Category: Police

Courts, Police, public disclosure

Police Department Reverses Course on Public Records After Lawsuit Loss

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last month, a King County Superior Court judge ruled that the Seattle Police Department’s policy of considering no more than one public disclosure request from the same person at a time, leaving subsequent requests in an indefinite “inactive” status, violates the state Public Disclosure Act.

The policy, called “grouping,” has been allowed in Seattle since 2017, when then-mayor Ed Murray and the City Council passed legislation aimed at preventing people from using bots to file dozens or hundreds of requests at a time.

In practice, SPD has been the only city department to deploy grouping on a mass scale, allowing the police to delay or deny disclosure for years by responding to every request by the same requester, in full, before even starting on subsequent requests. The Seattle Times sued to stop the practice, secured an agreement from SPD that they wouldn’t group requests from any requester that were more than eight weeks apart, and sued again when SPD failed to abide by their agreement. (PubliCola filed a declaration in support of the Times’ position).

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This week, SPD finally took action to comply with Superior Court Judge Sandra Widian’s ruling, sending notices with actual dates when the first (or next) installments of records will be available. PubliCola has nine outstanding requests with SPD, including some that SPD had been working on before they stopped responding to all our requests but one in November 2024; on Tuesday, SPD sent us new dates for all of our stalled requests. Each response said that SPD was providing these estimates “pursuant to a court order.”

SPD, of course, can push back these dates individually in the future, delaying disclosure in a way that appears more transparent than its previous practice of providing end-of-year “placeholder” dates for every request that move forward at the end of every year.

And in PubliCola’s case at least, SPD’s responses will still be far from timely: SPD now says they’ll provide new records for our oldest outstanding request, from June 2023, by July 2026, and we won’t see a single document from our most recent request, from December 2024, until June at the earliest. (That request, appropriately enough, is for correspondence between the public disclosure office and other records requesters about “grouping” in 2024). But perhaps it’s a sign of progress that SPD appears to be complying with this court order, so far. We’ll let you know in June.

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.”

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.

Police

SPD Stands by Decision to Promote Administrative Staffer to $315,000-a-Year Top Civilian Job

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department’s new Chief Operating Officer Sarah Smith, will make almost $315,000 a year—about $12,000 more than her predecessor, Brian Maxey—despite having fewer responsibilities and significantly less experience in public safety or government employment.

Smith has been at the city since 2019. Most recently, she worked as Seattle Fire Department administrative staffer on loan to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office.

Although Smith’s internal title in Harrell’s office was “Deputy Director of Public Safety,” her city job classification was Administrative Specialist III—”an advanced technical expert in the Administrative Support series,” according to the city’s job class description— and her salary was just under $90,000.

At $151 an hour, Smith’s salary as SPD’s top civilian employee is higher than Mayor Katie Wilson’s, though still slightly lower than Police Chief Shon Barnes’ two deputy chiefs, Yvonne Underwood and Andre Sayles, and his Executive Director of Crime and Community Harm Reduction, Lee Hunt. Each of those executives now makes $320,000 a year, thanks to a cost of living pay increase that went into effect this month.

Prior to starting at the city in 2019, Smith was a program manager at the downtown YMCA. Before that, she worked at Specialty’s, a now-closed bakery downtown.

Before becoming chief operating officer at SPD, Smith’s predecessor, Maxey, was an assistant attorney general, supervising attorney at the City Attorney’s Office, and general counsel to SPD.

Asked about Smith’s qualifications, SPD communications director Barbara DeLollis called the COO “a Washington native with extensive public service experience and proven operational and management experience.”

DeLollis said the decision to hire Smith “followed a full review of the department’s strengths, gaps, and opportunities. As you know, Chief Barnes is committed to evolving SPD into a professional department that continuously improves to protect the people of Seattle.”

The department did not respond to questions about why they chose not to do a national search for the COO position, or hire an internal candidate with more experience.

“[W]ith the recent changes, women make up 53% of the Chief’s Command Staff,” DeLollis said, adding that Barnes “is proud to let Sarah’s accomplishments speak for themselves.” The math behind that percentage: Eight of Barnes’ 15 command staff positions are now held by women.

As we’ve reported, Barnes has the largest command staff in recent Seattle history, with the addition of a new assistant chief, a new chief of staff, a new deputy chief of staff, a new executive-level communications staffer (DeLollis), and Hunt, who’s in a newly created position. Barnes promoted one woman—deputy chief Yvonne Underwood—and hired Smith, DeLollis, assistant chief Nicole Powell and deputy chief of staff Cindy Wong, another former Harrell staffer.

A bio for Smith attached to Barnes’ announcement about her appointment credited her with helping to launch the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC), “developing the new Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department, and leading the City’s policy response to fentanyl.”

The RTCC was launched in 2014 but re-launched with the advent of SPD’s neighborhood surveillance cameras last year. Internal sources told PubliCola that the point person for the RTCC relaunch was Harrell staffer Vinh Tang and that Andrew Myerberg, a Harrell public safety advisor, was the point person on fentanyl response.

Amy Barden, the chief of the CARE Department,  said that before she was hired in 2023, the people who developed CARE were, “from SFD, Chiefs Chris Lombard and Reba Gonzales, and Jon Ehrenfeld. From SPD, Cpt. Dan Nelson, Sgts Whicker and Sullivan, Zee Andrignis, and Barb Biondo. From the Council, Lisa Herbold and Andrew Lewis. And significantly,  Bill Schrier, who was the consultant hired by the Mayor to help develop the concept and map the system of response.” Barden did not mention Smith having any role in developing CARE.

Barnes also credited Smith with playing a “key role” in drafting legislation including the public safety sales tax increase, “balancing the citywide budget,” and “fostering inclusive and reciprocal community engagement across all departments. Her proven leadership and deep insight into the City’s ecosystem give her invaluable insight into SPD’s operations and our growth ambitions.”

“She also has over seven years  of experience in leadership roles within Seattle’s municipal government and the Seattle Fire Department, and more than 10 years in business operations, including her time overseeing operations at a revered community organization, the Downtown Seattle YMCA,” Barnes wrote in his announcement. According to her LinkedIn profile, Smith started at the city in August 2019, which is about six and a half years.

Despite those accolades, Smith will have fewer responsibilities than her predecessor. Of the job duties that have previously been part of the COO’s job description, Sayles will oversee professional standards, including force investigations, force review, training, and policy, while Hunt will be in charge of technology and innovation.

Dan Eder, former mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget office director, will be stepping in to head up SPD’s budget and finance operations while Angela Socci, SPD’s finance director, is out on leave.

SPD did not respond to questions about Smith’s responsibilities as COO.

legislature, Mayor Wilson, podcasts, Police

This Week on PubliCola: January 18, 2025

SPD Is Still a Boys’ Club, the Wilson Era Begins, and More.

Monday, January 12

Seattle Homelessness Programs Get Temporary Reprieve as Anti-Trump Lawsuit Moves Forward

Seattle’s permanent supportive housing programs got a temporary reprieve from federal funding cuts, when the US Department of Housing and Urban Development walked back its new rules limiting the kind of housing programs that are eligible for federal assistance. But uncertainty remains about this year’s funding; and in 2027, all bets are off.

Seattle Nice: City Attorney and LEAD Founder Set the Record Straight on Drug Diversion

On the first of two Seattle Nice episodes this week, we talked to City Attorney Erika Evans and LEAD diversion program founder Lisa Daugaard about Evans’ plans to divert misdemeanor drug defendants into services instead of jail. Last week, the head of the police union falsely claimed that Mayor Katie Wilson had declared amnesty for all drug defendants.

Tuesday, January 13

Legislation Would Give Prisoners Serving Long Sentences a Path to Release

Washington state has no parole, meaning that people must serve out their entire sentences before they can be released. State Rep. Tarra Simmons has proposed a bill that would allow some incarcerated people to ask a judge to reconsider their sentences, something only prosecutors currently have the authority to do.

Wednesday, January 14

In 2025, 90 Percent of New SPD Hires Were Men

The Seattle Police Department hired only 17 women in 2025—just 10 percent of 165 new hires last year. That’s a significant dip from SPD’s already dismal numbers in 2024, when just 14 percent of the 84 people SPD hired were women. It’s also less than half the average for police departments across the US.

Thursday, January 15

Bills Would Crack Down on City Efforts to Banish Homeless People, Shelter, and Housing

Pro-housing state legislators want to stop cities from taking advantage of loopholes that have allowed them to prohibit market-rate and emergency housing, and to revent cities like Seattle from banning ground-floor apartments, among other proposals to crack down on local NIMBY policies.

New Police Directive: “Be Respectful,” “Don’t Interfere” When Responding to Calls About ICE Raids

A new Seattle Police Department directive tells officers to exercise caution and beat a quick retreat if there’s any possibility they may be in danger from ICE in Seattle, adding that cops should in no circumstances “interfere in federal immigration enforcement actions.” It’s a far cry from Police Chief Shon Barnes’ headline-grabbing statement, back in July, that he would probably be arrested for resisting federal intervention in the city.

Wilson Issues Orders to Speed Up Transit and Shelter, Will Replace More Harrell Appointees

Mayor Katie Wilson issued two executive order on Thursday. The first is aimed at speeding up the production of shelter in the run-up to this year’s World Cup games and beyond. The second will help speed up the city’s slowest bus, the 8, by finally painting a long-planned bus lane on Denny Way.

Also this week, Wilson replaced the directors of City Light, Labor Relations, and other city departments.

Friday, January 16

Scott Lindsay, Deputy for Ousted City Attorney Ann Davison, Doesn’t Mince Words

Voters soundly rejected Republican city attorney Ann Davison last year, but her deputy, Scott Lindsay, says her policies cracking down on drug users and shoplifters were popular, sound policies that helped neighborhoods that are being “destroyed” by people with addiction and “prolific offenders” who commit a large percentage of the city’s misdemeanor crime.