Vaddadi

Seattle Mayor’s Race Remains a Dead Heat in Polling

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Seattle and King County News:

First off, I took a closer look at the upcoming Seattle City Attorney election, with a particular focus on incumbent Ann Davison’s signature policies, for Bolts Magazine.

For The Urbanist, I wrote about the nuisance property and graffiti legislation recently passed by the Seattle City Council, as well as Council President Sara Nelson’s proposal to allocate some of a not-yet-proposed sales tax bump to pay for addiction treatment. I also gave an update on how Donald Trump’s recently passed budget reconciliation package, which includes large cuts to Medicaid (Apple Care) and SNAP, will impact Washingtonians, and how Seattle and King County are responding to the current national funding and policy threats.

We have a primary election coming up next Tuesday, August 5, which means it’s time for some new polls. The two frontrunners for Seattle Mayor, Bruce Harrell and Katie Wilson, are still statistically tied. In the Seattle City Attorney’s race, incumbent Davison is ahead, closely followed by Erika Evans. 

And a recent poll on Washington Governor Bob Ferguson’s job performance found that only 32% of voters think he’s been doing an “excellent” or “good” job during his first six months. 

We also have a new Seattle councilmember, the returning Debora Juarez, who has been appointed to fill Cathy Moore’s empty D5 seat. That seat will not be up for election until November of 2026. 

Coming up this week, we have a select budget committee meeting tomorrow morning with a possible vote on the Seattle Shield Initiative, which has picked up a whopping 17 proposed amendments. Then on Thursday morning, there will be a special public safety committee meeting to discuss the proposed expansion of CCTV cameras to three new locations, which will cost over $1 million. The updates would also allow SPD to view and record footage from SDOT traffic management cameras.

Guy Oron recently published a great piece about the ballooning settlements the City of Seattle has had to pay related to SPD actions. He includes some illustrative graphs as well, and I recommend taking a look. Overall, the City spent nearly twice the amount it had budgeted over the last ten years (2014-2024) on SPD settlements etc. The most recent figure: in 2024 the City spent $15.1 million on police litigation. 

The Urbanist has a piece from Carolyn Bick documenting the poor public record practices of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). 

The Seattle City Attorney’s Office is still refusing to allow Seattle Municipal Court (SMC) Judge Pooja Vaddadi to hear domestic violence and DUI cases. SMC Judge Damon Shadid vigorously criticized this decision in open court earlier this month.

The King County Prosecutor’s Office has paused youth felony diversion due to a limited analysis that showed a recidivism rate of 53% for youth being referred to Restorative Community Pathways for felonies. Some of these cases will instead be referred to court-supervised diversion programs, but these programs are currently lacking in capacity and also lack other benefits provided by community-based programs. An audit of Restorative Community Pathways is due later this summer. 

Last week, a meeting of Seattle’s housing and human services committee was unable to convene due to a lack of quorum after both Nelson and Councilmember Rob Saka didn’t show up. Nelson apparently gave a day’s notice about her absence, and Saka was reportedly in his office at City Hall at the time of the meeting. 

As a result, the committee was unable to vote on many appointments that would finally fill the City’s renters commission, which former committee chair Cathy Moore appears to have deliberately let languish as she pursued the idea of including landlords in a body meant to advocate for renter rights. The committee was also supposed to report on accepting $16 million in federal HUD grants. 

Neither Nelson or Saka has given much explanation for what happened. If they deliberately skipped the meeting in order to thwart the renters commission appointments, doing so would be an undemocratic act, the seriousness of which is only magnified by the active erosion of democracy right now at the federal level.

The committee’s business is now supposed to be heard at the full City Council meeting later today, when the renters commission vacancies will hopefully finally be filled. 

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New Seattle councilmembers want to weaken their ethics code as the US is sliding into authoritarianism

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Seattle News:

Well, Seattle has been buzzing with news these last two weeks! Let’s dive right in.

On April 28, SPD and the Mayor’s Office held a press conference to tout how many officers SPD has hired so far this year. The Mayor’s Office claims the number is 60, with another 160 they say are going through background checks. 

At the press conference, which featured a few rows of the new recruits, there appeared to be one woman recruit present, while all the others were men. As PubliCola reported, 5 of the 60 new hires in 2025 are women, while last year SPD hired 12 women. PubliCola also reported that of the 24 officers who have left so far in 2025, five of those were women, meaning a net gain of zero women officers since the beginning of the year. 

SPD still doesn’t appear to be a good place to work if you’re a woman, an issue I cover in my story about former SPD Chief of Staff Jamie Tompkins, who alleges SPD was a sexually hostile work environment. 

President of the police union SPOG, Mike Solan, isn’t happy either, saying the higher SPD hiring numbers represent a “lessening of standards.” About SPD, Jason Rantz wrote, “nearly 30% of the department is over 50 years old. Nearly 26% are 51 years old or older. At 53, depending on the length of service, officers are eligible for retirement.”

Meanwhile, two more Black SPD officers are suing the department for racial discrimination. And attorney James Bible told the Seattle Times that “there are more cases coming.”

PubliCola has been doing a huge amount of helpful reporting in the public safety space recently, including covering Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison’s new “drug prosecution alternative,” which appears to be a less good version of the community court she shut down a couple years ago; SPOG suing SPD over SPD’s inability to fulfill public records requests; and Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi filing a formal complaint with the Washington State Bar Association against Davison and former criminal division chief (and now the Mayor’s Chief Public Safety Officer) Natalie Walton-Anderson for deciding to use a procedural loophole to disqualify Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases in her courtroom.

Meanwhile, Councilmember Cathy Moore has introduced an ethics bill that would weaken the ethics rules for city councilmembers. If passed, councilmembers would no longer be required to recuse themselves if they have a possible financial conflict of interest. Instead they would be required to simply disclose the possible conflict. 

The City’s head of ethics, Wayne Barnett, supports the change. Interestingly, rumor has it that this ethics change is a precursor to Moore introducing new legislation that would gut renters rights protections that are currently in place in the city. Both Councilmember Martiza Rivera and Councilmember Mark Solomon are currently landlords who would have to recuse themselves from a vote on that legislation should the ethics rules not be changed. It is possible Moore would still have the votes to strip renters of protections just as the Trump administration is making cuts that are likely to increase the rate of homelessness in Seattle, even with the two recusals, but it would make for a tighter vote. 

Why a sitting councilmember would want to join Trump in worsening the city’s homelessness crisis in the first place is an interesting question. Why she would choose to weaken the longstanding ethics rules governing city council (in place since 1980) right when many political scientists believe the United States is moving into some form of authoritarianism is another good question. 

Mayoral candidate Katie Wilson wrote an op-ed about what a bad idea weakening the ethics rules is, and it sounds like most, if not all, current D2 city council candidates oppose the bill as well. Solomon was appointed to his position representing D2 until an election can be held this November.

Council President Sara Nelson’s Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development Committee first took up this ethics bill on Thursday afternoon, although no vote was taken at that time.

Finally, to end on some promising news, the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) has been trying a new, less painful method of administering buprenorphine to help people addicted to fentanyl. Early results show that more than 70% of people trying this new course of treatment are making it to their second month of treatment, which is more than triple DESC’s previous numbers. More studies are needed, and cost could be a limiting factor, but this could mark a really helpful breakthrough in treating fentanyl addiction.

King County News:

Shannon Braddock is now officially the King County Executive until the elections in November, and she has rolled out a “200 Day Plan.” Top of the list is enacting the 0.1% “public safety” sales tax just approved by the state legislature and establishing an emergency reserves fund to help the county deal with continued federal shenanigans. 

At a Health, Housing, and Human Services committee meeting on Tuesday, county budget director Dwight Dively gave another of his updates on said federal shenanigans. He said one of the things we’re seeing now is an inability to move projects forward because the federal government employees and/or infrastructure no longer exist to do so. The county is also losing federal workers at various of its agencies. 

King County filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for adding “unlawful” conditions to previously approved federal grants, which has generally meant insisting the grantee follow every single one of Trump’s executive orders, many of which are probably illegal. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration in the case on Wednesday.

Also at the committee meeting was a presentation on an old 2022 report on wage theft that somehow never received a committee presentation until now,  as well as an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice. 

At the Law and Justice committee meeting on Wednesday, the committee received presentations on an audit of asset forfeitures by the King County Sheriff’s Office (summary: the the records of said asset forfeitures are a mess, the electronic system is incomplete and so the office is basically relying on paper records, and the seizure notices are both hard to understand and only offered in English.) You can read the entire report here. 

Also presented at the meeting were the Department of Public Defense’s annual report for 2024 and a briefing about the inquest program. 

WA State News:

I wrote a wrap-up piece about the Washington state legislative session in which I primarily focused on the state’s 2025-2027 operating budget, including which new taxes and which new cuts were included. Governor Bob Ferguson has until May 17 to sign or veto the budget. 

Meanwhile, Ferguson is being pressured to veto an estimated $1.86 billion of new tax revenue passed in the Democrat’s package.

The Washington state Supreme Court upheld the legislature’s ban on high capacity magazines this week. 

We also got a piece from the Washington State Standard about why police accountability didn’t have a good year in the state legislature, which basically boils down to this: because it didn’t suit the people in power to move anything. 

In the article, we receive this confusing gem: “Meanwhile, fears of rising crime have emboldened opposition to policies believed to hinder officers trying to do their jobs. In 2023, the last year with available statewide data, the state saw a significant decrease in year-over-year violent crimes after years of increases, according to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.”

So fears of rising crime, which the data shows is not happening, is what is keeping the legislature from wanting to pass police accountability legislation. Gotcha. 

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Cities that own SCORE jail seem uninterested in accountability or improvement

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SCORE Jail:

PubliCola has continued its crucial coverage of the terrible conditions at the local SCORE jail in Des Moines. 11 people held in the jail have now died over the past two years, which is a shockingly high number. The jail has been reported to have inadequate medical care, filthy conditions, and contemptuous staff. 

The jail is owned and operated by six local cities–Auburn, Burien, Des Moines, Renton, SeaTac, and Tukwila–and it has contracts with many more local cities, including Seattle, Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Shoreline, Kenmore, Federal Way, and more. The jail is run by an executive director who reports to an administrative board with representatives from the six cities. 

The most recent board meeting was this past Wednesday, when the executive director called PubliCola’s recent reporting “misinformation.” The board didn’t ask the executive director anything about the conditions and facts reported in the article nor showed any interest in accountability or improving conditions inside this deadly facility. 

If you live in one of the six cities that operates the jail, here is a document with talking points and contact information.

Seattle News:

I sat down last week with Seattle City Attorney candidate and current public defender Nathan Rouse, and we had a long talk about his road in deciding to run and his vision for the Seattle City Attorney’s office. 

Real Change ran an op-ed by David Stoesz this week, entitled “Facts and evidence are our greatest strength: A response to Katie Wilson.” He makes some compelling arguments, and he also provides a nugget of information I think is important to emphasize. 

While discussing how in addition to housing, some folks are also in need of wrap-around services, Stoesz says that Plymouth Housing has calculated that one year of assisted living with the highest level of service costs the same as three days at Harborview or three months at the King County Jail. (King County Councilmember Sarah Perry said at a meeting this past Tuesday that a night at the King County Jail costs $250 per night.) 

While there are plenty of other evidence-based reasons why housing first and providing services to folks is smart policy, in this time of looming governmental budget deficits, remembering the relative cost of these policies is also useful. 

The City Attorney’s Office has slightly relaxed their blanket affidavits of prejudice against sitting Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi, who is now able to oversee some criminal cases. However, the Office still filed several affidavits of prejudice against her last week for DUI and domestic violence cases, and her primary assignment remains in infractions, as she does not yet have enough criminal cases for a full courtroom calendar. 

New interim SPD Chief Shon Barnes presented to the city council’s public safety committee for the first time on Tuesday. I’ll be reporting more on that meeting soon. 

Seattle awarded $22 million through its Equitable Development Initiative (EDI) in January. Projects funded include: “Africatown Community Land Trust (completing the Africatown Plaza development), Cham Refugees Community (completing a Cham community center), Rainier Beach Action Coalition (completion of the Food Innovation Center), the Somali Health Board (assisting construction of the Somali Community Cultural Innovation Hub), and Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network.”

WA State News:

The fiscal committee cut-off for bills this legislative session is TODAY, so soon I’ll be going through a bunch of interesting bills to see if they survived. I can already tell you that the Traffic Safety for All bill has unfortunately died. 

Yesterday Governor Bob Ferguson proposed $4 billion in state budget cuts. These cuts, combined with those proposed by former Governor Jay Inslee before his departure, would add up to $7 billion of a budget gap Ferguson is now estimating will be $15 billion over the next four years. 

Part of his plan involves state workers taking one unpaid day off per month. These furloughs would begin in July and save the state $300 million. He also wants to cut funding to food banks, which, given the combination of potential federal cuts to the SNAP food assistance program and the much higher demand on food banks since the pandemic began in 2020, seems potentially disastrous. 

Ferguson says it’s still too soon to say whether he’ll support state tax increases, which seems strange, given that were his cuts to be adopted, they still only address half of the state’s four-year budget deficit. There is also no word on how he is considering dealing with any federal fund cuts. Again, Washington State received $27 billion from the federal government in fiscal year 2024. 

In Praise:

I highly recommend reading author and organizer Kelly Hayes’s most recent piece, How to be a Fighter When You Feel Like a Punching Bag. It is long so you will need to put aside some time to read it (or there is also a listening option!), but I found it incredibly valuable and think it is worth your time. 

Among other topics, it covers:

  • Agency, trauma, learned helplessness, and feeling stuck/frozen in the current onslaught
  • The impact of social media, the bubbles it often relegates us to and how that encourages despair, isolation, and misanthropy, and the necessity for trust in order to organize collective action
  • The necessity of building social skills and relationships to meet this moment, as well as the importance of community
  • A key quote in the piece from Aaron Goggans: “Every time Musk or Trump weaponizes cruelty to shock a group into compliance we have to show, not with our outrage but with our care, that another response is possible.”
  • The strategy of taking small steps of agency and thinking about what activities/routines you can add to your life that are aligned with your values and keep you more informed and connected.

I hope you all find this piece to be as inspiring and helpful as I did. 

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Social housing Prop 1A is a major progressive victory in Seattle

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Seattle News:

Good news first! Prop 1A to fund social housing has passed with a resounding 20-point lead. Congratulations to everyone who put in so much hard work into helping this pass.

As I said on Bluesky, “House Our Neighbors and their two social housing initiatives are an inspiring example of the kind of progressive victory and progress we can achieve in Seattle without compromising our values or appeasing big business.”

On Tuesday, the Seattle City Council voted to pass the less lethal weapons legislation (which includes SPD use of blast balls). Councilmembers Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Joy Hollingsworth, and Cathy Moore voted no. 

Moore tried again to put some limits on mutual aid (help SPD gets from other law enforcement agencies) by requiring said mutual aid to agree to comply with Seattle’s crowd control policies–which, given the policing would be taking place in Seattle, seems eminently reasonable–but even Hollingsworth voted this amendment down. 

Reading the first sentence in PubliCola’s article about the decision is illustrative: “The Seattle City Council approved legislation yesterday that retroactively authorizes the Seattle Police Department to adopt its own policies governing how officers can use “less lethal” weapons such as pepper spray, foam-tipped bullets, and blast balls—rubber grenades that can cause serious, even life-threatening injuries when they explode.’” The bolding is mine. 

The Urbanist ran a first-person account by MJ Jurgensen (they/them), who was permanently injured by a blast ball deployed during a Seattle protest in 2020. 

Another lawsuit was filed against SPD by SPD Lt. John O’Neil, alleging discrimination and retaliation. O’Neil has experienced quite a saga for more than two years being bounced around SPD. Four of the people identified in his lawsuit were the same four women who brought their own lawsuit against SPD last year. 

The Washington Supreme Court decided that the SPD officers who attended the January 6, 2021 rally in Washington DC can be identified by name. Their names are Jacob Briskey, Jason Marchione, Alexander Everett, Caitlin Rochelle-Everett, Michael Settle, and Scotty Bach. The Everetts were fired by SPD for the part they played at the insurrection.

The Seattle City Attorney’s Office has said they will finally allow an elected municipal court judge, Judge Pooja Vaddadi, to hear criminal cases again. It has been almost a year since Natalie Walton-Anderson’s March 1 memo stating that the office would be filing a blanket affidavit of prejudice over all future criminal cases for Vaddadi. The memo cited three specific cases involving Vaddadi, about which Ashley Nerbovig wrote, “The case facts appear to deviate from the claims made by the CAO in their memo.” 

In spite of this change, not enough cases have been restored to Vaddadi for her to resume her previous role.

King County News:

The lawsuit against Burien brought by the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness had a hearing today. The lawsuit is regarding Burien’s homeless camping law.

I wrote a piece for The Urbanist about Kirkland’s new 24/7 drop-in mental health crisis center–Connections Kirkland–that opened last summer. King County announced this week that Connections Kirkland has been selected to be one of the five crisis centers supported by the crisis care levy. 

Washington State News:

The Legislative Black Caucus, which represents 14 state lawmakers, has some concerns about Governor Bob Ferguson’s $100 million police officer hiring grant program. 

Rep. Kristine Reeves, the Chair of the caucus, told The Washington State Standard, “We’ve spent the last five years trying to repair the harm done over law enforcement investments in communities where real people have been harmed, and particularly Black people have been harmed,” she said. “We want to make it clear that we are equally prepared to have hard conversations about how we prioritize community investments.”

The caucus would like to see equal investment for social services and other supportive community programs as is made into the police grants. They particularly support more investment in the Community Reinvestment Project that was originally created in 2022. 

In Praise:

I recently read If We Burn, a book by journalist Vincent Bevins, covering societal uprisings from 2010-2020, which occurred right as social media was becoming mainstream. I thought its many awards and positive reviews were very well deserved, so if you have some reading time, you might want to check it out. 

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What would Seattle do without JumpStart?

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Seattle News:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

King County News:

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

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How the democratic process in Seattle is being undermined by the City Attorney’s Office

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There hasn’t been a huge amount of news as we all recover from the long weekend, but let’s look at what we’ve got this week.

Seattle News:

This weekend there was follow-up on a story I wrote last March about Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi. If you remember, the City Attorney’s Office (CAO) announced they would file an affidavit of prejudice against Vaddadi on all criminal cases going forward. Six months later, this tactic to prevent Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases is ongoing. 

Now Judge Vaddadi, recently returned from maternity leave, has published an op-ed in The Stranger sharing her perspective on this unprecedented step on the part of Davison. 

In her own words: “This behavior has a significantly negative impact on the Court and our democratic process. If prosecutors can effectively nullify a sitting judge this way, we do not have real elections. To my knowledge, this is the first time in Washington history that a prosecutor has made it so a particular judge will never hear any criminal cases.”

Vaddadi claims every detail named in the memo written by then-Criminal Division Chief Natalie Walton-Anderson, who now works for the Mayor’s Office as the Director of Public Safety, is false, and many of its false claims, even were they true, do not reflect the bias of which Vaddadi has been accused. Neither Vaddadi nor any reporter has been able to obtain the details for the cases cited in the memo. Vaddadi is blunt in her op-ed: “The CAO has failed to provide any evidence of this case simply because it does not exist.”

The memo in question was circulated only a few weeks after Vaddadi had disqualified a prosecuting attorney from a case due to a “potential ethics and evidentiary issue,” the only decision made by Vaddadi that the city has appealed. Her decision was later held up by the Superior Court. 

As budget season quickly approaches, it is also relevant to point out that not only do these blanket affidavits undermine the democratic process of electing judges in Seattle, they are also costing the city additional money, as it now needs to hire pro tem judges to cover the cases Vaddadi is not able to hear. 

In other news, Seattle kids returned to school on Wednesday, and there is a report that on the first day of school, an SPD officer sat in Garfield’s parking lot most of the day. Two security guards were also observed patrolling, and some members of Community Passageways were present at lunchtime. 

King County News:

Following the King County Council’s vote last week to support a non-binding motion to keep its youth jail (The Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center) open, The Stranger reported on how Councilmember Girmay Zahilay’s vote in favor of this motion seems to contradict his 2019 platform to “dismantle our current youth prison model.” The article speculates that Zahilay might have chosen to vote in this way due to a desire to become the next King County Executive; if he’s preparing for a run next year, he might benefit from distancing himself from the “radical” left. 

However, Zahilay  told The Stranger that his position on youth incarceration hasn’t actually changed that much, and that the community groups that helped him develop his platform back in 2019 were in favor of his amendments to the recent motion, which was originally put forward by Councilmember Reagan Dunn. 

Current Executive Dow Constantine, on the other hand, is sticking with his decision made in 2020 to work towards closing the youth jail. He told The Stranger, “The youth justice system does not produce the outcomes we all want, which are safe communities and healthy kids.”

As the narrative of increasing youth crime begins to spread both locally and elsewhere in the nation, The Stranger provides an important counterpoint by looking at local case referral numbers: juvenile crime at present seems about on par with pre-pandemic numbers. Bookings into the youth jail are now also about on par with pre-pandemic numbers. Both these numbers had dropped in 2020 due to the pandemic.

The main difference between pre-pandemic and now appears to be that youth are more likely to be using guns, which is a strong argument in favor of investing more heavily in the County’s  gun violence prevention programs that are perennially underfunded. 

King County’s budget season begins at the same time as Seattle’s, with Constantine’s proposed budget dropping on September 24 and council budget briefings beginning on September 25. 

While King County usually does a biennial budget, for this budget cycle they will only be preparing a budget for 2025 in order to avoid budget season overlapping with elections for county offices. Voters recently approved elections at the county level to move to even years, which means those elected for office in 2023 and 2025 will only serve three-year terms. Four-year terms will resume beginning for those elected in 2026. 

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Council President Nelson Pushes Back Against Experts’ Opinions

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Seattle News:

At this week’s Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development Committee meeting, Council President Sara Nelson hosted a discussion on draft legislation of an “SPD Recruitment Ordinance.” The ordinance as currently drafted would do the following: 

  • make permanent an SPD recruitment and retention program, moving 3 positions created by a previous ordinance for a recruitment manager and two recruiters into SPD
  • encourage the Public Safety Civil Service Commission (PSCSC) to consider the use of the entry level police officer exam used by multiple other agencies in Puget Sound region (known as the PST test)
  • asks PSCSC to make personal contact with officer candidates within 48 hours
  • requests PSCSC increase frequency of eligibility rosters to every 2 weeks
  • add to police exams unit in HSDR a new position for more robust candidate support (a position that will be paid for in 2024 with vacancy savings in SPD recruitment and will cost $146k/year extra starting in 2025)

There appears to be a small amount of friction between city council members and the Mayor’s Office over the details of this bill, as the Mayor’s Office would like to move only 2 of the recruitment positions to SPD, with the third going to PSCSC. However, the Mayor’s Office is reportedly looking to see if they can accommodate the council members’ desire in their reorganization plans. 

Council President Nelson said that while PSCSC Director Andrea Scheele had expressed concern that switching entrance tests would lower standards, she doesn’t believe that would be the case. It is unclear why she believes this, given it is Director Scheele’s literal job to review and assess these exams.

She also said that only 5 jurisdictions within Washington State are using the test used for SPD officers-–the NTN test-–although Council Central Staff member Greg Doss later corrected her, saying 27 cities in Washington use the NTN test, as well as all the West Coast Seven cities. 

Councilmember Kettle suggested using both tests, and while Doss said three jurisdictions in Washington do use both tests, he suggested doing so would be complicated and have legal ramifications. All three jurisdictions who do so have developed a special pre-employment process to make sure using both tests remains fair. It seems likely SPD would likewise have to develop a new pre-employment process in order to use both tests.

Council President Nelson also discussed how this legislation was changed to use discretionary language when it came to the PSCSC after receiving input from the law department. However, she says she has been closely reading the City Municipal Code herself and thinks it is unclear who gets to select the test. 

There have been many stories about the new proposed SPOG contract, on which SPOG members are currently voting.

The headlines sum up the situation: the contract represents a huge raise for SPD officers (we don’t yet know the full fiscal impact on Seattle’s overall budget) and almost no accountability improvements.

Even The Seattle Times editorial board agrees the proposed contract would be a mistake, writing, “To strengthen bonds between cops and communities, Seattle leaders must ensure that any new labor agreement fully implements the city’s landmark 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance.”

An attached MOU to the proposed contract lists some duties that could, were this to be approved, be taken on by civilian employees. As The Stranger reports, “Instead of creating serious police alternatives that could save the City money and help alleviate staffing shortages at the department, the MOU outlines civilian roles that look more like personal assistants to cops and that protect cushy positions wholly unsuited for some of the City’s highest-paid employees.”

As I wrote at The Urbanist:

“Noteworthy in this list is the item regarding wellness checks. The MOU with SPOG passed last year allowed the new Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) team to respond to two call types: person down and wellness checks. This new MOU places additional restrictions on wellness check response, saying civilians can only respond to these calls “where the identified individual known to the caller does not have any history of or current suicidal ideations, significant health problems including mental health, history of or fighting addiction, history of or concerns of domestic abuse, or is living in one of the City’s ‘wet houses.’” Some advocates are concerned these additional parameters could mean wellness checks able to be performed by CARE civilian responders will be few and far between. Indeed, this definition appears to preclude the idea of an alternate civilian emergency response to mental health crises, a policy strongly supported by Seattleites.” 

This concerning news comes at the same time that U.S. Rep. Adam Smith has begun touting a new federal investment of $1.926 million into Seattle’s CARE program. He says, “This funding will help launch the CARE Department, which will support the Seattle Police Department and Seattle Fire Department by diverting health mental health, substance use disorders, and related wellness services calls to this new civilian-run department.” Apparently he hasn’t read the new SPOG proposal nor The Stranger’s reporting on how CARE’s dual dispatch is currently going.

Meanwhile, PubliCola reports that many city workers who just had a new contract approved, including retroactive pay raises for 2023 and 2024, won’t be receiving those payments until at least October, which would be six months after agreeing to the bargaining agreement. It is unclear whether a new contract with SPOG would face the same delay in payout.

At this week’s Public Safety committee meeting, councilmembers heard a report on the OIG’s latest use of force assessment for SPD. Some noteworthy points from the presentation:

  • The counts of force against Black, Hispanic/Latino, and other minorities increased. 
  • Unknown race for both subjects with complaints of pain and civilians subject to pointing of a firearm increased substantially in 2023.
  • 2022 and 2023 years had no Type III and no Type III use of force in response to behavioral crisis for the first time since 2015.

At the presentation, Chief Operating Officer of SPD Brian Maxey bemoaned that “the same communities that complain about over policing complain about under policing.” He said the goal is to police based on need rather than by demographics. The presenters stated that the data showing increased use of force against Black and Latino community members wasn’t enough to draw conclusions of bias in what came across as “thou doth protest too much.” The Inspector General of the OIG, Lisa Judge, said they want to do a deeper dive to better understand what is driving “that particular snapshot of use of force.” 

A female lieutenant at SPD, Lauren Truscott, has made a complaint against SPD’s Lt. John O’Neil, the head of public affairs. The OPA has opened an investigation around this complaint. 

As KUOW reported, Truscott believes SPD’s acceptance of sexual harassment and discrimination comes from the very top and has called for new leadership: ““Women are being marginalized and dismissed, and no one is listening,” Truscott said. “We should never be treating employees as though they’re disposable. They are our most valuable commodity, but especially during a staffing crisis.””

The Loudermill hearing for Officer Daniel Auderer, the SPOG VP who was caught on bodycam joking about Jaahnavi Kandula’s death, was supposed to be held on April 1, but it was delayed.

The City Attorney’s Office finally filed a complaint against Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi for a case in which an assistant city attorney was disqualified from a case. A Superior Court judge found that Judge Vaddadi had acted properly. Nevertheless, the City Attorney’s Office is still continuing to prevent Judge Vaddadi from presiding over criminal cases.

Lisa Daugaard, Co-Executive Chair at Purpose Dignity Action, tweeted that the program CoLEAD, which provides lodging for unhoused people with behavioral health issues, has “shrunk from 250 rooms to 130 and a year from now will likely be down to 60.”

PubliCola published an update on how things are going with the new Seattle drug ordinance criminalizing public drug use and possession, saying that it doesn’t seem to have made more than superficial changes to the level of drug use. And there are other problems: “According to municipal court records, the average time between an arrest under the new drug law and when the city attorney files charges is about 70 days; more than half of the people charged under the new law had to wait 90 days or more for Davison’s office to file charges. This is in sharp contrast to Davison’s promise, in 2022, to decide whether to file charges in all criminal cases within five business days after her office receives a referral from the police department.”

The entire article is well worth the read.

Other News:

The Renton City Council has increased the hiring bonus for lateral police hires for the Renton Police Department. Formerly lateral hires received $10k upon hire and $10k after completing a one-year probation period. Now they will receive $20k upon hire and $20k after completing a one-year probation period, for a total of $40k per lateral hire.

Gun sales in Washington, which increased last year as the legislature passed new gun control laws, have plummeted so far in 2024. As measured by background checks, gun sales in January and February were cut in half this year compared to last year, and March gun sales were down 70%. You can read more about gun sales in the state here.

King County officials are considering whether they can begin their own corrections officer training program, with Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion asking Attorney General Bob Ferguson whether counties have the legal authority to do so. The state Criminal Justice Training Center does not support this idea. 

A man who died at the ICE facility in Tacoma last month had been held in solitary confinement for nearly all of his 4-year internment there. He spent nearly a decade in solitary confinement in state prisons before being transferred, so all together he spent more than 13 years in solitary confinement. ICE said he was in solitary confinement for “disciplinary reasons.” The Department of Correction reports 8 people have been held for over 500 days in the most severe restrictive housing. 

The Seattle Times reports: “The agency’s disclosure about Daniel’s time in state custody calls attention to the broad use of solitary confinement, not just by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And it raises more questions about whether Daniel’s prolonged periods of solitary contributed to his March 7 death at the Northwest ICE Processing Center.”

Recent Headlines:

 

Council President Nelson Pushes Back Against Experts’ Opinions Read More »

All Kinds of Power Struggles in Seattle This Week

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Seattle News:

This week there are some interesting follow-ups on developing stories we’ve discussed in the past.

First, Publicola reported that CM Nelson plans to propose legislation that would require the Public Safety Civil Service Commission (PSCSC) to switch police officer tests to the Public Safety test. The current National Testing Network test is more rigorous and was developed with the City of Seattle’s consent decree in mind. The Public Safety test, on the other hand, has a 90% pass rate on the first try. Contrary to what Nelson said in the previous public safety committee meeting on the topic, this seems likely to in fact compromise the standards for police officers in Seattle.

But the plot thickens! The PSCSC has sole authority over developing and holding testing, and changing this would require a law change. From the Publicola article: “Courts have upheld the PSCSC’s authority in the past, Scheele notes. “The last time the Council passed an ordinance undercutting the commission’s independence it had to be repealed,” she said, after a state appeals court ruled that the city council acted outside its authority when it passed a law moving many of the PSCSC’s “substantive” duties, including officer testing, to the city’s Human Resources Department.” So a court case regarding this issue may be in our future. 

Meanwhile, hiring new officers has become difficult across the country and is much more likely to be related to the fact that perceptions of being a police officer have shifted and people aren’t as interested in pursuing a career in law enforcement. 

Relatedly, SPD issued a tepid and disingenuous defense of their treatment of female officers. On the same day, KUOW published an investigative report on sexism and harassment within the department that emphasized how scared these female officers were to even speak to the press: “These women started talking with each other and agreed to speak with KUOW on condition of anonymity, because they feared retaliation. Floyd was the only one to let KUOW identify her. The women said that if found out, they could be investigated for speaking to the press without permission. One woman shook through her interview with KUOW. Five women declined to speak with KUOW, saying through intermediaries that they were scared of retaliation.”

In other news, City Attorney Ann Davison charged the six protesters at a City Council meeting in February with gross misdemeanors for trespassing. And we also got some more information about why Davison might have made the decision to disqualify Judge Pooja Vaddadi from all criminal cases at Seattle Municipal Court. The Stranger reported that Davison asked a higher court to review Vaddadi’s decision to disqualify an assistant city attorney from prosecuting a case. The day after this decision of Vaddadi’s was the day then-Criminal Division Chief Natalie Walton-Anderson sent out the infamous memo that I covered here, announcing the new policy of disqualifying the judge from all future criminal cases.

The Stranger published an in-depth piece on the problems currently faced by Seattle’s dual dispatch program, aka the “alternative” emergency response program that doesn’t follow the best practices of such programs run elsewhere. Ashley Nerbovig reports that the program is currently underutilized and mostly getting referrals from SPD instead of from 911 dispatch. Here is a particularly pertinent quote from the article:

“Right now, Smith acknowledges the City is watching whether this program can exist without pissing off either the police or fire union. Police union president Mike Solan has expressed a distaste for police alternatives, appearing to view them as an insult to SPD officers. The City’s contract with SPOG prevents it from shifting any work from sworn-officers to civilians without negotiations. Given how much leverage the City has already given away in the MOU, and given the repeated emphasis from the Mayor and the council on hiring more police officers as the only solution to public safety concerns, it seems unlikely that they’ll push hard to take lower-priority work off the plates of officers who constantly complain about having all this low-priority work on their plates. The other lingering question is whether the City plans to actually fund the program long-term.” 

Finally, Publicola reported on two smaller stories. First, the City Council are having embarrassing budget conversations in which they call out problems of efficiency with the budget that do not in fact exist. And second, CM Bob Kettle exposed City Hall to COVID when he knew he’d been exposed but did not choose to work from home until he got a positive test. For those who are unaware, it is in fact possible to spread COVID before you test positive. 

Jail News:

The Seattle Times reported about a 24-year-old who hung himself while in the Klickitat County Jail last year while withdrawing from fentanyl, which highlights how underprepared many Washington jails find themselves for dealing with the current fentanyl crisis. The article says, “As of 2019, Washington’s county jails had among the highest death rates in the nation. Suicide has been the leading cause of death in the state’s jails and in jails nationally.”

And Publicola reported on the death of a woman in the SCORE jail last year. She died of dehydration, malnutrition, low electrolyte levels and renal failure. 4 people died in the SCORE jail last year, which is a very high number given its population. About the fatality report, Publicola had this to say: “The report said Majoor was well-known to staff at SCORE and implied that this may have led to inadequate care: “Over familiarity with the decedent and previous detox experiences were discussed as possible issues.””

At the King County Law and Justice committee meeting this past week, councilmembers discussed the plan to close the County’s juvenile detention facility. In 2020 Executive Dow Constantine promised to close the facility by 2025, but that date has been recently pushed out until 2028, and judging by the committee discussion, is likely to be pushed out even further. Indeed, some councilmembers did not seem convinced that actual achievement of zero youth detention will ever be possible.  

The main points of contention appear to be whether the newly proposed respite and receiving centers for youth would feature locked doors and what the differences might be between security and safety. 

Councilmember Jorge Barón spoke eloquently about the problem, saying, “It strikes me as a failure of our society that we have people at a young age engaged in harm-causing behavior, including very serious criminal behavior. We need to really reflect on that. What kind of society are we creating and how do we change that?” He spoke about how the current system contributes to harm-causing behavior rather than reducing it. 

The County will start public engagement on the Care & Closure plan soon, as well as releasing recommendations for improvements that can be made to the existing facility that can be included in Constantine’s budget proposal this fall. Meanwhile, the advisory committee will continue to meet to hash out the question of security vs. safety.

Recent Headlines:

All Kinds of Power Struggles in Seattle This Week Read More »

Are $230 Million in Seattle Budget Cuts Even Possible? Budget Director Says No.

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Seattle News:

This week at Seattle’s Public Safety committee meeting, the committee discussed SPD testing, recruiting, and retention. Then on Thursday night, Mayor Harrell hosted a public safety forum at the Seattle Public Library. He plans to hold more informal public safety forums by precinct in the month of April.

Fascinating things were said at both of these meetings, and I’m currently working on a longer piece analyzing them more thoroughly. More on this, hopefully next week! 

City Council is teed up to vote on a resolution at next week’s 3/19 meeting that appear to eliminate several Statements of Legislative Intent (SLI) passed by last year’s Council. One of the SLIs not appearing on the new list is the request for an evaluation of Seattle’s current gun violence prevention programs. More specifically, the SLI requested that “HSD and CSCC/CARE perform a gap analysis of the City’s current and priority investments in gun violence prevention as compared to the recommendations in the King County Regional Community Safety and Wellbeing (RCSWB) Plan, and identify complementary, duplicative, or gaps in services provided by the City and King County.” 

It is ironic that at a time when the city is trying to pressure through three concerning surveillance technologies with the justification that the city is struggling with gun violence, they are not willing to even finish a basic evaluation of already existing investments that won’t cost a penny.

Following up on the news about the City Attorney trying to disqualify Judge Vaddadi from hearing cases, the Seattle Times reports that certain defense attorneys are independently trying to find a way to fight back by having Vaddadi sign subpoenas and then arguing her signature on these documents means she shouldn’t be unilaterally removed from hearing the cases:

“In an interview, Vaddadi confirmed attorneys had sent her “fewer than a hundred” subpoenas to sign, which she did, but said she was unaware of any strategy by attorneys to get her back on the calendar. She, and at least some of her colleagues, interpret the court’s rules to mean that any judge can sign any subpoena sent to them.

“I would never strategize with one party or another, that would be incredibly unethical,” she said.”

Regarding Seattle’s upcoming enormous budget deficit, Crosscut recently reported that Julie Dingley, the city’s budget director, had said they will not be able to make $230 million worth of cuts by the beginning of 2025, and has suggested they will have to come up with one-time strategies to stagger implementation of such a large amount of cuts. It’s worth noting that Seattle is required by law to have a balanced budget. 

The same article reports that Councilmember Kettle supports having JumpStart tax funds go directly to the general fund to help balance it instead of honoring the spending plan for the tax that is currently in city statute. The JumpStart tax is currently the top source of funding for affordable housing in the city, so redirecting it in such a way would have consequences to the already meager store of affordable housing. 

Election News:

Tanya Woo has officially declared her candidacy for the Seattle City Council seat that she currently holds as an interim appointee. No other candidates for the seat have yet filed.

Perennial state lawmaker Frank Chopp has announced his retirement, and Shaun Scott has announced his candidacy to take over the 43rd Legislative District seat. And he is coming out swinging! Here is the first paragraph of his press release announcing his candidacy:

“The past four years have dealt a lifetime of challenges to residents of the 43rd Legislative District. The working class has seen costs of living increase, while major corporations dominate local elections and evade taxes. Renters can’t afford rent. For young people, the reality of a permanently altered climate lingers like smoke. Students are punished for attending state universities with a life sentence of debt. Disabled and immunocompromised Washingtonians enjoy few public accommodations, and Long COVID looms as a public health emergency. While Washingtonians hope a Democrat-controlled State Legislature and Governor’s office will support staple programs such as special education funding and the resumption of free meals in public schools, MAGA Republicans in cahoots with the billionaire class have launched initiatives to rollback recent state-level wins on climate sustainability and fair taxes.”

Scott is the Policy Lead at the Statewide Poverty Action Network, which is the advocacy arm of Solid Ground, which was founded by his predecessor Chopp. He is known for his run for City Council for D4 in 2019, a race he lost to Alex Pedersen by 4 points while being wildly outspent. Scott also authored the state-level guaranteed basic income (GBI) pilot in 2022.

King County News:

The Washington State Bar Association recently passed new standards for public defenders that will reduce their caseloads. While these standards will affect the entire state, they particularly impact King County because attorneys in King County are required to follow standards that the WSBA adopts.

Publicola reported that Executive Constantine was “alarmed enough” about this possibility that he had his general counsel send a letter to the WSBA asking them not to adopt these new standards. It is likely he is concerned about how this will impact funding for public defense, given the County is currently facing a two-year $100 million budget deficit. 

Publicola said: “According to DPD director Anita Khandelwal, that means the county must either hire enough attorneys—along with support staff like paralegals, social workers, and investigators—to meet the new standards or invest in alternatives to prosecution and incarceration, reducing caseloads by reducing the number of cases.” But Khandelwal argues it doesn’t have to be a budget question, as the County has three years to potentially ramp up alternative programming that would reduce their dependence on the traditional criminal legal system.

Recent Headlines:

 

Are $230 Million in Seattle Budget Cuts Even Possible? Budget Director Says No. Read More »

The Seattle City Attorney Has Been Busy

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Personal News:

I had a novel come out this week! My Stars Shine Darkly is a YA science fiction novel and a dystopian romance. 

Book cover of My Stars Shine Darkly by Amy Sundberg, showing a teenage girl in a fancy dress and a golden Venetian mask

“In a story awash with Shakespearean intrigue and hijinks, join our intrepid heroine as she struggles against the dystopian patriarchy of her world.”

You can purchase it here or request it from your local library.

Seattle News:

Soon after I hit publish on my issue last Friday, the news dropped that the Seattle City Attorney’s Office would be filing an affidavit of prejudice on Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi on all criminal cases going forward. I dug more deeply into the issue with my story at the Urbanist. Perhaps most concerning is how this decision undermines the independence of the court from other branches of government.

Meanwhile the court is also in turmoil because of the rollout of a new case management system this week that has been bumpy at best. As The Seattle Times reports: “Court hearings have been exceedingly slow. Where it previously took a half a day to work through first appearances, when a judge sets bail, it’s now taking a full day, meaning some people are spending longer in jail than they otherwise would.”

Yesterday at the State of Downtown event hosted by the Downtown Seattle Association, City Attorney Ann Davison said she “supports setting a limit on the number of times a person is allowed to overdose in public before they’re arrested and booked into jail.” While this law would supposedly only go into effect if a person refused treatment after an overdose, in practice treatment is often unavailable.

The City Attorney’s Office also announced they would be charging SPD Officer Kevin Dave, the officer who struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula, with what amounts to a traffic ticket. Publicola reported that Dave received a hiring bonus of $15k after being hired in November of 2019: “Dave was previously an officer in Tucson, Arizona, but was fired from that previous position in 2013 after failing to meet minimum standards during his 18-month probation period.”

Daniel Auderer, the SPOG vice president who got caught in a recording laughing at Kandula’s death, was scheduled to have his disciplinary hearing with Chief Diaz this past Tuesday. Auderer has not yet had his pre-termination or “Loudermill” hearing, which would be required before he could be fired.

In other news, Publicola reported that SPD is continuing to operate under a crowd control policy that is against the law. SPD ignored the city’s new less-lethal weapons law (passed in 2021) for a few years before finally submitting a proposal in December 2023:

“Accompanying the policy: A memo from SPD denouncing their own proposal as “dangerous” and unworkable and asking the court to instead approve the department’s existing “interim” crowd control policy, which does not ban or substantially restrict the use of a single less-lethal weapon.”

The article goes on to state, “Antonio Oftelie, the court monitor overseeing the consent decree, told PubliCola that his office and the DOJ have decided to step back and see if SPD, working with the mayor and new city council, can come up with a policy in the first quarter of this year that complies with the consent decree and is something all sides can live with.”

One example of SPD ignoring the new law was back in February when they dispersed a Pro-Palestine rally with pepper balls, which wouldn’t have been available for use if SPD had a policy in line with the existing legislation.

Mayor Harrell announced a new contract with the Coalition of City Unions with the following specifications:

“The proposed contracts include a 5% Annual Wage Increase (AWI) retroactively applied for 2023 and a 4.5% AWI for 2024, totaling a two-year 9.7% adjustment. The 2025 AWI will be based on a two-year average of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue-area with a 2% floor and a 4% cap. The 2026 AWI will be calculated similarly but then be increased by 1% with a 3% floor and a 5% cap.”

The contract has already been approved by union members and will now go for a final vote before City Council. It is currently unclear to me whether this increase in wages has already been calculated into the city’s looming deficit for 2025. According to Publicola, city departments are preparing plans to lay off employees (while already operating under a hiring freeze).

King County News:

This week Executive Constantine announced a five-prong strategy for addressing the fentanyl crisis and preventing overdoses. The five prongs are as follows:

  1. Treatment: launching a 24/7 buprenorphine prescribing line; increasing staffing for both the youth and adult mobile crisis programs; hiring 6 new community navigators to connect people with treatment
  2. Behavioral health beds: partnering with Pioneer Health Services to open 16-bed residential treatment program for people with both mental health and substance abuse disorders; re-opening a 24/7 SUD sobering center; opening post-overdose recovery center
  3. Overdose reversal meds and fentanyl testing: distributing more naloxone kits and test strips; testing drug samples; increasing number of fire depts providing leave-behind naloxone
  4. Behavioral health workforce: adding 100 apprenticeships statewide with half in King County
  5. Reduce disproportionality in overdose: investing $2 million in disproportionately impacted populations

KUOW reported that no new money is being allocated for this project, and “when exactly any of this will happen is unknown. Neither Executive Constantine nor anyone else at the press conference would specify a timeline. Clint Jordan of Pioneer Human Services, however, did comment on when a 16-bed residential treatment program could open.

“We’re targeting a six month open,” Jordan said. “I think that puts us in October, November, somewhere in there.””

WA State Legislature News:

Initiative 2113, which changes the state-wide policy on vehicular pursuits, was passed in the state legislature on Monday. Unlike the reform on pursuits passed in 2021 and then weakened in 2023, this initiative doesn’t restrict pursuit based on type of violation in any way. Opponents say this change will almost certainly cause collateral damage, likely leading to more deaths and injuries. As Publicola reported, “Going back to 2015, Morris found that of 379 people killed by police in Washington state, 26 percent involved vehicular pursuits. Of the 32 deaths in Washington caused by collisions during pursuits, more than half were bystanders, passengers, or officers.”

Crosscut reported on two new gun control laws that are likely to make it through this year’s legislative session: one on reporting stolen guns and another on gun dealer security measures. 

Speaking of, this year’s legislative session is officially over. The WA State Standard reported that “Republicans had a pretty good year” and “big progressive priorities flared out.” 

Recent Headlines:

The Seattle City Attorney Has Been Busy Read More »