Category: Women

City Council, Courts, Crime, Police, Women

Advocates, Scholars, and Legal Experts Say Criminalizing Sex Work Harms Workers, Fails to “Clean Up” Neighborhoods

 

City Attorney Ann Davison

By Erica C. Barnett

As the city council prepares to reinstate an old law against “prostitution loitering” and establish off-limits zones for people accused of being sex workers, advocates say the proposed laws will not only harm the people they purport to protect but won’t accomplish their primary goal: “Cleaning up” areas like Aurora Avenue, where the sex trade has persisted for decades.

The legislation, along with a similar law reinstating the crime of “drug loitering” and establishing new Stay Out Drug Areas zones for people accused of violating laws like the recently adopted ban on public drug use and possession, will be heard in the City Council’s Public Safety Committee at 9:30am today, Tuesday, August 13.

North Seattle Councilmember Cathy Moore announced her proposal to crack down on sex work, which she’d been working on since last spring, earlier this month. The first part of Moore’s legislation would reinstate a law against misdemeanor prostitution “loitering,” or street sex work, that was overturned after an official city task force recommended getting rid of it in 2017. Under this law, police would again be empowered to arrest anyone who “remains in a public place and intentionally solicits, induces, entices, or procures another to commit an act of prostitution.”

The second half of the legislation would create an official Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zone encompassing hundreds of square blocks around Aurora Ave. N. and empower police to banish anyone suspected of engaging in sex work from the area. Police could then charge suspected sex workers with a gross misdemeanor for violating their SOAP order, whether or not they’re ever convicted of the underlying misdemeanor offense. The law would also give police the power to stop and frisk anyone they believe is a sex worker and charge them for additional offenses, such as drug possession, if they find anything incriminating during their search.

People who “promote prostitution loitering,” which police are supposed to decide based on ill-defined “particular circumstances of each case,” could be charged with a gross misdemeanor, but would not—unlike sex workers—be subject to banishment.

Emi Koyama, an advocate with the Coalition for Rights and Safety for People in the Sex Trade, said repealing the prostitution and drug loitering laws was one of the few concrete victories to come out of the Black Lives Matter movement in Seattle. “We never actually tried defunding and investing in community the way the movement wanted. … On the other hand, we tried exclusion zones in the past, and it wasn’t working, it was causing harm, and it was racist —that’s why they got rid of it.”

Jenna Robert, who worked as an assistant city attorney under Pete Holmes, said Holmes stopped prosecuting most prostitution loitering cases and issuing SOAP orders before the Reentry Work Group—voted into existence by then-Councilmember Bruce Harrell’s public safety committee— finalized its recommendations because Holmes was convinced that the laws made it harder for sex workers to access services, which are concentrated on Aurora, and did nothing to reduce sex work or address trafficking.

“I think the Reentry Work group did a really good job of bringing up the harms that [the loitering law] caused,” Robert said. “We stopped charging even before it came off the books… so I thought, ‘I can’t imagine that anyone would ever put this this back on the books,’ because it’s so harmful to the people it’s supposed to protect.”

In its final report, issued in 2018, the Reentry Work Group concluded that the prostitution loitering law, adopted in 1973,  “targets individuals in the commercial sex industry, a group already at high risk for trafficking, abuse, and other exploitation”—particularly Black women and other cis and trans women of color, who were disproportionately targeted under the law. “Bringing them into the criminal legal system will only exacerbate any underlying unmet needs and exposes them to further physical and sexual harm caused by incarceration.”

Jazmyn Clark, the ACLU of Washington’s Smart Justice Policy program director, told PubliCola that the proposed new penalties for drug users and sex workers “expand police power to harass our vulnerable neighbors and continue the failed war on drugs. Rather than provide support and resources, these zones push people to the margins of society and further stigmatize individuals struggling with substance use disorder or engaging in sex work.”

In a letter to City Attorney Ann Davison and the city council, Clark wrote that the laws also raise constitutional concerns because they deprive people who have never been convicted of a prostitution or drug-related crime of their right to free travel and association. The diversion group Purpose Dignity Action has described this aspect of the SOAP and SODA laws as a prohibition on “future otherwise-lawful conduct–just being present in a place, and doing nothing wrong.”

Proponents of the legislation, including business owners and homeowners near Aurora, have said their primary goal is to reduce gun violence and sex trafficking in the area— claiming, for instance, that a number of recent shootings were caused by “turf wars” between pimps in the area. Moore recently said this was one of her reasons for proposing the law, citing SPD as the source for her information.

But advocates for sex workers question that claim. “If it’s actually a turf war, we would see a drastic decline in the number of people who are [on Aurora], Koyama said. “The women won’t feel safe … and the buyers won’t come either if they realize there’s a huge risk.”

Koyama notes that supporter of the law who see women as an “access point” to fight against felony crimes, like murder and assault, are treating sex workers as people “outside the community”—saying, in effect, “‘We are just a peaceful neighborhood; it’s other people who are completely different from us who cause these problems.” During the press announcement, Moore, Kettle, and Davison repeatedly cited overwhelming support from “the community,” referring to the overwhelmingly white property and business owners who showed up to support the legislation.

Sex workers, as a demographic group, are disproportionately Black and brown women.

Madison Zack-Wu, an organizer with Strippers Are Workers, said that while the legislation includes a lot of references to sex trafficking and gun violence, the policy language “really just focuses on criminalizing and policing sex workers and people in the sex trade.”

“When it comes to being at risk for trafficking, the main cause of vulnerability for trafficking is financial instability and poverty,” Zack-Wu said. “This bill focuses on pushing people away from community and into more marginalized areas. And that also increases trafficking,” because they have less access to communities that help keep them safe.

When Backpage, an online marketplace for sex workers and buyers, was shut down in 2018, many sex workers went from working online to more dangerous street work, and “even people that disagree with us acknowledge that it was really bad,” Koyoma said. “When conditions get worse, people have less bargaining power. More people get banished to more dangerous areas and more dangerous acts—people have to say yes to things they wouldn’t otherwise.”

Advocates also note that arresting and charging people for prostitution upends their lives and makes it harder to get jobs, access services, and find stable housing. Amarinthia Torres, director of the Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence, said, “I think, honestly, that sometimes we underestimate the scope and reach of the criminal legal system—that one arrest can really follow a person for a long time, and it can follow them into all aspects of their life for the long term. People who  have had that happen to them understand the way it can hang over your life and the choices you have access to.”

Historically, banishment zones and loitering laws have not been effective at reducing exploitation of sex workers, decreasing violent crime, or even “improving” the areas that are off-limits to sex workers or drug users, according to the 2010 book Banished, by Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, a sweeping study of exclusion zones in Seattle. One major reason, the scholars wrote, is that people simply returned to the places where they knew people and feel safest, ignoring off-limits orders even when it meant going to jail repeatedly and racking up thousands of dollars in fines.

“Most people do return to the neighborhoods that they’ve been banned from,” Beckett told PubliCola. “[The vast majority] said it didn’t change where they went; they just accepted that they could be picked up on those charges and then lived with that. It didn’t accomplish what anyone was hoping to accomplish.”

Yet the city council, and Moore in particular, seem convinced that this time, everything will turn out different. During the press conference earlier this month, counncil public safety committee chair Bob Kettle said “the focus needs to be on those carrying out the sex trafficking and profiting off the abuse of women. For those caught up in this sad situation, we need to find diversion and support options. The goal here is not to punish those who are also victims, but instead to offer an opportunity to walk away and get help.”

Yet the legislation proposes no new diversion programs or funding, nor does it lay out a process by which arrested sex workers would “walk away and get help.” And if the goal is for police to become a conduit for sex workers to “escape” their current jobs (a dubious prospect, but one the council and city attorney have embraced), there is nothing whatsoever stopping cops from approaching and speaking to people they believe are sex workers now, without arresting them.

Beckett says people have a tendency to forget past failures and grab for easy-seeming solutions, even those that have failed in the recent past. “Our memories are fairly short-term. We forget that we’ve already tried all this,” Beckett said. “It’s also what we want to think is true. We want to believe there are cheap, easy fixes to structural problems that require actual investments.”

gender, Mayor Harrell, Police, Women

The Seattle Police Department Has a Gender Discrimination Problem

 

Image via City of Seattle

By Andrew Engelson

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) is a toxic workplace for women, according to a damning internal report commissioned by SPD that was first reported by KUOW last week.

One woman who’s been an SPD officer for more than 15 years echoed the findings of the report, saying she’s been passed over multiple times for promotions by less-qualified male officers, and has seen this happen to many other female officers over the years.

“I’ve experienced men getting jobs with a lot less experience than me specifically, and other females not getting jobs,” said the officer, who requested anonymity. “I’ve seen this throughout my career,” which has included both patrol and office jobs, she said.

The internal report, by Washington State University Professor Lois James, was a part of the 30×30 Initiative—a nationwide effort to increase gender equity in policing. As part of the initiative, police departments across the country have pledged to boost the number of women in their departments to 30 percent by 2030. SPD signed on in 2021, with the goal of increasing the number of female recruits to 30 percent by 2030. 

SPD isn’t close to reaching those goals. In 2023, out of 61 new officers hired, just five were women, according to Jamie Housen, a spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell. Currently, just 16 percent of SPD officers are women.

James conducted focus groups and interviews with about a dozen women, who described a toxic, hyper-masculine culture in which women are often passed up for promotions and lucrative assignments because of their gender.

Women recalled watching less-qualified men get promoted because they had “connections” with other men in the department, or because they could work shifts that weren’t accessible to women, who often had family obligations men didn’t have. 

One female officer said she told her supervisor she could work any shift but the night shift, “because frankly, there was nobody home to look after my kid… [And the response was]… this is the only one we have available… So I guess I’m not getting  promoted. But then I’ll turn around and I see a counterpart who is going through a divorce, and he gets a hardship transfer assignment.”

Stories of sexual harassment and casual misogyny were also common. “I had a sergeant [tell] told me I look yummy in front of a bunch of officers,” one woman recalled; on another occasion, she said she was introduced at roll call by lieutenant who “was like, ‘don’t worry, guys, she’s married.’ It’s like, is that necessary?”

The officer who spoke with PubliCola said that while most of her interactions with male colleagues have been positive, she has personally experienced many of the situations women described in James’ report. Once, she said, a male officer was complaining about an officer who was pregnant. “He said that’s why he didn’t like women in his unit—because they go out on maternity leave and then everybody else has to scramble to cover for them,” she said.

James said harassment and discrimination are common across all police departments. “Unfortunately, my impression is that this is very, very typical and representative of police departments,” James said. “It’s clear that there’s a lot farther to go.”

Ivonne Roman, one of the founders of the 30×30 Initiative and a former New Jersey police officer, said female officers often cope with toxic work environments by keeping their heads down. “These women say: ‘I don’t complain, because I don’t think that it will be taken seriously.’” Roman said. “So there’s this disconnect between what the chiefs think is happening and what’s actually happening on the ground.”

In response to the report, Housen said the mayor was planning to arrange a meeting with female officers within SPD to hear their concerns. “Ensuring women at SPD attain positions of leadership, feel welcome and supported, and can serve free of bias or harassment is paramount for creating a representative department and building a culture at SPD that fully reflects the values of our city,” Housen said.

James’ report follows news of a lawsuit filed against Police Chief Adrian Diaz in King County Superior Court in January. Deanna Nollette, a 27-year veteran of the force and a former assistant chief of police, was demoted to captain—along with another assistant chief, Eric Greening—in July. In her lawsuit, Nollette claims that Diaz has “a history of misogyny. He is demeaning to women in the police force, articulating his bias that women should not hold leadership positions in the police force.”

“I am heartbroken to have been placed in an adversarial position against a department that I have loved and given 100 percent to for almost 28 years,” Nollette told PubliCola. “I have a responsibility to try to ensure that women who are with or join SPD have a fair and equitable opportunity.”

Diaz’s attorney, Ted Buck, said “Chief Diaz is disappointed that a routine personnel decision has led to these demonstrably false claims. The chief’s overt support of women in departmental leadership has been clear and consistent.”

Nolette’s attorney, Judith Lonnquist, was blunt in her assessment of Diaz: “It is reprehensible that an organization responsible for law enforcement is headed by a man who regularly violates the laws against discrimination,” Lonnquist said.

When asked if she thought Nolette was more qualified for the job of chief than Diaz, the current SPD officer replied, “Oh, definitely.”  She said she was disappointed to see both Nolette and Greening passed over (and Diaz hired instead). “Both of them blow Diaz away,” she said.

The lawsuit—covered by the Seattle Times and other outlets last month—is the second high-profile gender discrimination case brought against the department in the past year. In February 2023, detective Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, known for promoting chess among young people in south Seattle, filed a $10 million complaint against SPD, citing “race and gender discrimination on a daily basis.”

Housen insists SPD is making progress toward the 30×30 goal (which SPD interprets as having 30 percent of its graduating recruit class of 2030 consist of women) and said the department has made gains hiring women into leadership positions. “SPD currently has four women captains and six women lieutenants,” Housen said. “Half of the department’s command staff are women.” In fact, five of SPD’s 13 command staff are women, and only one—assistant chief Lesley Cordner—is a sworn officer. The other four women on the command staff are civilian employees in budgeting, legal, and administrative or advisory roles—roles that are, in turn, held almost exclusively by women.

SPD’s lack of progress toward overall gender diversity comes at a time when the department faces what elected officials and Diaz have characterized as a hiring crisis. (It’s a familiar term.)

In 2020, SPD had 1,339 trained officers; by mid-2023, that had dropped to 1,029 – a 23 percent decline. The number of “deployable” officers—those who are fully trained and able to patrol—is lower; according to data provided by Housen, SPD had 921 deployable officers last year, down from and 1,094 in 2020.

The city began raising alarms about the declining number of SPD officers most recently during the Durkan administration, which instituted a short-lived hiring bonus program back in 2021.In 2022, Bruce Harrell announced a recruitment and retention plan that included bonuses of $7,500 for new officers and $30,000 to people transferring from other police departments. But Harrell’s office has seen lackluster results in its goal to boost SPD’s active force to 1,400 officers.

The numbers are part of a nationwide trend; in every region of the country, police departments are shrinking as retirements and separations outpace new hiring. A 2023 report found that total police force staffing in the US was down 4.8 percent from 2020. 

Overall, according to SPD spokesman John O’Neil, 151 of its SPD’s officers are women, or about 16 percent, down from nearly 18 percent in 2021, but still above the national average for municipal police departments. According to the most recent data from the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the FBI, that rate ranges from 13.5 to a little less than 14 percent. According to the mayor’s office, 42 percent of the officers hired in 2023 were Black, Indigenous, or people of color and 9.6 percent were women. 

Last year, 91 officers left the department, which, when combined with the 61 new hires, represents a net reduction of 30 officers.

City council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, one of six new council members elected last November, said SPD’s called those hiring numbers disappointing. “The number of women that were hired in 2023 was not acceptable,” Kettle said. “We need to have a representative force where women are well represented. We need to be creating that culture and an environment of inclusion. And also the idea that you can advance, you can be promoted, you can move forward in the organization.”

One police department that has made strides toward a more representative force is Madison, Wisconsin’s, where 28 percent of officers are women. The department makes a point of recruiting women and places women in prominent roles as teachers in its academy, as well as providing female mentors to new recruits.

San Diego’s police department, where 23 percent of officers are women, actively recruits women and is working to make its force more welcoming, including creating the nation’s first on-site child care center within a police department.

Policies like these can help attract women to police departments and encourage them to stay, 30×30 Initiative cofounder Roman said, adding that lactation rooms and generous family leave policies can also help with retention. 

The benefits of hiring women are measurable. “We did a literature review on women in policing,” Roman said, “and we found that there are all these benefits associated with having a high representation of women: they reduce lawsuits, reduce use of force, they have a calming effect on their partners, and they have better outcomes for victims of crimes.”

Statistically, female officers generally have fewer incidents of excessive use of force and tend to use force less often than their male counterparts, and Roman notes that women who are victims of domestic violence are more likely to report it to a female officer. 

The officer who spoke to PubliCola said that, in her opinion, conditions were better for women under Kathleen O’Toole, who served as chief between 2014 and 2018.

“O’Toole was very focused on career development and very supportive of women,” she said. Under former chief Carmen Best, who stepped down amid criticism of the department’s violent response to protests in 2020, “You saw women being promoted, you saw minorities moving into [positions of] deputy chiefs and assistant chiefs,” the officer said, but the 2020 controversy “kind of derailed what she might have brought to the table on that end of things,” the officer said.

Roman said physical fitness requirements pose a common hurdle for women seeking jobs as officers. SPD uses standards set by the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, which include 20 pushups, 25 sit-ups, and 35 squat thrusts. Roman said that while these might not seem excessive, analyzing how many women consistently pass or fail the test is the best indicator of whether it’s discriminatory.

“I’ve noticed there’s an almost knee-jerk reaction that [some women] weren’t qualified to be cops because they can’t do 24 pushups within the first two weeks of the academy,” she said. “There’s no research that shows doing 24 pushups can make you a better, more effective officer.”

SPD has taken some steps toward improving its reputation and attracting more diverse recruits. Diaz frequently touts SPD’s Before the Badge program, a five-week pre-academy course designed to introduce potential recruits to members of the community and provide them with skills for dealing with on-the-job stress. 

Brandon James, a lieutenant who’s part of the Before The Badge program, said he’d like to see more women officers. 

“Recruiting is a challenge for everyone, and police departments are going after the same applicants,” James said. “We do see a good share of female recruits coming through. But absolutely, I wish it were more.”

Women

Seattle Library Rents Room to Kirk Cameron, Right-Wing Crusader Against “Woke Marxist Librarians”
Poster image from the 2014 movie "Saving Christmas," starring Kirk Cameron.

By Erica C. Barnett

On May 27, the Seattle Public Library will rent a 200-person meeting room to Kirk Cameron, the ‘80s TV star-turned-evangelical Christian activist, who’s promoting his conservative Christian children’s book as part of his publisher Brave Books’ “Freedom Island Tour.”According to Brave Books’ website, the tour—which only includes a handful of stops, including on in San Francisco—provides “a wholesome alternative to the Drag Queen Story Hours promoted by woke Marxist librarians.”

The Seattle Public Library stopped holding Drag Queen Story Time several years ago.

PubliCola broke the news about Cameron’s appearance on Twitter last Friday. On Saturday, the library issued a statement about its decision and invited the public to submit comments and questions about the event.

Contacted about Cameron’s appearance on Friday, a spokeswoman for the library said SPL isn’t “hosting” Cameron or endorsing his views, but providing his group access to a meeting room that’s available for anyone to rent. “We do not choose who gets to use our meeting rooms or what they are allowed to say or believe. That would be government censorship and a violation of the First Amendment. The Library is committed to intellectual freedom,” the spokeswoman, Laura Gentry, said.

“This was a fairly standard procedure meeting room booking request, however the event itself is likely to be more high-profile than most other room bookings and is likely to require additional Library resources due to the anticipated public interest,” a library spokeswoman said. Those resources could include extra security to insulate Cameron from protesters.

This mirrors the American Library Association’s policy on meeting room rentals, which says that banning hate speech in library meeting rooms would be tantamount to banning Drag Queen Story Time (something many libraries across the country have, in fact, been forced to do because of protests by right-wing groups). “If libraries kowtowed to the exclusive tastes of patrons, our cherished institutions would cease to exist,” according to an ALA opinion piece.

Cameron has said homosexuality is “unnatural,” opposes women having jobs outside the home, has called women who get abortions “murderers,” and said he believed that two recent deadly hurricanes were God’s punishment for people’s sins.

He has also said that public schools are “sexualizing” and “grooming” kids, a common trope among right-wing fringe groups.

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“This was a fairly standard procedure meeting room booking request, however the event itself is likely to be more high-profile than most other room bookings and is likely to require additional Library resources due to the anticipated public interest,” Gentry said. Those resources could include extra security to insulate Cameron from protesters who may want to disrupt the event.

For public institutions, hosting controversial groups can be costly and sometimes dangerous. In one of the most famous examples, the public library in Wakefield, Massachusetts rented a meeting room to a neo-Nazi group in 2002. In an effort to prevent violence, the town shut down a highway, had staffers work at the library after hours, and paid hundreds of police officers to quell violence that erupted between neo-Nazis and anti-racist protesters.

Closer to home, the University of Washington provided access to Kane Hall, its largest auditorium, to far-right troll Milo Yiannopolous in 2017. Police in riot gear, hired to keep protesters away from the event, did not prevent two people from shooting a protester as Yiannopolous railed against ” hairy dykes,” “trannies,” and “Sasquatch lesbians” inside.

SPL’s policy on meeting rooms was tested most recently in 2020, when the library rented its main auditorium to a group of anti-trans activists engaged in legal efforts to bar trans women from gender-segregated spaces such as women’s restrooms. The library’s decision to provide space to the group sparked protests and a backlash against the library, including from trans and non-gender-conforming library staffers, who said the event was a threat to their safety and ability to do their jobs.

The event—held after hours with extra security, all funded by the public—sparked protests and caused long-term damage to the library’s reputation as a place that’s welcome to LGBTQ+ people, particularly trans and gender-nonconforming patrons and staff.

City Council, Health, reproductive rights, Women

Seattle Legislation Aims to Stop “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” From Lying Quite So Much

By Erica C. Barnett

At a press conference and bill signing for three pieces of legislation aimed at protecting people who seek abortions in Seattle, City Councilmember Tammy Morales said she had also introduced legislation that would bar so-called crisis pregnancy centers—fake clinics run by religious anti-abortion groups—from false advertising at their locations inside city limits.

CPCs, also known as “limited-service pregnancy centers,” use deceptive tactics to get pregnant people in the door, using phrases like “pregnancy alternatives” to suggest they provide abortions. Inside, staffers attempt to persuade people to go through with their pregnancies, offering “non-diagnostic ultrasounds” and the promise of “free” baby-related items in the future.

According to a 2021 report by the Alliance, a coalition of groups supporting reproductive and gender justice, these “free” items were almost always contingent on participation in Christian programming, such as “counseling, Bible studies, abstinence seminars, video screenings, or other ideological CPC programming.” Despite their baby-centric advertising, they virtually never offer contraception, STI testing, or prenatal care of any kind.

Morales’ bill, which her Neighborhoods, Education, Civil Rights, and Culture Committee approved on Friday, would bar CPCs in Seattle from making misleading or false claims about their services, or to claim or imply that they provide abortions, prenatal care, or other services that they don’t provide. The bill also emphasizes, in a “whereas” clause, the city’s commitment to state law protecting the privacy of people who seek abortion care.

On Monday, Morales said she hoped the bill would help address some of the privacy issues associated with these fake clinics, which collect personal medical information from their “patients” but are not subject to federal medical privacy laws. If someone came to a CPC from a state where abortion was illegal and told a CPC worker they planned to go through with an abortion in Washington state, that CPC could have collected enough information to report that person to the authorities in their home state, for example.

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“The potential is that they could use that information to track who is seeking abortion care, and this is particularly dangerous for people who might be coming from states where this is illegal now, so it’s trying to address both of those things,” Morales said.

There are only about three CPCs (two CareNet outposts and a group called 3W, which has denied it is a crisis pregnancy center) currently operating in Seattle, plus a pregnancy center operated by Catholic Community Services; Morales said she was also aware of a “mobile clinic” operating in South Seattle. However, many more CPCs are located around the Puget Sound region, including Next Step Pregnancy Services (Lynnwood), the Pregnancy Resource Clinic (Everett), Pregnancy Resource Services (Bremerton), Pregnancy Aid (Auburn, Des Moines, and Kent), and nine other CareNet outlets.

Morales said her legislation (co-sponsored by Councilmember Lisa Herbold) is modeled on a San Francisco law—the Pregnancy Information Disclosure and Protection Ordinance, passed in 2011. That law bans CPCs in San Francisco from misleading the public about what services they provide.

Sate legislation would be more effective still, because it would apply everywhere, including rural areas where anti-abortion sentiment is more prevalent than it is in liberal Seattle. No one in the state legislature has introduced a bill related to crisis pregnancy centers since 2012, when a proposal to prevent CPCs from misleading pregnant people died in committee.

A more sweeping 2015 law, known as the Reproductive FACT Act, required crisis pregnancy centers to inform potential clients that California has public programs that provide immediate free or low-cost access to reproductive health care, prenatal care, and abortion; it also required unlicensed CPCs to disclose that they were not medical facilities. CPCs challenged the law and the US Supreme Court struck it down in a 5-4 decision in 2015.

In 2017, the Seattle/King County Board of Health passed a rule requiring crisis pregnancy centers to post two 11-by-17-inch signs saying “This facility is not a health care facility.” King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski cited the Supreme Court’s decision on the FACT Act a year later as one reason the county didn’t propose a more sweeping law. County Councilmember Kathy Lambert, who was defeated last year, was the only board of health member to vote against the rule; before the vote, she circulated through the crowd in council chambers, passing out anti-abortion literature.

Seattle’s legislation, which is certain to pass, will have less impact than would countywide legislation imposing similar rules; state legislation would be more effective still, because it would apply everywhere, including rural areas where anti-abortion sentiment is more prevalent than it is in liberal Seattle. No one in the state legislature has introduced a bill related to crisis pregnancy centers since 2012, when a proposal to prevent CPCs from misleading pregnant people died in committee.

Health, homelessness, King County, Morning Crank, Parks, Women

Controversial Officer Gets Short Suspension for Shattering Driver’s Window; Woodland Park Sweep Houses Four People; County Councilmember Dunn Votes “No” on Choice

1. Last month, Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability, which investigates allegations of officer misconduct, dismissed most of a complaint filed by a police lieutenant against SPD officer Andrei Constantin, who deliberately shattered the window of a car parked at a gas station while the driver and a passenger were inside. Of five allegations, including charges of retaliation and dishonesty, the OPA upheld only two—failing to document the smashed window and behaving unprofessionally. As a penalty, Police Chief Adrian Diaz issued an eight-day suspension.

If Constantin’s name sounds familiar, that’s because this isn’t the first time his actions have landed him in the press. In 2020, Constantin was outed as the person allegedly responsible for an anonymous Twitter account that, among other inflammatory statements, mocked victims of police violence, including George Floyd, promoted violence against protesters, and called for donations to a defense fund for a driver who killed a demonstrator on I-5 in the summer of 2020.

Since that controversy, police accountability watchdogs have unearthed at least four other OPA complaints against Constantin, many of them containing multiple misconduct allegations, in the last five years. Many of those resulted in referrals for training rather than suspensions or more serious punishment. The complaints identified on the SPD.watch website, a joint project of DivestSPD and Tech Bloc Seattle, included: Pulling over a driver without justification, pointing a gun at him, and handcuffing him; threatening to use his Taser on a man who was not being threatening; stopping a homeless Black bike rider and detaining him for nearly an hour because he wasn’t wearing a helmet; and a use-of-force allegation that the OPA hasn’t yet resolved.

According to the OPA report on this latest incident, Constantin saw a car parked at a gas station, ran driver’s plates and determined that the title to his car hadn’t been transferred when it was sold. When Constantin approached the car, the driver, who was Latino, got back in the car and rolled up the window, according to the report. At that point, Constantin “used a hard object to strike and shatter the driver’s side window” while the driver and a passenger were inside. In his own report on the incident, Constantin withheld the fact that he had smashed the person’s window.

A disciplinary action report recommending the suspension noted that Constantin had been disciplined for misconduct twice before. “[Y]ou did not have probable cause to arrest or any basis to engage in a vehicle pursuit. Despite this, you destroyed a community member’s property,” the report says. “That is an act akin to vandalism done under the purported color of law.”

2. The site of a longstanding encampment in Lower Woodland Park was quiet and mostly empty on Tuesday afternoon, save for a group of volunteers trying to start a vehicle and push it out of the park. Piles of pallets, tarps, and trash were the only evidence that dozens of people had been living on site for months, many of them as recently as a few hours earlier.

More than 95 percent of the Woodland Park encampment residents who accepted referrals from the HOPE Team were offered emergency shelter, not housing.

By 2pm, workers with the city’s Parks Department had surrounded most of the former encampment site with caution tape and posted large “PARK TEMPORARILY CLOSED” signs at the entrances to the area; parks employees stationed at the east end of West Green Lake Way asked drivers entering the area where they were going.

The city has spent five months doing outreach at the park and offering shelter beds to people on a “by-name list” of those who were living on site back in February. Since then, dozens more have arrived who were not on that original list, including at least some who moved to the park because they heard it was scheduled for a sweep, effectively unlocking city services that are not available at other encampments. The HOPE Team, run by the city’s Human Services Department, has exclusive access to about a third of the city’s shelter beds, which it offers to people living in encampments in the runup to sweeps.

According to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, the city’s HOPE Team made 83 offers of “shelter or housing” to people living in the park, including most of the people on the original 61-person list. Seventy-nine of those offers were for shelter; just four people moved into permanent supportive housing. Other than the four housing referrals, the city does not have data on how people actually enrolled in shelter.

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“The goal since the onset of this coordinated engagement was to ensure that everyone residing onsite received an offer of shelter and that the vast majority were  connected to the best-suited shelter and support services,” Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said. As of Tuesday morning, the city had 42 shelter beds available for those who remained on site; 27 accepted referrals, including 20 referrals into tiny house villages run by the Low-Income Housing Institute. 

As always, people who receive “referrals” do not necessarily show up and stay at a shelter, and people who enroll in a shelter within 48 hours—”enrollments,” in the city’s nomenclature—do not necessarily stay there. (More on the HOPE Team’s low shelter enrollment rate here). And media reports, like this one, that claim dozens of people moved into “housing” are, at best, misleading, since more than 95 percent of the Woodland Park encampment residents who accepted referrals from the HOPE Team were offered emergency shelter, not housing.

One reason the city was able to offer so many shelter beds—particularly tiny house village spots, which are in high demand—is that they reserved spots specifically for this encampment removal; the referral rate is not representative of the number of beds available to the HOPE Team on a typical night, nor is it close to the number accessible to nonprofit outreach groups like REACH, which access shelter beds through a separate pool.

According to HSD spokesman Kevin Mundt, the Low-Income Housing Institute made about 30 of its shelter beds available to people living in Woodland Park, including 16 spots at tiny house villages.

The park will be closed until next Monday, according to Housen, so that Parks employees can “focus on returning the park to its intended use (access to recreation, hosting events and sports, and sustaining critical natural area).”

3. King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn, currently running as a Republican against Democratic US Rep. Kim Schrier in Washington’s 8th Congressional District, cast the lone “no” vote against a resolution supporting women’s right to choose and affirming the validity of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which the US Supreme Court is poised to overturn. Even the council’s other Republican, Pete Von Reichbauer, voted to support the measure after several council members, including women and gay men, spoke passionately about their support for the right to abortion as well as other rights that could be threatened if Roe goes away, such as the right to same-sex marriage.

Dunn did not explain why he voted against the measure, which “declares [the council’s] support of a woman’s right to reproductive freedom and of Roe v. Wade as settled law of the land” and asks the health department to “actively enforce” existing law regulating so-called “crisis pregnancy centers”—sites run by religious groups that attempt to talk pregnant women into going through with their pregnancies.

Dunn, a moderate by contemporary Republican standards, is up against several more conservative primary-election challengers peddling conspiracy theories and touting their support for Trump. Still, his vote against a nonbinding pro-choice resolution places him out of the mainstream of Washington politics, and could alienate many voters in his district; Schrier, a Democrat, ran against anti-choice Republican Dino Rossi and won on an explicitly pro-choice platform.

criminal justice, Women

Closure of King County’s Only Work Release for Women Raises Gender Equity Questions
The closed Helen B. Ratcliff House on Beacon Hill in Seattle

By Paul Kiefer

When the only work release facility for women in King County closed last November, it sparked no public outcry—in fact, Washington’s Department of Corrections didn’t even announce it was closing. But for women from King County awaiting their transfer from prison to a work release facility, the closure of the Helen B. Ratcliff House in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood presented a new hurdle.

The few women housed at Helen B. Ratcliff House when it closed transferred to the scarce women’s beds in work release facilities in Tacoma and Olympia.  Women scheduled to move to work release in Seattle often faced even worse options. One woman, who PubliCola will call R to protect her identity, landed at a work release facility in Spokane. “Work release is supposed to be helpful because you can find your footing in your community before you’re fully released,” she said. “I’d never even been to Spokane. I didn’t know anyone there.” Though the Spokane facility had fewer than a dozen residents when she arrived, R noted that roughly half of the women at the facility were from King County.

Work release facilities are low-security detention centers that allow incarcerated people to work, attend school, and visit their families during the final months of their prison sentence.  People tend to transfer to work release facilities in their home county, where they can rebuild their relationships with friends and family, find a steady job, and develop a support system to ease the transition into post-prison life.

“The whole point of work release is to help people acclimate back into their communities,” said Joe Nguyen (D-34, White Center), the vice chair of the senate’s reentry and rehabilitation committee. “If they’re sent somewhere that’s hours away from home, or even to the other side of the state, that’s probably an indicator that work release might not be successful for them.”

In Washington state, work release beds for women, who make up five percent of the state’s incarcerated population, are few and far between. Most of the state’s eleven work release facilities reserve only a handful of beds for women. The facility in Spokane is Washington’s only remaining all-women work release center.

In contrast, incarcerated men from King County still have two all-male work release facilities available to them. The two work release facilities for men in Seattle—one across from the King County Courthouse and another on First Hill—remain open, and the two facilities combined have dozens of vacant beds, in part because COVID-19 outbreaks at the facilities limited the number of people who could be housed safely in each building.

“It’s not equitable,” said Sonja Hallum, the Director of Washington’s Office of Corrections Ombuds (OCO), during a stakeholder meeting last week.

Paula Bond, whose daughter spent time in the mixed-gender work release facility in Tacoma, told PubliCola that single-gender facilities are especially vital for women, regardless of how few women go to work release. “The number one issue why women go to prison is addiction. The number two reason is men, and there’s a lot of crossover,” she said. “There’s a huge correlation between sexual trauma and going to prison for women. It can be traumatizing, or it can be a barrier to get back on your feet, to be placed in a work release with men, and women in western Washington need a place to go for work release if they don’t want to worry about that.”

The company that contracted with the Department of Corrections to run the Helen B. Ratcliff House, called the Progress House Association, informed the DOC two months in advance that it planned to pull out of Seattle, and the 53-bed facility was mostly empty when it closed.

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The house wasn’t free of controversy while it was open—in 2019, for instance, the OCO investigated allegations that staff at the facility conspired to retaliate against a resident who criticized the work release program during a meeting with DOC administrators. The allegations fit into a broader pattern of complaints from formerly incarcerated people about work release staff across Washington being too quick to punish residents for minor infractions, including returning to a work release facility late because of public transit delays.

Despite criticisms of the program, work release plays an important role in Washington’s efforts to scale back its prison population and reduce recidivism. In 2019, faced with a growing waitlist for work release beds, the state legislature set aside funding to build new work release facilities, including in King County. Meanwhile, the Department of Corrections set about searching for ways to reduce the state’s prison population to bring down the state’s annual spending on incarceration, adding more urgency to the effort to expand the work release program. Continue reading “Closure of King County’s Only Work Release for Women Raises Gender Equity Questions” →