Tag: Carmen Best

Health, homelessness, housing, human services, Mayor Durkan, public safety

Mayor’s Office Refuses to Budge on Encampment Removals as Nearly Six-Hour Meeting Ends in Stalemate

If you’re looking for a takeaway from this Wednesday’s nearly six-hour hearing on legislation that would place some limits on the city’s authority to displace homeless people from encampments during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s this: Nothing is going to change. Representatives from Mayor Jenny Durkan’s administration made it abundantly clear, loudly and repeatedly, that the mayor does not consider policies governing encampment sweeps to be a matter that can be legislated under any circumstance, and that now is also not the time for discussing non-legislative solutions, such as changes to the administrative rules governing encampment sweeps in general.

Not that they would be likely to consider changes to those rules anyway—in the view of Durkan and her Human Services Department, the Multi-Disciplinary Administrative Rules, or MDARs, allow the Navigation Team to remove encampments without any prior notice, outreach, or offer of services in almost any circumstance involving one or more tents in a space that could theoretically be accessed by the public. Some of these encampments block sidewalks and entrances to public buildings; in non-pandemic times, these present a clear-cut case. But the Navigation Team also uses the “obstruction” exemption to remove tents tucked into remote areas of public parks, along unpaved, gravel-covered roadway shoulders, and in other areas that aren’t generally used by the public but are technically public spaces. In the fourth quarter of last year, 96 percent of encampment removals were exempt from notice requirements because the Navigation Team deemed them to be “obstructions.”

The mayor holds the cards here; because the proposal is emergency legislation, it requires not only seven council votes but her signature to go into effect.

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Senior deputy mayor Mike Fong began the executive branch’s assault on the legislation Wednesday by expressing incredulity that the city council was trying to prohibit the police from responding to crime in encampments, to prevent the public health department from addressing COVID outbreaks, and to make it impossible for private property owners to report people for trespassing. In fact, the legislation still allows sweeps in many circumstances, including threats to public health and public safety, and trespassing remains illegal.

Specifically, the bill, sponsored by council member Tammy Morales, defines the “extreme circumstances” the Durkan Administration alluded to when it “suspended” encampment removals in March, allowing sweeps when encampments are blocking sidewalk access or access to a building, when an encampment poses a public health or safety threat, or when an encampment poses a threat to infrastructure (for example, if people were lighting fires at the base of a bridge). The restrictions would end when Durkan declares the COVID-19 state of emergencybover, or at the end of the year, whichever comes first.

Deputy mayor Casey Sixkiller  followed up by claiming that since the beginning of the pandemic, t the Navigation Team had placed hundreds of people “into shelter.” In fact, by the Navigation Team’s own admission, only 29 percent of encampment residents who “accepted” referrals actually spent a night in shelter in the fourth quarter of last year. The Navigation Team says this percentage has increased dramatically during the pandemic, but the city has not provided information about how many people actually ended up in shelters after the last two sweeps in the International District, despite multiple requests.  While the Navigation Team gets exclusive access to some beds, shelters have been fuller than usual because of the pandemic, and the reason “new” beds become available is because people leave, not because they are housed.

Finally, police chief Carmen Best recited a litany of the worst things that SPD has ever uncovered at encampments, going back to 2017, including sex trafficking, a man eating a sandwich full of maggots, and a laundry list of illegal items, including “meth, heroin, pills, machetes, swords, stolen property, guns,” and knives. If we allow encampments to exist, Best was arguing, all these horrors will continue “under cover, so to speak, the cover of the tents.” If we sweep the encampments out of existence, those crimes will disappear. Get rid of the tents, and the people sitting around exhibiting grotesque signs of mental illness will be cured or disappear.

None of these arguments hold water. Most of the crimes Best was describing, including drug dealing, gun and knife violence, and sex trafficking, happen more frequently in homes and inside buildings than they do in encampments; it is not the type of structure or kind of community a person lives in that causes crime, and Best presented no evidence that people living in tents are either inherently more criminal or more likely to commit the kinds of crimes she listed than people living in houses, apartments, or yurts.

Moreover, as council members pointed out, displacing an entire community because a few people living in that community are committing crimes, including serious ones, does not make any of those people safer. In general, sweeping encampments leads to people being dispersed into the community, which is what happened last week And removing dozens of people over the crimes of a few is not an approach police take to crimes that occur in any other setting. Police carried out a drug sting earlier this month that involved arrests at four tents, an apartment, and a house. Notably, no one called for removing all the other tenants from the apartment building, or for demolishing the house and tossing its contents in a dump truck. But that is routinely what happens at encampments, and the city argues‚ as Best did on Wednesday, that it’s for the good of their “vulnerable” residents. Continue reading “Mayor’s Office Refuses to Budge on Encampment Removals as Nearly Six-Hour Meeting Ends in Stalemate” →

Crime, criminal justice, Mayor Durkan, neighborhoods, Police

“I Haven’t Heard That Criticism”: Council, Mayor Offer Conflicting Takes on “Emphasis Patrols” In Seven Neighborhoods
Mayor Jenny Durkan and Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best

City council members raised questions this morning about Mayor Jenny Durkan’s decision to target seven specific neighborhoods for increased police patrols this month based on, as Durkan has put it, “crime and the perception of crime.” In addition to additional officers, the seven neighborhoods will get special attention from Seattle Public Utilities, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and other city departments to address outstanding maintenance needs such as fixing potholes and graffiti.

Representatives from the Seattle Police Department confirmed that patrols are being increased not just in neighborhoods where crime is on the rise, but in areas where crime is down but the “community input,” including reports made through the city’s Find It-Fix it smartphone app. Chris Fisher, a strategic advisor with SPD, said that although crime, particularly property crime, is generally down across the city, there were “pockets” in which crime has spiked or where “issues that aren’t criminal in nature” were causing concern. One question the city asks when determining where to focus policing, Fisher said, is, “What are people feeling on the ground?”

“We’re going with these seven neighborhoods first because we have only so much bandwidth.” —Assistant Police Chief Eric Greening

The seven neighborhoods that will be targeted for extra “emphasis patrols” and additional maintenance are Ballard and Fremont,  Pioneer Square and the area around Third and Pike downtown, the SoDo and Georgetown areas just to the south of downtown, and South Park, across the Duwamish River from Georgetown.

Council member Teresa Mosqueda questioned whether the mayor’s approach to crime in neighborhoods was based on data or “the perception that crime is increasing in certain areas. … We have to make sure that the data bears out the policy solutions,” Mosqueda said. “We cannot just have a call for action and just rush to put more [police] on the streets” if the surge isn’t supported by data, Mosqueda said.

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Council member Lorena Gonzalez, whose letter asking Durkan to provide some justification for her choice of neighborhoods, pressed assistant police chief Eric Greening to explain what the new patrols would look like on the ground, and whether they would likely result in more arrests. Greening acknowledged that “any time you increase police presence in a neighborhood, the likelihood of arrest also increases,” adding that SPD would focus primarily on people with outstanding warrants, on assaults, and on “predatory drug dealing”—that is, drug dealing for profit above a level needed to support a drug dealer’s own addiction.

“What I’ve heard from every neighborhood and community group is, ‘We are so glad you’re listening not just to what the data is showing but what we’re experiencing in our community.'” — Mayor Jenny Durkan

District 4 council member Abel Pacheco, who was recently appointed to serve out the remainder of former council member Rob Johnson’s term, asked several times why the University District was not included in the emphasis areas, given that it has a higher crime rate than the neighborhoods that were selected. “That was a decision made based on a number of factors, including data and community input, to go with a limited number of neighborhoods,” Greening said. “We’re going with these seven neighborhoods first because we have only so much bandwidth with our partners,” including city departments that, unlike SPD, don’t operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

A representative from one of those departments, SDOT’s chief of staff Genesee Atdkins, told the council that as part of the emphasis patrols, SDOT would be repairing sidewalks, filling potholes, and fixing deteriorating crosswalks in the seven emphasis areas. On Tuesday, during one of the “public safety walks” the city has organized in all seven emphasis neighborhoods, she and others from SDOT noticed “an alley with a very deteriorated condition and we were, right then, able to dispatch some of our crews out to quickly fill some potholes.”

The city council has no authority over SPD or the neighborhoods where the department conducts emphasis patrols, nor to require the mayor to put them through a race and equity analysis. Such an analysis would likely consider issues such as which neighborhoods have actually experienced an uptick in the most serious types of crime, whether the policy was based on 911 calls, “Find It Fix It” reports, and other complaints from neighborhoods with more resources and populations that are likely to feel more comfortable calling police, and whether the “perception of crime” was based on reality or on the presence of visible signs of poverty and homelessness, such as tents.

Mayor Jenny Durkan and Downtown Seattle Association president Jon Scholes

After the meeting, which Durkan did not attend, the mayor and SPD chief Carmen Best took questions briefly before a scheduled public safety walk in downtown Seattle, the fourth in the series. (The final three will take place tomorrow). Durkan talked about a “holistic” approach to crime and disorder in neighborhoods that sounded not unlike the “broken windows” theory tried, and abandoned, in many US cities in the late 1980s and early 1990s: The emphasis patrols she said, are “not just the police—it’s really going in and taking away the graffiti, [fixing] street lights, activating parks, making sure that neighborhood feels safe.”

Near the end of the brief press event, a reporter asked Durkan for her response to criticism that her emphasis patrols focused on the neighborhoods that complained the most and the loudest, instead of those actually experiencing the most crime.  “I haven’t heard that criticism,” Durkan responded. “What I’ve heard from every neighborhood and community group is, ‘We are so glad you’re listening not just to what the data is showing but what we’re experiencing in our community.'”

Crime, criminal justice, homelessness, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, public safety, Transportation, zoning

Morning Crank: Reminiscences
File:Seattle Streetcar 301 leaving Pacific Place Station.jpg
Streetcar image by Steve Morgan.

1. Earlier this month, 100 representatives from Seattle neighborhood groups, downtown businesses, and advocacy groups—including the interim director of the Transportation Choices Coalition and the head of the Compass Housing Alliance—wrote a letter to Mayor Jenny Durkan urging her to move forward with the delayed, over-budget downtown streetcar line, which would connect the two existing streetcars (which go from Chinatown to First Hill and from Westlake to South Lake Union) via a “Center City Connector” running on First Avenue downtown. Durkan pressed pause on the project in March,  directing the city to do its own investigation, and hired a consultant to do an outside review of the $200 million project, setting a self-imposed deadline of June 19 that came and went without a report from the consultant. (According to the Seattle Times, the results of the internal review are expected to be released on Friday).

The letter, which urges Durkan to think of all the small minority-and family-owned businesses that would benefit from the streetcar, is in many ways reminiscent of the public pressure that came to bear on Durkan in two other recent debates: The head tax (a $250-per-employee tax on about 500 high-grossing businesses) and the appointment of a new police chief. In both cases, Durkan took a controversial position, then changed her mind. With the head tax, she opposed the version the city council initially proposed, then reversed course to support it after ostensibly getting Amazon on board, then flipped again to oppose it after a coalition of businesses and developers created a campaign to defeat it at the polls. In the case of the police chief, Durkan initially eliminated interim Chief Carmen Best from the running, citing the recommendation of her appointed search committee, whose chairman, Tim Burgess, said the group agreed “it was best at this point for an outsider to be brought in as the next chief.” Yesterday, in a stunning turnaround, Durkan appointed Best, saying by way of explanation that the thing that had changed between Best’s elimination from the running and her appointment as chief was that “she got on the list of three finalists.”

So will Durkan flip-flop on the streetcar as well—approving the over-budget link between two slow, underutilized lines in response to pressure from community groups that argue the streetcar is the best way to provide “much-needed transit access and enhanced mobility” to people traveling through downtown? Look back in this space after Friday, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if the streetcar turns out to be Durkan’s third 180 in as many months.

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2. Late Monday night, the Bellevue City Council approved a process for siting permanent shelters in the city, which is a first step toward the lengthy process of approving a permanent shelter in Bellevue—a process that could still take another several years. Currently, the only shelters in Bellevue are temporary; the land use code amendment adopted Monday creates a land use code designation for a permanent shelter. The arguments for and against the shelter were reminiscent of the debate over shelter in Seattle, writ small—what’s at stake in Bellevue are 100 potential permanent shelter beds, compared to the more than 3,100 shelter beds that currently exist in Seattle.

Among other amendments, the council narrowly rejected a proposal to require a 1,000-foot buffer between the shelter and any residential areas or K-12 schools (the amendment would have also allowed shelters to be located up to one mile away from a transit stop, rather than within a half-mile, which would effectively limit shelters to industrial areas inaccessible by transit. The council also considered, and rejected, the idea of making homeless shelters a temporary, rather than a permanent, use.

The city of Bellevue has been embroiled in debate for years over a proposed men’s shelter in the Eastgate neighborhood, near Bellevue college and a Sound Transit park-and-ride. According to the most recent one-night count of King County’s homeless population, there were at least 393 people living unsheltered in East King County.

Former city council member Kevin Wallace and recently elected council member Jared Nieuwenhaus have suggested that the shelter could be located in an industrial area near Sound Transit’s light rail station in the Bel-Red neighborhood, which would require Sound Transit to create new plans incorporating a shelter into its light rail station. (When he was on the council, Wallace, a developer, frequently tried to delay or alter Sound Transit’s plans to build light rail to Bellevue.)

Council member Jennifer Robertson, an opponent of the changes adopted Monday, claimed she had seen crime statistics that showed that the majority (55 percent) of the property crime in the city of Portland was committed by the 3 percent of its population who are homeless, along with 39 percent of the violent crime. I was unable to track down this statistic; Portland’s crime dashboard, like Seattle’s, does not track crime rates based on a perpetrator’s housing situation.

Deputy mayor Lynnne Robinson, who voted for the land use amendments, said she had never seen a process drag out this long. “We made a commitment to site a permanent men’s shelter, and there [has been] more public process  in this [land use code amendment] than I’ve ever seen in anything else in my five years on the council that we’ve permitted or created a permitting process for,” Robinson said.

The first temporary winter shelter in Bellevue opened in 2008; the city first committed to opening a permanent shelter for men in 2012.

City Hall, Crime, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Police

Evening Crank: Week 2 Shakeups at SPD, Seattle City Light

The big news out of city hall today was the surprise announcement, dropped in the middle of a press conference to announce the less-surprising news that Seattle police chief Kathleen O’Toole was stepping down, that Seattle City Light director Larry Weis had resigned over the weekend. “It was clear to me that City Light … was somewhere we needed to make a change,” Durkan said this morning. “I talked to the director in terms of what my expectations were, we made a mutual decision that he would resign and so we will be having a nationwide search to make sure that we get the right person in place.”

The news of Weis’ departure came after allegations of widespread sexual harassment and sexism in the department, and after the department’s new consolidated utility billing system launched months late and at least $34 million over budget. “We’ve had challenges at City Light… everything from billing to the workplace environment,” Durkan acknowledged.

Weis is the highest-paid city employee, with a base salary of $340,000, and the only department head eligible for a performance bonus; earlier this year, while seeking a $30,000 bonus, he gave himself perfect marks on a self-evaluation of his performance. I asked Durkan whether she planned to compensate the next director as generously as Weis, whose high salary former mayor Ed Murray justified by saying a lower salary would not be competitive with similar positions in the private utility market. “I’m not going to comment on what the range of compensation is, but I can tell you that if we pay at a certain range, we expect a certain performance,” Durkan responded. The city will do a national search for Weis’ replacement; during the last national search, which resulted in Weis’ hiring, the city paid $50,000 to an executive recruiting firm.

SPD chief O’Toole will be replaced, on an interim basis, by deputy SPD Chief Carmen Best, who will the the first African-American woman, and only the second woman, to head the department. The search committee will be headed up by ACLU deputy legal director Jeff Robinson, former mayor Tim Burgess, Chief Seattle Club director (and Community Police Commission member) Colleen Echohawk, and ex-King County sheriff Sue Rahr. Durkan said she would announce the other members of the search committee in the next two weeks, and that they will begin a national search at the beginning of 2018. O’Toole’s last day will be December 31. Best said she plans to apply for the permanent position. Best’s status as a department veteran—she’s could give her the inside track on the job.

Durkan announced she had asked several other department heads, including fire chief Harold Scoggins, Office of Emergency Management director Barb Graff, and Seattle Public Utilities director Mami Hara, to stay. Last year, Hara was given a significant pay increase, to around $300,000, after the city’s human resources department argued that her pay was not competitive with similar department heads in other cities.

Durkan said to expect more big HR announcements in the coming weeks. Don’t take this as gospel, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s taking a close look at who’s running the Office of Housing and the Human Services Department, two departments whose profiles are only going to get higher as the city—and Durkan—tackle the growing homelessness crisis in the coming year. And I would be shocked if she isn’t planning to announce a new director for the Seattle Department of Transportation (whose current director, Scott Kubly, is already applying for jobs out of town) very soon. Although many urbanists may long to see Durkan appoint Jessyn Farrell, the former mayoral candidate, state legislator, and director of the Transportation Choices Coalition, the better money’s on SDOT chief of staff Genesee Adkins, the former chief lobbyist for King County and, as it happens, a former Transportation Choices policy director herself.

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