1. On Friday, Mayor Bruce Harrell accused his opponent, Katie Wilson, of “darkening” his photo in a social media post, blaming her for “another chapter in the troubling history of manipulating skin color to dehumanize candidates of color” like himself. The image Harrell circulated, an Instagram post by the Black-led progressive nonprofit Common Power, made his skin looked unnaturally orange.
In a statement, Harrell campaign manager Marta Johnson said, “We are asking the Wilson Campaign and Common Power to immediately retract the manipulated image and apologize for the clear intent to darken Bruce’s skin tone. There is no excuse to alter the tone of a candidate’s skin, especially given the troubling history of racist intent behind these types of manipulations.”
Harrell made the accusation again during a debate on Saturday at the Royal Room in Southeast Seattle, saying she had used the “common tactic—to darken my image in a regular picture, to make me look ominous, okay?”
The practice of darkening Black and brown people’s skin tone in photographs has a long and ignominious history based in colorism and the racist idea that darker-skinned people are more threatening than those with lighter skin. The most famous example comes from Time magazine, which dramatically darkened OJ Simpson’s skin color on its cover in 1994.
Beyond the screen shot, Harrell presented no evidence for his claims.
On Sunday, Common Power director Charles Douglas responded to Harrell’s accusation that his group had darkened Harrell’s skin to make him look “ominous”: “The claim that we ‘darkened’ Mayor Harrell’s photo is both offensive and untrue. As a Black man leading an organization primarily run by people of color, I know firsthand the harm caused when racial tropes are weaponized in politics.”
“To suggest that Common Power engaged in such tactics is a sensationalist smear that reeks of desperation from a mayor who has repeatedly contributed to inequality and hurt the very communities he now claims to represent.” On Sunday, Common Power and the 36th District Democrats swapped out the photo of Halloween Harrell for a less orange version.
The source for the image appears to have been a story by the (UK) Independent about the 2021 mayor’s race. The photo appears to have been taken in low light at this debate, creating the unnaturally orange cast.
Smartphone photos taken by several different people in similar conditions at Saturday’s low-light debate at the Royal Room made both Harrell and Wilson look orange, with Harrell’s black hair coming through as grayish in the photos. For example, a reader contributed this photo of Harrell checking in on the Huskies game during the debate; my own, unedited iPhone photos, taken from the front row, turned Harrell an even more extreme orange color and tinted Wilson orange as well.
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2. As I reported on Bluesky last week (seriously, follow me there for the latest breaking news, short news items, and live coverage of everything from mayoral debates to the council’s budget deliberations), the business-backed political action committee supporting Mayor Bruce Harrell, Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future, has raised more than a million to defeat Harrell’s challenger, Katie Wilson. Most of that money, $554,000, has come in since the beginning of September—revealing a rush to fill the pro-Harrell campaign’s coffers after the mayor’s dispiriting 41 percent showing in the August primary.
The biggest donations to the PAC, which is separate from Harrell’s official campaign, come from real estate advocacy groups, development and property management companies and their current or retired CEOs, and land-use attorneys who work for real-estate interests. Overall, real-estate interests contributed at least $592,000 of the $1,080,500 the PAC has collected so far. Tech companies and their leaders, including retired tech company founders as well as current executives like Microsoft CEO Brad Smith, gave another $257,000, at a minimum.
A majority of the 218 contributors to the pro-Harrell PAC listed their occupations as “retired” (59 total) or did not list their occupations (56 total), so the true percentage of both real estate interests and tech company executives is almost certainly higher than the ones I was able to confirm.
A pro-Wilson PAC, Katie Wilson for an Affordable Seattle, has raised about $85,000.
3. During a meeting about the city’s police department budget on Monday, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes responded to a question from Council President Sara Nelson by saying he couldn’t answer it because Nelson cited PubliCola as her source.
“Icameacrossanarticlein PubliCola … thatmentioned [the city’s proposed contract with the south King County jail] SCORE,andIwantedsomeinformationonthis,” Nelson said. “Ithinkthatitmentionedthatwearenolongerdependingonthatcontract. Isthatthecase?”
In response, Barnes told Nelson he would not answer her question, forcing her to reframe her factual question about SCORE. “I’llbeclear.Idonotread PubliCola,soIwon’trespondtothat,” Barnes said. After Barnes answered the rest of Nelson’s questions, but not the one about SCORE, budget director Dan Eder had to jump in and answer in the affirmative.
Barnes’ dismissive comment about PubliCola was the first time I can recall, in this publication’s 16-year history, that a department director has used a public meeting to disparage us directly. SPD’s communications department has reportedly stopped including stories from PubliCola in the department’s daily news clippings email, and in a recent social media post, Barnes said he wouldn’t be “swayed by opinions, criticism, lies, or the stories that others may fabricate.” He added, cryptically, “This is my leadership journey and you won’t make me quit! The battle is not mine.. It’s the Lords!”
PubliCola will, of course, continue to apply a critical lens to SPD and other city departments in our coverage, as we have since 2009.
SPD says the city offered Barnes the bonus, first approved in 2022 to boost police officer hiring, “as part of his compensation.”
By Erica C. Barnett
Editor’s note: This post is an update to yesterday’s story revealing that the Seattle Police Department paid $50,000 bonuses intended for new rank and-file-officers to new Deputy Police Chief Andre Sayles and new Assistant Chief Nicole Powell. Sayles and Powell’s positions, along with other positions added by Barnes, are new, and add ongoing costs to the Seattle Police Department’s budget.
The Seattle Police Department confirmed that Police Chief Shon Barnes, appointed by Mayor Bruce Harrell in December and confirmed by the Seattle City Council last month, received a $50,000 recruitment bonus under legislation first passed in 2022 to promote the “recruitment of new police officers” during what proponents called a crisis-level officer shortage. (In 2024, the council increased the bonus from $30,000 to $50,000).
“While recruiting Shon Barnes, a respected law enforcement leader, the City of Seattle offered as part of his compensation a ‘hiring incentive’ of $50,000 under the City’s 2024 legislation, which is related to the recruitment and retention of police officers at the understaffed Seattle Police Department,” an SPD spokesperson told PubliCola.
As we reported yesterday, the legislation that created lateral hiring bonuses was explicitly about police officers, not executives. According to the 2022 legislation, the bonuses are meant to entice trained officers who “require minimal training and can immediately bolster the department’s 9-1-1 response ability or provision of investigative services.”
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Lisa Herbold, the former councilmember who sponsored the 2022 legislation, confirmed that the bonuses were intended for police officers, not command staff. Council President Sara Nelson, who sponsored a 2024 bill that increased the lateral hiring bonus from $30,000 to $50,000, said her intent was to provide an extra incentive to help SPD recruit more “lower-level officers.”
SPD’s statement suggests that Mayor Bruce Harrell proactively offered Barnes the $50,000 bonus on top of an annual salary of more than $360,000 a year. We’ve reached out to Harrell’s office to find out whether and, if so, why he initiated this offer.
SPD said they’re splitting Barnes’ payment into two parts in accordance with the hiring-bonus legislation. “To date, $25,000 has been paid to Barnes according to the City’s agreed-upon compensation structure,” the SPD spokesperson said.
The section of the about splitting the hiring bonuses actually highlights the fact that the bonuses were never intended for the top SPD brass. According to the legislation, “Half of the hiring incentive will be paid in the first paycheck and the second half upon completion of any probationary period required by the Public Safety Civil Service Rules.” The probationary period isn’t there just to require cops to prove they can do the job—once they’re off probation, they get job protections as part of the civil service.
Chiefs (including deputy and assistant chiefs) aren’t part of the civil service—they can be fired at will. As such, they don’t have any probationary period. Put another way, Barnes’ position falls outside the parameters of the legislation, so he isn’t subject to the two-payment structure mandated in that law.
Maritza Rivera’s amendments would shrink neighborhood centers—areas where 3-to-6-story apartments would be newly legal—across her northeast Seattle district.
The comprehensive plan sets rules for how Seattle develops in the future, including where the city will allow its renter majority to live.
By Erica C. Barnett
After nearly a year of delays, the city council is finally getting ready to put its stamp on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 10-year Comprehensive Plan—a document Harrell has branded with his campaign slogan as the “One Seattle Plan.” The council has been meeting for months to discuss elements of the plan, including the creation of a few dozen new “neighborhood centers” where apartments will be allowed for the first time in decades, but this week was the council’s first opportunity to propose tweaks to the plan—107 amendments in all.
The comprehensive plan sets policies for growth and development, designating where new housing, transportation, and other infrastructure should go and placing limits on housing density in the city’s neighborhoods. It’s updated every 10 years, with periodic amendments, and inevitably reflects the political priorities of whoever is in office at the time.
We’ve reported previously on the Harrell Administration’s reluctance to allow significantly more housing in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods as part of the plan.
After killing an early draft of the plan that would have allowed significantly more density, Harrell released a plan last year that fell far short of the changes necessary to create enough housing for new and current residents—including renters—to live in Seattle affordably. After intense criticism of that proposal—the city’s Planning Commission said it upheld exclusionary policies rooted in redlining and failed to provide the housing Seattle needs—the mayor came back with a new plan that allowed slightly more housing, though still less than the proposal most members of the current city council said they supported when they ran for election in 2023.
The council’s proposed amendments are a mixed bag. Several proposals would collectively shrink the size of the proposed “neighborhood centers”—areas within 800 feet of certain frequent transit stops where 3-to-6-story apartments would be allowed—by hundreds of acres, in a blatant retreat to old single-family zoning patterns that benefit people who already own property and don’t want renters living in “their” neighborhoods.
Others would impose new restrictions on any new development that requires removing trees, including one that would give the city free rein to force builders to redo projects if even one tree, of any size, was threatened.
Still others would provide new incentives for developers to build dense housing, serving as a counterpoint to other councilmembers’ proposals to shrink the areas of the city where people who can’t afford to buy a house in Seattle are allowed to live.
Breaking the substantive amendments down into broad categories, we have:
Expanded Neighborhood Centers
On balance, the proposed amendments that make it easier to build housing—including everything from density bonuses for affordability to expanded and brand-new neighborhood centers—outweigh NIMBY proposals to restrict housing, although some of the proposals are probably nonstarters—or negotiation starters—in their current forms.
Harrell’s final comprehensive plan proposal included 3o neighborhood centers—down from 48 in an early draft, but more than the 24 included in an early version of the plan. Since then, though, there’s been intense pressure on the council to further reduce the number of neighborhood centers in the plan, coming primarily from incumbent homeowners in neighborhoods like Wedgwood, Madrona, and Maple Leaf.
Although several council members did end up proposing amendments that would scale down the size of neighborhood centers, in some cases dramatically, the amendments to add new areas of potential density outweigh those proposals, meaning that if every proposed change to the neighborhood centers was adopted, the amount of land in designated neighborhood centers would increase significantly.
Council members who proposed new or expanded neighborhood centers included Dan Strauss (who proposed a new East Ballard neighborhood center and called for expanding the boundaries of five others, including in Magnolia), Bob Kettle (who proposed a new North Queen Anne/Nickerson Neighborhood Center) and Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who’s proposing eight new neighborhood centers, one in each council district.
“Seattle needs more housing,” Rinck said. “Seattle also needs full and thriving communities, and we’ve heard an overwhelming call from constituents to achieve these goals with more housing, especially in high-opportunity neighborhoods which haven’t seen proportional growth.”
Build This, Not That
Other proposed amendments would add density bonuses and incentives for different types of housing, such as stacked flats and affordable apartments.
Kettle, for instance, proposed getting rid of an “amenity area” requirement for new housing in neighborhood residential zones, freeing up more land for housing.
Under the current proposal, 20 percent of the space around new apartment buildings in the city’s traditional single-family areas would be reserved for open space, typically a yard, for residents to “recreate on site”—as if what apartment dwellers in cities really want is a tiny lawn where they can all hang out together.
An amendment from Sara Nelson would retain a requirement that residential buildings, including new apartments in all parts of the city, be exempt from environmental review under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA); that exemption is otherwise set to expire next month, making housing harder to build.
Other amendments, from Hollingsworth, Nelson, Kettle, and Rinck, would provide bonus density for developers who agree to build specific types of housing, including social housing, accessory dwelling units, and low-income or affordable housing. Several proposals would create incentives for developers to build stacked flats—apartments spread out across a single story of a building—including density bonuses for retaining trees and amendments that would allow stacked flats to be denser than other types of apartments in neighborhood residential (former single-family) zones.
Rob Saka also has an amendment that would give a density bonus for one- or two-story “cottage” apartments surrounding a large common area, a style that resembles single-family housing more than the three-to-six-story apartments that will be allowed in the new neighborhood residential zones under the current plan.
Strauss proposed an amendment that would increase the maximum height in these areas from six to seven or eight stories immediately next to a major transit stop, and Rinck proposed changing the definition of “major transit stop” to include high-frequency buses.
15-Minute City
Several amendments would reduce or remove mandatory parking requirements. The most ambitious, from Rinck, would “remove parking requirements citywide for all land uses in all zones,” a phrase that brings joy to my car-hating little heart. (Yes, I own a car. No, I don’t think the city should socially engineer car culture, as it currently does.)
Builders wouldn’t be barred from including parking in their developments, but they wouldn’t be forced to do so, as they are in many places under the city’s current code.
Another amendment from Rinck, essentially a backup if her first parking proposal fails would reduce parking mandates to comply with a statewide parking reform bill that requires cities to eliminate some of their parking mandates by 2028. Another proposal, from Strauss, would establish parking maximums in the city’s regional centers—the densest areas, including downtown, Capitol Hill, and Strauss’ home turf of Ballard. In a concession to the tree-preservation lobby, Rinck’s amendments also include one that would eliminate parking mandates for developments that preserve trees.
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A proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods could also see some meaningful changes.
In the past, we’ve dunked on Harrell’s proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods, because it would only allow new stores and restaurants on literal corner lots, with restrictions that don’t apply to other businesses in the city, such as a mandatory 10pm closing time. Several amendments attempt to remedy those issues. The amendments range from extremely modest (a Nelson amendment that would remove the literal-corner requirement but retain restrictions on business type, size, and closing hours) to ambitious, by Seattle standards (a Rinck proposal that would remove the corner requirement, allow businesses to be open past 10pm, and add bars to the list of businesses that are legal in neighborhoods.
Three amendments, from Rinck, Strauss, and Nelson, would make it easier to open stores and restaurants in residential neighborhoods where they’re currently banned. As we’ve reported, Harrell’s comp plan proposal would allow corner stores in neighborhoods, but only on literal corners, with additional restrictions such as mandatory 10pm closures and a stipulation that they can include restaurants, but not bars.
The amendments range from modest (amendments from Strauss and Nelson to allow stores throughout residential zones, not just on corners) to ambitious (a Rinck proposal that would allow restaurants and bars throughout these areas, eliminate a requirement that businesses be closed from 10pm to 6am, and ditch a 2,500-square-foot size restriction included in the mayor’s proposal). Allowing bars in neighborhoods, a policy that works fine in big cities across the country, may be a bridge too far for censorious Seattle, but a compromise between these proposals could be a first step toward creating more 15-minute neighborhoods in Seattle.
Homeowners vs. Renters
Of course, it wouldn’t be a zoning update without some NIMBY poison pills. Although no one, including newly appointed District 5 Councilmember Debora Juarez, has proposed reviving former D5 councilmember Cathy Moore’s quixotic effort to remove an entire neighborhood center from Maple Leaf, several councilmembers have proposed reducing the amount of land in their districts where people who rent apartments can live.
Maritza Rivera, who has frequently claimed that the city did insufficient outreach to single-family neighborhoods before allowing apartments near frequent transit stops, has three amendments to shrink neighborhood centers in Bryant, Ravenna, and Wedgwood. Her proposal to scale back the Wedgwood center is the most radical of the three, in that it would reduce the size of the center by about 40 percent, limiting apartments to 35th Ave. NE, already a busy arterial, and prohibiting them in the adjacent blocks. (In contrast, one of Rinck’s amendments would expand the Wedgwood neighborhood center to the south; expect strong objections from Rivera to that one).
“Based on months of feedback from community members who live in and near the proposed neighborhood centers, my amendments modify the boundaries of the neighborhood centers in the D4, including Wedgwood, Bryant and Ravenna, to reflect resident concerns…. around the ability of local neighborhood streets to handle increased growth and the infrastructure,” Rivera said.
A Rivera amendment for Ravenna traces a similar line to carve single-family houses in a designated historic district (itself a way for older neighborhoods to oppose density) out of the proposed neighborhood center around Third Place Books, leaving the commercial area but ensuring that there would be no apartments in the neighborhood surrounding the commercial center.
Separately, Rivera proposed an amendment that would give the city the HOA-like authority to dictate what kind of external siding would be allowed on buildings within designated national or local historic districts, based on factors like the “historic character” of an area; this extraordinary new power would also apply to historic districts that might be designated in the future, including those proposed by house owners who oppose new development in their neighborhoods.
Joy Hollingsworth wants to cut the Madrona Neighborhood Center by about seven blocks, concentrating new housing into a smaller area that already includes parks, schools, and other areas where housing can’t be built.
Joy Hollingsworth has proposed shrinking down another controversial neighborhood center in Madrona, whose homeowning residents showed up en masse to oppose the zoning change in their neighborhood. Hollingsworth’s amendment would shrink the Madrona center by nearly 40 percent, slicing off big chunks of current single-family areas on the east and west sides of the proposed center and concentrating any new housing around an existing commercial stretch that includes an elementary school, library, and playfield where housing can’t be built.
Finally, it wouldn’t be a conversation about housing in 2025 without hand-wringing over trees—not planting or maintaining trees in public spaces, which are actions the city could take at any time, or encouraging property owners to plant new trees themselves, but preserving trees that already exist, generally at the expense of new development.
In addition to the tree preservation incentives I mentioned earlier, there’s an amendment from Strauss to “recognize the importance of the natural environment and native species, including trees, bees, salmon, orca, and herons,” plus several from Rivera to make it harder to develop housing if trees are on site.
The most extreme proposal from Rivera—and the one that made Rinck confirm with council staff that the amendment really would do what it appeared to do—would allow the city to require developers to come up with a completely new alternative plan if it turned out their housing proposal would require the removal of any tree, no matter its size, age, or viability.
It’s easy to see how this could grind development in traditional single-family areas to a halt. If someone planted a sapling on a property slated for development, or if there was already unremarkable small tree on site, the city could stop the project and require the developer to start from scratch.
Housing is already tremendously expensive to build in Seattle, and construction permits are declining as developers pull out of the city. Empowering unelected city staffers to force full project redesigns around every existing tree would exacerbate the housing crisis, adding costs to projects that are already financed while reducing the amount of housing that could be built in every project with a tree on site. And forget about expanding the city’s tree canopy—who would plant a new tree on a property they may want to sell in the future, knowing it would instantly reduce their property value?
Police Chief Shon Barnes and Mayor Bruce Harrell touted the uses of new closed-circuit cameras that currently allow police to surveil 57 locations around the city, from Aurora Ave. N to the Chinatown International District, at a press event at SPD’s Real Time Crime Center on Tuesday. The department plans to add cameras in additional locations soon, including the area around Garfield High School, in Capitol Hill’s Pike-Pine corridor, and around the two downtown stadiums.
The city council funded the cameras, along with the expansion of SPD’s existing Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC), last year, adding 21 full-time police positions and expanding the program beyond its originally proposed boundaries at an ongoing cost of several million dollars a year. SPD plans to integrate feeds from private cameras, such as surveillance cameras outside local businesses, into the system.
At Tuesday’s event, SPD Captain James Britt showed reporters how RTCC staff could use a live, map-based feed to monitor the cameras in real time, zooming and panning to see an area up close and from different angles. A six-minute video showed how footage from one camera at Aurora Ave. N and N 100th St. was used to apprehend a shooting suspect, along with footage from King County drones, private businesses, and the top of an apartment building.
Barnes said the cameras had been used in “600 incidents” and more than 90 investigations, but SPD did not provide a further breakdown of those incidents or say whether the city’s cameras duplicated the private surveillance footage that the police have always used in investigations.
City officials took pains to reassure residents that SPD won’t hand its surveillance footage over to ICE for use in immigration raids. “I can’t say enough, we’ll make sure everyone’s rights are protected and the right constitutional safeguards are in place,” Harrell said.
As a city council member, Harrell added, he was “the first person who proposed body cameras” for police and the “author of the privacy surveillance ordinance”—an apparent reference not to the far-reaching 2017 surveillance ordinance, authored and sponsored by then-councilmember Lorena González, but a 2013 law Harrell co-sponsored with then-councilmember Nick Licata that required council approval for new surveillance technologies.
The city has promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking and gun violence. But not every business owner in the areas under surveillance considers them a benign crime-fighting tool.
PubliCola spoke with Cory Potts, who owns the Center for Bicycle Repair near 12th and Jackson— a longtime “hot spot” for drug use and sales of both drugs and stolen goods. One of the new cameras faces his shop, which is located in a nearly 100-year-old building that was occupied by Japanese businesses before Seattle’s Japanese population was removed from the area and interred in concentration camps during World War II.
After a mass stabbing in front of his building, Potts said, a representative from the mayor’s office showed up at a community meeting to tell them the city was installing the cameras, which Potts later learned was not actually a response to the violence, but a plan that had long been underway.
The city had already made what Potts considered some troubling decisions in the neighborhood, which was historically known as Japantown. First, they placed signs around the areas banning “buying or selling merchandise” in public spaces. “I was struck by the historical similarities,” Potts said. “There was no outreach about the signs whatsoever—all of a sudden, they went up.”
Shortly after that, city trucks began cleaning the streets with a foaming disinfectant that seeped into Potts’ building. A worker with the Seattle Department of Transportation told Potts the foam was meant to clean up urine, but “based on observation” and talking to the people who hang out near his business, “I don’t believe that was the actual purpose for the foaming,” he said.
“The city doesn’t give those people enough credit for how sensitive they are to the neighborhood and the stuff that happens here. I think they know what it means when a city truck drives by them and shoots foam at the place where they spent most of their time.”
As a business owner in the area since the pandemic, Potts says he doesn’t see how cameras will benefit him, given that he’s seen police hanging around all day without interacting with people on the street. The police department, and Harrell, promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking, but the building that used to house Viet Wah burned down after the building was improperly secured against intruders for months, Potts said, and no one did anything to address the situation.
He’s asking the city to blur out his business on footage from the cameras as a way to “stand up for what the building represents and what the history of the neighborhood represents.” On Tuesday, Captain Britt told PubliCola SPD generally only blurs footage of residential property, because commercial buildings are open to the public. “We would want to be cautious about [blurring out] businesses that front onto a sidewalk, because the sidewalk is an area that we would want to make sure that we had good footage of,” Britt said.
The RTCC expansion was one of many mayoral priorities that added $100 million in costs, most of them ongoing obligations, to the 2025-2026 budget despite a known revenue gap of around $250 million. In April, the City Budget Office issued a new revenue forecast showing that the city will need to close an additional, previously unanticipated budget shortfall of $241 million during 2025 and 2026. (The budget already assumed deficits starting in 2027).
On Tuesday, Harrell said his 2026-2027 budget proposal could include more funding to add more cameras and expand surveillance into additional neighborhoods. “We think this is good technology, and there could be a push to expand its citywide,” Harrell said. “Everyone in this room understands we have some constraints on our budget, and so it becomes a question of priorities.”
The city’s surveillance ordinance requires agencies like SPD to complete a Surveillance Impact Report, or SIR, before deploying any new surveillance technology. In its SIR for the new surveillance cameras, SPD said it was in the process of creating a new “omnibus surveillance policy” that would include a specific policy for CCTV. To date, an SPD spokesperson confirmed, the department has not completed either the omnibus policy or specific camera and real-time crime center surveillance guidelines, and has “no firm timeline” to finish the work.
According to the spokesperson, SPD’s two-person policy shop has been busy drafting new crowd-control policies but has already begun the work of researching and drafting the new policies around the RTCC.”
The city’s Office of the Inspector General has hired researchers from the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a two-year assessment of the RTCC and the new camera surveillance program.
1. I was back in the old country recently, by which I mean south Mississippi, and I finally got around to trying a gas-station snack I’ve always skipped over to save more room for fried chicken—potato logs, whose ugly-sounding name really fails to sell what’s going on with these unassuming treats.
Potato logs: Not to be confused with jojos, a Pacific Northwest invention in which potatoes are cut into thick wedges, heavily seasoned, lightly breaded, and fried. I used to buy them all the time at the Red Apple on 23rd and Jackson before it closed, and they’re like zazzed-up steak frites.
Compared to a Mississippi potato log, as this Southern Living recipe refers to them, jojos are restrained. To make potato logs, you take a baked potato, slice it into four wedges, and thickly batter and fry it until the inside is fluffy and the exterior has the exact texture of crispy chicken skin. I suspect that true potato-log flavor comes from a deep-fryer that’s been cooking chicken all day, but since I’m rarely at a gas station in the south, I’m going to try making them at home, adding a bit of chicken bouillon powder to the spice mix. And next time I’m in Hattiesburg, I know where I’m headed.
2. Much, much closer to home is Saigon Drip Cafe, a popular spot for bánh mi and phở in Pioneer Square. Josh loves Saigon Drip for its tofu sandwiches, but I’m going back as soon as conscionable for the Bánh Mi Drip, a flavor bomb that includes deeply caramelized onions, tender, anise-scented brisket, and mayo, along with a side of pho broth for dipping or sipping. At $17, and stacked inches thick, it’s not the cheapest or lightest lunch, but I promise you it’s worth the money and the indigestion. This is the best fusion-style banh mi I’ve had outside of the New Orleans area, and one of the best sandwiches in the city.
3. Guys, did you know there is such a thing as SPRING panettone? I happened into a deal on an orange-scented loaf through Too Good to Go this week via ChefShop.com, a local gem on 15th Ave. W that sells hard-to-find international snacks and kitchen goods. I wasn’t expecting much—the standard cinnamon-laced, raisin-dotted Christmas panettone leaves me cold—but the second I peeled back the floral wrapping paper I knew I had lucked into something special.
The rich yeasted cake, made by this Italian company, was pillowy, lightly sweet, and vividly yellow thanks to copious egg yolks, orange essence, and threads of candied orange peel, topped with a rich streusel and a smattering of whole almonds. ChefShop.com appears to be sold out, but you might be able to find it at other online sources—or set a calendar alert for next year, when this extremely seasonal delicacy will be available again.
What I’m reading:
Fiction: Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Ackner. You may think it’s hard to sympathize with a story about intergenerational trauma among the very wealthy, and you’d be right: No one in this novel, which starts with the violent kidnapping of the scion of a polystyrene manufacturing empire, goes unscathed, and every character is horrible in their own unique, larger-than-life way—like the Righteous Gemstones of the old-money set. I’m calling it: Taffy Brodesser-Ackner is the Philip Roth of her generation.
Nonfiction: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson. Before writing her sweeping interrogation of inequality, Caste, Wilkerson wrote the definitive history of the Great Migration of 6 million Black Americans from the South to the North and West, telling the stories of three people who participated in that exodus to illustrate why millions left and how they fared. I thought I knew about the Great Migration, but Wilkerson’s book made me think about America in a different way, as a place where every single region was profoundly shaped not just by the reprehensible history of slavery but millions of brave individual decisions to leave for parts unknown.
The “30 by 30” pledge, SPD’s commitment to having a police recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030, is “unachievable in current market conditions,” Barnes said.
By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle City Council’s public safety committee held its first official hearing for Interim Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes’ confirmation on Tuesday, setting Barnes up with mostly friendly questions like “Can you talk about what transformational relationships looks like to you?” (Joy Hollingsworth) and expressions of gratitude, like” I just wanted to say thank you so much for everything that you’ve done so far.” (Cathy Moore.)
Barnes nomination is a gimme, so it wasn’t surprising that a council dominated by SPD cheerleaders spent most of their time lavishing fulsome praise on Barnes. (Moore also praised Barnes for his “homespun wisdom,” which she said must be because he’s from North Carolina.)
Not to pick on Barnes, who’s been in the position for just over three months, but the council probably should have had more questions about how he will actually change the culture of the department, which is currently being sued for, among other things, racial and gender discrimination, and which has already faced criticism under Barnes’ leadership, for harassing sunbathers at a longtime LGBTQ-friendly nude beach and arresting dozens of people who protested two anti-trans rallies by a far-right Christian group.
Many of Barnes’ remarks on Tuesday, along with the written responses he submitted to council questions earlier this month, suggest that his policies, which are similar in name and content to programs he implemented as police chief in Madison, WI, will be less than transformative.
Barnes’ marquee proposal, called “Seattle-Centric policing,” sounds similar to the “Madison-Centric policing” model the Madison Police Department adopted in 2023.
According to Barnes’ lengthy written responses to councilmember questions, “Seattle-CentricPolicingisacomprehensive planfocusedonreducingharmandcrimewhileenhancingthequalityoflifeforSeattleresidents” that involves “fosteringintegratedpartnerships” with existing community and business groups to “createasaferandmorevibrantcity.”
Many of the specific strategies, like opening up storefront-style police offices in neighborhoods across the city, have been tried before and abandoned for various reasons; many others, like putting police officers in schools, are also controversial and not up to SPD alone. And one policy Barnes proposed, expanding the Find It/Fix it app to include a category for “generalopenair druguseandgeneraldisorder,” is already basically in effect, in that many people already use it for this purpose.
During Tuesday’s meeting, the only slightly spiky questions came from progressive councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who asked how Barnes planned to deal with protesters against federal immigration policy, given “the lengths SPD will go to protect the free speech rights of anti-trans, anti-queer, anti-abortion, Christian nationalists calling for the ousting of Mayor Harrell,” a references to SPD’s actions during two protests against a far-right Christian group last month.
In response, Barnes said SPD is “neutral in all matters of protest” and added that “at some point I will probably go to jail and be in prison, because we have an administration that has threatened to jail politicians.” While this offhand remark garnered significant coverage in the Seattle Times and local TV stations, Barnes’ claim that SPD doesn’t pick sides during protests probably rang hollow to those who protested against the anti-trans events, given that SPD effectively served as security guards for the right-wing group that organized both events.
In his written response to a similar question, Barnes said SPD should work with protest leaders to establish lines of communication, but said that given that SPD was operating with a “paper-thin margin in staffing” during last month’s counterprotests he believes that “by and large, officers appropriately met their responsibility of facilitating the First Amendment rights of all involved.”
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A large chunk of Barnes’ response to questions about how SPD should handle protests in the future was taken directly from a Sentinel Event Review of the 2020 protests in Madison, produced by an outside firm called the Quattrone Center, with the word “departments” substituted for “MPD.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, Rinck pressed on, asking Barnes how SPD is verifying the identities of ICE officers in Seattle, given that many people who say they’re ICE officers are wearing masks and obscuring their identities. “Every law enforcement officer should have a badge of some type, and they should have an identification of some type, and it’s not unreasonable to ask, ‘May I see your identification please?'” Barnes said. “If they do not have [ID], then certainly they can call the police and try to verify.”
(Editorial aside: This comment reminded me of Bob Kettle’s admonition, earlier in the same meeting, that protesters for immigrants’ rights should behave “responsibly” to avoid giving the Trump Administration an excuse to send troops to Seattle. It sounds like a transmission from a different reality than the one we’re currently experiencing—one where people can simply reason politely with officers sent in to facilitate deportations, and where being well-behaved will protect Seattle from federal crackdowns on civil rights.) Barnes did not know whether ICE was required to notify SPD if they are doing raids in the city, but said no one from the Department of Homeland Security had called his office.
Barnes defended SPD’s record on police accountability, arguing that the city’s accountability system is one of the best in the nation; even when the US Department of Justice placed SPD under a federal consent decree in 2011, Barnes wrote, they “foundthatSeattle’saccountabilityprocesseswere ‘soundandthattheinvestigationsofpolice misconductcomplaintsaregenerallythorough,well-organized,well-documented,andthoughtful,’ [and]theworkSeattlehasdonesincehasonlystrengthenedthissystem.”
The interim chief also pushed back on Rinck’s question about the department’s use of monitored CCTV cameras along Aurora Ave. N., in downtown Seattle, and in the Chinatown/International District, disagreeing with her premise that CCTV surveillance is not an effective crime-fighting tool.
As a counterpoint, Barnes pointed to a recent triple homicide in which SPD used private camera footage after the fact to help arrest and identify suspects—and said SPD’s 34 cameras have helped the department “materially assist” in more than 50 incidents since May 20.
Barnes also disputed Rinck’s claim that CCTV doesn’t address violent crimes, writing that “there is evidence that CCTV cameras reduce violent crime, as events that lead to continued violence may be interrupted.” The study he cited, however, is most often used to illustrate the opposite—cameras don’t deter violent crime, but they can be useful in solving car thefts after the fact. The study also found that private cameras are more effective at helping police solve property crimes than those operated by police.
Finally, Barnes acknowledged that many women in the department say SPD is a toxic work environment, and that this perception is one reason the department has historically found it hard to recruit and retain female officers. (As of the end of April, SPD had hired just five women this year.) But, he continued, the problem isn’t unique to SPD. Nationally, women make up just 13 to 15 percent of police recruit classes—in part, Barnes wrote, because younger women are doing better than men academically and have more types of professional opportunities than they once did.
Seattle, like many cities, signed the “30×30” pledge, a commitment to having a police recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030. In his written comments, Barnes said this goal was probably “unachievable in current market conditions,” particularly in “large urban markets” like Seattle, “which despite offering unique opportunities also come with unique risks and cost of living challenges that may render them less attractive to younger officers.”
Instead of a specific number, Barnes concluded, the “30×30″ commitment is really about “makinglawenforcementaprofessionwherequalifiedwomenwhoaredrawntoitfeelwelcomedandsupportedwhileensuringagenciesaddresstheiruniqueneedsandfostertheirsuccess.”
Barnes will appear at one more committee meeting before the council votes on his appointment; you can read his to written questions here.
In a statement, Harrell campaign manager Marta Johnson said, “We are asking the Wilson Campaign and Common Power to immediately retract the manipulated image and apologize for the clear intent to darken Bruce’s skin tone. There is no excuse to alter the tone of a candidate’s skin, especially given the troubling history of racist intent behind these types of manipulations.”
