OPA

SPD police chief loses his cool

/

Seattle News:

I’ve been closely covering the debate around universal school meals for students in Seattle, which you can read about here and here. Right now it looks like Seattle might get both universal school meals starting this fall and a voucher-based food program for weekends and school breaks. Today, Mayor Katie Wilson and the Seattle City Council released a joint statement indicating both branches of government are on board with the plan.

The City Council will be voting on a proposal to fund the universal school meals through the general fund on August 4 as part of their mid-year supplemental budget deliberations. 

I’ve seen a lot of speculation that one or more Seattle city councilmembers might have purposefully blocked Mayor Katie Wilson’s universal school meals proposal in order to tank her political capital and have a more successful mayoral run against her in 2029. I cannot say what lies in the hearts of the councilmembers, but something else to consider is the fact that the council isn’t particularly politically aligned with the mayor and might not be worried about crossing her in the same way they might have feared crossing Mayor Bruce Harrell, who helped many of them get elected. 

In the last few weeks, I also wrote about both the D5 Seattle City Council seat race and the 46th LD state representative race.

I’m sure you’re all aware of the tragic shooting at the Seattle Center during the Bite of Seattle food festival on Sunday. PubliCola reported that SPD Chief Shon Barnes was out of town at the time of the shooting, and indeed, was scheduled to be out of town until mid-August, in spite of summer tending to be a time of increased violence overall, and gun violence in particular. 

At a press conference about the shooting on Monday, Barnes snapped at a reporter from The South Seattle Emerald who was asking about his traveling habits, and his chief of staff Alex Ricketts had to step between Barnes and the reporter and escort Barnes away. You can watch the video clip here.

At another press conference today, Barnes was asked about the incident with the reporter and said it merely illustrated his passion for being a police officer. Someone has filed a complaint with the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) about the incident. Barnes was also asked again about his travel schedule, a question he tried to dismiss as quickly as possible.

Other News:

ICE is still getting Washington state data to assist in their immigration enforcement efforts, according to KUOW, meaning the state’s sanctuary law isn’t being fully enforced. This is in spite of the state denying tens of thousands of requests from ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and Customs & Border Patrol. According to KUOW’s article:

““The records we’re getting show that the rejection doesn’t stop them from getting the data,” said Angelina Godoy, director of the UW Center for Human Rights. “They get rejected using one [Originating Agency Identifier] and then just submit their request under another one. There are thousands of still-open [Originating Agency Identifiers] they can use.””

Leaked video from the San Francisco Police Department’s drone program has shown one of the privacy risks of this surveillance technology. Ben Werdmuller, the senior director of technology at ProPublica, wrote an essay on his personal site about the more inherent problems with such ubiquitous surveillance. Furthermore, Werdmuller wrote that the police drones in San Francisco have had no impact on crime. 

Meanwhile, LAPD announced they will be letting their contract with Flock Safety expire. As 404 Media reported, “Notably, the decision came after an audit of ALPR technology found that, in a two-month period, the LAPD had improperly “investigated” 161 people whose cars were flagged as stolen in the LAPD’s ALPR system but were not actually stolen.” Here is that audit. 

Last week, the Renton City Council voted to continue to pause their use of Flock Safety stationary license plate readers in the city. However, they voted to resume use of in-vehicle license plate readers (these readers are from Axon, not Flock). It became clear during the councilmember discussion that in practice, the in-vehicle license plate readers will also not be used at present since they are not compliant with the new state law regulating the use of license plate readers (the same issue faced by the City of Seattle). While a technical fix might be possible to resume use of the Axon in-vehicle license plate readers, it is unclear if and when that will happen. 

Recent Headlines:

SPD police chief loses his cool Read More »

SPD’s overtime spending has more than doubled in four years due to SPOG contract

/

Local News:

I wrote a piece last week about new data out of King County’s DCHS showing that permanent supportive housing in the area is reducing jail bookings…and I attended the opening of DESC’s newest permanent supportive housing building, Birch Grove, located in Lake City. DESC isn’t moving forward on future building projects due to federal funding uncertainties. 

Lime is going to equip their scooters in Seattle with cameras. About half of their scooters have been fitted out with cameras so far, and all of them are planned to have cameras by the end of the year. The idea is it will make scooter riders behave better, but it also ups the surveillance on Seattle streets. 

HardPressed News reported that SPD was waiting for the mayoral election results last year with the belief that if Bruce Harrell won, he’d greenlight a police drone program. 

For more than two years, the Seattle Fire Department has been using an artificial intelligence program to listen to 911 calls and decide which callers won’t receive a rapid response and instead be routed to a nurse line located in Texas. What’s really amazing about this story, broken by The Seattle Times, is that the program has had no public review, wasn’t disclosed to any 911 callers, and has no apparent mechanisms for measuring how well it’s working. It also didn’t go through a surveillance impact review process.

“SFD will be open from now on about its AI use, said Lombard, the assistant chief.” This sentence in the article carries a lot of weight. It implies SFD will be open about their AI use in the future because they got caught. Not exactly the sort of thing that builds public trust. 

DivestSPD reported that SPD Chief Shon Barnes has received 47 OPA complaints since he began his job as Chief early last year, which is a very large number. Most of the complaints appear to be nothing burgers. They sometimes have interesting timing, suggesting a possible SPOG-coordinated attack against the Chief. 

Barnes is on track to receive more OPA complaints than his predecessor, Adrian Diaz.

Seattle City Council’s public safety committee received their SPD 2026 Q1 sworn staffing, overtime, and call time report on Tuesday. SPD’s Q1 2026 actual deployable number of officers is 939, only 13 officers more than in Q1 of 2025. 

The rate of hiring, along with the slow-down of officer separations, means SPD might be on track to overspend their salary budget by $1.7 million this year. Chair Bob Kettle said he and Councilmember Dan Strauss had told SPD not to slow down their hiring to account for this potential overspend. I reached out to Strauss’s office, and he said he has no plans to introduce an item in the mid-year supplemental budget to account for the $1.7 million. 

We also got to see how expensive SPD overtime has become due to the new SPOG contract. In 2022, SPD spent $26.3 million in overtime. In 2026? Their overtime budget stands at a whopping $55.8 million. 

King County’s new Point in Time Count for 2026 came out this week, showing that the region’s homelessness numbers continue to grow, albeit not as rapidly as they did between 2022 and 2024. While the overall number of homeless people grew by 9% in the last two years, the unsheltered population of homeless people grew by 21%, highlighting the urgent need for more shelter spaces. 

Finally, The Economist, that bastion of progressive thought, published an article this week entitled “American police killings are rising, even as murder rates fall.”

From the article: “Killings by police have yet to reignite the broad outrage that followed Mr Floyd’s death, but each day, unfortunately, brings the chance of a grisly event that might. Shootings by sheriffs, who operate mostly in rural areas, have risen especially fast in recent years, countering improvements in some big cities.”

Recent Headlines:

SPD’s overtime spending has more than doubled in four years due to SPOG contract Read More »

It’s been a hard month for license plate readers in Washington State

/

Seattle News:

Katie Wilson will be Seattle’s next mayor, and Seattle’s 2026 budget has been adopted! Whew, what a month. 

I wrote my take on the budget last week, a few days before its final passage. You can also read a list of budget amendments proposed by the councilmembers and PubliCola’s budget wrap-up. 

No budget discussion would be complete without noting both the efforts on the parts of councilmembers to limit the Mayor-elect’s budget flexibility. There are also deep concerns over the likely loss of federal funding for housing and homelessness programs via the Continuum of Care funds from HUD, especially permanent supportive housing funding. 

A coalition of states, including Washington, has filed a lawsuit against HUD over the above policy changes.

King County has selected Connections Health Solutions to run the new crisis care center in Capitol Hill. Connections already runs the crisis care center in Kirkland and is a national company as opposed to a local community based provider. 

DivestSPD published some charts last week about changes at the Office of Police Accountability (OPA). According to Divest, the OPA only fully investigated 23% of complaints in 2025 compared to 37% in 2023, when the department was under the leadership of former Director Gino Betts. 

OPA contact logs have also increased from 16% in 2022 to 28% in 2025, so it will be interesting to hear from the OPA next year (now under the leadership of Bonnie Glenn) as to why this is the case. 

For those interested in the Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy spending plan, the Department of Education and Early Learning (DEEL) is holding four community outreach/conversation sessions in December, for which you can RSVP:

  • Tuesday, December 2, 5:30–7:30 PM at the Magnuson Community Center, 7110 62nd Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98115 
  • Wednesday, December 10, 5:30–7:30 PM at the Ballard Branch – Seattle Public Library, 5614 22nd Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107 
  • Thursday, December 11, 5:30–7:30 PM at Denny International Middle School, 2601 SW Kenyon St, Seattle, WA 98106 
  • Tuesday, December 16, 5:30–7:30 PM at Rainier Community Center, 4600 38th Ave. S, Seattle, WA 98118 

Divest SPD reported that less than 10% of 2025 SPD recruits were women, a blow to the department’s 30×30 initiative. 

Skeptics of the initiative point out that women making up 30% of the police force wouldn’t necessarily fix the systemic issue of police violence. Also concerning is the department’s efforts to recruit women without a clear plan in place to address what appears, from both lawsuits and conditions documented in a 30×30 report published in September 2023, to be a hostile workplace for women. 

New Councilmember Eddie Lin was sworn in today. Councilmember-elect Dionne Foster and Mayor-elect Katie Wilson won’t be sworn in until the beginning of 2026, but because Lin’s seat was being held by an appointee, he was sworn in early. 

For the same reason, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay was sworn in today. 

Surveillance News:

I wrote about Washington cities’ struggle with what to do about Flock Safety license plate readers (ALPRs), both because of the evidence that the data is being shared with federal agencies, including ICE, and because of a recent lawsuit brought by the cities of Stanwood and Sedro-Wooley in which ALPR video was deemed to be within valid public record parameters. As a result, many Washington cities have paused or delayed their ALPR programs. 

In the summer, I reported that it looked like the King County Housing Authority’s (KCHA) ALPR camera data had been shared with federal agencies such as ICE. KCHA has since decided to end their ALPR pilot. 

Since I wrote the article, Stanwood and Sedro-Wooley have appealed the court decision about whether ALPR video counts as a public record, and residents of Olympia are asking their city council to shut down their Flock ALPR program.

There are also new records showing that ALPR programs are being used to surveil protesters and activists, including in Washington state. 

Meanwhile,The Intercept found that fusion centers were being used to surveil pro-Palestine protests on at least five college campuses across the country. Fusion centers were established after 9/11 to better enable information sharing between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, including campus police. 

“The normalization of intelligence sharing between campus police departments and federal law enforcement agencies is widespread across U.S. universities,” the Intercept wrote.

Washington State News:

Governor Bob Ferguson made an appointment to fill the upcoming vacancy on the Washington Supreme Court: Colleen Melody, who spent the last decade working at the Attorney General’s office leading the civil rights division (a position to which she was hired by Ferguson). While at the AG’s office, Melody was deeply involved in filing lawsuits against President Donald Trump’s executive orders during his first term from 2017-2020. A career government lawyer, Melody has never before served as a judge. 

Melody will serve as a Supreme Court justice for 2026, but she would have to run for election next November in order to retain the judgeship. The big question to consider, should she choose to run, is her stance on the legality of a wealth tax in Washington state. 

The latest state revenue forecast showed a slight uptick in revenue projections for the current biennial budget (2025-2027), but not enough to make much difference. Talk abounds about potential new revenue sources for the state. It’s unclear if we’ll see a repeat to this year’s legislative session when Ferguson said he’d veto any budget proposal that included a wealth tax. 

Ferguson is expected to release his budget proposal before the end of the year, giving us a few weeks to review it before the next state legislative session begins on January 12. 

Recent Headlines:

It’s been a hard month for license plate readers in Washington State Read More »

Will Katie Wilson be a Sea Change for Seattle?

/

Election News:

It feels like for the last week, it’s been all Seattle mayoral election, all the time! But it looks like Katie Wilson squeaked out the win in what is likely to be a sea change for Seattle. 

In other Seattle election results, Alexis Mercedes Rinck handily won reelection as a councilmember, and Dionne Foster beat incumbent Sara Nelson as the other city-wide councilmember. Eddie Lin beat Adonis Ducksworth for the D2 council seat. 

For Seattle City Attorney, Erika Evans beat Republican incumbent Ann Davison. I chatted with Evans on the phone a few days after the election, and we discussed her vision for the office. 

The new (and much larger) Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy passed, as did the B&O tax restructure championed by Rinck. The spending plan for the FEPP dollars will be decided next year, including whether any of those dollars will go to police in schools, so that will be something that bears watching.

In King County, Girmay Zahilay will take over as King County Executive, beating out Claudia Balducci, who will remain on the King County Council. Zahilay is vacating a seat on the council, so look for a replacement to be appointed soon. Otherwise, on the King County Council, it was an election for the incumbents, with the open seat in District 5 going to Steffanie Fain. 

I also want to give a shout-out to Burien! Their progressive slate of councilmember candidates all won their races.

You might also want to check out my colleague Ryan Packer’s article about 6 election bellweathers, which include a city council race in Bellevue in which incumbent Conrad Lee has finally been unseated after… 32 years.  

Seattle News:

I wrote an article about Mayor Bruce Harrell’s response to the threat of escalating ICE enforcement and the possibility of President Donald Trump sending the National Guard to Seattle. I discuss Harrell’s proposed law enforcement mask ban and Rinck’s proposed Statement of Legislative Intent that will require the Seattle Police Department to report on their implementation plan for the two executive orders. 

This is a tough one because looking around the country, it looks like the most impactful/successful resistance to ICE is coming directly from the streets. So far, responses from city and state governments have been less productive. 

Budget Chair Dan Strauss announced his 2026 budget balancing package. There was enough money for him to provide funding for each councilmember to address at least some of their priorities. The councilmembers will be voting on amendments to the balancing package this Friday, November 14. The amendments have not been released to the public as of publication of this newsletter, giving very little time for review.

The final budget vote is expected to be on Friday, November 21. 

There’s been a shakeup at SPD, with Chief Shon Barnes firing two of his top civilian command staff members: Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey and General Counsel Rebecca Boatright. It is unclear if the Mayor’s Office was involved in this decision in any way. This might mark a preference to move away from civilianization at SPD, a position that would certainly make the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) happy. 

Barnes also named Captain Jim Britt as the new commander of the East Precinct. Britt was formerly in charge of SPD’s real time crime center, and I haven’t yet heard who will be taking his place in such a highly technical role. 

It looks like it might not be just SPD that has a problem mistreating their women employees. The Seattle Fire Department’s (SFD) former head of human resources, Sarah Lee, has filed a $2.5 million claim against the department. Lee, who was fired in September, says she was let go in retaliation for standing up to workplace misconduct and discrimination against women in the department. Her claim contains details of 14 different allegations.

The Seattle Times wrote, “Lee’s filing speaks of a department that broadly mistreats women.”

Lastly, this afternoon, city council voted to confirm Bonnie Glenn as the new director of the Office of Police Accountability OPA). This is a bit surprising as in the past, the public has been able to hear from finalist candidates for the OPA director position and submit their questions to potentially be answered. This time there’s been no public engagement that I’m aware of and the appointment is simply being rushed through. 

However, the appointment of Glenn is only for a one-year term (until the end of 2026) to complete the term of former director Gino Betts. Wilson will be able to select her own candidate if she so chooses for a term beginning in 2027. 

My journalist colleague Glen Stellmacher has some direct and concerning experience with Glenn in her role as the interim OPA director. He says he had to file a bar complaint against Glenn before she would begin an investigation about an SPD intelligence officer who “knowingly lied to investigators about SPD’s use of informants during the 2020 protests.”

King County and WA State News:

King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda has a few interesting addendums to the 2026-2027 county budget that made it into the budget striker. One proviso will require the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (KCPAO) to provide data on reoffending rates for youth subject to traditional prosecution. This data will allow a more meaningful analysis of the recidivism rates for youth participating in diversion programs. 

Mosqueda has a second proviso that will require the creation of a master list of surveillance technology being used by any King County department. She is interested in such a list as her office works to develop a surveillance technology ordinance for the county. 

On the state level, the Senate Democratic Caucus is discussing the idea of a “millionaires tax.” The proposal being discussed would levy a 9.9% tax on adjusted gross income over $1 million. The Democrats would have to pass this new tax during an election year, however, and Governor Bob Ferguson has proven to be resistant thus far to passing progressive taxes, having quashed the much-discussed wealth tax earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Senator June Robinson, the Democrat’s chief budget writer, has told her colleagues not to put in any new requests for funding for 2026. Since Ferguson approved the state’s budget in the spring, revenue forecasts have been grim and there is likely to be a large shortfall to deal with in the short legislative session this winter. 

Ferguson will submit his budget proposal in December in advance of the legislative session in January.

I do have an article coming out very soon (maybe tomorrow morning?) with more about license plate surveillance being used for immigration enforcement across Washington state, a recent Public Records Act lawsuit, and more, so keep an eye out for that. 

Recent Headlines:

 

Will Katie Wilson be a Sea Change for Seattle? Read More »

Seattle’s budget is precariously balanced, faces long-term problems

/

Seattle News:

First off, we’re officially in budget season! Both Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed Seattle budget for 2026 and Executive Shannon Braddock’s proposed King County budget for 2026-2027 were introduced on Tuesday. 

I wrote an overview of the Seattle budget, which covers a lot of ground. Once again, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) was the clear winner, with the largest budgetary increase of any City department. 

And for those of you who remember that pesky budget deficit, Harrell managed to avoid having to make large cuts and layoffs by continuing to transfer the JumpStart payroll tax into the General Fund and getting behind two new revenue sources: the retool of the B&O tax championed by Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and a new 0.1% public safety sales tax. 

Harrell got very lucky in that the most recent city revenue forecast was decidedly better than the one earlier this year. He would have also been in trouble if it weren’t for Rinck’s B&O tax proposal, which explains why he got behind a new progressive revenue source for the first time in his mayoral term. 

However, that revenue forecast is very uncertain, and it’s quite possible the next forecast, due October 20, will be significantly worse. Happily for Harrell, that will be the city council’s problem and his hands will remain relatively clean for his reelection campaign. 

King County has already passed its own 0.1% public safety tax, which is singlehandedly saving the county from its own large deficit. 

Speaking of SPD, ICE is launching a new advertisement campaign to recruit Seattle law enforcement. They’re offering hiring bonuses and student loan forgiveness to entice candidates, while telling them they’ll be working to detain illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. However, here in Washington State, 60% of those currently in detention have no criminal record, while others have minor infringements only like traffic violations.

I dived into Seattle’s new AI Policy so you wouldn’t have to. Somehow I survived the many buzzwords and learned about the 42 AI pilots the City of Seattle has conducted so far. I covered several concerns, but I think one of the most interesting things I discovered is SPD’s potential interest in diving into the world of AI-generated predictive policing. 

Relatedly, PubliCola reported on an Office of Police Accountability (OPA) complaint from a community member who used an AI-detecting tool that found several public-facing communications from SPD (blog posts and a statement from the new police chief) appeared to be completely or partially written by AI. 

As I reported at The Urbanist, on October 8, the Seattle Public Schools school board is set to vote on whether Garfield High School will have a “Student Enforcement Officer” (SEO) pilot program this school year. They were supposed to vote on this pilot during their September meeting, but board director Joe Mizrahi asked for a postponement while he works on an amendment. 

Washington State News:

In July, Cascade PBS reported that Governor Bob Ferguson has the lowest six-month approval rating of any Washington State governor since 1993. 

And things aren’t slated to get any easier for Ferguson. Out this week, the most recent state revenue estimate has gotten worse. Revenues are expected to drop another $889 million over the next four years. Lawmakers will grapple to rebalance the state’s 2026 budget during the short legislative session early next year. 

Local Media:

Earlier this week, Seattle’s Cascade PBS station announced it’s laying off most of its newsroom staff and discontinuing production of local long-form journalism. This is a huge blow to local journalism in the Puget Sound area, and to be honest, I’m still reeling. You can donate to the laid off journalists here.

The cancellation of Cascade PBS’s local coverage comes the same year we’ve seen a large shift over at The Stranger, which appears to have changed its focus to covering local arts and culture at the expense of covering as much local news as in the past. Certainly from my perspective, as a local reporter covering the public safety beat, the sudden lack of a criminal justice reporter at The Stranger has left a huge void in what gets covered.

Mayoral candidate Katie Wilson has been promoting her Local News Dollars program that would provide public funding to small local media outlets, which gives me some hope for the future. But in the meantime, now would be a good time to donate to those outlets that still exist, including PubliCola, The Urbanist, the South Seattle Emerald, and Real Change. 

I suppose I should also mention that you can support Notes from the Emerald City and my work through my Patreon. 

Recent Headlines:

Seattle’s budget is precariously balanced, faces long-term problems Read More »

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

/

Seattle News:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Headlines:

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

We’re all waiting to find out exactly how austere the new WA state budget will be

/

Seattle News:

Last week I dived into the recent Seattle Auditor’s Office report on gun violence patterns in Seattle for The Urbanist.

At the public safety committee meeting on April 8, Chief Innovation Officer Andrew Myerberg presented on the search for a new Office of Police Accountability (OPA) director. The search committee consists of Councilmember Bob Kettle, SPD Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis, CPC co-chair Joel Merkel, and Lisa Daugaard, the co-executive director of PDA. The first consideration date for candidates is today, 4/25, interviews of finalists will be all day 5/16, and meetings with stakeholders (the three police accountability bodies and SPD) will be on 5/22. 

Mayor Bruce Harrell expects to announce his hiring decision sometime in early June. As with the most recent police chief search, there is no public engagement scheduled around this hiring decision. 

There will be a special public safety committee meeting on Tuesday, April 29 to discuss Seattle’s police accountability system, including moving forward with the appointment of Eci Ameh as Executive Director of the Seattle Community Police Commission (CPC).

As has been previously reported by Guy Oron in Real Change, homeless encampment sweeps have escalated a large amount during Harrell’s tenure as mayor. And now The Seattle Times is even reporting on the story, writing, “To hide from the city’s escalating pace of encampment removals, homeless people say they are hiding deeper in the woods, where assaults, overdoses and emergencies can go unnoticed. Some say they’ve given up on setting up a tent altogether, leaving them less visible but more vulnerable to the elements and predators.”

Seattle has also lost 130 shelter spaces since 2022. Existing spaces are full (95%, which accounts for time spent in turnover). 

PubliCola reported that there have only been five SOAP orders issued since the law was passed more than seven months ago. Four of the five orders were against men who were indigent (making less than $24,000/year or showing they can’t afford an attorney). 

PubliCola also provides important context: “At a time of mass deportations and crackdowns on even legal immigrants, it’s also noteworthy that, according to public defenders, most of the men who get busted for patronizing street sex workers are immigrants. White men have more discreet ways of buying sex, and they’re more likely to be represented by private attorneys, rather than overworked public defenders.”

Meanwhile, in an Urbanist op-ed, Nathan Rouse, who is a candidate for Seattle City Attorney, comes out strong against cash bail for nonviolent misdemeanors. It’s worth reading what he has to say, and he includes many links for those interested in learning more. I’m curious what his opponents think about bail reform and whether this will be an issue on which the candidates differ. 

King County/WA State News:

My latest article is out at The Urbanist today, looking at the intersection between what’s going on with the state budget right now and how that will impact King County, with a particular focus on the bill that would have lifted the property tax revenue growth cap and the bill that would allow municipalities to raise the sales tax 0.1% as an additional “public safety” tax. 

In a letter delivered today, King County Councilmembers Girmay Zahilay and Rod Dembowski ask Executive Shannon Braddock to propose this new sales tax. Last I heard, neither councilmember had signed the letter to Ferguson asking for him to reconsider his resistance to the property tax cap lift. 

It should be an exciting few days in Olympia as this legislative session is slated to end this Sunday, April 27. A few news tidbits in the meantime: the bill to create a permit-to-purchase program for guns has been passed by both chambers and will become law if Ferguson signs it. It looks like the Senate might be creating the wealth tax “test balloon” that Ferguson indicated might be acceptable to him. And Senate Democrats have proposed a 55% cut to abortion access funding in the state, right at a time when medical agencies providing these services are under severe attack from the federal government. The House Democrats have preserved this funding, and we’ll find out soon if they prevail in this matter. 

King County’s 2024 Point in Time Count was released this week, saying 16,868 people experienced homelessness on any given night in 2024. This is 26% higher than in 2022. Homelessness continues to disproportionately affect communities of color, including Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic people. 

There are more than two people per every shelter space in King County, and in North King County, this number is much worse at 9.6 people per bed. You can read more about it at PubliCola.

Meanwhile, PubliCola also reported that the current state budget cuts funds for former Governor Jay Inslee’s right-of-way program, which resolves encampments on state-owned rights of way through extensive outreach. 

National News:

Jeff Asher, a nationally recognized crime data analyst, released an essay announcing that crime is down down down. His own words: “All we can say with certainty is that major crime — as counted by the FBI — almost certainly declined quite a lot in the first quarter of 2025. These would be record levels of decline for most crime types if they held up for the full year.”

I’ll add my usual disclaimer about taking crime data with at least some salt.

Recent Headlines:

 

We’re all waiting to find out exactly how austere the new WA state budget will be Read More »

Crime falls in Seattle in spite of SPD’s “organizational weaknesses”

/

Seattle News:

First up, I had a new article out this week that covers continuing local developments from the Trump administration. I wrote about how both King County and Seattle are impacted, how various decisions from the Trump administration and Congress are likely to cause more homelessness, less affordable housing, and fewer services for those who are unhoused, and the worsening situation for unaccompanied immigrant and refugee children who lack legal representation when they face ICE in the courtroom. 

We’re also seeing eviction rates in King County skyrocket. KUOW reported that the King County Sheriff’s Office received 702 eviction orders this March, as compared to 317 eviction orders received in March of 2024. For 2025 so far, there has been a 30% increase from last year’s rate. 

Even though SPD only managed to hire a net ONE officer in 2024 (a gain that was immediately erased when former Chief Sue Rahr decided to fire Officer Kevin Dave on January 6), Danny Westneat reports that crime is “plummeting,” citing the following stats:

  • Shots fired YTD down 24%
  • Violent crime YTD down 15%, its lowest quarter for five years
  • 8 homicides through the end of March, the lowest figure since 2019
  • Car theft is down 30% from a year ago and 50% down from its peak

Looks like police department staffing really doesn’t have much to do with crime rates. 

Speaking of SPD, the OPA has recommended they institute an AI policy after one of their officers used ChatGPT and other AI tools to write his reports. SPD COO Brian Maxey made it into the news again this week. And SPD Captain Eric Greening reportedly settled his discrimination lawsuit with the City for around $1 million.

Seattle received its April revenue forecast yesterday, and the news is bleak. The revenue forecast council adopted the pessimistic forecast, given all the turmoil being caused by the Trump administration and Elon Musk. The total revenue forecast for 2025-2026 has been lowered by $241 million. This does not include the loss of $46.8 million of expected JumpStart revenue from 2024 (the tax only brought in $360 million in 2024 after being predicted to bring in $406.8 million). 

Seattle will need to make up that $241 million + $46.8 million gap this year during their mid-year supplemental budget process and their fall budget season. The revenue forecast could continue to grow worse during this time. And let’s not forget Seattle has already been projected to face an additional $78 million deficit for 2027, a number we can also expect to grow larger. 

It is really hard for me to emphasize enough how much trouble all of these budgets are in, from the Washington State budget to the King County budget to Seattle’s budget. They were already in deep trouble before any federal cuts, but the federal cuts will undoubtedly exacerbate the situation. Without significant new revenue sources, the current level of public services enjoyed in these localities is unsustainable.

That being said, it will be difficult for Seattle to pass enough new revenue sources, and especially to get them up and collecting quickly enough, to meaningfully address the problem. Thus far the city council has shown itself to be recalcitrant when it comes to passing any new revenue sources, but it remains to be seen whether this latest downturn will change any minds. 

One possible solution would be to move all JumpStart funds away from their originally intended purpose (affordable housing, Green New Deal, and equitable development) and plug it all into the General Fund. However, given what we know about how the Trump administration is already negatively impacting affordable housing projects and homelessness services, as well as how recessions generally further increase the unhoused population, pulling further large investments from affordable housing would almost certainly have disastrous consequences. Similarly, the longer the City postpones dealing materially with the climate catastrophe, the worse the fallout will be, and the less the City invests in addressing historical disparities, the more those inequities will continue to compound. 

Local journalist Guy Oron continues his reporting about homeless sweeps in Seattle, finding that the number of sweeps in 2024 was even higher than the record set in 2023 – there were 2,504 sweeps in 2024 and 2,205 sweeps in 2023. The vast majority of these sweeps were done without prior notice. 

Harrell clocks in with 5,633 sweeps performed during his three years and three months in office, by far the highest number of any Seattle mayor since at least 2008. Former mayor Jenny Durkan oversaw 1,781 sweeps during her four-year term, the second highest number. 

For the 2025-2026 biennium, the Unified Care Team that performs these sweeps is slated to get $66 million, a bump from their previous 2023-2024 budget of $52.5 million. 

Over the last year, at least 15 defendants at Seattle Municipal Court (SMC) have not been assigned public defenders to receive the defense services to which they are legally entitled. This particular issue does not seem to be resulting from the public defense crisis currently hitting the state, but rather seems to be due to errors on the side of SMC. Public defenders suspect this problem might be resulting from the Court’s expensive new case management system that originally rolled out a year ago and has been plagued by issues.

The Office of the City Auditor recently released a report on gun violence patterns in Seattle and then delivered a presentation about it to the council’s governance committee last week, which became unexpectedly heated when Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington appeared to feel attacked and disrespected by both the report and the process by which it came into existence. 

Politics aside, it’s an enlightening report that the Mayor’s Office doesn’t appear to have much interest in engaging with. It references a report delivered by the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy (CEBCP) to SPD in June of 2023, saying, “The report found that SPD does not follow many best practices for “investigative effectiveness” and that “even if the SPD returns to full personnel capacity, these organizational weaknesses will continue if unattended.”

The auditor’s report lists six specific weaknesses of SPD investigations found by the CEBCP and references SPD’s lack of public legitimacy as an ongoing issue. No one at the council meeting on this subject explicitly brought any of this up, however. 

WA State News:

The Washington State budget continues to wend its way forward. Governor Bob Ferguson’s budget director sent a letter to legislative budget leaders underlining his priorities. The letter underlines Ferguson’s desire to maintain strong reserves and acknowledges that “meaningful reductions alone will not fully address the budget shortfall.” It says new revenue sources should be “thoughtfully considered” but makes it clear that Ferguson remains opposed to the wealth tax, which is “untested in court.” 

More surprisingly, the letter goes on to list more than two dozen policies and programs that Ferguson would like to see receive more funding and attention. As the Washington State Standard reported, “Budget writers said this week that the level of granular detail in the letter didn’t surprise them. But the absence of advice from the governor on where they could make a bigger dent in addressing a multibillion-dollar shortfall did.”

What the letter does NOT do is give any specific advice about either cuts or new sources of revenue that Ferguson would support. 

The state’s capital budget proposals include more money for affordable housing compared to the last biennium, with the House proposal including almost $724 million for housing and the Senate proposal including $770 million.  

Meanwhile, hundreds of Washington state workers, who have been threatened with varying furlough plans by both Ferguson and the Senate, protested at Olympia on Wednesday. It’s possible that Washington State Federation of State Employees (WFSE) workers might strike over the proposal.

Recent Headlines:

 

Crime falls in Seattle in spite of SPD’s “organizational weaknesses” Read More »

Seattle Councilmember Morales’s resignation raises red flag about Seattle’s institutions

/

Seattle News:

Perhaps the biggest news this week is that Councilmember Tammy Morales is resigning from the Seattle City Council, effective January 6. She announced her resignation about a week after Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck was sworn into office, replacing Tanya Woo, who was appointed by the Council earlier this year. You can read about the resignation here, here, here, and here.

Former Councilmember Andrew Lewis had this to say over on Twitter: “The comparison with Pedersen [referenced in PubliCola’s article] is really illustrative. Alex had a different point of view from most of us, but there were still things we could work on together or amendments that improved a bill. The freezing out and hostility Tammy has faced is unprecedented and unacceptable. Or Licata, who served 18 years as the lone progressive. Despite his politics his colleagues respected him and he got a lot of good things passed on their merit (paid sick and safe leave for one). The curiosity that leads to good ideas breaking through is sorely lacking today.”

While we could all see other councilmembers bullying Morales on the dais live on the Seattle Channel, it sounds like this was the tip of the iceberg in terms of the poor treatment experienced by her and her staff. However, as bad as this is, perhaps even more troubling is the disenfranchisement of District 2 as a result of this behavior. It should not escape anyone that District 2 is the only Seattle district where people of color constitute the majority. Morales herself seems deeply aware of this, providing this list of actions the current Council has taken in the last year that have undermined her policy work and have been, in some cases, what could be considered anti-democratic:

  • “Interfered with the ability of our non-partisan Council Central Staff to provide objective policy analysis 
  • Suppressed the will of voters by offering an alternative ballot initiative that would effectively gut the Seattle social housing developer next February 
  • Stifled first amendment rights during public comment by arresting people 
  • Intimidated commenters by having a police presence when any controversial legislation is considered 
  • Witnessed a significant reduction of institutional knowledge through the departure of 3 Council Central policy staff, the entire Council communications team, members of our human resources and finance team, and several legislative aides 
  • Attempted to defund a critical program for addressing anti-displacement and supporting community economic development led by people of color 
  • Passed 11 separate bills to increase the punitive nature of our criminal legal system without any additional meaningful accountability for our police department 
  • And passed a budget that reduces funding for social services for our most vulnerable while dramatically increasing funding for jails, police, and sweeps”

The articles linked above include additional examples, and while this is not the purview of the Seattle City Council, a similar anti-democratic spirit has been shown by the City Attorney’s Office this year in their vendetta against sitting Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi. Meanwhile, the City has authorized a major expansion of surveillance technology, including automated license plate readers, CCTV cameras, and real time crime software. And next week the public safety committee intends to take up work on new less lethal weapon legislation that appears to functionally return the City to its pre-2020 status quo in terms of crowd control.

In a national environment in which many Democrats are raising the alarm about the health of our democracy, it’s worth reflecting on how we’re doing locally. And in Seattle, the answer appears to be that we could be doing better.  

You can read my article at The Urbanist about OPA Director Gino Betts resigning and Seattle’s troubled accountability system. A new director will be appointed by Mayor Bruce Harrell sometime next year.

One subject I touch upon in that article is the City’s 2025 legislative agenda and how it vastly reduces the number of agenda items relating to police accountability. Indeed, the agenda is significantly shorter and less coherent than its predecessor, as well as being significantly less progressive. The 2025 agenda was passed by Full Council on Tuesday with a few amendments.

Rinck walked on one amendment to state the City’s commitment to exploring progressive revenue options before considering other options for revenues that would put a higher tax burden on lower income and middle income households. She referenced the $10-12 billion state budget deficit over the next several years. Her amendment was successfully added, with Councilmembers Rinck, Cathy Moore, Morales, Rob Saka, and Dan Strauss voting yes, Councilmember Bob Kettle voting no, and Councilmembers Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, and Sara Nelson abstaining. 

Her second walk-on amendment adjusted a housing bullet point to add language to state the City’s commitment to increasing funding specifically to the Housing Trust Fund and other housing programs. It also passed. 

Attorney Rory O’Sullivan is the first candidate out of the gate to announce he’s running for Seattle City Attorney next year. More on this from me coming up.

The Seattle Police Department might soon move to be able to use drones as part of their surveillance apparatus. Hard Pressed reports that Seattle’s Information Technology department has determined such technology will need to go through a surveillance impact report process such as that conducted for the recently approved CCTV and real time crime software surveillance technologies. SPD has indicated they would like to use drones for “patrol units, arson and bomb squad, SWAT, harbor patrol, traffic collision investigation squad, CSI and to utilize drones as a first responder.” 

For more information, you can read a Wired investigation on a drone program currently being run in Chula Vista, California. 

King County News:

The Seattle Times recently ran an article entitled “Are King County’s homeless shelters full?” The answer appears to be a resounding yes.

“Either way, beds were consistently filled at prepandemic rates by late 2022 and by April 2024, were over 95% full — the highest in the last five years. “Generally, shelters are full, functionally full, and that’s been the case the entire time, nearly two decades, that I’ve been privy to the inner workings of this system,” said Alison Eisinger, executive director of Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness.”

They are full across the board regardless of type, although tiny home villages to tend to be even fuller. We also know that many people are turned away without a bed. And the article says that in 2023, the City of Seattle cleared almost 2,000 encampments as “obstructions,” sweeps which do not require the City to offer shelter.

King County launched their expanded mobile crisis team program at the beginning of the week, which dispatches teams of two to de-escalate mental health crises and provide connections to services. The expansion adds 10 teams, which gives the County a total of 27 teams, as well as having nine new customized vans. The teams will be dispatched through 988, run for the county by Crisis Connections. The dispatch is strictly voluntary, which means the caller has to agree to have the team come out. 

The family of Allen Duane McNutt, a man who died by suicide in the King County in Jail in 2022, is suing King County for $5 million. He was the fourth person to die by suicide that year in the jail, which is also being sued by the ACLU of Washington for not providing adequate medical care. 

Last week Executive Dow Constantine announced $11.75 million in participatory budgeting funds being allocated to various capital projects such as community centers, senior centers, and schools, as well as programming such as increased food bank funding, youth classes, and physical fitness programs. 

Recent Headlines:

Seattle Councilmember Morales’s resignation raises red flag about Seattle’s institutions Read More »

Seattle capital gains tax dead…for now

/

Seattle Budget and Progressive Revenue:

At long last, this year’s Seattle budget season is over, with the Seattle City Council voting 8-1 to pass the new 2025-2026 budget. You can read my takeaways from the budget here. You can also read what The Stranger and PubliCola have to say about it.

I hopped on the internet last week to point out that the 2% city-wide capital gains tax had a 4-4 vote (with Councilmember Tanya Woo abstaining), which meant that once Councilmember-elect Alexis Mercedes Rinck takes over this week, there are theoretically enough votes to pass the excise tax. My “theoretically” was doing a lot of work though, as five votes is not a veto-proof majority, and Mayor Bruce Harrell is on the record as opposing this tax. I also thought a few of the votes might not be solid, which was later evidenced by Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth changing her vote from yes to no for the extremely weak reason that the legislation received a committee recommendation of “Do Not Pass.” PubliCola posits that Councilmember Dan Strauss’s vote in favor might be “squishy” as well. However, we’ll probably be hearing more about this tax, as both Councilmember Cathy Moore and Councilmember Tammy Morales have said they’ll bring it forward again next year.

A new poll from the Northwest Progressive Institute shows strong support for new progressive revenue in Seattle. Check out the findings:

“NPI’s most recent survey of the Seattle electorate, which fielded a couple weeks ago, finds that only a quarter (25%) of Emerald City voters back the mayor’s proposal, with nearly-three fifths (58%) expressing support for an alternative approach — namely, levying new taxes on wealth that would keep essential public services funded and allow better than anticipated Jumpstart revenue collections to flow to the vital priorities that former Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda’s enabling legislation specified, like housing.”

Other Seattle News:

Gino Betts, the Director of the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) has resigned. OPA Deputy Director Bonnie Glenn will take over as interim director. Betts’s last day is December 13. 

We can expect some new legislation from Harrell creating two new misdemeanors, one for illegal street vending and one for interfering with City employees. 

SPD has adopted a new emergency driving policy. PubliCola reports that “though Merkel said he was skeptical that SPD officers will now face stronger discipline for unsafe driving, he does believe the new policy spells out what officers need to consider to improve safety.” Merkel is currently the co-chair of the Community Police Commission (CPC).

The King County Jail’s booking restrictions for misdemeanors booked by SPD have been officially lifted as of November 1.

The South Seattle Emerald has been doing investigative reporting on the infamous 2020 Proud Boys ruse, with both an exploration of personal impacts the ruse had on protesters active at that time and a more in-depth investigation of the ruse itself. The latter piece says that while an OPA investigation of the ruse found that six SPD officers were involved, the Emerald has determined that upward of 30 SPD officers appear to have been involved, many of them not being investigated and some of them since being promoted. 

I found this analysis of the recent Seattle Council seat election to be both interesting and amusing: “To wit, Rinck’s victory was a repudiation not so much of what the centrist City Council promised to do, but the fact that, handed a mandate of sorts in the 2023 election, it’s done what every Council does in Seattle: nothing anyone who doesn’t work for Publicola could explain to you.”

The Stranger recently ran two op-eds also about the Council seat election: How Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s Victory Reclaimed Public Safety as a Progressive Issue and its rebuttal, Hiding Centrism in Progressive Clothing. Both talk about the public safety messaging utilized during Rinck’s recent successful campaign but take vastly different lessons from it. 

King County News:

You can check out my recent article at The Urbanist on the public defender crisis, and specifically on what that crisis is likely to look like on the ground. This is likely to be a pressing issue for years to come so worth getting up to speed on now.

King County Executive Dow Constantine announced he won’t be running for re-election next year, leaving the top post at the County up for grabs after sixteen years. Current King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci has announced her run for the position. Current King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay is widely expected to run as well. 

King County passed its 2025 budget last week. A tougher budget season is anticipated next year for the 2026-2027 biennium, with a projected $150 million shortfall.

Recent Headlines:

Seattle capital gains tax dead…for now Read More »