City Attorney-elect Pete Holmes (who met with PubliCola in the lobby of City Hall because the city provides exactly zero dollars for the city attorney’s transition—meaning Holmes still doesn’t have a real office) says he won’t move the city’s domestic-violence advocates out of the city attorney’s office, as he proposed doing during this year’s campaign.
“I have no plans to do that,” Holmes said. “It was an idea discussed on the campaign trail as something to consider. The point is you want advisors to be truly focused on the victims. … If the advocates are moved out, they don’t have the quick access to the prosecutors” they have under the current system, in which domestic-violence advocates work closely with prosecutors throughout the arrest and trial process, Holmes says. (The counterargument is that if advocates are too close to prosecutors, they end up focusing more on getting a conviction than on what’s best for the victim).
Holmes says he told the DV advocates, with whom he met yesterday, that he wanted Seattle to be “the model for how we handle domestic violence [cases] in the nation. And they said, ‘We used to be the model. We’re not anymore.’” Holmes notes that the city cut the city attorney’s budget for continuing legal education, meaning that if domestic-violence prosecutors want to get additional training, they have to get a grant or pay for it out of their own pockets. That’s not likely to change any time soon: Next year’s city budget will likely cut the city attorney’s office between six and seven percent.
Holmes also acknowledged that he has already told about ten percent (8 out of 90) of the attorneys in his office that he will not renew their contracts in January. Those include former civil division chief Suzanne Skinner and criminal division head Bob Hood, as previously reported. And they reportedly include assistant city attorney Ted Inkley, who was controversial for his handling of nightlife issues under Holmes’ predecessor, Tom Carr, and for his defense of the controversial teen dance ordinance under Carr’s predecessor, Mark Sidran.
