state wealth tax, a 1% annual tax on worldwide wealth of more than $100 million. Just to be clear, anyone who has more than $100 million is very, VERY rich. He is also proposing to raise taxes on businesses, with a temporary 20% tax increase on about 20,000 businesses with high revenues, followed by a 10% across-the-board business tax increase. 

Here is a flavor of the arguments in favor of the wealth tax and against the wealth tax. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this in 2025. 

Inslee’s budget also includes $5.5 million for additional security for Seattle during the World Cup in June of 2026.

Recent Headlines:

“Prince” Diaz out, Barnes in, and the outgoing governor wants to tax the rich Read More »

SPD officers are some of the best-paid workers in the city

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Election News:

First, the elephant in the room. Last week we had an impactful election.

While the nation elected Republican Donald Trump to be our next president, local results were much more promising for progressives. Interestingly, Washington was one of only two states (along with Utah) who shifted further left rather than right. 

Three of the four Washington state-level initiatives backed by millionaire and hedge fund manager Brian Heywood failed, with Washingtonians voting resoundingly in support of progressive revenue, public education, long-term care insurance made possible by universal participation, and prioritizing the climate and environment. Only the initiative regarding natural gas access succeeded and is now likely to face legal challenges. Initiative 2109, which would have repealed the state level capital gains tax, passed with a resounding 63.91% of votes. 

In Seattle, Alexis Mercedes Rinck decisively triumphed over Tanya Woo. The Council had appointed Woo earlier this year to fill the at-large seat vacated by Teresa Mosqueda, who moved over to the King County Council (where, btw, she is busy working on making their budget process a little more transparent). Rinck currently has 197,428 votes, which is 57.94% of the total vote. The newly formed Progressive People Power PAC spent around $177,000 supporting Rinck.

Meanwhile, Democratic Socialist Shaun Scott, running against Andrea Suarez to be state representative for the 43rd Legislative District, won with 68.53% of the vote. 

Discussions now abound about what these local results could mean for the 2025 elections, when Seattle will be voting for the positions of mayor, city attorney, and the two at-large councilmembers, including Council President Sara Nelson’s seat. 

Budget News:

The second and final Seattle budget public hearing is tomorrow, Tuesday, November 12, beginning at 5pm. Sign up for public comment here. That hearing is followed by three full days of budget meetings to discuss councilmember amendments, so you know what I’ll be doing for the rest of the week. 

Councilmember Cathy Moore proposed a 2% capital gains tax to go into effect at the beginning of 2026. Her co-sponsors are Councilmember Tammy Morales and Councilmember Rob Saka. Her proposed “spending plan” is expressed in a single sentence: “Proceeds of the capital gains excise tax are intended to support rental assistance to rent burdened households, down payment assistance to low, moderate, and workforce households, and food assistance to food insecure households.”

Meanwhile, Budget Chair Dan Strauss’s proposal regarding changing the JumpStart tax legislation would, just as the Mayor’s original proposal did, do away with required percentage allocation of the tax revenue to pay for affordable housing, Green New Deal, and equitable development investments, a policy move I continue to oppose.

Morales has proposed amendments to the Mayor’s proposed JumpStart legislation. She has also proposed two statements of intent (SLIs) regarding progressive revenue, investigating a professional services excise tax and a digital ad tax.

A city budget tracker tool that provided increased transparency to the budget process has been removed. I will say as someone who has followed Seattle’s budget process closely since 2020, there has been a marked difference in reduced transparency this year, especially as key documents aren’t being shared publicly until the very last moment.  

Seattle criminal legal system news:

Andy Engelson reported there was another death in the SCORE jail in August, meaning 8 people have died there in the past 2 years. Seattle has been actively working on a contract with SCORE.

SPD Deputy Chief Eric Barden sent an email to all officers last week celebrating the end of the King County Jail’s booking restrictions for misdemeanors and instructing officers to increase arrests. 

The Office of Police Accountability (OPA) sustained allegations against SPD Officer Kevin Dave, who ran over and killed Jaahnavi Kandula with his patrol car on January 23, 2023. The next step is for discipline to be decided.

Interim SPD Chief Sue Rahr is apparently clashing with the OPA and its civilian director Gino Betts. She has overturned or modified more disciplinary recommendations from the OPA over the last six months than had been done by former Chief Adrian Diaz and former Chief Carmen Best during the last five years. 

Meanwhile, Jamie Tompkins, who was Diaz’s former chief-of-staff who was put on leave from SPD recently, just resigned. There were rumors that she and Diaz were romantically involved.

Ron Willis, an SPD officer, was suspended again (for 90 unpaid hours) for filing excessive overtime hours. PubliCola reported he “reported working 133 hours in a single week, including 93 hours of overtime, plus 10 hours of vacation.” He was first suspended for the same offense back in 2021. Willis has appealed his punishment, saying it’s “excessive.” It’s worth clicking over to the article to read excerpts from Rahr’s report on the matter, in which she sounds quite exasperated by how unrepentant Willis appears.

DivestSPD revealed that five other SPD officers reported more overtime than Willis last year, meaning “it’s mathematically impossible that they didn’t violate the same rules as he did.” However, they do not appear to be under current investigation by the OPA.

Finally, new census data for 2023 shows that in Seattle, law enforcement workers have the second highest level of compensation, with median earnings of $124,600. The highest level of compensation is enjoyed by tech workers (specified as computer and mathematical workers), who earned a median of $157,200. 

As The Seattle Times reports: “While the median earnings for law-enforcement workers was $32,000 lower than that of tech workers last year, the gap could shrink. In May, the Seattle City Council approved a new contract with the Seattle police union that includes significant increases in compensation, and which will make Seattle officers the highest paid in the state.”

The new SPOG contract also meant significant backpay for SPD officers, which would be reflected in their 2024 earnings.

Meanwhile, for 2023, legal workers (aka lawyers) were ranked fourth with median earnings of $116,061. And community and social service workers had median earnings of $58,810, less than half that of the median law enforcement wage.

Recent Headlines:

 

SPD officers are some of the best-paid workers in the city Read More »

What would Seattle do without JumpStart?

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Seattle News:

Budget Chair Dan Strauss released his balancing package for the 2025-2026 City budget this week (presentation here). This new budget proposal actually increases the amount of JumpStart dollars moved from JumpStart spending priorities to the General Fund, which now clocks in at a gobsmacking $305 million. 

As The Stranger reports: “Strauss’s balancing package proposed two new tiny shelter villages, additional funding to the storefront repair program, four new 911 dispatchers, another $10 million for the Seattle Police Department (SPD), Council Member Rob Saka’s goofy proviso to remove the traffic barrier on he compared to former President Donald Trump’s border wall, and much more.”

You can read more about Saka’s plan to remove a traffic calming measure right next to a preschool here. Not only is the amount he put under proviso for this project a stunning $2 million, but at the budget meeting, Strauss announced that Saka had told him this self-serving measure that will actually decrease safety for those in the neighborhood was his top priority for the budget. You can’t make this stuff up.

You can read my op-ed at The Urbanist about the Mayor’s proposed JumpStart legislation that would remove the guardrails on JumpStart tax revenue spending, permanently siphoning it into the General Fund as needed. The proposed legislation also gets rid of the JumpStart oversight board that was meant to provide much needed oversight and transparency to the expenditures of this major source of progressive revenue for the City. Unsurprisingly, I argue that these are both poor ideas. 

Before we get to this week’s SPD drama, some Seattle Municipal Court news: the ACLU of Washington is suing the Seattle City Attorney over their blanket policy to file affidavits of prejudice against sitting Judge Pooja Vaddadi for all criminal cases. The ACLU states: “The city attorney’s actions go beyond a mere impediment to functionality – the city attorney has effectively removed a sitting judge from the bench.”

On Monday, former SPD Chief Adrian Diaz and SPD Communications Director Jamie Tompkins were placed on paid administrative leave. Diaz is still receiving his annual “chief’s” salary of $339,000, and KIRO reports he hasn’t been seen at Police Headquarters in weeks. 

KUOW reported Diaz was placed on leave for allegedly lying during an investigation. The investigation in question was conducted by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) around a complaint that Diaz had hired a romantic partner to a top-level position at SPD, assumedly Tompkins. KIRO reported Diaz also potentially violated department policy.

Diaz responded by filing a $10 million tort claim against the city, Mayor Bruce Harrell, and Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess. The claim alleges Diaz was discriminated and retaliated against, as well as harassed, when he expressed his sexual orientation to Harrell and Burgess, and also alleges Diaz refused to commit an “illegal act.”

Regarding that illegal act, The Seattle Times reports: “While he was chief, Diaz was also directed to take actions he believed would violate police officers’ due process rights and other regulations, Downs said, declining to share specifics.”

In other news, PubliCola reports that SPD officers have a demonstrated pattern of speeding, even when they’re not responding to high level emergency calls: “The data shows that SPD officers regularly drive at speeds higher than 80 mph and sometimes even over 90 mph, on streets with speed limits between 25 and 30 mph. Officers consistently drive well over 70 mph on perennially dangerous streets such as Aurora Ave. (which accounts for 20% of Seattle’s traffic fatalities) and Martin Luther King Jr. Way S, where the SPD dataset showed at least 270 instances of speeds exceeding 70 mph.”

One noteworthy example is former SPD officer Daniel Auderer, who made international headlines when he was recorded mocking the death of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula. On the night he went to assess whether Kevin Dave, the officer who hit and killed Kandula, had been driving impaired, he was driving consistently at 90mph and sometimes over 100mph. This was not, of course, in response to an emergency call. 

King County News:

King County’s 100 Days of Action against gun violence is officially over as of October 18. Gun lockboxes are still in the process of being distributed, with several events planned for November. Next, the Regional Office of Gun Violence Prevention will develop a five-year plan.

Recent Headlines:

 

What would Seattle do without JumpStart? Read More »

Seattle’s budget looks to be in trouble for years to come

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Seattle Budget News:

First off, we have my analysis of the 2025 proposed Seattle budget over at The Urbanist. I dig into proposed police and other “punitive” spending and compare it to what’s being spent for alternatives, diversion, and upstream solutions. 

PubliCola reports on the Seattle budget outlook for future years, with projected deficits of $78.6 million in 2027 and $151.2 million in 2028. While not as large as the deficit faced this year of around $250 million, these are still large numbers that signal we’re not out of the woods even if we follow Mayor Bruce Harrell’s plan of diverting a large percentage of the Jumpstart payroll tax away from its intended purpose of supporting affordable housing, Green New Deal, and equitable development investments and into the General Fund to pay for things like big raises for SPD officers and the ability to sweep homeless encampments even on the weekends. 

As PubliCola reports: “But Harrell’s 2025-2026 budget also depletes the JumpStart fund balance—essentially, a non-renewable reserve of unspent money—taking $140 million from this pot next year and another $90 million in 2026. By 2026, the total amount of funds left over at the end of the year, after all spending is accounted for, will be reduced from $97 million to $179,000.”

While I know this might sound wonky, what it means in practice is continued budget deficits (and cuts) well into the future unless another source of progressive revenue is identified. 

Other Seattle News:

On Tuesday, the city council voted to pass the crime prevention pilot that includes CCTV and a new real time crime center. It also voted to pass $50,000 hiring bonuses for lateral hires at SPD. 

This week the Seattle Fire Department announced it’s making buprenorphine, a drug that treats opioid withdrawal, available to use by all its emergency crews. According to the press release, “The SFD currently has about 35 paramedics trained to administer the medicine and has begun the process of training the firefighter/EMTs who staff the post-overdose response unit (Health 99) and Health One units.”

PubliCola interviewed interim SPD Chief Sue Rahr last week. While Rahr had previously said she’d only stay in the position for six months (until around the end of the year), she’s saying now that she’s not going to make that promise. Erica Barnett does ask Rahr what went wrong in the backgrounding process of Kevin Dave (the officer who killed Jaahnavi Kandula and had a history of reckless driving and no current WA driver’s license), a question I’ve been asking for some time, but surprising no one, Rahr replies that she doesn’t know. 

I found this exchange to be particularly illuminating:

“ECB: I totally get the problem statement. What you’re describing as the solution, frankly, is kind of Whac-a-Mole.

SR: It is, but doing nothing doesn’t work either. And what we know is that just having social workers go out and talk to people, in and of itself, is not working. If it was working, we wouldn’t have so many people out there. I think you need to have a multi-pronged approach, and if nothing else works, there has to be a backstop.”

One could argue that the reason social workers aren’t effective all on their own is because there aren’t enough services and places to live for them to offer people. But alas, instead of trying that out as a solution, it looks like Seattle will continue robustly funding the backstop that doesn’t get to the root of the problems. 

The Seattle Municipal Court judges elected Honorable Anita Crawford-Williams to serve as Presiding Judge and Honorable Damon Shadid to serve as Assistant Presiding Judge. They will serve a term of two years starting at the beginning of 2025. 

Current Presiding Judge Faye Chess will be stepping down. You might remember that she was elected to that position right after the election of Judge Pooja Vaddadi in late 2022 in what I called at the time “an act of breathtaking pettiness.” In an early vote with no notice, neither Vaddadi nor Judge Damon Shadid were allowed to participate in that vote. 

Articles to make you think:

Last weekend Kevin Schofield wrote about a paper studying bail reform: “The report thoroughly and completely debunks the notion that bail reform causes a rise in crime.”

The Stranger published an article about candidate for the state legislature Andrea Suarez. All politics aside, this article provides one of the best explanations of housing first I’ve read.

Also in The Stranger is a column by Justin Ward calling for a more robust public health response focusing on mental health to increase public safety:

“Instead of mobilizing the vast resources of one of the richest metropolitan areas in human history to solve our housing and mental health crisis, area leaders are doubling down on the failed strategy of criminalization. On top of pointless prosecutions of the mentally ill that waste money and that are frequently dismissed, city officials are escalating sweeps, scaling up surveillance, implementing banishment areas, and raiding housing funds to pay for police raises.

If we want to prevent murders like that of Ruth Dalton, we must get serious about treating mental health problems before they become public safety emergencies.”

And over at South Seattle Emerald, Gennette Cordova wrote about how funding education reduces crime: “Every glaring, shameful example of our city’s leaders overinvesting in police under the guise of increasing public safety, while underfunding the community programs that are proven to reduce crime, must be highlighted again and again until people come to understand that so many of the shortcomings we experience in our communities are a result of our patterns of intentional systematic failures.”

Recent Headlines:

Seattle’s budget looks to be in trouble for years to come Read More »

Permanent SPD Hiring Bonuses and Expanded SODA Zones

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Budget Talk:

Looking for last-minute plans for tomorrow afternoon? Hosted by the 46th District Democrats, I will be joined by Ron Davis tomorrow, Saturday 9/14 at 2pm to give a presentation about the Seattle city budget and the upcoming budget season. We’re meeting at the Northeast Public Library, 6801 35th Ave NE, and the program will be 90 minutes long. Feel free to come on up and brush up on budget basics!

Seattle News:

On Monday morning, the Seattle City Council is holding a special Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development Committee meeting to discuss legislation that would make SPD officer hiring bonuses permanent. It would also increase the lateral hiring bonus from $30,000 to $50,000. Officers would be eligible for these bonuses if they left SPD for a period of at least two years and then elected to return. Any officer receiving a bonus must then serve at SPD for at least five years. The annual estimated cost of this program is $1.5 million.

Last Tuesday, the Public Safety committee met to discuss the SODA and SOAP legislation, both of which they unanimously passed. You can read my live tweets of the meeting here.

Several new SODA zones were added to the legislation: Pioneer Square, Belltown, Capitol Hill, and the University District, and some added blocks to the CID proposed zone. The SOAP zone ordinance was changed so that the SOAP zones will no longer apply to sex workers, only to buyers and promoters. However, the prostitution loitering law is still part of the ordinance.

The Stranger reported that in an initial draft of the SOAP bill, Moore tried to include funding for The More We Love, a one-year-old nonprofit organization that is mostly known for conducting sweeps. As such funding would be required to go through a competitive bidding process, Moore later retracted that part of the legislation. Currently no additional funding for services is included in the ordinance.

The final vote on this legislation will be on Tuesday, September 17 at 2pm. 

In a graffiti case against SPD, a judge has ordered the city to pay over $750,000 in legal fees for the plaintiffs, who won their jury trial back in June. 

In the case of the death of Black Lives Matter protester Summer Taylor, a jury ruled that the state was not negligent, and that the driver who struck Taylor must pay their family $6 million in damages. 

The family of Jaahnavi Kandula is suing Seattle for $110 million plus $11,000 in a reference to SPOG VP Daniel Auderer’s cruel comment about Kandula’s life having no value. PubliCola reported that attorney Vonda Sargent said Officer Kevin Dave should have never been hired, and the fact that SPD knew about his history and still hired him points to a systemic problem. 

The Seattle Indian Health Board is walking away from working with SPD to improve how officers track cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people and behave with Indigenous communities. In doing so the organization is walking away from a contract of $87,500 per year. 

Abigail Echo-Hawk, the organization’s executive vice president told The Seattle Times, “I’m tired of sitting on committees while people die. We’re going to work with entities that want to change, and I hope SPD will eventually be an organization that wants to meaningfully help.” 

PubliCola has given a rundown of the OPA’s current investigations on former SPD Chief Adrian Diaz. There are currently 14 intake investigations on the former Chief that are pending at OPA.

Recent Headlines:

 

Permanent SPD Hiring Bonuses and Expanded SODA Zones Read More »

Seattle City Council Gets a Little Bit Messy

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Seattle News:

First off, allow me to highlight my article last week at the Urbanist about the new rushed SCORE jail contract being considered by Seattle City Council. The contract was then passed by full Council vote last Tuesday. 

In fact, that meeting on Tuesday, August 6 was such a doozie that I was hearing about it even though I was on vacation. The Council was supposed to vote on whether to put I-137 (funding for social housing) on the November ballot, and for this reason Council President Sara Nelson said she was limiting public comment to one hour even though many people had signed up to speak out against the new jail contract. 

After the public comment period, Councilmember Bob Kettle moved to remove the procedural vote on putting I-137 on the ballot from the agenda, citing some unknown last minute legal concerns. What these legal reasons might be is unclear, as any legal issue with the initiative itself would likely be a matter for the courts, not the City Council. The delay passed on a 7-1 vote, with Councilmember Cathy Moore abstaining and Councilmember Tammy Morales voting against. Morales suggested that delaying the vote would open the councilmembers up to a recall.

A recall would require making the argument that the Council was acting in a political manner by deliberately intending to place the initiative on a less advantageous ballot by delaying it until a special election in February. The longer they wait to act upon the initiative and the more other business they do while waiting, the more they open themselves up to a potential recall challenge. 

However, at this Tuesday’s (8/13) full Council meeting, during the I-137 agenda item, the council had someone available to answer questions, and not a single councilmember availed themselves of this opportunity. There wasn’t any discussion or conversation about the initiative. In comparing this initiative to Council actions around previous initiatives, one could begin to build a case that this is a deviation from established practice, which is what would be required to show political intent and support a recall action. 

For now we’ll wait and see if the council advances a serious alternative to I-137 and how long it takes them to accomplish this.

Meanwhile, at last week’s meeting, those present for public comment, many of whom hadn’t been allowed to speak, were understandably upset by the delay of the I-137 vote, especially considering that had been the stated reason for not letting them speak. The meeting was interrupted by their protests, and after taking two ten-minute recesses, Nelson gave up and conducted the rest of the meeting remotely.

The SCORE jail contract was passed with an amendment that requires the Mayor’s office report on operational issues with the new plan. However, the amendment did not require that any fixes be found for issues, and the total price tag of the new contract is still in question.

This Tuesday, August 13, was also a big day for the Seattle city council. In the morning the public safety committee met to discuss the new SODA and SOAP legislation that further criminalizes drug use and sex work, including by establishing specific geographic zones where people can be banned from entering due to previous arrests. I’ll have an article out in the Urbanist next week with more analysis, but in the meantime, you can read a lot more about it here:

Then at the afternoon full council meeting, the council voted on the mid-year supplemental budget. Councilmember Tammy Morales made one last attempt to recover the remaining $10 million promised to students for mental health resources during budget season last year, but she was thwarted by Councilmember Dan Strauss, who proposed an amendment allocating $2.25 million of those dollars. His amendment passed with a unanimous vote. 

The new supplemental budget approved by Council this week included $800,000 for additional SPD marketing, for which the city is already paying $2.6 million in 2024.

The Council will be on their summer recess starting August 19 through Labor Day. Publication of Notes from the Emerald City might be a bit sporadic during this time, but fear not, I am busily gearing up for budget season!

Other News Tidbits

You can take a look at SPD’s new animated recruitment ads here.

Seattle’s latest budget forecast saw next year’s budget deficit expand by another $7 million. The deficit is now believed to be more than $260 million.

The City of Seattle learned of additional money coming their way from opioid settlements, and Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the expenditure of $2.85 million to support additional bed capacity at Valley Cities Recovery Place Seattle in Beacon Hill. The investment will pay for approximately 13 additional detox and inpatient treatment beds that could serve as many as 150 people per year. 

‘Operation Safe Transit’ is a pilot program operated by King County and the King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) launched on May 1 to “make transit safer, combat crime, and provide behavioral health supports and resources, particularly along the transit corridor in downtown Seattle.” So far the initiative has resulted in 86 arrests. Since May, the King County Jail has made exceptions to bookings for misdemeanor crimes committed in the transit system at the request of KCSO.

PubliCola did a great job documenting the dysfunction and problems at the Community Police Commission (CPC), one of Seattle’s three police accountability bodies. 

Important dates coming up: 

  • On August 27, the full King County Council will consider whether to support the eventual closure of youth detention as has been laid out by Executive Dow Constantine. 
  • On August 28, King County’s Law & Justice committee will once again take up the matter of youth solitary confinement.
  • Also on August 28, there will be a Seattle Public School school board meeting, the final one before the new school year begins. 

Recent Headlines:

Seattle City Council Gets a Little Bit Messy Read More »

Seattle City Council Pushed for Easier Police Officer Entrance Exam that the Company Doesn’t Even Want to Provide

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Seattle News:

Seattle City Council voted to pass the expansion of license plate readers (ALPRs). Currently installed in 11 of SPD’s vehicles, the expansion will lead to 360 of SPD’s vehicles having ALPRs. This vote took place in spite of the fact that 3 of the 9 councilmembers were not present at the meeting. Councilmember Cathy Moore asked for a delay of the vote but received no support from her colleagues. It sounds like she intends to abandon her legislation limiting data retention to 48 hours due to the opposition for this data security  measure from the majority of the Council. 

In spite of a few amendments, and without a 48-hour retention limitation, privacy concerns with this expansion still abound, especially for those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare and undocumented immigrants. At the council meeting, Councilmember Bob Kettle apparently stated that folks are not coming to Washington State for abortions, a statement that is patently untrue.

The Public Safety Civil Service Commission (PSCSC) released their report on police officer entrance exams this week. The recommendation about the test remains the same, that Seattle should continue to use the NTN test as opposed to the PST test (that has a significantly higher pass rate). Of particular note, PST asked to not be considered as a testing vendor for Seattle. 

It is also clear that even if PST was willing to work with Seattle (which they are not), their standard test used by smaller agencies in the region would be inappropriate for SPD, and a new test would need to be developed. This would mean that law enforcement applicants would still have to take a separate test to be considered as an SPD officer, which defeats the stated purpose for switching tests. There are also significant legal difficulties involved with Seattle offering both the NTN and PST tests, which would prevent candidates from being ranked equitably and fairly based on their test results, especially given the large difference in pass rate between the tests (NTN has a 73% pass rate while PST has a 90% pass rate). 

Why the City Council spent so much time pushing for a test that the provider doesn’t even want to provide is an interesting question, particularly given the glaring problems with SPD’s backgrounding process that have come to light over the past several months due to the case of Officer Kevin Dave. PubliCola has now reported that Dave, who struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula last year, did not have a valid Washington State driver’s license at the time of the collision. 

Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison announced legislation that would bring Seattle into line with new state law around the definition of street racing. However, her legislation would also institute a $500 fine, which is not required by state law. This legislation will be discussed at the public safety committee meeting this coming Tuesday.

Deputy central staff director Aly Pennucci will be leaving the city after 11 years, to become one of two deputy county executives in Whatcom County. Following Julie Dingley’s departure as director of the city’s budget office, this feels like a painful brain drain before the city has to grapple with the 2025 budget deficit. Readers will remember that Esther Handy was also removed earlier this year from her position as head of Central Staff.

PubliCola reported on the hiring of a new head of the Council’s communications office, Brad Harwood, who has an interesting political past, including being quoted as a spokesperson for the state Republican party.

Former Senior Deputy Mayor (and niece to Mayor Bruce Harrell) Monisha Harrell was pulled over for a traffic stop on Sunday, June 16 that she called “frightening”, because of her car having a license plate cover:

“Harrell, who is Black, said the stop was a clear example of the kind of racial profiling the Seattle Police Department pledged to reduce in 2022, when the department adopted a new policy barring police stops for some minor violations, including missing registration stickers and obscured license tabs.

“Despite the gestures SPD has made toward ending racial profiling, Harrell said, it seems like nothing has changed. “We just went through this whole [process of asking], can we do things to minimize unnecessary stops … because it increases the rate of violence between people and law enforcement,” she said. “Sandra Bland,” the Texas woman who died in a jail cell in 2015 after police pulled her over for a minor traffic violation, “was not that long ago. … I get ‘two steps forward, one step back,’ but I cannot explain to you how far back this goes.””

Data collected by SPD themselves shows they continue to struggle with racial disparity in their stops and frisks, with Black and Indigenous community members five times to seven times more likely to get stopped and six times to seven times more likely to be frisked than White community members. 1 out of every 20 Terry stops conducted by SPD is unconstitutional.  

Former SPD Chief Adrian Diaz came out as gay this week in an interview with conservative talk show host Jason Rantz. He appears to be using this news as a defense against allegations against him of sexual harassment, discrimination, and creating a hostile work environment for Black and women officers. He is also now up for a job as Chief of Police in Austin, Texas.

But as PubliCola reported this week, “several current and former Seattle Police Department officers say Diaz established a “dictatorship” at the department in which officers who speak out against the chief and an inner circle of leadership have been demoted or subject to retaliatory investigations.” It is important to note that this behavior, in addition to the previously stated allegations, is not impossible just because a person is gay.

After the recent shooting and death of a student at Garfield High School, there are discussions about whether school resources officers (SROs) should be put back into Seattle schools. One parent wrote an op-ed in The Stranger about the poor experience her son had with Garfield’s SRO back before they were removed from schools in 2020.

Jail News:

Another person in custody at the SCORE jail in Des Moines died on May 9, PubliCola reported. This is the 6th death since March 2023 and the second death in the last two months. This is a very high rate of deaths for a jail, and particularly concerning given ongoing discussions in Seattle to contract with SCORE.

Crosscut reported on the “grim conditions” at the Patricia H. Clark Children & Family Justice Center–the King County youth jail. Staffing shortages there continue to impact youths’ access to programming, including educational programs and enrichment sessions. Youth go long periods without visitors (including attorneys) and are worried about the quality of their drinking water. As I reported in February, this youth jail was originally slated to be closed by 2025, but Executive Dow Constantine has since walked back this commitment, saying it will now be closed by 2028 at the earliest. 

Recent Headlines:

Seattle City Council Pushed for Easier Police Officer Entrance Exam that the Company Doesn’t Even Want to Provide Read More »

Homelessness up 23% while Seattle plans to cut funding for homelessness by 19%

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Seattle News:

The new interim SPOG contract passed City Council on Tuesday with a 7-1 vote, Councilmember Tammy Morales being the only CM opposed. Mayor Bruce Harrell signed the legislation soon thereafter. You can read more about it in my article here. You can read about some of the SPD officers who will be receiving large backpay payments here.

Officer Kevin Dave, who hit and killed Jaahnavi Kandula last year, was issued a traffic citation by the Seattle Municipal Court. Dave was required to pay a $5k fine by May 13, but as of the evening of May 14, he hadn’t yet paid. If he continues to fail to pay the fine, he could have his driver’s license revoked.

At the Public Safety committee meeting this week, councilmembers discussed the bill to approve the expansion of SPD’s automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). SPD wants to include these ALPRs in all existing patrol vehicle dash cameras, which would cost about $280k per year. Councilmembers expressed concern about the current data retention period as well as harms this technology could cause to people seeking reproductive healthcare. The legislation has not yet come to a committee vote, but may do so as early as May 28. 

At the Select Budget committee meeting on Wednesday, councilmembers heard presentations on the General Fund Financial Plan Update and the JumpStart Payroll Expense Tax. The budget deficit for 2025 has grown once more, from $241 million to $258 million, due to settled labor contract costs exceeding planning estimates, Councilmember Rob Saka expressed some reluctance to use the JumpStart tax to fill in the General Fund deficit, and other councilmembers also expressed interest in staying true to the original purpose of the tax, which was codified in the JumpStart spending plan that allocates money to affordable housing, green new deal investments, equitable development, and small businesses. They were also concerned about the tax’s potential volatility when considering using it as a permanent General Fund fix. 

Ballard Food Bank’s 2023 annual report was recently released, and it showed the number of household shopping visits and deliveries in 2023 was more than double the number in 2019.  Emergency financial assistance in 2023 was 4 times what it was in 2021.  

KUOW uncovered the secret donor behind the kid playground at Denny Blaine Park that would have potentially displaced the nude beach that is currently located there. Wealthy resident Stuart Sloan, who lives near the park, texted Mayor Bruce Harrell directly to complain about the park and offered to foot at least part of the bill for the proposed playground. As KUOW reported, “The playground plans showcase how the ultra-wealthy can exert influence in Seattle city government, and how the city’s policy of accepting anonymous gifts allows it to keep contributors secret.”

On Homelessness in the Region:

The 2024 King County Point-In-Time count was released this week, and it showed that 16,385 individuals on any given night in King County are experiencing homelessness. This number has increased 23% from the same estimate done in 2022, and is the largest number ever found in these reports. Homelessness in King County continues to impact communities of color disproportionately, with 19% of those unhoused identifying as Black and 7% as Indigenous while only 6% of King County’s total population identifies as Black and only 1% identifies as Indigenous, although there is a possibility that the disparity for Indigenous communities is even worse than these numbers due to counting methods.

As The Seattle Times reports, this news comes at a time when Seattle has asked the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to cut its funding ask for 2025: “The current proposed budget would eliminate hundreds of shelter beds, among other services, which are often used to move people from the street and get them ready for permanent housing.”

A more detailed article from The Seattle Times elucidates that the net loss for 2024 would be $21 million, which is about a 19% decrease. This would cut “about 300 emergency shelter beds, a 125-bed shelter for Black men in the Central District, homelessness diversion funding for 265 households, and a reduction in behavioral health services or beds at tiny home villages.”

The article quotes Alison Eisinger, the executive director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness: “I defy you to find me one person in the city of Seattle who thinks that reducing the number of shelter beds available in this city is the right move,” she said.

Recent Headlines:

Homelessness up 23% while Seattle plans to cut funding for homelessness by 19% Read More »