Elections, LGBTQ+, Mayor Wilson

Former City Department Director Broke Election Law; City IT Director Resigns; LGBTQ Advocates Call for Removal of Civil Rights Director

1. Seattle’s IT director since September 2024, Rob Lloyd, step down on March 27. “Leading IT and our dedicated teams in service to Seattle has been an honor,” Lloyd said in an email to staff. “Thinking more on recent events and transitions, it’s clear that this is the right time. I wanted you to hear this directly from me and as quickly as possible.”

A spokesperson for Mayor Katie Wilson confirmed Lloyd’s resignation but did not respond to questions about whether he had been asked to leave. In an email to IT staff, Wilson did not exactly gush about Lloyd’s tenure.

“We would like to acknowledge and thank Rob for his service and the work he performed during his time with the department,” the mayor wrote. “We appreciate his contributions to our technological operations. I wish him the best.”

Tracye Cantrell, the department’s assistant chief technology officer, will take over as interim director, Wilson told IT staff.

Lloyd, a Bruce Harrell appointee, was a gung-ho AI proponent who advocated for funding a number of new AI programs at the city—including an $800,000 program that will replace permitting functions previously performed by workers at the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections. That program will purportedly “streamline the permitting application process and improve customer services using Artificial Intelligence and data integration.” Lloyd also implemented a public-facing AI chatbot called “SEAMore Voice” and a separate internal generative AI system from Microsoft called NebulaONE.

2. The Friends of Denny Blaine are calling on Mayor Wilson to remove Seattle Office for Civil Rights Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith in response to allegations of anti-LGBTQ bias made by his staff in interviews with PubliCola for a story we published earlier this week. The group of advocates got together after learning that a wealthy homeowner, Stuart Sloan, was working with then-mayor Bruce Harrell to install a children’s playground at the longstanding nude beach, effectively shutting it down.

Several SOCR staffers told PubliCola that Wheeler-Smith and his deputy director, Fahima Mohamed, made insensitive comments and dismissed LGBTQ+ rights in general, including one staffer who said Mohamed laughed in front of staff at a text message Harrell sent Sloan saying “I share your disgust” about the beach. Staffers said Wheeler-Smith, whose previous employer was a Christian nonprofit that does not hire people in same-sex relationships, frequently sidelined LGBTQ+ rights or treated them as insignificant.

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“The Office of Civil Rights is entrusted with enforcing our city’s equity initiatives and safeguarding the rights and dignity of all marginalized communities within Seattle, including LGBTQ+ people,” the group wrote on Instagram. “The statement ‘l share your disgust’ is not neutral language; it perpetuates a long legacy of marginalizing and dehumanizing language targeting LGBTQ+ individuals in public spaces. For SOCR leadership to treat this rhetoric in such an offensive and dismissive manner undermines community trust in the department, and calls into question its legitimacy as a department claiming to hold a commitment to civil rights.”

“This concern is compounded by the broader reporting showing repeated dismissal and minimization of LGBTQ+ civil rights issues within the department,” the post continued. “Seattle’s commitment to LGBTQ+ equality cannot be symbolic. It must exist from the top down, and if the Office of Civil Rights of all offices cannot be trusted to genuinely foster those values and protect the rights of LBGTQ+ people, there can be no trust in any city department, and the sincerity of all commitments to being a welcoming city” to LGBTQ+ individuals must be called into question.”

3. The state Public Disclosure Commission ruled on Tuesday, February 24 that former Seattle Office of Economic Development Markham McIntyre broke the law when he used an internal City of Seattle Teams chat to solicit contact information from city department heads on behalf of Harrell’s reelection campaign. But they decided not to issue a fine or other penalty beyond a written admonishment. “Staff expect that you will refrain from any use of city equipment, staff or other resources for any effort tied to support or opposition of a candidate or ballot measure,” PDC Executive Director Peter Lavallee wrote.

Lavalee’s ruling reveals that after the Harrell appointee obtained the directors’ personal emails last August, he followed up with an email on September 8. It read: “A little while ago, I asked for your personal information. Part of my intent is to help the campaign. If you are not OK with me sharing your contact information with them, please let me know by tomorrow night. For those you are interested in helping out: we need ideas! Yes, we can do all of the traditional campaign activities (door knocking, phone banking, etc.) but is there something special that we could contribute as City leaders? Now’s the time to get in the game!”

State law prohibits public employees from using their office or any public facilities for campaign purposes. PubliCola reported exclusively on McIntyre’s request for department director’s private contact information in October.

Paul Chapman, who filed the complaint, filed a similar complaint with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission. SEEC director Wayne Barnett dismissed that complaint on Thursday, writing, “Having reviewed the PDC’s letter of February 24, I agree with their conclusion that the evidence collected (and summarized in their February 24 letter) does not warrant further investigation. Mr. McIntyre is no longer a City employee, and Bruce Harrell lost his bid for reelection.”

housing, legislature

Elevator Followup: Reform Bill Watered Down
Dinkun Chen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Josh Feit

The state legislature got stuck on the second provision of the elevator reform bill we reported on earlier this month. The evidently controversial section would have directed the state’s Department of Labor and Industries to support harmonization between national and international elevator standards

Currently, elevators cost three times as much in the US and Canada as they do in the rest of the world, thanks to inflexible standards that limit elevator production, installation, and repair to a handful of companies. Among other issues, elevators have to be much larger here than in other countries, where builders can choose from a much longer roster of safe, reliable elevator companies.

The legislation, which passed the senate early this month before getting amended in the house this week, would still shrink elevator size requirements in smaller apartment buildings; that provision was a YIMBY goal to help lower costs for missing-middle housing. But the harmonization standard was meant to elevate Washington as a national example and lead other states to follow suit in a challenge to the elevator industry’s monopolistic hold over the US. That larger goal could have helped bring down elevator costs across the board.

As they say: follow the money.  While several groups testified in  favor of the original bill, including both the commercial real estate association and  housing density environmentalists from Futurewise and Sightline, there was only one opponent: The National Elevator Industry, Inc. Their lobbying firm? McBride Public Affairs.

It’s not so much that the elevator industry is writing gargantuan checks to McBride ($9,000 in total from the NEII and elevator company TK Elevator combined this month.) It’s that McBride’s list of clients—AMGEN, Boeing, Honda, McDonald’s, Uber, Molson Coors, and it goes on—means McBride has a hold over legislators. McBride’s client list is so all-encompassing, they also represent NAIOP WA, the real estate advocates who testified in favor of the legislation.

One of the main proponents of the bill is elevator reform advocate Stephen Smith; he wrote an influential in-depth study of the elevator industry oligopoly and its inflationary hold on the North American market. Smith wouldn’t speak to the behind scenes efforts of his foes to sway votes. But he quipped: “I hope it isn’t an anticompetitive effort to keep barriers to entry in the market and stop smaller manufacturers from entering.”

Morning Fizz, Police

SPD’s National Recruitment Push Includes Police Chief’s Alma Mater; Chief Attended Tiny Desk Concert with Security In Tow

1. Seattle Police Department officers are traveling across the country on a college recruitment tour, including a five-day trip this week to the Central Intercollegiate Athletics Association (CIAA)  basketball tournament in Baltimore. The CIAA includes a dozen Division II Historically Black Colleges and Universities, including Police Chief Shon Barnes’ alma mater, Elizabeth City State University in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

A spokesperson told PubliCola last week that the department also “plans one coordinated annual recruitment trip that includes multiple universities in close geographic proximity, including several Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Consolidating multiple campus visits into a single trip allows for efficient use of travel resources while expanding outreach to historically underrepresented populations in law enforcement. These efforts are intentional, strategic, and aligned with our long-term workforce diversity goals.”

The SPD spokesperson said the inclusion of Barnes’ alma mater, which has about 2,300 students, was coincidental.

“The department prioritizes events that provide demonstrated applicant yield, and broad and diverse candidate pools,” the spokesperson said. “Our goal is to use our finite recruitment resources where they will produce measurable impact while expanding awareness of opportunities in Seattle.”

A majority of the CIAA colleges have fewer than 2,000 students, and several have student bodies in the hundreds. The spokesperson said SPD has no specific metric for measuring whether a recruitment event was an effective use of city resources, such as the number of people who applied after an event.

“Recruitment success is measured through overall applicant pipeline growth, diversity metrics, and long-term hiring outcomes rather than a single-event numeric target,” the spokesperson said. “Since implementing a more strategic and dedicated recruitment approach, SPD has seen applicant numbers reach historic levels.”

In fact, recruitment spiked shortly after the city signed a labor agreement with the police guild that boosted starting salaries to nearly $120,000, and more than $126,000 after a six-month training period, making Seattle one of the highest-paying police departments in the country. The raises represented a 42 percent pay boost over just five years.

The recruitment tour has included other stops outside the Pacific Northwest. This month alone, according to SPD’s recruitment events page, SPD has sent recruitment teams to a women’s softball tournament in Clearwater, Florida, as well as a Rutgers University event in Piscatawy, New Jersey; the University of Idaho; Brigham Young University; Utah Valley University; and Utah State University.

With the exception of the CIAA schools and Rutgers, most of the colleges and universities where SPD is holding recruitment events, including those in the Pacific Northwest, have student bodies that are more than 70 percent white.

The spokesperson said Barnes did not participate directly in the recruitment events.

Conservative talk show host Jason Rantz reported today that SPD was the “corporate sponsor” for the CIAA tournament and wrote the group a $25,000 check. We have reached out to SPD to ask whether they believe this sponsorship complies with state law prohibiting gifts of public funds.

Screenshot via YouTube.

2. Barnes did take a trip to Washington D.C. recently, accompanied by his security detail, where he attended a recording of a Tiny Desk Concert by Jill Scott, part of the long-running NPR series. A photo Barnes posted on Facebook shows him in the crowd, along with two members of his security.

SPD did not immediately respond to a question about how much it cost to provide Barnes with security while he attended the NPR concert. A spokesman told us late Wednesday afternoon that Barnes was in D.C. last November to attend the Active Bystander for Law Enforcement conference, “a nationally recognized program that trains officers to intervene when they spot officer misconduct and provides resources for officer health and wellness.”

Mayor Wilson

After PubliCola Story Details Discrimination Claims, Civil Rights Office Director Accuses Deputy Mayor of Threats and “Defamation”
Seattle Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt: Not a source.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday, after PubliCola reported on turmoil at the city’s Office for Civil Rights, SOCR director Wheeler-Smith sent a lengthy email titled “COMPLAINT re DEPUTY MAYOR Brian Surratt” to the city’s Human Resources department and the City Attorney’s office, cc’ing a list of city officials, reporters, and editors (though not PubliCola).

“I write to submit a formal complaint against Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt who engaged in workplace misconduct by threatening me while I was on vacation celebrating my 50th birthday,” the email begins. “Given the city’s efforts to tarnish my name, character, and reputation through defamatory accusations and allegations, I thought it imperative to get my complaint filed quickly despite being on FMLA to support my mother” through a health challenge.

The complaint is based on two assertions. First, Wheeler-Smith says Surratt told him to resign before my story came out or it would be “really bad” for him. Second, he says Surratt and possibly other Wilson cabinet members “worked in tandem” with me to craft a false story about Wheeler-Smith based on “anonymous sources, mistruths, and misrepresentations.”

“It is devastating to learn that people in the Cabinet would work to coordinate such a piece going so far as to direct a few disgruntled staff—current and former—to the reporter,” Wheeler-Smith claimed.

PubliCola’s story was about allegations by Wheeler-Smith’s employees that their boss and his deputy engaged in “discrimination, retaliation, harassment, and mismanagement,” in the words of a memo to Wilson from their union, PROTEC17. Acting on behalf of represented staff, PROTEC17 asked Wilson to remove Wheeler-Smith shortly before she took office. Under a law passed in 2017, the SOCR director can only be removed for “just cause.”

Nine current SOCR employees and one who recently left the department spoke with me on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation. In all, I spoke with about a quarter of SOCR’s current staff.

Surratt, Wheeler-Smith claimed, had informed him on February 7 that “a story would be coming out from Erica Barnett and that it was really bad.” Wheeler-Smith wrote that this was the first time he had heard of such a story, and that he was “flabbergasted” at this news.

In fact, I told Wheeler-Smith I was writing a story more than a week before he said Surratt contacted him. On January 29, I reached out to Wheeler-Smith directly and through SOCR’s communications staffer, Sage Leibenson, describing each of the allegations individually. I requested a phone or Zoom interview with Wheeler-Smith but said “email is fine” as an alternative, and I included dozens of detailed questions.

My email concluded, “‘I apologize for the voluminous number of questions in this email; however, I always think it’s better to put everything out there than for anyone to be blindsided by allegations or concerns that they were unaware of or would like the opportunity to respond to.”

After I received no response to that email, I sent the list of questions again on February 20, writing, “I’m following up on these questions. I’m planning to publish a story next week about the union’s request, on behalf of staff, for Director Wheeler-Smith to be removed for cause and the experiences described to me by staff, and I’m re-sending these questions to provide another opportunity to respond.” I never heard back.

In the email he sent Tuesday, Wheeler-Smith said he knew Surratt was “the source” for my story, because he had “made a rookie mistake. Generally, when someone can point to a story coming out, its author, and its contents—they were in fact the source. … It is devastating to learn that people in the Cabinet would work to coordinate such a piece going so far as to direct a few disgruntled staff—current and former—to the reporter.”

Surratt was not a source for the story. Wilson’s office did not respond to PubliCola’s questions on Tuesday.

Wheeler-Smith alleged that during their call on February 7, Surratt said he should resign or “things would ‘get really ugly’ for me.” Quoting a text message he sent Surratt, his complaint continued, “I am confident that an investigation will absolve me of any wrongdoing and I will be vindicated. I am in discussions with counsel about legal action to protect my character and reputation given the defamatory nature of the allegations.”

“I would urge [Human Resources investigators] and the City Council to redirect their energy from these baseless claims and examine why 50% of Black department heads have been relieved of their duties under this administration,” Wheeler-Smith wrote. “This alone signifies why I must stay and so must this Department.”

Wilson replaced two of Harrell’s seven Black department heads: former transportation department director Adiam Emery, who was previously Harrell’s deputy mayor, and Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs director Hamdi Mohamed, who spoke with PubliCola about her departure last month.

City Council, Mental Health, Police

Police Contract Has Prevented Unarmed Crisis Responders From Doing their Jobs, CARE Chief Says
Seattle CARE Department Chief Amy Barden

By Erica C. Barnett

During a tense meeting of the Seattle City Council’s public safety committee on Tuesday, Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department chief Amy Barden said a labor agreement between the city and the police guild has prevented the CARE Team, a group of social workers trained to respond to mental health crisis calls, from doing their jobs effectively.  “It is unacceptable to not fully maximize this important team, and it’s also unacceptable to waste even one dollar in such a challenging budget environment,” Barden said bluntly.

As PubliCola has reported, the CARE Team has to operate under the limitations of a Memorandum of Understanding adopted as part of the Seattle Police Officers Guild contract last year.

But the contract also includes many restrictions that result in police, rather than CARE, continuing to respond to most 911 calls. (A police sergeant determines which calls get routed to CARE—another way in which the team’s work remains directed and constrained by the police department.) Those limitations prohibit the team from responding to calls if “drug paraphernalia,” such as foil or a pipe, is visible; if a person seems likely to be “confrontational”; if a person in crisis is inside a building or car; or if there is an “indication” that the person has committed any crime, among many other restrictions.

The new rules also prohibit CARE from responding if a minor is present—a factor that could be contributing to a gender imbalance in the type of people CARE assists. “Perhaps we are not serving women as often as we should, because they have children with them,” Barden said.

CARE is not a party to that contract, and Barden did not see the new restrictions on her team until after labor negotiations wrapped up and the contract became public.

Last week, Barden said, the CARE team was told 911 would not dispatch the team, with or without police officers present, to any “private property where someone could be trespassed” for a crime, such as shoplifting. “What this means—and this actually happened last night—is that someone can be in a QFC parking lot, clearly struggling mentally or emotionally, and when that QFC employee calls 911 and asks if we can send someone to provide resources, our only option is to send an officer. We are not even permitted to send an officer and dual dispatch the CARE responders at the same time.”

The way Seattle’s 911 system is set up, a police sergeant decides in the moment whether calls can be dispatched to CARE,  effectively putting police in charge of a separate public safety department. In the incident Monday night, an SPD sergeant determined that CARE couldn’t respond to a crisis call on the sidewalk outside a QFC in the North Precinct because they were near the QFC door; a 911 dispatcher sent police instead.

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The CARE Team is the only group of non-SPD first responders that is explicitly prohibited from responding to crises in specific locations and scenarios. The Fire Department, Health One (operated by SFD), and SPD’s civilian Community Service Officers have no similar restrictions. Under the restrictions, Barden said, CARE can only respond to between 10 and 20 of the 2,400 calls 911 receives on a typical day. “Today, we estimate that the 24 responders are, on average, fulfilling only 28% of their capacity due to the constraints described,” Barden said.

When the city first started discussing whether a team of unarmed social workers could respond to 911 calls, back in 2020, police argued that they needed to be on hand in case the situation escalated and suddenly became dangerous.

After a lengthy public debate, CARE began as a “dual-dispatch” system in which CARE responders would have to wait for police to accompany them and confirm that the scene was safe before letting them proceed. The SPOG contract adopted last year allowed CARE, for the first time, to respond to certain 911 calls without a police escort, and lifted restrictions on the size of the team. This year, the CARE Team is supposed to expand to 48 people.

On Tuesday, Chief Barnes resuscitated many of the same talking points police made in the years leading up to the latest contract, arguing that  it’s risky to send social workers out on calls that might start as something that seems innocuous, like trespassing, and escalate into violence. For instance, Barnes said, he once had a gun pointed at him while responding to a call that was originally reported as “dementia.” You just never know, Barnes suggested, when a situation might go off the rails. But according to Barden, the CARE team has only had to call police for additional assistance 16 times since 2023, and never because a team member was in physical danger, because they only respond to calls that are unlikely to escalate, based on the analysis of 911 call outcomes that preceded CARE’s deployment,

Barnes seemed particularly affronted at the idea (which, to be clear, no one had suggested) that police don’t care about the communities where they work,

“Most police officers that I have learned from and work with, they want to serve their community, too, and simply having a badge and gun doesn’t mean that we don’t care,” Barnes said. “Doesn’t mean that we don’t have children with autism. Doesn’t mean we don’t have parents that are suffering from dementia. And we want to serve our community just like everyone else. Just because we have a badge and a gun doesn’t mean that we should be relegated to certain types of calls.”

CARE, like the other 130-plus unarmed first-responder teams that exist across the nation, was created in response to community outcry against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and local killings by police, including Charleena Lyles, a woman experiencing a mental health crisis who was shot by two officers after she called 911 in 2017.

The demand for unarmed first responders, in other words, originated with Seattle residents who demanded an alternative to police response. By design, programs like CARE “relegate” police to other types of calls. The fact that Barnes seems eager to relitigate this settled question seems to suggest the former Madison police chief hasn’t fully bought in to the way alternative response works in Seattle.

It’s unclear if the city can change the agreement that restricts CARE from responding to most calls without reopening the entire SPOG contract, which isn’t up for renewal until 2028. Barnes said he talked to the new head of the SPOG, Ken Loux, recently, and Loux  “informed me, and he said I could say this publicly, that they support CARE, but they want to abide by the MOU or the agreement, that’s it.””

Alison Holcomb, Mayor Katie Wilson’s public safety advisor, told the council that Wilson’s office “is actively consulting with the city attorney’s office on the proper interpretation of the collective bargaining agreement and this particular addendum, referred to as the CARE MOU, and we hope to have an answer about what potential next steps could look like in the near future.”

To read my live reporting on Tuesday’s meeting, which includes reactions from city council members and more comments from Barden and Barnes, check out my Bluesky thread.

 

LGBTQ+, Mayor Wilson, race

Staff Call for Removal of Civil Rights Office Director, Citing “Discrimination, Harassment, Retaliation, and Mismanagement”

By Erica C. Barnett

Three years ago, before the City Council unanimously appointed Derrick Wheeler-Smith as director of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, a few voices of dissent stood out among the many supporters who showed up to urge the council to approve his nomination. SOCR conducts investigations into alleged civil rights violations, enforces fair-housing law, oversees several city commissions, and is in charge of the city’s internal Race and Social Justice Initiative.

Wheeler-Smith is a longtime community advocate, high-school basketball coach, and Rainier Valley resident who headed up King County’s Zero Youth Detention Program and has advocated for treating gun violence as an urgent public health issue. Appointed by then-mayor Bruce Harrell, Wheeler-Smith publicly criticized Harrell’s high-profile initiative to put several neighborhoods under police camera surveillance, signing his name to a memo that laid out the harms cameras can pose to the communities of color that most often find themselves under police surveillance.

But back in 2023, not everyone considered Wheeler-Smith a well-rounded choice to head the civil rights department. The dissenters included members of the city’s LGBTQ Commission, who raised concerns about Wheeler-Smith’s previous employment by a Christian nonprofit with explicitly homophobic workplace policies. They also criticized Wheeler-Smith’s decision, shortly after taking the interim director position at SOCR, to send staff a long quote about morality that was written by a homophobic Kirkland pastor, which Wheeler-Smith misattributed to George Carlin. The quote criticized premarital sex, overweight people, and people who take psychiatric drugs.

“I don’t have any doubt that Derrick is a great leader,” LGBTQ Commission member Andrew Ashiofu said before his confirmation. “I do admire his community leadership and all he’s done, but I’m saying it’s not the time.”

Kristina Sawyckyj, a member of the city’s Disability Commission, testified that Wheeler-Smith had refused to meet with commission members and had been absent from their meetings. “He doesn’t reach out. He doesn’t participate with us. We don’t hear from him at all,” Sawyckyj said in public comment. “He might have some great skills on racial equity, but disability equity, and disability social justice, is also equally important here in Seattle.”

***

Nearly three years later, employees at SOCR say that many of the concerns raised during Wheeler-Smith’s nomination have borne out. On December 1, the union representing SOCR employees, PROTEC17, sent a memo to mayor-elect Katie Wilson’s transition team urging them to remove Wheeler-Smith and his deputy, Fahima Mohamed, from their positions.

“Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights cannot credibly enforce equity and justice in the community when its own leadership engages in discriminatory conduct,” PROTEC17 representative Matt Edgerton wrote.

The memo cited an internal survey of SOCR staff in which a majority of respondents reported witnessing or experiencing workplace misconduct or inappropriate behavior. It also described about 20 of these incidents in detail. PubliCola spoke to a racially and gender-diverse group of ten current and former SOCR employees, including about a quarter of SOCR’s current staff, who corroborated the details in the memo and provided additional insight about their own experiences working at the office.

Staffers alleged that Wheeler-Smith texted misogynistic memes to his employees, ignored repeated requests for gender-neutral restrooms, downplayed the rights of LBGTQ+, Asian, Latino, and disabled people, and argued that SOCR shouldn’t weigh in on the rights of homeless people because homelessness is a temporary status—a sharp departure from previous practice. (Prior to 2017, SOCR was in charge of monitoring encampment sweeps).

The employees also raised concerns about an AI-generated racial bias worksheet that Wheeler-Smith directed them to fill out and submit using the city’s email system, potentially exposing staffers’ private information to people making public records requests.

“SOCR Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith and Deputy Director Fahima Mohamed have created a workplace environment characterized by discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and mismanagement,” the union’s memo concludes. “PROTEC17 respectfully recommends that you remove SOCR Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith and Deputy Director Fahima Mohamed early in your administration.”

SOCR staffers requested anonymity when they spoke with PubliCola in order to share their stories candidly without fear of retaliation.

Neither Wheeler-Smith nor Mohamed responded to a detailed list of questions PubliCola sent in late January or a followup request in February.

SOCR staffers told PubliCola and their union representatives that they were initially reluctant to speak about their concerns, even through relatively private channels, out of fear of retaliation. PROTEC17’s memo documents one incident last year in which a staffer who contacted human resources said both Wheeler-Smith and Mohamed told them “that ‘we keep things in house at SOCR’ and the next time this staff member contacts HR, ‘there won’t be a next time.”’

It was only once SOCR union stewards distributed the staff survey and started scheduling coffee check-ins, several staffers told PubliCola, that they started to realize that they weren’t alone. “The union survey was the first time I’ve seen a properly conducted staff survey,” one current staffer said. “That matters so much when trust has been broken, and through shared experiences coming to light, we were heard. It’s taken a lot to trust the process. Staff organizing made that happen.”

LGBTQ+ Concerns Sidelined

SOCR staffers said it was clear early on that Wheeler-Smith’s personal views on LGBTQ+ civil rights did not align with the longstanding values of the department. One staffer recalled an incident that occurred before Wheeler-Smith’s confirmation, in which the then-interim director asked whether had to go to mandatory LGBTQ flag raising and Pride events, given his “personal objections,” as the memo puts it, and his view that supporting LGBTQ+ rights was a matter of personal choice.

“He draws a pretty clear boundary between what he describes as the community that is most associated with civil rights, and then queer folks, which of course, betrays the history of civil rights in the United States,” one staffer said.

At times, these internal conflicts have led to public controversies. One such incident involved a partnership between SOCR and Wheeler-Smith’s former employer, the nonprofit World Vision, with SOCR on a school supply drive in 2023. World Vision is a conservative Christian charity that does not hire people in same-sex relationships. The partnership prompted some employees to ask Wheeler-Smith during a meeting why the city’s civil rights office was partnering with a group that had explicitly discriminatory employment policies, staffers said.

According to one SOCR staffer who attended the meeting, “Derrick’s hands were both on the table, and he had his head down the whole time while the rest of us were discussing it. [When he] eventually started speaking, he was really defensive, and said, ‘Good people do bad things, and if we vetted everybody out who did something wrong, we wouldn’t have any partners.'”

The following year, SOCR signed a $40,000 contract with Wheeler-Smith’s former supervisor at World Vision, Leonetta Elaiho, to “provide support and strategic planning” for a leadership training fellowship. Elaiho was one of the commenters who urged the council to approve Wheeler-Smith’s appointment in 2023, saying she’d known him and his family for more than 20 years.

Around the same time as the World Vision controversy, several staffers said, Wheeler-Smith sent an email to staff that included a long quote by a controversial Kirkland pastor, Bob Moorehead, about the ills of modern society.

While the quote didn’t include any explicitly anti-queer content, it criticized wives who work outside the home and people who use psychiatric drugs, along with “throwaway morality, one night stands, [and] overweight bodies.”

“It was very slut-shaming, looking down on folks who took medication, fatphobic,” the former SOCR staffer recalled.

“I regularly got misgendered”

The former staffer, who’s nonbinary, said they repeatedly asked for a gender-neutral restroom at SOCR’s office, located in a leased space in the Central Building downtown, only to be dismissed or told “we’ll consider that when we move” to a different building in the future. During their entire time at SOCR, the staffer said, they had to use a public restroom on the ground floor of the building.

The slight felt especially cold, the former staffer said, coming from the only city department with an official mandate to focus on gender justice. Among other anti-discrimination laws, SOCR enforces the city’s gender-neutral restroom law.

“We’re mandated to be in the office and there’s no equitable bathroom access for me,” the former staffer said. “It feels especially bad for SOCR, which had, at the time, the only gender justice position in the city, that has been vacant for five years, with no efforts to fill it.” Current staffers brought up the same story independently, and one recalled that Mohamed, the SOCR deputy, questioned allowing “men” to use the women’s restroom.

“I regularly got misgendered by the department director—by Derrick,” the former staffer recalled. “When I tried to bring that to him and say, ‘This is really hurtful, especially given the position you’re in,’ it felt like it was dismissed in the classic way—’I’m trying, it’s not coming from hate in my heart.’ It felt like one of those apologies where I was supposed to say ‘It’s okay, it’s not a big deal.'”

According to the union memo, deputy director Mohamed also “repeatedly misgendered staff members who identified as gender non-binary by continuing to use incorrect pronouns despite correction.” A current SOCR staffer said Mohamed routinely refused to participate when people identified their pronouns during meetings, despite being asked to do so.

“We have a standard of, you use your names and pronouns so that folks can know how to refer you, and she’ll just not use pronouns, like, 90 percent of the time—just refuses to do it. It’s jarring, because everyone else is doing it,” the staffer said.

In another incident, recounted by several current employees, a DJ hired for an all-staff SOCR training directed the group divide up between men and women (or “boys and girls,” as one staffer remembered it) for a team-building game, leaving those who did not identify as either men or women standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. “It was straight-up division by cisgender women and cisgender women,” one staffer, who refused to participate in the exercise, said.

In 2024, a group of employees organized a two-day gender justice training for department staff. Two staffers told PubliCola that Wheeler-Smith went to the training for a few hours on the first day, then left and did not return. During one of the discussions, two staffers recalled, a staffer raised the issue of transphobia they had witnessed at the office. As the staffer was talking, Mohamed sent them a text message that said “tread lightly,” effectively shutting down the conversation.

Other staffers said Wheeler-Smith and Mohamed reacted inappropriately to high-profile incidents that impacted the LGBTQ community, such as former mayor Harrell’s efforts to shut down the longtime queer nude beach at Denny Blaine Park. According to one staffer, Mohamed laughed openly, in front of multiple SOCR staffers, when she saw that Harrell sent a text message to wealthy homeowner Stuart Sloan saying “I share your disgust” with queer people who use the beach. At the time, Sloan and Harrell were collaborating to build a playground that would have forced the nude beach to close.

“It was very clear that we couldn’t say anything because we could be retaliated against, even though it was deeply uncomfortable to have the second in command at the Office for Civil Rights laughing about, you know, disparaging comment in connection to queer folks in the city,” the staffer said.

The same staffer recalled that Wheeler-Smith criticized Harrell’s public statements supporting a counter-protest against the right-wing, anti-trans “Mayday USA” event in Cal Anderson Park. “He said, ‘Christians have religious freedom,”’ the staffer recalled. “Christians are not a embattled minority group in this country, and for anyone to frame the Cal Anderson protest as if it was this symmetrical conflict just reveals how little he understands power.”

LGBTQ Commission Co-Chair Ashley Ford recalled that after the Cal Anderson protest, Wheeler-Smith “tried to prevent us as a commission from contacting the mayor’s office or council,” sending an email to commissioners titled “Coordination on External Communications” that chided commission members for speaking out against the police escalation.

“I request that for future communications, particularly with the Mayor’s Office and other city departments, that you include me in advance. This will assure that we present a unified message,” Wheeler-Smith wrote.

According to the PROTEC17 memo to Wilson, Wheeler-Smith also “directed [the] removal of LGBTQ imagery from a general office publication, questioning its connection to civil rights and Black history” and “shared a podcast titled ‘Can You Be LGBTQ and Christian’ with staff”; the memo alleges that Wheeler-Smith talked about his own Christian beliefs and asked employees about their personal religious views at the office.

“Grotesquely inappropriate”

Staffers who spoke to PubliCola also accused Wheeler-Smith of making inappropriate remarks about Black women and about sex.

Several employees also said Wheeler-Smith sent misogynistic messages to male staff, including a series of tweets by Kanye West about women “selling pussy” and a meme of Kamala Harris with bruises on her knees that read “CONGRATS to Kamala on her new promotion! I don’t know how you do it!”

“The clear message of this meme was that Kamala Harris, an accomplished woman of color, exchanged sexual favors for career mobility,” PROTEC17’s memo notes.

“I’ve come to know that he he has some deeply held sexist, and I will say almost disdain for, Black women,” one employee who received the messages said. “Don’t get me wrong. I mean, I was socialized like every other American male, but I wouldn’t be in this work if I still held those beliefs.”

Distributing the image, the memo continued, “perpetuated harmful stereotype about women trading sex for advancement, [had] racist undertones targeting woman of color, created hostile environment for women and people of color, [and was] grotesquely inappropriate for civil rights office director.”

At an after-hours event at a mandatory staff retreat, for example, multiple staffers said Wheeler-Smith the following toast: “Life has its ups and downs. I hope all of yours are in the bedroom.” At other mandatory events, staffers recalled, Wheeler-Smith brought up sex unprompted—like an all-staff lunch where he told a strange story about being propositioned after accidentally ending up at a swingers’ resort. Both these incidents are included in the union’s memo.

“Can We Talk About Xenophobia?”

Many of the staffers who shared stories with PROTEC17 and spoke to PubliCola said they appreciated Wheeler-Smith’s focus on anti-Blackness in Seattle, an issue that Seattle’s white leaders and residents have frequently dismissed, ignored, or addressed with performative statements rather than meaningful action. But staffers also said that Wheeler-Smith’s focus on anti-Black discrimination and bias has sometimes come at the expense of other marginalized people who face hate and discrimination—including people with disabilities, Asian Americans, Latinos, and people experiencing homelessness.

During the COVID pandemic, for instance, staffers said Wheeler-Smith was unreceptive when they tried to talk about directing resources toward addressing anti-Asian xenophobia and hate crimes. “One of our staff members said, ‘Can we talk about the xenophobia and show support for our Asian community?'” one staffer recalled. “And he was like, ‘Who cares about that?'”

That staffer said Wheeler-Smith walked out of a staff tour of the Wing Luke Museum designed to educate SOCR employees about Asian American history and anti-Asian discrimination in America. Partway through the tour, the staffer said, Wheeler-Smith excused himself and did not return. When staffers started asking where he was, the staffer recalled, they were told,  “‘Oh, Derrick left. He went home.’ He doesn’t care enough to be there to even support us, his own staff members, and stay for the whole event.”

Staffers told PubliCola it has been equally difficult to get Wheeler-Smith engaged on the issue of federal immigration enforcement, arguably the most pressing emergent civil rights issue facing blue cities across the country. SOCR’s website includes links to resource guides produced by the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. And the department recently posted a “Statement on ICE Actions and the Importance of Solidarity” from Wheeler-Smith that touches on a grab bag of civil rights issues, including book bans and Medicaid cuts. Continue reading “Staff Call for Removal of Civil Rights Office Director, Citing “Discrimination, Harassment, Retaliation, and Mismanagement”” →