out of order layoffs - Notes from the Emerald City

The revised budget passed!

By Amy Sundberg / August 10, 2020

First things first, the big vote of the day: the revised 2020 budget passed today with a vote of 7-1. CM Sawant voted against the bill and CM Juarez wasn’t in attendance.

Resolution 31962 was also passed, stating the Council’s intent to organize a new Department of Public Safety and laying out a road map and timeline of their future actions in this regard. Unfortunately Legistar doesn’t yet have a copy of this resolution available for our perusal, so I’ll take a more in-depth look at it later this week. Another resolution passed affirming the rights of members of the press, legal observers, and medical personnel covering the protests against police brutality.

With these votes the Council chose to take a middle road that is a bit more progressive than that advocated by Mayor Durkan, while disappointing both those advocating for an immediate 50% defund of the SPD and those who want more police. In particular, they ensured community organizations and the community research process have funding to begin their work right away, which is a big win. The Council has clearly stated their intentions to continue the process of defunding and creating a new vision of public safety during the fall budget process and beyond.

How this revised budget will play out remains to be seen, given the previously discussed obstacles of SPOG negotiations and consent decree requirements, as well as Mayor Durkan’s and Chief Best’s resistance. I agree with Council President Gonzalez, who stated that this process will get harder before it gets easier. We will have to watch to see if the Council’s commitment to change wavers in the face of so many obstacles. But this summer budget process was a first step in a positive direction.

Additional amendments on the passed budget bill discussed today:

Amy Sundberg @amysundberg

Council briefing in a few minutes here. Big day of meetings today!

There was a long conversation about the amendment reducing the salaries of the command staff at the SPD. The amendment that passed reduces Chief Best’s salary to $275k instead of the lowest pay band as the previous amendment passed stated, but maintains the other salary cuts.

CM Sawant’s Amendment 52 version 3, the one prohibiting SPD from spending money supporting the prosecution of protesters in the George Floyd protests, didn’t receive a second to be voted upon so it’s now dead.

Amendment 56 pertains to CM Strauss’s reporting provisos, which Central Staff determined didn’t work as passed, so this is an alternate bill trying to get those reports. CM Pedersen added 56a, which asks for an additional report on how budget reductions will impact police deployment and response times. CP Gonzalez stated concern about how this amendment is worded as a leading question and that its resulting reports might become politicized, but it did pass 5/0 with Strauss, Gonzalez, and Sawant abstaining.

Amendment 57, creating two new civilian positions in the 911 call center to replace the two remaining sworn officers working there, passed 5/1 with two abstentions.

Amendment 58 imposes a proviso for funding on community service officers to make sure this funding is retained this year. It passed 8/0.

Amy Sundberg @amysundberg

New thread for the Full Council meeting. Public comment will last 60-75 minutes, I’m guessing till around 4pm.

Amendments 59 and 60 were walked on in full council, provisos to HSD regarding the $4m and $10m marked for community investment, in response to some legal issues with the original amendments. They passed unanimously 8/0.

Other News of Note:

The August update of the budget forecast was released today, and it is worse than anticipated. Seattle’s economic recovery is no longer predicted to follow a fast V-shape, and Seattle’s revenues for 2020 will fall short an additional $26m. Recovery is not nw expected until 2023 and 2024.

The judge signed an updated injunction in the case brought against the City of Seattle by the ACLU/BLM-King County. The evidentiary hearing that was scheduled to take place later this month has been canceled as a result. This new injunction states the following:

SPD can’t use chemical irritants or projectiles to re-route a protest unless necessary to prevent an imminent act of harm or as a response to a specific act of violence or property destruction.

The SPD must provide a warning of usage of these and provide enough time, space, and opportunity for people to leave.
The SPD may not target journalists, legal observers, or medics.
The SPD may not indiscriminately deploy chemical agents or projectiles into a crowd.
Declaring a protest to be a riot or unlawful assembly does not preclude the SPD from following this injunction’s requirements.

SPOG issued a demand to the city of Seattle to bargain today over out of order layoffs based on officer history of complaints.

Further legislation related to the SPD will be voted on this Wednesday afternoon at a special Council meeting, where they will also vote on the vetoed COVID Relief Bill. I’ll be back to discuss the results of this meeting.

Victory for the Defund Movement and the Mayor has a hard weekend

By Amy Sundberg / July 13, 2020

It has been an eventful few days, and with such a storm of activity comes the understandable confusion and inevitable misinformation as people scramble to keep up. I’m going to do my best to bring you up-to-date now. Take a deep breath and let’s dive in.

Let’s start with last Thursday, July 9, when journalist Andrew Buncombe published his story of being arrested by the SPD while trying to report on the ongoing protests, giving us insight into what happens once protestors are arrested and brought to a precinct for booking while also showing a shocking disregard for the freedom of the press.

Lisa Herbold @Lisa_Herbold

herbold.seattle.gov/wp-content/upl…. The Constitution and Municipal Code protections for the press, and observers, do not exist for the convenience of government, to be cast aside whenever they happen to be inconvenient to government.” @Omarisal @AndrewBuncombe

The next day, Friday July 10, seven out of nine Seattle council members came out in support of defunding the SPD by 50% and reinvesting the money in community needs. This is noteworthy because this is a veto-proof majority of CMs, meaning they can pass an amended budget without the Mayor’s approval. The two hold-outs? CM Juarez and CM Pedersen, no surprises there; neither of them were likely to support this plan. The CMs who waited to announce their support until Friday were CM Herbold, CM Lewis, and CM Strauss; these are the CMs that need the most ongoing support/pressure to stick with their position. CM Strauss in particular has publicly asked for continued public pressure to hold the Council accountable, including protests, public testimony, calls, and emails. These will all need to be kept up till the beginning of August at minimum, and then probably again later in September.

Deputy Mayor Fong and Police Chief Best were upset about the council members’ commitment, to say the least. Meanwhile, the SPD took to Twitter to share that lay-offs in the department would mean a large decrease in BIPOC officers.

Seattle Police Dept. @SeattlePD

Cuts this deep mean we would lose more than 50% of our (BIPOC) officers. These officers’ life experiences make us a better department and community. 4/4 spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/07/10/chi…

That being said, CM Herbold suggests there’s a way to avoid this problem:

Lisa Herbold @Lisa_Herbold

@Masters131 @NikkitaOliver Layoff out of order. PSCSC ED “may grant permission for layoff out of the regular order, upon showing by the appointing authority (Chief Best) of the department of a necessity therefore in the interest of efficient operation of his or her department…”

Also on Friday, a King County Superior Court Judge approved a petition for an election to recall Mayor Durkan. Okay, what does this mean? Well, there were originally two petitions to recall the Mayor filed; I’m not sure what happened to the other one. With this one, the Judge allowed one charge to stand, which was that Mayor Durkan allowed tear gas and other crowd control weapons to be used during the pandemic. The Mayor is allowed to appeal this ruling; otherwise, the next step is to collect around 55-56k signatures of registered Seattle voters. If the requisite number of signatures are collected within six months, then the Mayor would be recalled. While that might sound like a high number of signatures, proponents of the Tax Amazon campaign collected around 30k signatures in six to eight weeks during Phase 1 of the pandemic (see the responses to this tweet for the full information).

Dae the Lawless @daeshikjr

FYI @eyesonthestorm reminded me that the tax amazon campaign collected 30k signatures in like a month. 56k signatures in 6 months is nothing with the way Durkan has endangering the lives of her constituents. We can have a new Mayor by the start of 2021.

Given the widespread anger about Mayor Durkan’s handling of the protests, this recall does seem possible, although it’s hard to predict its potential success rate with any certitude. Meanwhile, several protesters have filed suit against the city, county, and state, claiming excessive police force.

Which brings us to this morning, when Mayor Durkan and Chief Best held a press conference. You can find my live tweet stream here.

First let’s recap. The City Council has a veto-proof majority of members committed to defunding the police by 50% and a Judge has ruled that the recall petition for the Mayor may continue. The Mayor is not in the good position right now. In addition, the role she played in the consent decree that Seattle entered into back in 2012 means its perceived failure casts doubt on her as a leader. As Kevin Schofield wrote: “Her legacy, not to mention much of her political credibility, is tied to her work on negotiating the consent decree. For her to abandon it, this close to the perceived finish line, would probably sink her future political ambitions.”

Given all this, it’s not a big surprise that at the press conference this morning, Mayor Durkan came out swinging. Her very political survival is at stake. She is very adamant about her commitment to reimagine the police (you could play a drinking game with her use of the word “reimagine”), but her timeline for accomplishing this is less certain. The sense I got from her comments is that she wishes to reorganize the police department, and she’s basically on board with the idea of removing the 911 emergency response unit from under the auspices of the SPD. In addition to continuing a hiring freeze and cutting back on overtime (probably that related to events), she’s estimating cutting $60m from the SPD budget in 2021; that money will still be spent on the same purposes, just not under the SPD umbrella.

What she doesn’t seem to support are any lay-offs to the actual police force or the subsequent re-investment of those funds into community organizations. This is where her plan and the demands of community organizations, which the City Council is responding to, vastly differ. She attacked the City Council repeatedly, saying things they’ve done almost no analysis on the SPD budget, that they haven’t met with Police Chief Best, that they don’t have a plan, that you can’t govern by Twitter or bumper sticker, and that she hopes after consideration the Council will change their minds. She said if the Council doesn’t change their plan, she will veto (an empty threat as long as they can hold onto their veto-proof majority).

There is also an open question as to how many community organizations the Mayor has actually been meeting with, in spite of her public claims:

Nikkita Oliver @NikkitaOliver

.@MayorJenny your community engagement is inauthentic and disingenuous. And in some instances, you are straight up lying. https://t.co/jUPTrOjlgZ

Omari Salisbury @Omarisal

#UPDATE – I asked @MayorJenny who she has been meeting with in the Black Community in her efforts to Reimagine Seattle. Her office responded with this list of people and organizations. According to her office all meetings were official and available through freedom of info. https://t.co/DRPAOjKUlq

I want to respond directly to the Mayor’s attack on the City Council that they don’t have a plan and are behaving irresponsibly, because from what I’ve seen, this isn’t a fair characterization of what’s been happening. I saw the CMs commitment to a 50% divest and re-invest goal as a public statement that they are taking the demands of the community seriously and that they aren’t going to be simply paying lip service to the idea of transforming public safety, but rather have a serious intent toward change. While it is true they don’t yet have a plan for achieving this, Central Staff is already hard at work at developing a plan, and this is exactly what the next few weeks have been allocated to do. It seems clear the Mayor wants to erode support for the Council’s general commitment to defunding and scare the public before the Council has had a chance to finish developing their plan. Now, if it’s a bad plan, then yes, we have a problem, but we need to wait to see the plan before passing judgment.

CM Herbold responded to the Mayor’s accusations at the press conference here:

Lisa Herbold @Lisa_Herbold

I want to thank my Council colleagues for their words supporting our efforts to defund SPD so that we can reinvest in evidence-based public safety community interventions by reducing the kinds of 911 calls officers respond to. THREAD:

In addition, the Seattle Times reports the following response: “González described Durkan’s remarks as spin, while Strauss said council members understand a transition period will be needed as Seattle builds a setup that can send people other than police officers to more 911 calls.” I’ve heard various community groups also emphasize that they’ll need time to scale up, so I think everyone involved is aware of this constraint.

And with that, I think we’ve covered all the major developments of the past five days. I’ll be covering the City Council’s budget meetings on Wednesday. There will be more budget meetings the next few weeks, and if all goes as planned, the Council will vote on the revised 2020 budget on August 3.