Drugs

New Drug Sensors Lead to Restroom Closures at Four Seattle Library Branches
Seattle’s Ballard branch library. Photo by Dennis Bratland, via Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-4.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

If you need to use the restrooms at the Lake City, Ballard, Capitol Hill, or International District libraries and find them closed, new “air-quality sensors” that detect vapor from drugs that don’t set off regular smoke detectors, like fentanyl and meth, and alert staff to immediately close the restrooms down for at least 15 minutes or until the air quality improves to a minimum threshold level.

Library staff already have the authority to issue temporary or permanent bans for people who use drugs in the restrooms and other violations of the library’s code of conduct or the law.

According to Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Elisa Murray, SPL decided to start shutting down restrooms at certain branches in response to drug use as a way to protect patrons and staff.

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“Prior to implementing this technology, staff only became aware of unsafe conditions when fumes reached the service desks or when a patron comment prompted staff to enter the restrooms and detect smells, at which point they’re already risking exposure,” Murray said. “An alert allows the behavior to be interrupted as early as possible, and access to live data informs staff decisions about whether or not the restrooms should remain closed without exposing staff to harmful chemicals.”

King County has long advised that fentanyl “fumes” are generally harmless. “When someone smokes fentanyl, most of the drug has been filtered out by the user before there is secondhand smoke. It doesn’t just sort of float around,” Washington Poison Center medical director Scott Phillips said in a King County Public Health blog post in 2022. “There’s no real risk for the everyday person being exposed to secondhand opioid smoke.”

Despite this, Murray said library “staff have reported feeling sick from drug-related fumes, and we have had to close restrooms because of fumes related to drug activity. Air quality sensors help us maintain a safe and healthy environment for both staff and patrons.”

Murray said the library has received no complaints from patrons or staff about the restroom closures. Using or possessing drugs in public became a misdemeanor in 2023, and people accused of either offense can be banished from certain parts of the city even without a conviction.

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Police

Police Launching “Neighborhood Resource Centers,” Starting in Magnuson Park
Image by TIA International Photography; CC-by-4.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department is setting up a permanent “Neighborhood Resource Center” at a Seattle Parks Department building in Magnuson Park in Northeast Seattle and hiring two full-time officers to staff it, with more locations to come.

The department is also “working with community partners from Santos Place and Mercy Housing to address the safety challenges in the area through this program,” according to an internal email from Deputy Chief Yvonne Underwood announcing the new positions.

The park has been a source of neighborhood (and City Councilmember) complaints about loud parties and late-night music for decades, as well as gun violence.

It’s also the location of the low-income housing complex where police shot and killed a pregnant woman, Charleena Lyles, in 2017. Solid Ground operates the apartment complex where Lyles lived and also owns Santos Place. According to a police spokesperson, SPD has discussed operating out of space owned by Mercy Housing, “with appropriate safeguards.”

The new “resource center” appears to be an extension of a pilot SPD did last summer in the park, which SPD has credited with reducing shots fired, robberies, and car thefts in the area.

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But when PubliCola asked about the new resource centers, a spokesperson downplayed the announcement, saying SPD was simply “continuing a program, the ‘Neighborhood Resource Program,” that involves two officers, housed at a Seattle Parks Office in the park” that will not be open to the public.

A search for any past SPD program by this name came up blank, and in a response to followup questions, SPD described the new neighborhood centers as basically glorified restrooms: “These are just breakrooms with a bathroom and a place to lock up coats and non-sensitive equipment,” the spokesperson said.

The new positions will come with premium pay: An extra 1.5 percent of the highest salary available to patrol officers, which currently works out to  just over $2,250 a year. Underwood wrote that the officers working at the new neighborhood resource centers would “serve in the selected communities as vehicle, foot, and bicycle patrol officers” who will engage in “enforcement and non-enforcement capacities/activities” and “[m]aximize police visibility and citizen contact.”

Morning Fizz

More Big Changes at City Departments, Jamie Tompkins Has a Podcast, Mike Solan Thinks He’s Cute

1. Mike Solan, a police officer and the outgoing president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, insulted Community Assisted Response and Engagement Department Chief Amy Barden in an Instagram post on Thursday, calling her “clueless” and her team of first responders a group of “social workers that want to cosplay as first responders. They are not first responders.”

The CARE Team is a group of first responders who can be dispatched to 911 calls that don’t require police, including some mental health crisis calls. The SPOG contract adopted last year expanded the size of the team but placed new restrictions on their ability to respond to people in crisis, requiring them to back off and call police if any sign of drug use is present, if the person is inside a car or building, or if the person is “aggressive” or “confrontational.”

During a recent appearance on the Seattle Nice podcast, which I co-host,  arden expressed frustration at the new restrictions and the fact that police sergeants still serve as gatekeepers deciding whether 911 calls require a police or CARE response. Barden said she was “disappointed that it’s actually gotten worse since the contract,” with sergeants directing even more 911 crisis calls to police unnecessarily, leaving the CARE team unable to their jobs.

Solan, a guy who loves to Photoshop his head onto bulging superhero costumes, grabbed a photo of Barden he probably thinks is unflattering (but is actually cute), and professed outrage at her “attacks on sworn sergeants, SPOG members, and civilian community service officers (CSO),” who, Barden correctly observed, are responding to all kinds of calls for which they don’t have the same specialized training as CARE.

Solan will step down as SPOG president next year. He’s endorsed a mini-Mike.

2. Jamie Tompkins, the former chief of staff to fired former police chief Adrian Diaz, has a new gig: Like the rest of us, she’s now a podcaster! According to an Instagram post, the new show, “Respectfu11y” (or “Respectfu11y”? It’s a really confusing name) will feature the former Q13 anchor telling her own story for the first time. “She’s held the mic. She’s held the space. Now, she’s not holding back,” the promo copy reads. “Real. Raw. Rebellious.”

Tompkins was fired last year after investigators concluded she had lied about an affair with Diaz that violated SPD policies; investigators also concluded she had faked a handwriting sample in an effort to prove she did not write a love note found in Diaz’ car. She filed a tort claim against the city, seeking $3 million in damages for alleged gender discrimination, last year.

Her guests so far include a social media influencer and an actor-turned-“connection expert” who played Frankie Valli’s wife in “Jersey Boys.” They’re probably famous; PubliCola is not the target audience.

3. Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections Director Brooke Belman, resigned on Thursday to return to position as Deputy CEO at Sound Transit, PubliCola has confirmed. Belman, the former deputy CEO and interim CEO of the regional transit agency, was appointed to head the department last September, replacing interim director Kye Lee after longtime department leader Nathan Torgelson left the city in March.

Belman’s apparently sudden departure—we’re told she gave two weeks’ notice—may have come as a surprise to Mayor Katie Wilson, who did not make an official announcement.

The change at the top of the city’s permitting department came on the same day that the city’s other development-related department, the Office of Planning and Community Development, released legislation and zoning maps for “Phase 2” of the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan update (unfortunately, reporters were told yesterday, OPCD can’t remove former mayor Bruce Harrell’s signature branding without legislation changing the name). We’ll have more on the zoning changes in a separate post; for now, you can check out the detailed new zoning maps here.

4. Hamdi Mohamed, who was appointed head of the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs by former mayor Bruce Harrell in 2022, is out, she announced on Wednesday. Mohamed, who supported Harrell during his unsuccessful reelection campaign, will be replaced on an interim basis by former OIRA director Cuc Vu. OIRA provides support to immigrants in Seattle, including know-your-rights trainings and programs that provide legal assistance to migrants and people targeted by ICE.

Mohamed, who’s currently on leave awaiting the arrival of her second child, told PubliCola “it’s a bittersweet moment” to leave the city, but she’s hoping to “support this work in a new way, especially right now when immigrant communities are under attack.” Mohamed was an active supporter of former mayor Bruce Harrell and is one of many department heads Mayor Katie Wilson has replaced in her first month in office.

During her four years, Mohamed said, she was able to increase OIRA’s budget by 40 percent. “It really took holding the line for the community advocating for them, and being able to articulate why the funds that flow through our office directly support community organizations on the front lines.”

 

City Council, Courts, criminal justice, King County, Women

County Prosecutors Give Lurid Presentation on Sex Work Featuring Unredacted Images of Brutalized Women to Seattle Council Committee

The point of the prurient presentation: “You can’t make sex work safe,” one senior deputy prosecutor said.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County prosecutors gave an astonishingly graphic presentation about sex work and human trafficking to Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle’s public safety committee on Tuesday, showing unredacted images of brutalized women with bloodied and battered faces and bleeding bodies. (Content warning: Although I’ve redacted all identifiable images from the presentation as it appeared yesterday, the graphic language remains).

The carousel of images included a photo of a identifiable weeping, partly nude woman in a bathtub who, according to prosecutors, had been urinated on by her pimp after her he bashed in her eye.

Prosecutors accompanied the images with pornographic commentary copy-pasted from online review sites that dehumanized and belittled sex workers. Reading out loud from one of the slides displayed in council chambers, King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Alexandra Voorhees intoned, “Find them, fuck them, forget them. … Stupid fucking whore. Spread your legs, and that’s it. That’s it. That’s all you’re worth. A cum dumpster.'”

Later in the presentation, Voorhees read a list of objects a victim of sex trafficking said men had inserted into her by force, and read quotes from women who described vomiting and bleeding from forcible sex acts. Sex work, Voorhees claimed, often leads to dangerous physical conditions such as “vaginal prolapse, anal prolapse… fecal incontinence, forced abortion.” The presentation continued in pornographic detail: “Girls in dog cages, girls being waterboarded… stunned with stun guns… burned and strangled.”

During public comment, Emi Koyama—a longtime advocate for sex workers and founder of Aileen’s, a peer-led community space for women working along the Pac Highway in South King County—said the prosecutors “selectively quote and weaponize survivor testimonies that are useful in ceding further power to the law enforcement, while neglecting how the law enforcement itself is also a source of violence in the lives of many women.”

“Policy making should not be adversarial, and efforts should be made together with those who are impacted by any given issue, whether they align with law enforcement or not,” Koyama said.

The two prosecutors argued repeatedly that the public is misinformed about the inherently exploitative nature of all sex work—”this is not ‘Pretty Woman,'” Voorhees said—and said the graphic, exploitative images were necessary for people to understand that pimps and sex buyers need to be punished.

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After other council members, including Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Eddie Lin, expressed concerns about the lurid presentation, King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion sent a letter to the council saying that although “the goal of the presentation was to make clear to Council the violence that survivors experience at the hands of buyers and traffickers,” the prosecutor’s office will “do a better job of protecting victim’s [sic] privacy” in the future.”

The presentation has been removed from the committee agenda but is still available in the full agenda packet and viewable on the Seattle Channel recording of the meeting. UPDATE: As of noon on Jan. 28, he agenda packet has been removed as well.

Douglas Wagoner, the public affairs director for Manion’s office, stood by the intent of the presentation when he spoke with PubliCola on Tuesday evening. “The goal of the presentation was to make clear to City Councilmembers the violence that survivors experience in the hands of buyers and traffickers,” Wagoner said. “Their trauma is incredibly difficult to watch and learn about, but it’s also real and most people don’t know how bad the experiences are of the survivors who are going through it every day in King County.”

“Maybe in the future, we’d make a different choice in terms of the exact images and language in the presentation,” Wagoner added.

Whatever their intent, the images and words had the effect of re-brutalizing the women on the screen, who did not consent to be used as examples by prosecutors pushing further criminalization of sex work. Although the prosecutor’s office denied any political agenda, they noted during the presentation that they’re hoping to drum up support for state legislation that would elevate paying for sex, currently a misdemeanor, to a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $10,000.

The bill would take the question of whether to prosecute sex buyers out of the City Attorney’s Office, where progressive Erika Evans just took over from Republican Ann Davison, and put it into the county prosecutors’ hands. Sex trafficking is already a felony.

Kettle, along with his fellow committee members Maritza Rivera and Debora Juarez, used the presentation as an opportunity to express disbelief that people in Seattle, including advocates for sex workers and sex workers, have the gall to oppose the city’s recent crackdowns on sex buyers, including a law reinstating “SOAP” banishment zones and “john letters” sent to the homes of men identified as possible sex buyers through their license plates.

“There’s so many women in our city who make two points that really not should be made together— ‘Oh, Epstein, this, that whatever,’ but then… they decry the letters by SPD to those johns or potential johns,” Kettle said.

“These people come in here and yell at us when we’re trying to go after the men. … We as a city, need to stop, take a deep breath and think about that. When I read something online by the chattering classes in the city that talk about these pieces, they need to stop and look at themselves.”

Rivera, too, said she couldn’t understand why anyone would participate in “this whole movement of defunding things and ‘We’re not going about it the right way’—No.” The solutions—SOAP zones, “john letters,” and imprisoning sex buyers—”are so clear,” Rivera continued, and the fact “that people can’t see that you all really are helping victims is beyond me.”

Later, Voorhees yes-anded Rivera’s outrage that anyone would question the decisions the council has made in recent years to further criminalize sex work. “You were asking some questions about people who are who are opposed or somehow think that this is consensual, so it’s okay,” Voorhees said. “The problem is, you can’t make sex work safe. It is inherently dangerous. It is inherently a power imbalance.”

The idea that sex work is inherently so dangerous that it must be abolished is far from a consensus view in Seattle or the United States. Juries don’t tend to buy the notion that men who pay for sex are inherently abusive or dangerous, which is one reason they rarely go to trial—it’s harder for prosecutors to sustain a prurient image of monster predators when faced with a real man (in Seattle, typically an immigrant) who got caught trying to pay for sex.

While no one would express sympathy or support for men who beat, rape, or kidnap and traffic women, those crimes are separate from patronizing a sex worker (formally “commercial sexual exploitation” in Seattle law), and can be prosecuted on their own. Treating all men who pay for sex as monolithically evil does not stand up to reality as sex workers themselves describe it. No sex workers were invited to attend the presentation, which allowed prosecutors to paint them as childlike, helpless victims with no agency in their own lives.

Also, the approaches the two prosecutors described as “innovative” — increased penalties, “john letters,” and banishment zones—aren’t new, don’t work, and can put women at risk.

Near the end of Tuesday’s meeting, Saka asked the prosecutors what warning signs parents should watch out for to make sure their daughters aren’t being recruited by pimps..

“When I was a kid, it used to be called ‘fast’— don’t be a ‘fast little girl,’ ‘she’s a fast girl,’ whatever,” deputy prosecutor Braelah McGinnis said. “Kids who come home and have unaccounted-for money. They have their nails done all of a sudden, and things like that. And so, you know, those can be red flags of, like, ‘Well, who took you to get your nails done?’ …We also find kids, lots of times, may have a second phone, and it’s because it’s used to communicate with their pimp or their trafficker. Those are some of my tips.”

I called Kettle to find out why he approved the prurient presentation and whether he would invite advocates and sex workers who disagree with the prosecutor’s approach to present their own views and experiences in his committee. I hadn’t heard back by press time, but will update this post if I do.

Courts, Police, public disclosure

SPD’s Obstructive “Grouping” Policy “Violates the Public Records Act,” Judge Rules

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Superior Court Judge Sandra Widian ruled on Monday that the Seattle Police Department routinely “violates the PRA”—the state Public Records Act—by refusing to work on more than one public disclosure request by the same requester at a time.

The ruling was a partial win by the Seattle Times, which sued SPD after the department slow-walked reporter Mike Carter’s requests by Times by choosing to respond to a single request while providing end-of-year “placeholder” dates the other six. As they have done with all but one of PubliCola’s outstanding records requests, SPD bumped this generic December 31 date forward a year at the end of each year without doing any work on any of the “inactive” requests or providing an actual date when records would be available.

In 2023, SPD signed a pre-litigation agreement with the Times in which they committed to stop grouping multiple requests that were more than eight weeks apart. Although the agreement applied broadly to all requesters, SPD later told PubliCola that it only applied to the Times, and decided it applied to as few as two requests made by any requester, including the Seattle Times, over any period of time—so that, for example, a person who filed two requests over two years could have their second request placed in inactive status indefinitely with no actual estimate date for disclosure, which is required by law.

At a hearing at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent last Friday, SPD’s outside attorney, Jessica Goldman, argued that SPD is “inherently different” than an agency at a smaller city, because they get thousands of requests; for that reason, “we’re not going to make requesters happy sometimes. And I want to say on behalf of the Seattle Police Department that every single one of them wishes they could they had more resources and could provide responsive records the day they’re requested. Who doesn’t? This is not an issue of trying to hide the ball.”

By making five records requests in one day, Goldman added, Carter was “gaming the system”—asking for too many things at once to cause “excessive interference with [the] agency’s functions” and make it harder for them to respond to other requesters. As we’ve reported, SPD’s media relations office frequently directs reporters to file records requests for extremely basic information, such as a full police report or a person’s Outlook schedule, the subject of one of Carter’s long-delayed requests.

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The Times’ attorney, Kathy George, countered that SPD can’t simply complain that it has too many records requests. “And this notion that somehow, if you actually process every request when it comes in, that’s harmful, that’s backwards. It’s not harmful to actually fulfill your duties under the PRA—it’s exactly what the PRA requires.”

One fact that came out in discovery is that SPD’s public records office does treat media requests differently than other requests, by assigning them to “analysts” with lower records production requirements, rather than the “assistants” to whom non-media records requests are assigned. This raises the possibility that media requests get answers more slowly because they’re assigned to people who move through records requests at half the pace of lower-level public records employees, an especially troubling possibility if public records officers are also giving preferential treatment to “friendly” media, as the Times’ lawsuit alleges.

Judge Widian wrote that SPD’s defense of its “grouping” policy—that “because the requests are all grouped together …  providing installment updates as to one request fulfills SPD’s obligation to provide reasonable installment estimates as to all the other requests it has declared ‘inactive’—is a novel argument that has not been endorsed by the PRA or caselaw.” In other words, SPD can’t just pick one request to work on, ignore all the others, and fail to give real estimates of when the others will be fulfilled.

But the judge declined to overturn the 2017 administrative rule, adopted at the behest of then-mayor Ed Murray, that allows grouping in the first place, saying that was something the city would have to determine on its own.

Nor did she determine SPD showed preferential treatment to KOMO, a TV station owned by the conservative Sinclair network, when it quickly provided a KOMO reporter with travel records for former police chief Adrian Diaz and his chief of staff Jamie Tompkins within a month after failing to provide the same records to Carter for nearly two years. Whether SPD showed favoritism to KOMO and deliberately ignored the Times, and when SPD must change its public records practices, is still on the table.

PubliCola was unable to find the original hearing or rationale for the administrative rule that allowed city agencies to “group” multiple records in the first place, but the language of the rule itself makes clear that it was intended to address bots, DDoS attacks, malware, and malicious “extraordinary requests,” none of which apply to the media requests SPD has been de facto denying.

Mayor Katie Wilson has the unilateral authority to repeal the “grouping” rule through an administrative rulemaking process that requires a public hearing but no legislation.

Mental Health, Police

Two Years In, CARE Chief Amy Barden Says Her Crisis Response Team Still Faces Roadblocks

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice this week, our guest is Amy Barden, director of the city’s Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department.

Barden has been on the job for just over two years, running the city’s 911 operations while also setting up an unarmed team of social workers who respond to emergency calls that don’t require police—the CARE Team.

The CARE Team is expanding to 48 members this year, and their size will no longer be capped under the city’s contract with the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG), which has historically resisted reducing the duties that legally have to be performed by police, like directing traffic and responding to 911 calls.

Barden has not had a single one-on-one meeting with Police Chief Shon Barnes since former mayor Bruce Harrell appointed him as police chief in late 2024, PubliCola separately confirmed.

Barnes, who frequently speaks at length to friendly TV and radio outlets, told two KIRO hosts shortly before last year’s election that SPD officers typically don’t seek assistance from CARE on crisis calls because they are “problem solvers” who resolve most crises on their own.

“It doesn’t make sense to get to a call and then realize, well, this is something for the CARE Team. When you’re already there, you just counsel [the person in crisis, you solve the problem, then you move on to something else,” Barnes said. “So it’s not that the officers don’t like it, it’s that if they’re assigned to a call, when they go there, they’re going to do what we pay them to do—to solve that problem.”

Barden said officers frequently that people in crisis tell them that they don’t want services. “My colleagues in CARE are, like, yeah, they don’t want services from you. … Why would [they] say yes to an officer? And again, that’s not the same skill set. No matter how cross-trained they are, they can’t have the same conversation that these [Mental Health Professionals] can hav. And our understanding of the resources and the system is totally different. So that’s something we really need to work on.”

But the contract also includes new constraints on CARE that limit where the team is allowed to go and when they have to back off and call police. CARE can’t help people if there are signs that they’ve recently used drugs, for instance, and they aren’t allowed to go inside most buildings or respond to people inside cars.

CARE had no direct say on the contract, which allowed SPOG to determine their working conditions, but Barden said that she was periodically asked questions about issues that impacted the team.

“One question I got, very specifically, was, ‘Would you feel comfortable if CARE can’t go into private space,'” such as permanent supportive housing, Barden said.  “I said, ‘Categorically, no—that would render them virtually useless.'” But that restriction ended up in the contract anyway.

Police sergeants are also still responsible for deciding whether to send cops or CARE during individual 911 calls, putting the team at the mercy of the cops they are supposed to be freeing up so they can respond to other duties.

Barden said that she expected police to direct more calls to CARE after city labor negotiators approved the contract, which also boosted cops’ starting salaries to $126,000 after a six-month training period. Instead, “I’m really disappointed that it’s actually gotten worse since the contract, and I don’t understand that,” Barden said.

“I had a theory that it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re just in weird negotiation land, and everything’s going to go back” to normal, Barden continued. But the sergeants who decide whether to dispatch CARE are increasingly sending out community service officers (CSOs)—civilian SPD employees without formal training in mental health care or social work—to calls that Barden says should go to CARE.

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“If you look at the data, you can see more and more and more police are routing to CSOs rather than routing to CARE the way that they were in the first year,” Barden said. “The CSO calls go up, and the CARE calls go down. … . I value that team. … [But] that is not a first responder team that is trained to go to clinical calls. It’s not. And so there’s some natural conflict and tension there.”

Barden also told us she supports integrating CARE and the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s Mobile Rapid Crisis Response Teams with 988, which connects callers in crisis to trained mental health crisis responders, rather than the police-oriented 911 system. We also talked about how CARE has evolved in its first 27 months, what happens when people call 911 for a person in crisis, and Barden’s hopes for the team under new mayor Katie Wilson and a more progressive City Council.