In a fascinating piece of reporting in Real Change, Glen Stellmacher wrote about how SPD and the City of Seattle controlled the media narrative around the 2020 protests and the Defund Movement. I highly recommend reading the entire article, but here are some key points:
In a June 19, 2020 survey, SPD leadership recommended at least 12 areas of service within SPD that would be better with civilian employees.
In the face of defund demands, SPD claimed they would have to cut the SW precinct, SWAT, or traffic enforcement if cuts went too far. However, this narrative was shown to be false by both the June 19, 2020 and June 27, 2020 surveys of SPD leadership.
By August 2020, SPD and the City were aware that 45% of SPD patrol service hours didn’t require an officer. However, Mayor Durkan requested a second IDT; the results, not available until June 2021, also said nearly half of calls could be handled by a civilian response. At that point, you may remember SPD insisted on a risk managed demand report, which wasn’t completed until September 2022.
SPD played with the numbers to make the loss of diversity in the force, should there be layoffs, seem as bad as possible.
It appears then-SPD Chief Strategy Officer Chris Fischer may have ghost-written a Crosscut op-ed for Antonio Oftelie; Crosscut says they didn’t know SPD was involved and has since removed the op-ed from their site. Two days after publication, SPD’s Executive Director of Legal Affairs was pushing for Oftelie to be named the new Monitor of the consent decree. He was named the new Monitor the next month, beating out several qualified candidates.
This Sunday, July 23 from 12-7pm in Othello Park, there will be a Participatory Budgeting cookout to launch the idea collection phase of participatory budgeting. You can also submit a proposal here.
In a court ruling this week, a judge ruled the City of Seattle has been using an overbroad definition of “obstruction” to justify its sweeps activity, writing that it constitutes “cruel punishment.” The definition was expanded in 2017, increasing obstruction removals in the City. The lawsuit is scheduled for trial in September.
And finally, it’s supplemental budget time! The proposed supplemental budget includes around $815k in additional funding for SPD, including increasing overtime to pay for more downtown emphasis patrols, paying for additional online crime reporting, and hiring six civilian positions, including four new public disclosure officers. It also adds an additional $19 million for the City to pay for lawsuits, many of which are related to police misconduct. The City already added $11 million to the 2023 for lawsuits last year, but apparently that wasn’t enough.
In addition, the supplemental budget funds a graffiti clean-up team, and because the contracts have already been executed, the Mayor’s Office has potentially forced the Council’s hand into cutting other Seattle Public Utilities programs to pay for this. More money is also being requested for the CSCC for its dual dispatch pilot and updating its call center technology and for OIG to take over the consent decree’s Monitor duties.
There is a vote scheduled on the supplemental budget on the morning of August 2.
If you want to read about SPD’s Risk Managed Demand presentation, you can skip straight down to the “Seattle’s Public Safety Committee Meeting” section. But first, budget news!
The first Seattle Select Budget committee meeting of the season has begun. I’m not going to live tweet the whole meeting, but I’ll try to tweet the things I find interesting.
Let’s dive in and see what’s in this proposed budget relating to public safety.
First of all, SPD. The SPD budget in 2022 was $353m, and its proposed budget for 2023 is $373.5m, which is close to a 6% increase.
The bulk of this increase–almost $20m–is due to the Mayor’s proposal to move the parking enforcement officers (PEOs) back into SPD from SDOT. The stated reasons for doing so are that it will save more than $5m in overhead costs that SDOT needs to house the PEOs but SPD wouldn’t need, as they didn’t lose any overhead dollars when the PEOs left their department, and the PEOs would regain access to certain SPD databases, which would remove the basis for unfair labor practices. In addition, it sounds like the culture of the PEOs hasn’t yet shifted away from a more police-oriented feel. Mayor Harrell mentioned this might not be the final home of the PEOs. Reasons for keeping the PEOs in SDOT include maintaining promises made to community in 2020 to work to move civilian functions outside SPD; allowing closer collaboration between PEOs and SDOT to make our streets safer using more strategies than just ticketing; and leaving the PEOs where they are until a final home for them has been decided (I’m assuming the Mayor was referencing the possibility of housing them in the third public safety department he envisions).
In addition, the Mayor plans to reinvest about $17m of salary savings in SPD back into the department. This salary savings is realized through ghost positions within SPD that remain funded even though they will not be able to be filled during 2023. This money is to be used for the following investments:
$1.3m for addt’l police equipment, which is mostly weapons;
$4.25m for recruitment and retention bonuses;
$2.6m in addt’l overtime;
almost $3m for more technology projects;
$1m for a gunfire detection system, ShotSpotter;
$250k for Harbor Patrol;
$490.5k for a mental health practitioner;
$168k for a new OPA employee
$446k for relational policing, about which we have no details
$424.9k to transfer 1 IT employee and 2 LAW employees into SPD
Also in the budget for HSD are $4.3m for the Seattle Community Safety Initiative and $1.5m for the King County Regional Peacekeepers Collective, as well as $502k for victim advocates. The $1.2m allocated for alternative emergency response in the mid-year supplemental is retained, along with an additional $700k, all of which is currently sitting in Finance General until the Council decides which department to move it into. That $700k appears to be the only new investment allocated for community-based public safety alternatives, as the SCSI and the Peacekeepers were already funded in last year’s budget.
Controversially, the proposed budget includes legislation that would cap future liability for inflation-based increases for human service contracts at 4%. For reference, over the 12 month period ending in June 2022, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers increased 9.1 percent. It’s important to understand that these human service providers are public safety workers performing essential public services and already tend to be underpaid and are currently also understaffed. In a budget in which both police officers and fire fighters are being offered recruitment and retention packages, this legislation is a slap in the face to these essential workers, for whom it basically results in a pay cut.
Key Dates in the Seattle Budget Process:
October 11, 5pm: First evening public hearing
November 7: Chair’s Balancing Package introduced
November 8, 9:30am: Morning public hearing
November 15, 5pm: Second evening public hearing
November 16: Budget committee votes on balancing package
November 21: Budget committee vote on budget in the AM; final Full Council vote on the budget at 2pm
Public comment will also be heard at the October 11 and October 25 budget meetings at 9:30am, and probably one or two budget meetings in November as well.
King County Proposed Budget:
Executive Dow Constantine proposed his King County 2023-2024 budget on Tuesday. You can read about new investments being made in the law & justice category of the budget here and the complete rundown on the law, safety, & justice can be found here.
Some highlights:
$9m to the Regional Peacekeepers Collective
$2.3m to the Sheriff’s Office for a new gun violence unit and for detectives for the major crimes unit
$21m for 140 Metro “transit security officers” whose duties are not yet clear
$2.1m for behavioral health co-response unit expansion, which still involves sending armed officers to behavioral health crises
$5m for body cameras (this will take some years to implement)
$6.3m for jail-based opioid treatment programs and services for people being released from jail with substance abuse disorder
You can make public comment on the budget in person or virtually on the evening of Wednesday, October 5 at 6pm, and there are two in person only public comment opportunities on October 12 and October 19 at 6pm. There is one additional opportunity for public comment on November 8 at 9:30am. You can also email the King County council members directly about the budget. Suggested scripts are forthcoming from People Power Washington.
Seattle’s Public Safety Committee Meeting
The last Public Safety and Human Resources committee meeting until the end of budget season was held this Tuesday. Among other issues, the CMs discussed the City Attorney’s Office Q2 report and the SPD’s long-awaited Risk Managed Demand report.
The City Attorney’s Office Q2 report showed how much faster the office has been making its filing decisions. The number of filed cases has more than doubled, in spite of misdemeanor referrals from SPD being down. They have also been declining fewer cases. Just as filed cases have risen dramatically, so have referrals to Community Court and Mental Health Court.
You can see the Risk Managed Demand (RMD) presentation here and the technical brief here. SPD requested to do this research before an alternative emergency response program was designed here in Seattle.
The analysis looks at injuries associated with the final 911 call type using a matrix of likelihood and severity. SPD had to manually upgrade or downgrade slightly more than 50% of the 356 call types, meaning the matrix worked less than half of the time, which caused some concern to CMs. Also causing concern was the belief this report was supposed to be analyzing the risk to call responders, while instead it uses the risk to the subject as a proxy for that, leaving out data from calls that involved use of force. If this sounds convoluted to you, you are not alone.
CM Mosqueda questioned whether, given the issues with this new report, the NICJR findings weren’t just as sound while also giving concrete policy changes that this new report doesn’t give. CM Herbold was concerned, given that 50% of the time call types were either upgraded or downgraded, that we need to understand what policies, principles, or rules lead to those judgment calls of how to change call type classification.
CM Lewis brought up Denver’s successful STAR program that answers calls that this new RMD report would suggest should go to some kind of co-response instead. In response, Dan Eder of the Mayor’s Office said the RMD report can’t answer CM Lewis’s questions, explaining that this risk analysis isn’t determinative of the most appropriate kind of program to design or call types to assign to a new program. Which begs the question: if this research doesn’t answer these questions, why are we a.) spending tons of taxpayer money on it, and b.) allowing it to drastically delay implementation of any alternative emergency response program?
CM Herbold said this RMD report shouldn’t hold up implementation of a new alternative response as discussed in the term sheet between the Mayor’s Office and Central Staff, and announced the next Public Safety committee meeting will take place on Tuesday, December 11 at 9:30am.
Other News of Note
Seattle’s Redistricting Commission voted to approve an amendment that unites Magnolia into District 6 and divides the Fremont neighborhood into three districts: D4, D6, and D7. As Doug Trumm writes: “[Commissioner] Juárez also pointed out that this was a significant departure from the Redistricting Justice for Washington Seattle maps that had the most positive comments throughout the process, which is why the commission’s initial proposal had largely been based on that map.”
It is worth noting that Magnolia is predominantly zoned for single family housing, while a large part of Fremont is within an urban village and is more renter-friendly. You can give public comment on this new plan on Saturday, October 8 from 10am-12pm via Zoom or in the Bertha Knight Landes Room on the City Hall 1st Floor.
King County leaders held a press conference to announce a $1.25B plan to address the behavioral health crisis, which will involve a new property tax levy that will be on the ballot in April 2023.
Last Friday Seattle’s Neighborhoods, Education, Civil Rights & Culture committee discussed the participatory budgeting process, and they’ll be back to discuss it further on December 9. The timeline for PB is as follows: planning and design will happen in fall of 2022; idea collection and proposal development will happen in winter of 2022-2023; proposal development and voting will happen in spring of 2023; and funding will be provided to the winning projects in summer of 2023.
A forum was held for Seattle Municipal Court judge candidates Pooja Vaddadi and Adam Eisenberg. You can watch it here.
Yesterday morning Seattle had its last Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting before the summer break. The Mayor’s proposed new Director of the OPA, Gino Betts, was present for a drive-by introduction, and he will be back before the committee for a Q&A and committee vote on his appointment on September 13, which would potentially tee up the Full Council vote on his appointment for September 20, conveniently right before the madness of budget season is upon us. You can read his appointment packet here.
But the real interest of yesterday’s meeting was Greg Doss’s quarterly update on SPD’s staffing, finances, and call response times. Surprising nobody who has been paying attention, there have been 109 separations of sworn officers from SPD in the first six months of 2022, at odds with SPD’s previous projection that there would be 94 separations for the ENTIRE YEAR. Yes, you read that right. There have been 30 hires so far in the first six months of 2022, which doesn’t exactly put SPD on track for reaching their hiring projection of 125 for the year either.
These numbers mean there will be significantly more salary savings for 2022 than anticipated. However, SPD thinks they will burn through all this extra salary savings and might need even more money by the end of the year, primarily because of overtime spending, although also because of the costs of the hiring incentives bill the committee discussed at this meeting.
In a particular feisty moment, CM Lewis agreed that we don’t have the capacity to stand up alternative responses in the next few months because we should have taken the actions other cities took two years ago, a fairly safe political shot at now departed Mayor Durkan. The Council’s continued frustration at the lack of alternatives is palpable, although CM Herbold reported the joint workgroup on the subject between the Mayor’s Office and Central Staff has finally begun, and it sounds like the Mayor’s Office may be softening towards the idea of trying one or more alternative response pilots, an idea that has been memorialized in the latest consent decree filing.
As for the hiring incentives legislation being discussed, it was more of the same as has already been discussed this year, offering hiring bonuses for new recruits and lateral hires as well as providing money for more HR staff/support for SPD, more marketing, and the police chief search. It’s just now a slightly higher amount than previously discussed. One cannot help remembering CM Nelson’s comments earlier this year that it didn’t matter what the money was spent on as long as they did something, and this bill definitely feels more like a performative “Look! We’re doing something!” than a tangible, data-backed plan to actually improve public safety in Seattle. Indeed, rumors have been circulating that hiring bonuses or no, it could easily take ten years to return to pre-pandemic SPD staffing levels, meaning alternative plans are going to be needed to address public safety regardless of where on the defund spectrum any particular elected official may fall.
The legislation passed 4-1 with CM Mosqueda casting the only nay vote. In order to display “urgency,” the legislation will probably be voted on next week at Full Council on August 16 even though it would normally be delayed due to the split vote (otherwise the vote wouldn’t be until September because of the Summer Recess). You can read another account of the meeting here.
Tonight’s @SeaCPC Community Engagement Meeting in which incoming @SeattleOPA Dir. Gino Betts starts in a few minutes. I’ll be live-tweeting the meeting on this thread. 🧵
Last night the CPC held a “community conversation” with proposed Director of the OPA Gino Betts, which you can read about in more detail in the Twitter thread above. Why did I put community conversation in quotations? Because partway through the meeting, Felicia Cross, the Community Outreach Manager at the CPC, said the purpose of the meeting was actually to welcome Mr. Betts to Seattle as opposed to giving community a chance to ask him substantive questions, an assertion that showed a lack of respect for all the community members who took time from their busy schedules for what had been advertised as a conversation. To give a bit of flavor, earlier in the meeting, a retired SPD officer appeared to suggest the public needs to participate in training so as to avoid being harmed or killed by the police, and an impacted family member of someone killed by SPD was told the only way to get things done (read: possibly slightly improve things) was to agree to sit down with Betts at a later date, even though they had already clearly articulated the actions they wished to see. All in all, not the most successful meeting.
The contract for Seattle’s participatory budgeting project was finally signed last week, with a community vote on potential proposals projected for March-April of 2023.
Will Casey at The Strangerwrote an analysis of the Seattle City Attorney Office’s High Utilizer Initiative (HUI), finding more than half of the prolific offenders targeted by this program have a history of mental illness that means they are ineligible for misdemeanor prosecution. The initiative also replicates the criminal legal system’s racial disparities. Oops. Casey suggests a potential alternate course of action for the City Attorney’s Office:
On a systemic level, the City Attorney’s Office could use its influence within Seattle’s public safety debate to make the case that the city, the state, and the federal government needs to spend more money to build more supportive housing and to expand behavioral health services now.
Those investments would take time to change the daily conditions on Seattle’s streets, but they would also make clear for the public that the people who should be “held accountable” for our public safety crisis are the politicians at every level of government who have repeatedly defunded our social safety net since the Reagan administration.
Last week the Seattle Redistricting Commission did indeed agree on a final proposed map, which follows the proposal given by the Redistricting Justice for Washington coalition fairly closely. You can read more analysis on the new proposed map here and here. There will be two more public forums coming up to give feedback on the map.
Hello all! Welcome to new members. In this post, I’ll share news and commentary that’s come across my desk over the past month. I hope it’s useful and interesting to you! My favorite reads this month: Evangelicals (learn something new!), harm reduction
INBOX: From @kcexec Dow Constantine’s office, a media statement regarding a person who died in custody. This statement says that the person’s death was announced this week and that King County jail staff are investigating this death — which, again, occurred under KC jail’s watch. https://t.co/Mc252xfdSi
The incident exemplifies findings that Black people — and other people of color — are far likelier to find themselves at police gunpoint in Seattle than white people.
Good morning! Let’s take a listen to Seattle’s Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting, shall we? And I believe you can still sign up for public comment for this morning as well.
First, Seattle had a Public Safety and Human Resources committee meeting on Tuesday, at which there was a robust conversation about the report on city-wide hiring incentives. The findings were that hiring incentives tend to act as a short-term fix to increase the applicant pool and have a limited impact on retention. Looking at the hiring incentives in place for SPD and the 911 call center from October 2021-January 2022, they did increase the applicant pool for emergency dispatchers at the call center, but SPD did not see any increase in candidates. Proponents of the hiring bonuses say four months wasn’t a long enough time to see if they would be effective, which would be more convincing if the 911 call center hadn’t seen some success in the same time period.
CM Nelson says we know these hiring incentives work because police departments in other cities use them and therefore more study isn’t needed. CM Herbold referenced a preliminary study done on 2019 SPD hiring incentives, in which only 1 in 5 applicants said the bonus had affected their decision to apply; she seemed more interested in the idea of offering relocation assistance for lateral hires. CM Lewis pointed out police departments across the country are having trouble hiring police officers and wanted to investigate whether any departments are seeing more hiring success in order to emulate them if so.
The conversation will continue at the next Public Safety and Human Resources committee meeting on Tuesday, April 26 at 9:30am, at which you can sign up to give public comment. Last week there was discussion that there wouldn’t be a committee vote on any hiring bonus legislation until May 10, which would mean no full council vote until later in May. The conversation is especially critical given the city is still facing a $150m budget deficit for 2022, meaning every dollar counts.
Court Monitor Oftelie released his Use of Force Preliminary Assessment, and the community engagement meeting regarding it was held on Tuesday evening. Carolyn Bick has two excellent Twitter threads regarding this report: the first one details issues they find in the report itself, and the second one is reporting from the meeting itself.
Reading through Federal Monitor @AntonioOftelie‘s prelim assessment of SPD’s uses of force. This item stuck out to me, because my recent story in the @SoSeaEmerald from last Thursday revealed the former OPA director may have retroactively approved an untrained force tactic. https://t.co/F8wgih0cTx
The @SeaCPC is now starting its Community Engagement Meeting, the last one where @AntonioOftelie will be present. This is the thread about that meeting.
“At the same time, the monitor points out that Black and Native American people continue to be disproportionately represented when force is used, based on census data, and that Asian and Black people make up an inordinate number of the victims of police shootings. However, Seattle police monitor Antonio Oftelie said any conclusions are complicated by the fact that race data was missing in almost a third of the reports overall, even though officers are required to provide it. Both the monitor and Seattle police officials said the failure by officers to report the data, as well as their supervisors to require it, was troubling.”
Meanwhile, Seattle’s Human Rights Commission has decided to pursue amicus status in the consent decree. This status would potentially allow them to file a brief that could contain “the stories and solutions of our residents and community stakeholders most affected.” The goal, as I understand it, is to ensure residents’ experiences are preserved as part of the official record. What other effect this could have on the consent decree, if any, or indeed, how Judge Robart would respond to such an idea, remains unclear. You can read more about this decision here.
If you’re interested in how Operation New Day is going, Paul Kiefer wrote an excellent update and overview over at Publicola. There have been few felony arrests at Third and Pine, and US Attorney Nick Brown has said finding any high-level drug dealers at that intersection is unlikely. Police officers have begun to refer cases to LEAD again, there is still disagreement about how and whether to continue to fund JustCARE, and Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell is talking about the possibility of opening smaller satellite police precincts in places like downtown and the ID.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday the three candidates for King County Sheriff met with the press, and you can read a little about them here. You can also attend forums to hear them yourself on Monday, April 18 at 6pm and Thursday, April 21 at 9am. Erica Barnett reported the following about candidate Interim Sheriff Cole-Tindall.
On a press call just now, we (or maybe just I!) learned that if interim King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall is appointed permanent sheriff, she’ll have to go back through the police academy, a 19-week commitment, during which @kcexec would likely have to appoint someone else.
by Erica C. Barnett Later this year, Seattle voters could take a first step toward building a new kind of permanently affordable, mixed-income public housing known as “social housing.” The House Our Neighbors! Coalition — a project of the housing advocacy organization Real Change — is collecting signatures for Initiative 135 (I-135), which would create…
Another week, another chance to sign in CON to oppose HB 2037 (now in the Senate) and SB 5919 (now in the House). Both bills roll back changes made to policing last session from HB 1310 and HB 1054.
Click here to sign in CON for HB 2037. You can also read an Action Alert with more information here. While we’ve heard some version of this bill is likely to pass, the hope is to add language suggested by the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability and ACLU Washington that will alleviate some of the harm caused by it, so it’s important to put pressure onto lawmakers to work on this issue.
You can also click here to sign in PRO to HB 1169, a bill about sentencing enhancements. You can read more about the bill here.
Seattle News
First things first, one thing I forgot to mention in Mayor Harrell’s State of the City speech earlier this week: the Mayor promised his administration would end the federal consent decree. Because the consent decree requires first that the city meet compliance and then that it pass through a two year sustainment period, things would need to move rapidly. Realistically the city would need to be found in compliance by sometime in the first half of 2023, the earlier the better, in order to hit all the required deadlines and exit the decree before the end of Mayor Harrell’s term.
In other news related to the consent decree, lawyer Sarah Lippek sent information to Court Monitor Oftelie about the alleged sexual abuse of vulnerable people by SPD officers, asking him to give that information to the Department of Justice or the federal court. Instead, without consulting her or the community, Oftelie gave the information to the FBI, which is not involved in the consent decree process. The data had been collected in 2013 by a team under the umbrella of the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance (PHRA) and passed onto the City, where it disappeared from view.
Lippek also used to work for the OIG, where she reviewed over a thousand OPA complaints:
And in those complaints, she said, she “found serious, credible allegations of sexual assault and harassment buried in the OPA ‘contact logs’ and ignored, or kept in perpetual suspension while investigative procedures were ‘paused’ and unresumed for years at a time, allowing officers to retire with full pensions and without any disciplinary mark.”
Thus once again we see evidence of Seattle’s three-body accountability system not being up to the job. You can read Carolyn Bick’s entire story here.
There continue to be calls for an independent investigation into the missing text messages of former Mayor Durkan, former Chief Best, and seven other city officials. The recent forensic analysis only dealt with Mayor Durkan and Chief Best’s missing texts. The OPA says they cannot begin investigating the matter themselves until after litigation pertaining to the texts is complete, if they then receive a referral.
In participatory budgeting news, the Participatory Budgeting Project is the only non-profit who has applied to run Seattle’s program, and their proposal calls for the actual voting process to take place in January of 2023, meaning the program will have taken two and a half years from initial discussion to get off the ground. The Office of Civil Rights won’t announce its nonprofit partner officially until sometime in March. This lag could also mean participatory budgeting might once again be left out of the budget in terms of getting any new dollars allocated for 2023 beyond the original $30m.
The Seattle Public Safety and Human Services committee meets next Tuesday, February 22, when they will discuss SPD’s 2021 Year End Staffing Report & Year End Crime Report and the SPD Retail Theft Program. More about that next week.
On Feb. 26, Seattle Opera opens the critically acclaimed “Blue,” about a Black family that draws strength from the community after their son is killed by a police officer.
As always, there’s a lot going on! Let’s dive right in.
Primary Results
Aligning with the conventional wisdom that more progressive votes tend to be in the later vote counts, the progressives on the ballot have benefited from a boost in numbers as we get closer to a complete ballot count. And in big news, Seattle City Attorney incumbent Pete Holmes conceded.
The numbers as of yesterday morning:
Seattle CC Position 8: CM Mosqueda has 59.39% of the vote.
Seattle CC Position 9: Nikkita Oliver has 40.16% and Sara Nelson has 39.5% of the vote.
Seattle City Attorney: Nicole Thomas-Kennedy has 36.35% and Ann Davison has 32.72% of the vote.
Seattle Mayor: Bruce Harrell has 34.05% and M. Lorena González has 32.1% of the vote.
King County Executive: Dow Constantine has 51.92% and Joe Nguyen has 32.53% of the vote.
King County Elections dropped about 60,000 ballots today, including about 30,000 from Seattle, leaving only a small number of votes left to count. The latest tally continues the leftward trend in last-minute returns, and should finally put to bed the perennial bullshit about a conservative backlash, at least with this primary. Let’s take a look:…
At this week’s Seattle Council Briefing, CM Morales said the Office of Civil Rights has created a new Community Investments division from which to run participatory budgeting. They now have a PB page on their website and they’ve posted to hire three new staff members for this division. CM Morales hopes the City begins doing participatory budgeting as a matter of course as a normal part of their budgeting season.
Also remember that next Tuesday, August 17 at 9:30am, the Finance and Housing committee will meet to vote on the supplemental budget, which will include some amendments related to SPD’s budget. There will be time at the beginning of the meeting to give public comment. I’ll write more about these amendments once they become available.
Good morning, and welcome to Seattle’s Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting. CM Sawant won’t be attending; CP González, CM Lewis, CM Morales, CM Herbold are present. CM Mosqueda is also present.
This week’s Public Safety committee meeting was a long one! The CMs voted legislation out of committee that will move the parking enforcement officers out of SPD and into SDOT. You may remember there was an open question as to whether they would be moved to SDOT or the new CSCC. The rank and file PEOs wanted to be moved to the CSCC, while the supervisors and the Mayor wanted them to be moved to SDOT. Apparently the supervisors and Mayor won this argument. This will receive a final vote by the Full Council next week.
HSD then gave a presentation on the recent RFP process for allocating the $12m in community safety capacity building. You can see the presentation here. CM Morales pointed out this is only one time funding and said she’s interested in working on developing more sustainable programming in this vein.
Finally the Q2 SPD Budgeting and Staffing report was given by Central Staff and two members of SPD. CM Herbold pressed SPD more than once on why they are spending money in areas the Council hasn’t yet authorized. SPD presented their budget proposal for spending the $15.3m in estimated salary savings for the year. Some of this proposal will probably show up in the previously mentioned supplemental budget amendments being discussed next week. One area of disagreement was about the CSOs; CMs seem interested in the idea of moving the CSOs from SPD into the CSCC, while SPD wants to retain the CSOs and credits the success of the unit to their relationship with the sworn officers.
SPD anticipates another 60 separations by the end of the year, meaning there would be 160 separations total in 2021. There are also 108 officers who aren’t currently deployable. They spent some time discussing the morale issue at SPD, with several CMs thanking the police officers who have stayed for their service. CP González asked some pointed questions about specific retention strategies currently being discussed, and expressed that the lack of SPD’s ability to retain their officers is a management problem and something the Executive’s office hasn’t spent enough time addressing. You can read more about her exchange with SPD’s Dr. Fisher here.
It also came out that the new automated time keeping system, originally meant to be rolled out in Q2, was placed “on hold” after Seattle IT determined it hadn’t been sufficiently tested. They are scheduled to have a kick-off “soon” to determine where they left off and establish a new timeline, which begs the question why they put it on hold in the first place instead of continuing to move forward. This new technology is not scoped for tracking off-duty work, although it could theoretically do so, something CM Herbold indicated interest in.
Other Seattle News
In yet another blow to the integrity of Seattle’s police accountability system, an OIG auditor resigned as investigations supervisor, making a formal ethics complaint to the City alleging that the OIG is failing to provide independent oversight of the OPA, as well as having a pattern of concealing the truth and avoiding public disclosure request requirements. The letter also references a personal relationship between Deputy IG Amy Tsai at the OIG and OPA Director Myerberg as the source for the OIG’s reluctance to push back against the OPA . This story was broken by Carolyn Bick in the South Seattle Emerald and is well worth the read. At this week’s Council Briefing, CM Herbold said she was going to consult with the Ethics and Elections Commission and Seattle HR as to how to review these concerns.
As Kevin Schofield writes, at yesterday’s consent decree hearing, Judge Robart “wasted little time in eviscerating” the CPC’s attorney Edgar Sargent, turning down the CPC’s request to have the Police Monitor become more involved in the SPOG contract negotiations and OPA investigations. Robart also “noted the big changes underway: elections for Mayor, City Attorney (“candidates from left and right”), City Council; collective bargaining underway; a police department budget “threatened with abolition and different levels of cuts”; and a Mayor who doesn’t want to tie the hands of the next mayor and thus is postponing significant decisions — including hiring a new permanent police chief.” It is a big time of change for Seattle, and November’s election will play a prominent role in deciding how things proceed.
Pete Holmes reported that SPMA negotiations are quite far along, with the parties in mediation over some issues, and that for SPOG negotiations, the Labor Relations Policy Committee is close to finalizing the bargaining parameters. It’s worth noting that even if the parameters are finalized soon, most of the SPOG negotiation will be presided over by a different Mayor and City Attorney.
ACLU Washington recently released a blog post analyzing Seattle’s consent decree and concluding that it doesn’t block Seattle from engaging in a divest and reinvest strategy. “An analysis of the original consent decree documents demonstrates there is no explicit prohibition on making significant changes to the SPD budget. The consent decree does not make any part of the budget untouchable nor does it mandate particular staffing or the existence of certain units and there is nothing in the Consent Decree to indicate that the units must be SPD units.” It doesn’t seem Judge Robart is in complete agreement with this; although he supports scaling up Health One and alternate 911 response, he also wants the City to continue to improve SPD, assumedly by investing its dollars into it.
Chief Diaz terminated the two SPD officers who were present at the DC insurrection on January 6. They are allowed to appeal this termination. The other four SPD officers who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally aren’t receiving any discipline.
SPOG is objecting to the new COVID vaccine mandate for city employees, saying the adoption date won’t allow sufficient time to bargain the impacts of it (for example, bargaining for payment for receiving the vaccine, getting paid time off for any vaccine side effects, etc.) SPOG further says this mandate might drive more officers to leave the department.
Meanwhile, in Washington State….
Melissa Santos recently published an investigation in Crosscut finding that at least 22 police officers in Washington state who have landed on the Brady list have still been able to secure employment in law enforcement at other departments. There is some disagreement whether new laws passed this year in the state legislature apply retroactively. The Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, which licenses police officers, told Crosscut “it does not plan to go back in time to try to suspend or revoke officers’ certifications for past offenses. Commission spokesperson Megan Saunders wrote in an email that the state attorney general’s office has advised that the new law should not apply retroactively.”
We had a particularly eventful Seattle City Council meeting yesterday afternoon, with votes on both the participatory budgeting legislation and the SPD budget bill.
Popping my head into this afternoon’s Seattle City Council meeting, the public comment period has been extended to 60 minutes. Pleased so many people are taking the time to speak up today!
The participatory budgeting bill, which releases about $1m to the Office of Civil Rights to create three new positions to support the PB process and conduct the search for the third-party organization that will administer PB, passed unanimously. We can expect that third party to be chosen and hired by the end of the year and for the participatory budgeting process to begin in earnest in 2022, beginning with the brainstorming of ideas , the development of projects, and hopefully voting to happen around summertime 2022.
The SPD budget bill had spent several torturous months in committee before being finally brought to the full council for a vote with a recommendation of “Do Not Pass,” which means more CMs voted against it than for it in committee. The bill was originally intended to cut $5.4m from SPD’s 2021 budget after the department overspent by that amount in 2020. After SPD declared they were in a “staffing crisis” and both Judge Robart and Police Monitor Oftelie spoke against any cuts to the SPD budget, CM Herbold began changing the bill, seeking to find compromise. While emphasizing that SPD’s 2021 staffing plan was already and had always been fully funded, she reduced the cut to the department to $2m, which was to go to participatory budgeting, with the remainder to go to various priorities identified by SPD and the auditor, while also releasing another proviso.
CM Lewis complicated the bill further by introducing an amendment that would take the $2m from participatory budgeting and instead allocate it to the JustCARE program that addresses homelessness. He sees JustCARE as a great example of a community-based alternative for public safety that should be funded by money taken from the police department. Worried that the Council may be losing momentum, his hope was to get additional money to JustCARE more quickly than the PB timeline would allow, and also perhaps to tee up the idea of a dual stream of investments to both participatory budgeting and community alternatives for fall budget talks. His amendment passed 5-4, with Strauss, Lewis, Mosqueda, Herbold, and Juarez voting yes.
However, the SPD budget bill was ultimately voted down, with CMs having extremely different reasons for not supporting it. The final vote was 6-3 against, with Strauss, Mosqueda, Pedersen, Sawant, González, and Morales voting against the bill. This means the status quo is maintained, the provisos aren’t lifted, and SPD still can’t spend the $7.5m that had been in question, nor has that money been reallocated to other purposes.
There’s been a lot of talk about this being “the year of the outsider” in elections, but for all that, the only true political outsider in the Seattle mayor elections in the top six candidates is probably Andrew Grant Houston. In the race for City Council seat 9, the only candidate who hasn’t worked as a staff member for a previous council member is Nikkita Oliver. It is uncertain how important this perception of being an outsider will actually be to election results. This election could also potentially be a test of the power of labor unions in the city, who are thus far strongly backing CP González in her run for mayor.
A year after the murder of George Floyd, support for the Black Lives Matter movement has dropped, columnist Naomi Ishisaka writes. Will we keep up the momentum for racial justice?
In response to city-wide protests following George Floyd’s murder, the Seattle City Council vowed to chop the city’s police department budget in half. KUOW’s Kim Malcolm spoke with Seattle Times reporter Daniel Beekman about what’s changed with policing in Seattle … and what hasn’t.
The Community Economic Development committee finally heard an agenda item about participatory budgeting this week. Because the draft legislation hasn’t yet finished going through legal, CM Morales is hoping to vote on it at a special committee meeting on June 3, to be followed by a vote of the full Council. The legislation would release about $1m to the Department of Civil Rights to hire three staff members and start the process, including by issuing an RFP to hire a third-party administrator for the program, as well as releasing further funds (although not all of them) for the process.
Sean Goode from Choose 180 was present at the meeting and spoke eloquently in support of participatory budgeting. He sees the program as an opportunity to construct something new for the community that seeds lasting change and also spoke in favor of equity over expediency. His entire speech (about ten minutes) is worth listening to and can be found here starting at the 1:40:00.
The timeline on participatory budgeting has been moved back, with CM Morales expecting the Office of Civil Rights to hire a third-party organization by the end of the year and hopefully voting to begin around next summer.
Police Contract Bargaining and Accountability
Carolyn Bick has released the second part of her investigative series on OLEO and the experiences of its former Director Jacobs, the middle section of which will be of particular interest to those of you following the obstructions inherent with including accountability provisions as working conditions at the police contract bargaining table. Similar to what has happened in Seattle with the OPA, OLEO was granted oversight authority that it then had to bargain for, essentially maintaining the appearance of accountability without the power to provide actual accountability. I am going to quote extensively from the relevant section:
Much of the Guild’s alleged initial treatment of Jacobs appears to have stemmed, at least in part, from Jacobs attempting to bargain with the KCPOG for the oversight rights voters had already afforded OLEO in 2015 via ballot measure. Jacobs said that she had to work with Bob Railton, KCOLR’s deputy director and labor negotiator, who Jacobs said constantly made her feel as though she was a troublemaker and a nuisance and who routinely talked down to her in a sexist and demeaning manner.
This collective bargaining agreement (CBA) was not finalized and signed until April 2020. Its language has made it retroactive from Jan. 1, 2017, but it will expire in December of this year. It was necessary for OLEO to bargain for the rights voters had already afforded the oversight entity, because state law requires bargaining for anything considered “mandatory,” including wages, hours, and working conditions. OLEO’s oversight duties fall into this category.
“The Office of Labor Relations bargainer’s main concern was getting a bargain and not going to arbitration. That did not align with OLEO’s interest of having the voters’ will brought to fruition with the implementation of independent investigations conducted by OLEO,” Jacobs wrote in her email. “There was constant pressure on me to compromise, and some of it was manipulative and, to my mind, unethical.”
Topaz said that Jacobs’ recollection of the dynamic at the bargaining table tracks with what he remembers. Topaz worked as a labor negotiator with the KCOLR from 2014–2020 and was briefly assigned to help negotiate the CBA. Topaz said that from his point of view, for the period of time he worked to help bargain the contract, OLEO was little more than “a political thing that the [King] County Council did that they never really gave the support and authority needed to be successful.
“They created something, gave it limited resources and limited authority, and then expected it to produce something that I am assuming would have given them cover for people to complain about,” Topaz said.
“I don’t think [the Council] really backed [Jacobs] up very well to get done what she needed to,” Topaz continued. “Honestly, I think they have more or less set up anybody who would be in that role [of OLEO director] for failure.”
Other News of Note
The MLK Labor Council held a Seattle mayoral forum last night, ushering us into election debate season, and it seems like there were at least a few illuminating (and entertaining) moments, including a rapid-fire Yes/No round in which Bruce Harrell felt the need to quibble with the definition of “sweeps”.
Live tweeting here @MLKLabor mayoral forum starting now. It’s also on Facebook live. But that won’t have my color commentary so I recommend you stay here
A new system is currently under development, one that focuses on recognizing and addressing past trauma in an attempt to prevent future misconduct rooted in that trauma, which sounds interesting. However, because of the consent decree mandate for the prior ineffective system, both systems will have to run concurrently, meaning both will need to be funded and money will be wasted.
Thank you for your continued support, and I hope you enjoy the end of the week!
CM Morales has said the partipatory budgeting program is now clearly delayed until next year. An updated agenda for the Community Economic Development meeting taking place tomorrow at 2pm was released this morning, re-introducing a participatory budgeting discussion as an agenda item, where we will hear from a NYC Councilmember as well as Sean Goode from Choose 180. You can read the related draft legislation lifting the PBP proviso here, which I believe is still being reviewed by the law department.
At the Council Briefing this morning, CM Morales said the plan is to give around $1m to the Office of Civil Rights to hire three people to issue an RFP to an outside administrator for the PBP process, as well as to provide various support functions. Kevin Schofield said on theSeattle News & Brews episode released today that the OCR is quite a small department budget-wise so this is huge for them, and CM Morales hasn’t been talking to the Office of Civil Rights to see if they want to do this work.
Nevertheless, CM Morales is pushing forward and said she hopes this proviso lift can be voted on during a special meeting of her committee on June 3, leading to a Full Council vote. Both tomorrow’s meeting at 2pm and the June 3rd meeting would be good times to plan to give public comment in support of this participatory budgeting process.
CM Herbold signaled she might be adding an amendment to the legislation to move the 911 call center and PEOs out of the SPD to allow the PEOs more time to resolve differences and figure out which department would be best suited as their new home.
Seattle Scandals
Controversy surrounds Chief Diaz’s recent decision to overturn the OPA finding regarding the pink umbrella case. At this morning’s Council Briefing, CM Herbold, the Chair of the Public Safety committee, spoke about her correspondence with the Chief over this matter, including the bombshell that there is new evidence that has surfaced that wasn’t in the OPA investigation. CM Herbold says she is holding her judgment until she finds out more about what happened up the chain of command, but CM Lewis asked some pointed questions about whether this new information had been turned over to the OPA and whether the Chief is taking it upon himself to continue this investigation or whether the OPA will be doing so, as well as concerns that norms aren’t being followed. You can find all the related emails of this exchange over at SCC Insight along with a summary of the issues involved.
The most caustic article yet has been published on the scandal involving the missing text messages of Mayor Durkan, former Chief Best, and Chief Scoggins, saying:
…the context suggests a coverup. These suspicions are bolstered by the fact that five members of senior command at the Seattle Police Department also deleted their text messages. That means the question of who ordered the abandonment of East Precinct hasn’t been definitively answered, with both Durkan and former Police Chief Carmen Best denying they gave the order. It’s possible a subordinate made the call independently as they claim, but without the text messages to confirm this story, it’s a very convenient explanation.
Meanwhile, in King County…
The South Seattle Emerald has started an excellent series of investigative journalism by Carolyn Bick on the pushback and internal pressure faced by former OLEO Director Jacobs, OLEO being the Office of Law Enforcement Oversight for King County. She appears to have faced a years-long campaign against her by the King County Sheriff’s Office and the King County Police Officer’s Guild. Here are a few key quotes:
They said that this culture of law enforcement pushback against civilian oversight and closing ranks had always been present but has grown much more pronounced under Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht. These same sources also said that the KCPOG had been particularly hostile towards Jacobs over a similar period of time.
The pressure and roadblocks Jacobs faced during her tenure aren’t unique to Jacobs and the KCSO, according to civilian law enforcement oversight experts who spoke with the Emerald. Even former Sheriff Urquhart, who sat down with the Emerald for an interview on May 10, 2021, agreed that Jacobs faced an internal campaign to oust her and said that “there’s something about a reformer … they just don’t last long here [in King County].
and
In other words, the new contract appears to prevent investigators from consulting or commissioning reports from any expert whose findings KCSO determines are critical of findings by an expert KCSO consulted in its original administrative investigation of a matter, such as a police shooting. The contract seems to block OLEO from including rebuttal experts in their investigative reports or testimony.
The entire article is worth a read and puts into clear relief why an elected sheriff can sometimes be unfortunate , leading to internal politicking and backstabbing and getting in the way of much-needed reform. In an interview with Publicola, King County Executive Dow Constantine says, “I think that the ability of the executive and the council to hire and fire the sheriff dramatically increases accountability. Having the sheriff be elected creates deep rifts within the sheriff’s office, it creates these political camps that continue to war long after the election is over. And that is profoundly unhealthy. So I think this is a real step forward.”
As a reminder, King County’s Sheriff is supposed to change over to a new appointed Sheriff (as opposed to an elected one) at the beginning of next year because of a measure that passed in last November’s general election.
Let’s start with Tuesday’s Seattle Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting, shall we? The meeting had two agenda items. The first, regarding moving the 911 call center and parking enforcement officers out of SPD and into the new Community Safety and Communications Center, had disagreement because the management of the PEOs believe they should instead be moved to SDOT, while the rank and file parking enforcement officers prefer a move to the new Center. The CMs passed the bill with a divided report, meaning its discussion and vote in full Council is delayed until May 24, in the hopes the two sides of the issue might reach some consensus by then.
The second agenda item was the substituted bill that originally was regarding a $5.4m cut to the SPD for overspending in 2020. It’s worth noting current estimates say there will be $13m of SPD salary savings due to attrition this year, and if attrition rates remain the same as they have been the first four months of the year, that figure could increase. However, after the Federal Monitor sent a letter to Council opposed to any cuts whatsoever, CM Herbold introduced an amendment she hoped would appease him and the Court, releasing a different SPD proviso of $2.5m regarding out-of-order layoffs to lay off SPD officers on the Brady list. The Council has determined that because of existing state law and current SPD hiring policies (they hire laid-off officers first and are currently hiring), out-of-order layoffs are not feasible at this time. This amendment passed with a 3-2 vote (Herbold, Lewis, and González yes, Morales and Sawant no) and was added to the bill.
The amended bill was brought to a vote, and CMs Morales, Sawant, and González all opposed it, although for slightly different reasons. The bill is moving to full Council on May 24 with a recommendation not to pass. If the bill doesn’t pass, the status quo would be maintained regarding the budget passed last November, and these provisos could be revisited later in the year.
For those keeping track, that means the full Council meeting on May 24 will include a vote on moving the 911 call center and PEOs to the Community Safety and Communications Center; a vote on whether to lift these $5.4m and $2.5m SPD provisos; and potentially the vote on releasing the participatory budgeting funds. It’s definitely a date to mark on your calendars!
Election News
Hacks & Wonks continues their electoral interview series with an interview with candidate for Seattle City Council, Position 9, Sara Nelson. In the interview, Nelson says she opposes the Jumpstart tax and wants to focus on jobs and helping struggling small businesses, but then was unaware that the Jumpstart recovery package includes $18m in small business recovery investments. When discussing public safety, she says, “Yeah. I think that we need to bring back the Crisis Intervention Team. Because – that – that, you know – I think his name was Derek – that was a situation that was tragic.” I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions here.
We also have yet another Seattle mayoral candidate, Art Langlie, whose main qualification for the job appears to be that his grandfather was once the governor of Washington. As the Seattle Times reports, “State Public Disclosure Commission filings show he has donated to incumbent Mayor Jenny Durkan and King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, as well as the late Republican state Sen. Andy Hill of Redmond, and GOP candidate Jinyoung Englund, who lost a 2017 race for Hill’s seat.”
Campaign Zero and Tableau have released police department scorecards for municipal and county law enforcement offices across the country, based on the following data: “We submitted public records requests to local police departments and combined the data obtained from these departments with federal databases tracking crime, arrests, financial and personnel records from thousands of municipal and county governments.”
Of ranked Washington state counties, King County has the worst ranking at 36%. Seattle has the worst score of all ranked Washington state cities at 33%. A few key findings for Seattle: SPD has more police funding per capita than 89% of departments. 50% of all arrests made from 2013-19 were for low-level, non-violent offenses. A Black person was 5.7x as likely and a Latinx person was 2.2x as likely to be killed by police than a White person in Seattle from 2013-20. You can dig through the site to find further illuminating statistics.
The city employee said the issues currently surrounding participatory budgeting implementation aren’t unique.
“This is fundamentally a sort of a pattern that the city has engaged in when it comes to communities of color: not having viable conversations and putting the community in the space of being stuck between the mayor’s office and the council whenever there’s a conflict. And holding up resources that ought to be moving forward.”
The Metropolitan King County Council delayed a vote on a groundbreaking facial recognition ban, citing a need to do additional outreach and research on the policy’s effects.
Seattle police response times spiked amid the pandemic and last summer’s demonstrations for racial justice. Now, the question is how the 2020 uptick in response times should be interpreted, as…
