Claudia Balducci, a King County Council member who’s running for county executive, announced on Thursday that she’s planning to introduce a measure that would dedicate a portion of a recently approved countywide 0.1-cent sales tax increase to create a permanent retail crimes task force. The funding, around $600,000 a year, would pay for two new detectives in the King County Sheriff’s Office and one new prosecuting attorney—a position that was cut when a grant ran out.
Balducci announced her proposal outside the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, flanked by former King County sheriff (and interim Seattle police chief) Sue Rahr and Kent mayor Dana Ralph, who said organized shoplifting rings were partly responsible for Kroger’s decision to shut down the Fred Meyer in Kent’s East Hill neighborhood.
The store’s closure, Ralph said, “means that our neighbors can no longer walk to get groceries, diapers, prescriptions and other essential supplies. It means that our neighbors will struggle with food insecurity. Our neighbors who are being impact impacted here on the East Hill are not that affluent. They’re working-class people doing everything they can to get by, and this is a major blow to their quality of life.”
Ralph and Balducci both said there are multiple reasons corporations like Kroger choose to close stores, but that shoplifting was a major factor.
Balducci said her proposal was necessary “in order to avoid more closures like we are seeing here today. We shouldn’t go grocery shopping, and our grocery workers shouldn’t go to work, and worry about robbery and theft. We shouldn’t worry about sending our kids to the market and experiencing violence. And no one should be anxious about how they are going to be able to buy food and the necessities of life.”
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Shoplifting is generally a misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor prosecuted at the city level. “Organized retail theft,” a felony, refers not just to sophisticated crime rings that employ shoplifters to boost in-demand items from stores for mass resale, but individuals who steal items worth $750 or more from a store.
Balducci and Rahr said it was incorrect to think of shoplifting as “petty” theft. “I invite people to talk to the owner of a small business who gets robbed day in and day out and loses inventory and can’t afford to replace it and is hard working people,” Balducci said. “Often our small business owners are immigrants, people of color, and they are we hear frequently that it’s very hard for them to stay in business because there’s no help for them.”
Seattle is also preparing to pass its own 1-cent public safety sales tax, under state legislation passed last year as part of Governor Bob Ferguson’s commitment to boost police hiring across the state. The law allows jurisdictions to interpret “public safety” broadly; in Seattle, for example, Council President Sara Nelson has proposed dedicating a quarter of revenues from the sales tax increase to addiction services and treatment.
Balducci said she would be “open to spending some of this funding for that purpose,” but suggested the county’s Mental Illness and Drug Dependency (MIDD) levy, which is up for renewal by the county council this year, might be a more appropriate funding source for programs that address root causes. The sales tax “was actually also intended to fund public safety, and I want to make sure that we are using it for that purpose in ways that will make a difference, like on retail theft, where we are losing grocery stores, we are losing small shops, and people are losing their jobs, and we can do better.
King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay, Balducci’s opponent in the county executive race, called Balducci’s announcement “budgeting through press conferences” and questioned whether Kroger is truly closing stores primarily because of shoplifting, something the grocery workers’ union, UFCW 3000, has also disputed. (UFCW has endorsed Zahilay.)
“Retail theft is a serious problem in Washington, and I support putting real resources toward solving it,” Zahilay said, adding, “It would be irresponsible to pre-commit a fixed slice of the new sales-tax revenue to any single use before a transparent and deliberative process has occurred with our Sheriff, Prosecuting Attorney, workers, retailers, and community members. If those partners tell us dedicated detectives and a prosecutor are the highest-impact use of limited criminal justice funds, I am open to it.”
Reporter Andrew Engelson did a deep dive into the data on embattled City Attorney Ann Davison’s 2021 campaign promises, finding that while Davison did speed up filing on some misdemeanor cases, more cases have ended up dismissed or with no conviction than under her predecessor, and she has filed domestic violence cases much more slowly.
New Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes and Deputy Chief Yvonne Underwood received recruitment bonuses of $1,000 each for bringing on two executive-level staff (the two each got a bonus for recruiting the same new deputy chief and Barnes got a separate bonus for hiring an assistant chief). The bonuses were created with the intent of hiring more officers who can respond to calls, not executive staff.
As of Thursday, the city had exhausted all legal options for preventing an anti-LGBTQ Christian nationalist group from holding a concert and rally in Cal Anderson Park, and queer organizers were planning counter-programming with cooperation from city officials. On Friday, when the permit was to be announced, PubliCola learned that the city was working on a last-minute solution in which the group would voluntarily hold its “Revive in ‘25” event elsewhere.
In Thursday’s Afternoon Fizz, we took a look at historical election numbers to consider the likelihood that Harrell will be able to come back from a 10-point primary election loss to challenger Katie Wilson. And the council moved closer to expanding the city’s brand-new 24/7 police camera surveillance to new neighborhoods, including the Central District, Capitol Hill, and the stadium district.
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Mayor Bruce Harrell’s longtime aide, chief of staff and general counsel Jeremy Racca, is leaving the mayor’s office to move to New York after a month-long leave of absence. Racca is the first high-level staffer to leave Harrell’s office after the election. The departure led to a shuffling of personnel in Harrell’s office, elevating deputy mayor Tiffany Washington, who has played a top role on homelessness policy, to a new position of chief deputy mayor.
Newly release interviews with former police chief Adrian Diaz’ staff include new details about incidents that led the people surrounding Diaz to believe he was covering up an affair with the woman he hired as his chief of staff, including a late-night visit to an abandoned park in North Bend and an alleged directive to use encrypted messaging to communicate as a way of avoiding public disclosure.
Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison, flanked by council members, Mayor Bruce Harrell, and department directors at City Hall earlier this month.
By Andrew Engelson
A PubliCola analysis of Seattle Municipal Court data reveals that, in the three and half years Ann Davison has served as Seattle City Attorney, her office has failed to live up to promises she made in her campaign in 2021, when she criticized former city attorney Pete Holmes for waiting too long to file cases and failing to prosecute serious misdemeanors aggressively.
Under Davison, a greater percentage of cases have been dismissed or ended in no conviction than when Holmes was city attorney. And while she has sped up the time it takes to file non-traffic misdemeanors, she’s taking more than twice as long as her predecessor, Pete Holmes, to file domestic violence cases.
Davison, a Republican who took office in 2022 after defeating abolitionist public defender Nicole Thomas Kennedy, is currently trailing challenger Erika Evans by a wide margin in her race for reelection. As of Friday, August 8, Davison had 33.8 percent of the vote to Evans’ 55.3 percent.
During her first campaign, Davison promised to more effectively prosecute people for misdemeanor offenses, crack down on repeat offenders, and critically examine community court, a therapeutic court she single-handedly dismantled in 2023. After winning the 2021 primary, Davison told KIRO NewsRadio, “We must address crimes at the misdemeanor level because otherwise it invites an increase in severity and frequency.” The city attorney’s office prosecutes misdemeanors, not felonies, and also serves as the city’s law firm.
“[The city attorney’s office] can talk a big game about wanting to get tough, but they’re not really willing to devote the resources necessary to take a tougher approach, because everybody understands that that would be too expensive and time-consuming to be worth it,” said Austin Field, political action coordinator for the chapter of SEIU 925 that represents King County public defenders.
The COVID pandemic profoundly altered how Seattle’s criminal justice system functioned. The number of cases SPD referred and the number of charges the city attorney’s office filed fell dramatically. In addition, in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the King County Jail stopped booking people on misdemeanor charges.
Both before and during this period, Holmes’ office was widely criticized for slow filing times – the period between when someone is arrested by SPD and when the city attorney decides whether to charge them with a crime. According to Davison’s office, delays under Holmes increased to a median of 162 days in late 2021. Since Davison’s election, the office has dropped the median time to file charges to 19 days.
In 2022, Davison’s office cleared a huge backlog of cases left over from the pandemic era out of the system, declining to file charges in 3,790 old cases. These cases are not included in our analysis of Davison’s record.
Lisa Daugaard, co-director of Purpose Dignity Action and the founder of the LEAD diversion program, said decreasing those delays improves things for people who are arrested. “The time to a decision about whether or not a case is going to be filed is a clear improvement. They said they were going to do that, and they did that,” Daugaard said.
But data from the Seattle Municipal Court also show that Davison is performing far more poorly than her predecessor on many metrics she promised to address.
One of Davison’s biggest supporters, Scott Lindsay—a former city public safety advisor who now serves as Davison’s deputy—wrote two reports in 2019 that heaped criticism on Holmes for filing cases slowly or declining to file charges for serious misdemeanors. In the second of those reports, Lindsay criticized Holmes for declining to file nearly half of all non-traffic misdemeanor cases, claiming that only one in three cases reached what Lindsay called “meaningful resolution.”
“[D]eclining to file almost half of all cases for multiple consecutive years leads to a significant waste of police time and effort and has significant consequences for victims,” Lindsay wrote.
However, data from the Seattle Municipal Court indicates that Davison’s office also declines to file cases about half the time.
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Lindsay also faulted Holmes for failing to reach “meaningful resolution” in 42 percent of non-traffic misdemeanor cases, including cases dismissed for incomplete or missing evidence, cases that were still pending two years or more after an arrest, cases dismissed because the defendant was not mentally competent to stand trial, or a dismissal in the “interest of justice”—usually a judge using discretion to toss a case they believe is without merit.
Since taking office, however, Davison’s record on this measure has been nearly identical to Holmes’, with about 38 percent of non-traffic misdemeanor cases between February 2022 and April 2025 failing to meet Lindsay’s “meaningful resolution” standard— 2,218 of 5,804 cases that were resolved during that period. In April, there were an additional 2,358 cases still pending.
According to Daugaard, the similarity between Davison’s and Holmes’ record shows that Lindsay’s “meaningful resolution” standard is a faulty metric. “A lot of cases have always been dismissed in Seattle Municipal Court, whether under Mark Sidran, Tom Carr, Pete Holmes or Davison,” she said. “That’s just in the nature of the work.”
In his report, Lindsay also claimed that Holmes declined to file charges too often after arrests, letting people who should have been prosecuted off the hook. At the lowest point for filing during Holmes’ tenure, in 2016 and 2017, the city attorney’s office declined to file charges 46 percent of the time.
But data from Davison’s most recent quarterly report indicates that the rate of declines under Davison has been similar, and at times higher, than under Holmes, hovering between 40 and 50 percent. In the first quarter of 2025, Davison’s decline rate was 48 percent—two percent higher than what Lindsay called the “worst” years under Holmes.
In addition, Davison’s office declined to file charges in an increasingly large number of those cases because city attorneys believed they were unable to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In the past two years, according to the city attorney office’s first quarter 2025 criminal division report, that figure has climbed to 38 percent of all declines. This compares to an average of 27 percent in 2018, when Holmes was city attorney.
Daugaard says a high decline rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “There is no absolute right percentage or right number of filings,” she said. “Declining a large number of cases may be completely appropriate and the absolute right level of filings to be pursuing.”
Field says that because Davison is declining so many cases due to lack of decisive evidence, many of his public defender colleagues are now more willing to take cases to trial. “[The city attorney’s] goal has really been to try to scoop people up and impose just enough bail so that they get held until they plead,” said Field. “For them it’s really not about taking cases to trial. So the best way to ensure a good outcome for our clients is to try to aggressively litigate.”
In its 2024 annual report, the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD) noted that when the city attorney’s office takes cases to trial, it often fails to get convictions. “The [city attorney’s] own data for 2024 show that they were more likely to have their case dismissed than receive a conviction,” the report said.
Despite improving filing times, Davison’s office is taking much longer than her predecessor to decide whether to file charges in domestic violence cases. According to data provided by the Seattle Municipal Court, the average time to file in DV cases more than doubled during Davison’s term—from 25 days in 2018, under Holmes, to 58 days in 2023.
Kennedy, who ran against Davison on a progressive platform, said that figure is deeply disturbing. “In cases of domestic violence, there are times when someone does need to be incarcerated, or something of that nature, for someone to be safe,” she said. “And if the time to file goes from 25 days to 58 days, that’s not really doing anything for the victim. In fact, it’s potentially putting them in more danger.”
Many of the people Davison is choosing to prosecute are homeless, dealing with substance use disorder, or experiencing mental illness. Last year, Davison’s criminal division prosecuted nearly 5,400 total non-traffic misdemeanor cases—well above the pandemic low of 3,500 set in 2021, but actually down from a high of more than 7,300 set in 2018 under Holmes.
In its 2024 report, DPD criticized Davin’s strategy, saying that her office was “reviving failed policies and a renewed focus on jailing people accused of low-level, non-violent offenses.”
“Our clients experiencing housing instability or a behavioral health disorder routinely see their needs unmet and their challenges exacerbated when they are prosecuted for nonviolent misdemeanor charges,” said Matt Sanders, Director of the King County Department of Public Defense.
“What these clients need, and what would ultimately reduce their likelihood of future involvement in the increasingly costly criminal legal system, is access to supportive housing and effective treatment options.”
A review of cases Davison show that many of the people she charges are accused of minor offenses that often result from poverty, drug use, or mental health issues.
For example, a woman was arrested in May 2023 and later charged by the CAO for shoplifting $30 worth of merchandise—several rolls of paper towels and some wine—from the Walgreens at 23rd and Jackson. Court records show that the woman was likely homeless and had a chronic history of minor shoplifting, including a 2022 conviction for stealing a pack of toilet paper and a bottle of laundry detergent. Another case, also in 2023, involved accusations that she shoplifted frozen shrimp, Lysol cleaner, a bag of frozen lima beans, and several other items from a Safeway.
The woman, who pled guilty to charges of theft and criminal trespass in the 2023 case last year, has not served her 364-day jail sentence after failing to appear at multiple court hearings, most likely because she’s homeless and can’t be located.
Another “high utilizer” of the court system identified by Davison’s office, according to municipal court records, was a woman charged with several counts of theft after a 2023 incident in which she allegedly shoplifted small items, including a pair of earrings and a hoodie, from several Pike Place Market merchants. Later that year, a competency evaluation found that the woman’s mental health prevented her from understanding the court proceedings, and her case was dismissed.
Field says Davison’s performative “tough on crime” approach to incidents like these doesn’t address underlying issues like homelessness and poverty. “Poverty is actually a political choice,” he said. “It’s something we’re imposing on folks, and one of the ways that we are keeping people poor is by prosecuting them for behavior that’s inevitably associated with having been born poor and having grown up poor.”
Before she become city attorney in 2022, Davison ran for and lost a race against Debora Juarez for Seattle city council. Then, in 2020, during the first Trump administration, she ran for lieutenant governor on the Republican Party ticket headed up by Loren Culp, losing in the primary.
On predictable 7-1 votes (with progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck dissenting), the council passed two pieces of legislation yesterday that PubliCola—and our podcast, Seattle Nice—have covered extensively: A bill empowering the City Attorney’s Office to pursue civil actions for graffiti and fine individuals $1,500 per tag, and a bill expanding the city’s nuisance property law to allow police to penalize property owners and shut down businesses for off-premises activities, such as drug use or liquor law violations in the vicinity of a nightlife venue.
If police document three violations of the new law in 60 days, or seven in a year, they can begin abatement proceedings against a property owner, which can mean anything from corrective action to shutting down a business for repeated violations.
As we reported last week, Councilmember Rob Saka added a number of amendments in committee that dramatically expanded police power to take action against private property owners for violations of both city and county laws.
Although the ostensible purpose of the legislation was to reduce gun violence and dangerous criminal activity outside bars and clubs, a Saka amendment expanded the list of items that could qualify a property as a “nuisance” to include local laws against animal cruelty and garbage dumping as well as violations of the King County health code, including laws on rodent control, on-site sewage, chemical contamination, and more. (Saka also amended the bill to increase fines for violations by 50 percent, in line with his amendment boosting the fine for graffiti from $1,000 to $1,500 per tag.)
Because the nuisance ordinance allows police to go after property owners who rack up three or more violations, the law, with Saka’s amendment, would have allowed the city to fine or potentially shut down a business for non-criminal health code violations that fall entirely under the county’s purview, and which Seattle police are not trained or authorized to enforce.
On Tuesday, the council passed another amendment to correct Saka’s overreach, removing all of the language he added (and that the public safety committee approved) that would have made the presence of rats near a property the legal equivalent of shooting someone on a nearby sidewalk.
As District 2 Councilmember Mark Solomon put it, people in his district may complain about neighbors with “a junky yard,” but it isn’t appropriate to get police involved in a dispute that can already be resolved through the city’s inspections department or King County Public Health. “My concern is that adding the chief of police into the mix on what is actually a public health issue is not necessary,” Solomon said.
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As amended, the law still allows a court to order property owners to take care of public health nuisances, but it doesn’t count those hazards as “nuisance activities” that police can use to shut down a property.
The council also passed an amendment exempting nonprofits from potential police abatement because of activity that happens around their properties. Dan Strauss, the amendment sponsor, said the change would ensure that police couldn’t shut down food banks or other social service providers based on things like drug use or other criminal activity committed by clients of those providers. “There are other ways for the city to address the issues that don’t result in a loss of social services,” Strauss said.
Council President Sara Nelson and Councilmember Maritza Rivera opposed this exemption, arguing that the police should have the authority to target what Rivera called “bad actor” nonprofits, beyond simply arresting people for doing things that are already illegal, like selling stolen property or using drugs in public.
Nelson, citing an unnamed “small business owner” who complained about “spillover” from a nearby nonprofit, said allowing police to target nonprofits would create “an opportunity to really bring not just the nonprofit but the small business together to really think about what could be some solutions.”
Rivera, who cited an unnamed nonprofit in her district that “has refused to meet with me to discuss any way that they can be better neighbors in the community,” said the city has few tools to stop nonprofit organizations from allowing illegal activity outside their properties. “it’s not my intent to ever use it against” food banks or housing providers, Rivera said, b”ut other providers, that are not ones that we fund, where we don’t really have much of a mechanism for compelling them to behave better in community.”
Councilmember Rinck noted that the intent of a particular elected official in 2025 is less relevant than what the law actually says. “This bill gives not just this mayor, but any future mayor, broad power,” Rinck said. “We may trust this mayor, we may trust this city attorney, but I’m thinking about … the potential for this to be misused in the future.”
The council also passed the new anti-graffiti law, which proponents have argued will “deter” graffiti by imposing fines that could easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars. The ordinance now includes a last-minute walk-on amendment by Kettle that makes the law—which City Attorney Ann Davison has said she plans to enforce using social media posts—retroactive for the past three years, meaning that people could be fined for graffiti that no longer exists. Rinck and Strauss were the only votes against that amendment, which Kettle—inaccurately—called “technical.”
“This is not about murals,” Kettle said. “The murals are essentially commissioned art and beautiful … [going] back to Renaissance Italy. … This is about taggers who damage public and private property. This is about the taggers who bring blight to our community, to our neighborhoods, and then create the challenges that result from that.”
Kettle—always on brand—took the opportunity to say that the two bills were part of his six-pillar “public safety framework,” rather than one-off proposals based on the individual priorities of the mayor and city attorney, who advanced the bills to the council.
“This is not a standalone bill,” Kettle said. “It’s part of a broader strategy and a plan that we have here on council, particularly to the Public Safety Committee, to address the the public safety challenges that we have.” Kettle cited “20 public safety bills” the council has passed since 2024.
This number includes hiring bonuses for new police officers, a bill making it easier for police to shut down after-hours hookah lounges, two bills authorizing closed-circuit police surveillance cameras around the city and funding the expansion of the city’s Real Time Crime Center to monitor them, and bills that created new tools to crack down on sex work and drug use and to banish people from large swaths of downtown and north Seattle if they violate the new sex work and drug laws.
Late last month, the City Auditor’s Office released a report on Seattle’s response to gun violence that concluded the city has failed to create the kind of systematic, transparent, multi-departmental approach that has been adopted successfully in other cities like Baltimore and Milwaukee, which have dramatically reduced their rates of gun violence even as Seattle’s has increased. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of (reported) shots fired in Seattle increased 71 percent, non-fatal shootings increased 58 percent, and fatal shootings increased 23 percent.
The auditor’s office, which presented their findings to Council President Sara Nelson’s governance committee last week, made four broad recommendations.
First, they said, the city should develop systemic, transparent reporting on patterns in gun violence and make that information available to the public. Second, the mayor’s office should provide an update on its work to integrate all the city’s violence prevention programs under the CARE (Community Assisted Response and Engagement) Department, which “has not yet begun,” according to the audit, despite being a key element of the department’s mission since it was established in 2023.
Third, the city should implement evidence-based approaches to gun violence, such as problem-oriented policing (a proactive strategy that addresses underlying factors that contribute to crime), homicide review panels, and training requirements for organizations that get city funds for violence prevention to ensure they’re using evidence-based problem-solving methods; a previous audit found that many city-funded programs judged their own success against measures like how many people enrolled in a program, rather than whether the program reduced gun violence.
And fourth, the city should use multi-departmental, place-based methods to prevent and respond to gun violence, rather than just being reactive.
The audit—originally requested by Mayor Bruce Harrell and Council President Nelson as an update on a 2012 report on the city’s crime prevention strategies—noted that the city never implemented many of auditor’s previous recommendations on crime and public safety, including several on street outreach programs that the office “stopped tracking” last year because “we had no evidence that they would ever be implemented.”
The report noted that the city doesn’t need to invent its own strategy out of whole cloth: Other cities have already created frameworks that Seattle could adopt, including public-facing dashboards that provide access to a broad range of data about gun violence, post-homicide review panels, and investment in community-based programs that have been shown to reduce gun violence, rather than those that don’t produce results.
Milwaukee, for example, has a Homicide Review Commission that includes case management and services for victims’ families, along with an ongoing, detailed review of every homicide in the city that includes an analysis of “community-level contributing factors and … community interventions that may be appropriate.”
Baltimore’s comprehensive crime prevention strategy established a new Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) that is based on four “pillars”: A public health approach to violence; youth justice and violence reduction; community engagement and interagency collaboration; and evaluation and accountability.” Since the two cities implemented these new approaches, homicides in Milwaukee have dropped 52 percent over eight years; in Baltimore, fatal shootings declined 23 percent between 2023 and 2024.
“We tried to lift up the examples that we found from other jurisdictions where there’s just more visibility and more of a comprehensive view of gun violence,” Claudia Gross Shader, the audit’s lead author, told PubliCola. “There’s not an action plan for gun violence in Seattle that we can look at like like Baltimore has developed.”
For example, Gross Shader said, Baltimore has a public safety accountability dashboard that’s maintained by MONSE, not the police department, and includes information from police, prosecutors, and community-based providers. “That level of visibility into what the city’s doing and how things are changing over time does not exist in Seattle,” Gross Shader said.
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Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who said during last week’s meeting that she felt “validated” by the fact that the audit identified Magnuson Park as number four on a list of city parks with the highest incidences of gun violence, said she spent last summer asking police, the Parks Department, and the mayor’s office to do something about a spate of shootings and other criminal activity in and around Magnuson Park.
“I was asking them what their plan was for addressing this, and I definitely got responses form SPD and from Parks, in terms of action items, but I felt that the things I was bringing to the mayor’s office were getting diminished or dismissed,” Rivera told PubliCola. “I didn’t feel like there was that recognition that things were happening and we have a plan for addressing it. I didn’t get the sense of urgency.”
Shortly after the meeting, the mayor’s office reached out to Rivera and they had “a great conversation” about what the city can do in the short term to address issues in her Northeast Seattle district, Rivera said.
But, she added, “we should be taking a centralized approach” to gun violence, the way Milwaukee and Baltimore have done. In those cities, “it seems like it’s all-hands-on-deck to address gun violence in general, and the audit showed that the centralization wasn’t there like it should be.”
Tensions flared during last week’s meeting about how much the city is actually doing to address gun violence holistically and whether the audit was even necessary.
After Harrell’s office initiated the audit last January, Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess told the city auditor to stop working on it in April, “because [the Human Services Department] is preparing to issue a new round of [requests for proposals] that will result in new funding opportunities” for community safety organizations. HSD subsequently postponed the community safety RFP until later this year, and in October, Nelson directed the auditor’s office to move forward with its work.
Harrell formally “concurred” with all the audit’s recommendations, but it became clear during the committee meeting that the mayor’s office considered the audit unnecessarym even insulting. “The mayor’s office agrees with the audit findings, but we were already doing the things that were in the audit findings,” Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington told the committee.
When PubliCola asked if the mayor’s office or SPD plans to implement any new strategies in response to the audit, as opposed to policies that are already underway,, Harrell spokeswoman Callie Craighead said, “Our office plans to incorporate the findings of the Auditor’s report into existing strategies and initiatives. The report validated the approach of our One Seattle Restoration Framework, which states that improving public safety within our city involves collaboration across multiple City departments and programs and taking a place-based approach to our needs, as seen with the launch of our Downtown Activation Team.”
Speaking more bluntly at last week’s meeting, Washington told Nelson, “When you were getting ready to launch this, my argument to you [was], we are working on this, and we didn’t get that same respect. … It would have been nice to know that you guys heard us when we were telling you that we were already working on it.”
“I have a master’s degree in human services,” Washington added, along with a “personal degree” as someone directly impacted by gun violence. “I don’t need an audit to tell me the things that I can see on the streets and tell me the things that I hear from constituents.”
As examples of things the city is already doing, Washington pointed to the establishment of the CARE dual-dispatch pilot; the Unified Care Team, which removes encampments; Harrell’s “One Seattle Restoration Framework,” which includes a section on gun violence; the establishment of a real-time crime center that will be connected to new CCTV cameras around the city; the enrollment of the city’s gun violence liaison in a national workshop on violence interruption; and new Police Chief Shon Barnes’ plan to implement “stratified policing.”
According to Craighead, stratified policing “focuses on identifying and tackling crime and disorder issues by analyzing immediate, short-term, and long-term patterns, ensuring they are addressed swiftly and effectively through a collaborative approach that emphasizes community partnerships.”
Although the audit found that “the city has not systematically implemented” problem-oriented policing (identifying it as one reason the city hasn’t successfully reduced crime and overdoses at two well-known hot spots), SPD general counsel Rebecca Boatright told the council that “SPD routinely does a fair amount of work with problem- oriented policing and place-based policing” and would continue to do so.
As for the recommendation that the city create a systemic public safety dashboard like Baltimore’s, Boatright said the department is working to put more information online, but that providing too much specific information could harm ongoing investigations.
Gross Shader said she hopes the city will respond to the audit in more detail in the future to explain how some of the city’s existing approaches are working to reduce gun violence and how Harrell’s One Seattle Restoration plan compares to the holistic approach like the ones Baltimore and Milwaukee have.
She also noted that the city already has at least one home-grown example of a systematic public safety plan—the Phố Đẹp (Beautiful Neighborhood) Little Saigon Safety Plan that Friends of Little Sài Gòn released last month, which identifies a list of eight public-safety problems in the neighborhood, interventions to address those problems, and the outcomes that will result when each problem has been addressed. That framework focuses almost entirely on strategies that don’t involve police, such as the creation of a business coalition to combat EBT (food stamp) fraud, increased funding for affordable housing in lieu of policies that “criminalize poverty,” including sweeps, and funding for dedicated outreach workers in the Chinatown-International District.
A description of evidence submitted as part of Delostrinos’ rape kit—an invasive, lengthy procedure that victims are encouraged to undergo to preserve DNA and other evidence immediately after a sexual assault
By Erica C. Barnett
Late last September, Mayor Bruce Harrell put a high-ranking longtime staffer, external affairs director Pedro Gomez, on paid administrative leave after learning that Gomez was under investigation for alleged sexual assault. His accuser, Cheryl Delostrinos, met Gomez through his work at the mayor’s office, and filed a report with the Seattle Police Department five days after the incident in June. Gomez remained on the city’s payroll until January, when the case advanced to the King County Prosecutor’s office, prompting his resignation.
Delostrinos, who spoke with the Stranger earlier this year, was the first woman to make public allegations against Harrell’s longtime staffer. In recent weeks, however PubliCola has spoken with several other women who said many of the circumstances Delostrinos described in her police report were unnervingly familiar, down to the Capitol Hill restaurant where he bought them drink after drink, bragging that he was a part-owner of the business. That restaurant, Mercado Luna (previously known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) shut down in September.
Two of the women said Gomez offered to mentor them or collaborate on future business opportunities, then took them out for a night of heavy drinking and surprised them by suddenly kissing them at the end of the night. Those two women ended up in what they described as consensual (and overlapping) relationships with Gomez that they now regret. “I ended up feeling very violated,” one said.
Another, who worked with Gomez at the city, said she had a single, nonconsensual sexual encounter with Gomez after a night that began as a meeting to discuss city business and ended in a blackout. “I’d have weird sight, where I could see him sitting on my couch and I was very confused,” she recalled. “Somehow it progressed to the bedroom—it was like flashes of memory. I was just like, ‘There’s no way I can be this drunk.'”
Before he resigned last September, Gomez had worked for the city for more than a decade, including several years as a staffer for former mayor Ed Murray. During the Jenny Durkan administration, Gomez was the small business development director for the city’s Office of Economic Development. He returned to the mayor’s office in 2021, before Harrell even took office, as part of an initial wave of insider hires.
Delostrinos said she decided to go public with her story because she wants to reduce the stigma and shame associated with sexual assault and to help other survivors see that they have options. “I have nothing to be ashamed of. This is something that happened to me,” she said.
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Years before Delostrinos filed her report alleging Gomez had raped her, another woman—a city employee who worked with Gomez directly—had a similar experience, she told PubliCola. The woman has never spoken publicly about what happened to her, but says she was inspired to come forward after news of the allegations came out and she began comparing notes with one of Gomez’ ex-girlfriends, who posted on social media about Gomez.
The city employee told PubliCola Gomez sexually assaulted her after a night of drinking that began as a meeting to discuss her progress at work. She never called the police or pursued charges, she said, because as a young, single mom, she couldn’t afford to lose her job. Additionally, the woman said, she belongs to an immigrant community with a deep-seated “stay in culture” ethos of resolving issues internally, rather than going to police, and a lot of “cultural shame and stigma” around sexual assault.
Unlike the other women, the city employee felt she couldn’t say no to meeting Gomez for drinks to discuss work matters. She said she tried to keep their frequent meetings, which took place after hours, focused on business, but Gomez would often turn the conversation to more personal matters—like their previous romantic relationships, their common background as immigrants, and their obligation to support each other.
“It felt really fucked up—really cheap, really dirty, really sad,” she said. “Because what he’s saying is the truth—it is hard, especially as a young Black immigrant woman. We share some of the character traits that he used to prey on me—like, ‘We really have to make a lane for ourselves,’ and talking about what a big deal he is in the community.”
One evening around 6:00, the woman recalled, she met Gomez at Mercado Luna (then known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) for what she assumed was a routine meeting to talk about issues at work. Very quickly, though “the conversation swayed away from work, and the drinks kept flowing. … “I’m talking about rounds and rounds, just continuous.” Gomez kept saying things were “‘on the house, because I take care of my people,'” she said. As Gomez watched her drink, she said, he nursed a glass of mezcal, which she had never heard of, telling her it was meant to be “sipped.” As the night wore on, things got “blurry” and “kind of messy.”
She had never expressed any romantic interest in Gomez, the woman said. “There was never a progression, like, ‘Oh my god, I have feelings for him.’ It was never, ever, ever, ever mutual.”
By the end of the evening, she recalled, she was disoriented, weak, and losing patches of time.”It was almost as if my vision had a stutter —it was like, ‘Okay, my body’s betraying me and I’m not sure what’s going on.'” When Gomez offered to drive her home, she thought, “this is a good guy taking care of a coworker who got messy.”
Back at her house, she thought to herself, “There’s no way I can be this drunk.” Things seemed to be happening in flashes: Gomez was on her couch, then, the next minute, in her bedroom, and suddenly she was in the middle of a sex act to which she says she did not consent. The next thing she remembers, she was waking up the next day.
“I have no idea when I went to bed. I don’t know how long he was there afterward or when he let himself out,” she said. The next day, she found her phone and wallet “neatly put in a place that I would never normally put them in my house.”
“I felt gross. I was filled with so much deep shame,” the woman said.
Apart from a text saying something along the lines of “last night got crazy,” she said Gomez “pretended like it never happened.” At one point, she said, he seemed to be “testing” her to see what she remembered about that night. “He was like, ‘Do you remember what tattoos I have?’ And I said, ‘You have tattoos?”
The woman stayed at her job for another year. She said she never confronted Gomez, but there were many times when she would have “random outburst of anger” and lash out at him over text. She felt furious that he wouldn’t acknowledge he had done anything wrong. “I’m pretending like this shit didn’t happen. I didn’t tell a fucking soul. And I know for a fucking fact that he remembered more than I did.”
Shortly before she left her position, the woman said Gomez drove to her home one night and invited himself in. “Conveniently, he had a bottle of mezcal in his car.” The woman said he tried to convince her to “do what we did last time. He was like, ‘I can really trust you. You’re good people because you don’t gossip. You don’t tell other people your business.” She told him her brothers were coming to drop her kids off, she said, and “he was quick to get out of there.”
Because Gomez was involved in Harrell’s campaign and said he could help her get a better position at the city once Harrell was in office, “I didn’t want to burn a bridge, because he really put a heavy emphasis on how a recommendation from him goes so far,” she said. “He said, ‘Bruce is going to win and I’m going to be working for him. … I’ll be the reference of a lifetime.'”
The woman said Gomez never followed through on his promises to help her get a better job at the city, and after she left, she fell into a deep depression. At one point, she went to a barber in the Central District and asked him to shave off her hair—and suddenly found herself facing a placard from the city touting Gomez’ work relocating the shop as part of an anti-displacement effort. “This guy was raving about how much a savior he was. He had a great rapport with all these small businesses, and you felt it,” she sighed.
By Erica C. Barnett
