discrimination, Mayor Wilson, Police

Wilson Caves on Stadium Surveillance, Two More Cops Allege Discrimination as SPD Settles Earlier Claims for $2.6 Million

1. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson used unspecified “general but credible threats to safety and security” during the upcoming World Cup games to justify her last-minute decision to turn on more than 20 police surveillance cameras around the stadiums where the games will take place. In a late-afternoon announcement on Friday, Wilson said this information “has persuaded our law enforcement, emergency management, and FIFA security partners that we should be operating at a heightened risk level.”

SPD has staunchly defended the cameras, arguing the footage has already helped police solve crimes. Opponents have argued that the footage is vulnerable to abuse by federal agencies like ICE, vigilantes targeting people who travel to Seattle for reproductive or gender-affirming health care, and police officers themselves.

Wilson’s office told PubliCola won’t keep the cameras on after the World Cup. “Once the games are over and we return to normal safety and security operations, we will turn the cameras off until we make decisions about the original pilot,” a Wilson spokesperson said.

Wilson previously announced that the city would install the cameras, which connect to SPD’s Real Time Crime Center, but not turn them on until her office has had time to evaluate the “pilot” that placed cameras downtown, on Aurora Ave. N., and around 12th and Jackson. The NYU Policing Project just started work on a data and security audit of the police surveillance program.

Earlier this week, Wilson said in an onstage interview that the city already has access to many cameras around the stadium district, including live feeds operated by the Seattle Department of Transportation as well as private cameras operated by businesses, which have historically provided SPD with footage to help them investigate crimes.

2. The city settled a lawsuit filed by four female Seattle police officers who accused former police chief Adrian Diaz of sexual harassment and gender discrimination. The officers—Lauren Truscott, Valarie Carson, Kame Spencer, and Jean Gulpan—will receive a total of $2.6 million, according to a press release from their attorney, Sumeer Singh. Singh now works for Frey Buck, the same firm that once represented Diaz. Last year, PubliCola reported that Buck had ditched Diaz as a client.

“We are happy to see the City of Seattle take accountability for what was a clear lapse in leadership by the previous administration. We hope new leadership will improve working conditions for everyone within the Seattle Police Department, Singh said in a statement.

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3. News of the settlement comes shortly after two LGBTQ+ officers, Anna Fishel and Doug Raguso, filed tort claims against the city, alleging the department discriminated against them and denied them promotions based on their sexual orientation and, in Fishel’s case, her gender.

Fishel, a detective in SPD’s policy unit, said in her complaint that she passed the sergeant’s exam in 2024, rising to number one on the promotion list in 2025, but has been passed over for promotion by five other people since then. During a meeting with Barnes to make the case that she should be promoted as sergeant over her division, Fishel wrote, “I laid out my credentials and experience and my work on the 30×30 initiative,” which established the goal that 30 percent of SPD’s recruit class will be women by 2030.

“I also told him that I am the sole caregiver to my daughter and the only gay female up for Sergeant,” Fishel wrote in her claim. “Despite this, my ranking, and the support of my chain of command, Chief Barnes refused to promote me in place. Instead, he offered me the position of Third Watch Patrol Sergeant,” a position that would have required her to find an overnight caregiver for her child. The position Fishel was seeking went to a straight man, she wrote.

Raguso, a lieutenant, also said he was repeatedly passed over for promotion—including last year, when Barnes removed him as acting captain of Capitol Hill’s East Precinct and reassigned him to the Real Time Crime Center without a promotion. Instead of Raguso, who had worked in the East Precinct for years and was well-liked by many in the city’s historic LGBTQ-friendly neighborhood, Barnes promoted Mike Tietjen and assigned him to head up the precinct.

Barnes’ promotion of Tietjen, which the chief touted on social media, proved controversial: As a lieutenant patrolling the 2020 protest zone around Cal Anderson Park, Tietjen drove onto a sidewalk full of protesters in 2020 and compared them to “cockroaches” as they scattered to avoid his SUV. He was also involved in an incident in which a trans woman accused officers of heckling her and demanding to know what was under her skirt. Barnes eventually removed Tietjen and replaced him with Captain Jim Britt, another straight white man.

An earlier tort claim, by two former command staff members Barnes fired last year, also accused Barnes and members of his team of gender and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. Barnes oversaw a dramatic crackdown on nudity at the nude beach at Denny Blaine Park last year. His chief of staff, Alan Ricketts, reportedly blew off concerns about the optics of arresting people sunbathing at the LGBTQ+-friendly beach, telling one of the former command staff members, “we’re not here for the gays.”

Police, public disclosure, Tech

SPD’s Chief Spokesperson Asked AI for Help with Interview Prep, Rewriting Blog Posts, and More

SPD says the communications director only used AI tools a handful of times, and only “to evaluate their utility”

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department communications director, Barbara DeLollis, used AI chatbots that are not approved for city use to compose a sample script for a woman preparing for her first media interviews, to produce a list of “Interesting best practice on-camera ideas for big police Department,”  to produce a “Comprehensive Communications Toolkit for a Police Department Exiting a Consent Decree,” and to to rewrite a published blog post about a nuisance motel on Aurora.

That prompt reads, in full, “hi make this a better story for the public of a city that doenst liek crime or disorder” (sic).

DeLollis used ChatGPT to produce the sample blog post, and Perplexity to produce the other documents, according to records PubliCola obtained through a public disclosure request. The city’s information technology department confirmed that neither program is approved for use by city employees.

Last September, after noticing that a number of the department’s public communications had many of the hallmarks of AI, PubliCola requested “documents detailing all uses of generative AI” for the first nine months of the year by communications staff as well as Police Chief Shon Barnes and his staff.

The Seattle Police Department provided seven documents, all produced by DeLollis, and closed our request. We asked SPD to confirm that they are asserting that Barnes has never used generative AI, and that the seven documents represent every single use of AI by DeLollis and SPD’s entire communications team. They said yes.

However, the records themselves include two AI-generated documents for which SPD did not produce the written prompts that preceded them—an obvious omission of records responsive to our request that raises concerns about whether the documents really represent every use of AI by DeLollis or other staffers.

Last year, an anonymous person filed two complaints ahout SPD’s use of AI with the Office of Police Accountability, citing the apparent use of AI in a bio of Barnes’ chief of staff, Alan Ricketts, a bullet-pointed statement from Barnes about a violence prevention and enforcement effort, and other documents. The evidence in those complaints included a blog post full of passive-voice, AI slop-style sentences such as “On Thursday, we were confronted with a targeted homicide occurring in front of a place of worship.”  That complaint resulted in a supervisor action (essentially, a reprimand).

An SPD spokesperson responded to PubliCola’s nine detailed questions with a statement that read in part: “Last year, a department employee tested various AI tools to evaluate their utility in communication functions like editing, interview preparation, and blog strategy to see if they could offer fresh perspectives.”

The Office of Police Accountability “determined that using AI tools in this way without appropriate acknowledgement was a violation of city policy at that time,” the spokesperson said. “The department does not condone using generative AI to write narratives or communications.”

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A spokesperson for Mayor Katie Wilson told PubliCola, “Unapproved AI software is now blocked on city devices to ensure compliance with critical privacy, transparency, and records protections. The Mayor expects employees to use these tools in compliance with city policy.”

DeLollis’ prompts are riddled with typos that make them challenging to credit as official SPD work product and sometimes hard to interpret.

For example, in one Perplexity prompt—”Lost thengoala for a daily police blog where uoupost both police actions and responses to 911 callbut also show in compelling ways the other impactand resorts of work that a cutting edge evidencebased department does”—DeLollis appears to be asking the AI to define the goals for SPD’s Blotter blog. (The response, which includes generic advice like “Combining transparency with compelling storytelling and data will build trust while showcasing the full scope and positive impact of a modern police force,” seems less than useful.)

In two other conversations with the Perplexity chatbot, DeLollis appears to be seeking advice for a female employee doing her first media interviews and who, as a woman, tends to overprepare for things. SPD did not respond to our questions about the purpose of these prompts or whether they were on behalf of a specific woman.

“So we know why woken over prepare for media interviews but for our client we want to frame this advice on a positive way to prevent them from feeling negative. Help,” one of these prompts reads. “Frame this in positive way for client who is going to need prep for her first media interviews. Women typically over prepare for research drive reasons. It is t helpful though,” another begins.

The records SPD provided for the latter Perplexity query include an ongoing conversation between DeLollis and the chatbot, including a request for a sample script and two requests for academic research.

Because it’s AI (and AI sucks), Perplexity responded to the prompt about helping a woman avoid over-preparing with a list of reasons why it’s important to prepare. In the second conversation, the chatbot added 23 “sources” that included 10 duplicative links and several posts that were unrelated to the question, including guides for interviewers about talking to women who are researchers or subject-matter experts.

Perplexity also produced two guides for communicating about the end of the federal consent decree. (These are the two documents for which SPD did not include the AI prompts). The first is a series of bullet-pointed lists; the second, mentioned earlier, is more of a media “kit,” with sample op/ed language and social media posts, like this suggestion for a post on X: “We’ve made big changes in how we train, respond, and build trust. Now that we’ve met the federal standards for reform, our work continues—with you.”

In the final prompt, DeLollis asks Perplexity to come up with “Interesting best practice on-camera ideas for big police Department.”

It’s unclear whether DeLollis created the chat prompts from a city of Seattle computer or personal device. Washington’s public disclosure law requires city employees to produce all records that are responsive to a request, including those produced on personal devices or using personal emails or cell phone numbers.

homelessness, public disclosure

Investigation Found That KCRHA Director Retaliated Against Staffers Who Complained

By Erica C. Barnett

An investigation last year found that a “preponderance of the evidence” supports the conclusion that King County Regional Homelessness Authority director retaliated against two former stffers, Edmund Witter and Xochitl Maykovich, after the two voiced concerns about Kinnison’s leadership at a contentious staff meeting last year.

As PubliCola reported in August, staff questioned Kinnison’s decision to hire two white male executives, at salaries of $200,000 each, at the same time that she was proposing to eliminate 22 positions and lay off 13 people, including lower-paid staffers of color, to cut costs. The KCRHA board resolved the complaints against Kinnison last October by hiring an executive coach.

Simon Foster, then the deputy executive, accused Kinnison of hiring white male executives because she believed it would help the agency politically. He accused Kinnison of retaliating against him by reducing his duties. James Rouse, the agency’s former chief financial officer, said Kinnison retaliated against him by directing him not to present a preliminary 2026 budget after he said he didn’t support the proposal.

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The investigation, by the law firm Haggard & Ganson, did not find that Kinnison retaliated against Foster or Rouse. Foster’s and Rouse’s positions were eliminated last October. The KCRHA never hired another CFO—a decision that has come up recently as the KCRHA’s funders discuss whether to shut the agency down in light of a recent forensic audit that identified major gaps in financil reporting and accountability.

Maykocich, then the KCRHA’s interim chief program officer, accused Kinnison of retaliating against her by working to undermine her application for the permanent CPO position by, among other actions, sending an email to then-deputy director Simon Foster criticizing her job performance just 20 minutes after the meeting took place.

Witter, then the KCRHA’s general counsel, accused Kinnison of retaliating against him by removing him from all employment-related legal work.

Maykovich left the agency in September. Witter’s position was eliminated in the October purge, leaving KCRHA without full-time legal counsel. Kinnison hired one of the two white men at the center of the complaints, former Lake City Partners director William Towey, immediately after the layoffs.

A KCRHA spokesperson declined to comment on the findings.

On Thursday, Maykovich sued her former employer for alleged violations of the state Public Records Act, alleging that the agency illegally withheld records related to the investigation into staff complaints about Kinnison. Maykovich requested “All complaints against Kelly Kinnison” as well as “All emails, notes, and other materials relating to the investigation into Kelly Kinnison.” According to the court filing, the KCRHA produced 22 pages of redacted records and closed the request, which the lawsuit calls “obviously an incomplete response.”

The future of the KCRHA remains up in the air after a forensic audit found widespread financial failures at the agency, including a growing negative balance, widespread accounting errors, and erroneous invoices, among other serious issues. At a meeting of the City Council’s human services committee on Friday, Kinnison and Towey minimized the audit findings, suggesting that they were almost entirely the result of “historical” problems stemming from the agency’s founding.

Kinnison said the agency will seek funding to hire someone into a a “CFO-type role” from the temp staffing agency Robert Half, which charges significant fees on top of their temp workers’ salaries. Kinnison and Towey estimated that the cost of a temporary CFO would be around $500,000—more than twice the salary of the CFO Kinnison laid off last October.

Mayor Wilson

No More Laissez-Fare: Pilot Program Will Install Fare Gates at Up to 14 Stations
From Sound Transit presentation

By Erica C. Barnett

Sound Transit is recommending a “pilot” project that would add fare gates to as many as 14 light rail stations, citing high rates of fare “evasion” by riders who board trains without paying at ORCA card readers. The proposal would cost between etween $79 million and $88 million, according to staff, and bring in an additional $30 million a year by increasing fare compliance rates from a current estimate of 63 percent to 95 percent or higher.

In addition, Sound Transit’s executive director of security and fare evasion Brian de Place said, “There’s been a significant amount of attention, in transit circles at least, around other benefits from fare gates, including increased perceptions of safety [and] lower maintenance costs. And importantly, fare gates also allow the opportunity to de-conflict compliance-related actions that sometimes result in escalations and can put our workers at safety risk.”

In other words: Putting gates between riders and train make it less likely that people will board for free and argue with fare enforcement officers when they get caught.

According to a staff presentation, the pilot stations will likely include every Seattle station between Northgate and the International District, plus Redmond, Bellevue, Lynnwood, and SeaTac Airport. The pilot will exclude stations that are at-grade, largely for technical and safety reasons, Sound Transit principal architect Gavin Schaefer said.

In a “typical passenger journey,” Schaefer said, the “addition of the gates improves our passenger experience by making the transition [into the]” fare paid zone more legible. Currently, Sound Transit uses signs and yellow paint to designate the parts of stations where only paid riders are supposed to go.

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Although “fare evasion” is typically coded as a kind of illicit turnstile-jumping, a large percentage of people leaving stadium events, like Mariners games, routinely board crowded trains without paying. Both Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and Pierce County Executive Ryan Mello asked why Sound Transit isn’t proposing fare gates for the stadium station; Wilson also wanted to know how much this middle-class fare evasion contributed to the overall percentage of non-paying riders and whether Sound Transit had considered the impact of long lines for fare gates after sports events.

De Place said Sound Transit hadn’t calculated how many people fail to pay for light rail after stadium events, adding that “we do see people not paying at those times. Adding fare gates at Husky Stadium, where riders descend to the platform, “could actually help with that queuing and crowd control,” de Place added.

Wilson also wanted to know what the break-even ridership level would be if Sound Transit decided not to install fare gates and simply waited for fare payment to rise back toward pre-pandemic levels. “You would probably need to get back to” the pre-pandemic high of around 85 percent, de Place said, an outcome Sound Transit considers unlikely.

Wilson (who once made the case in PubliCola for a business tax to fund free transit) also wanted to know whether Sound Transit would make a more concerted effort to enroll people in its low-income fare discount program, which is open to people making up to twice the $16,000 federal poverty level.  A staffer said fare ambassadors already tell people about the program when they check for payment on the trains, suggesting that the burden for signing people up for reduced fare passes will continue to fall on social service providers.

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay also asked about “unintended consequences” of fare gates in other cities. But unlike Wilson, he praised some of the outcomes the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) has reported since it installed “hardened” fare gates that can trap riders who fail to pay. “They saw, I think it was $10 million in increased revenue, a 41 percent reduction in crime, [and] hundreds if not thousands of hours saved on cleanup time,” The new 7-foot-tall gates were controversial when they were introduced, with some riders calling them “prison-like” and complaining about long backups at the slow-moving new fare checkpoints.

Affordability, Mayor Wilson, Privacy

At City Club Event, Mayor Answers Questions Like “Why Isn’t Pizza Cheap Yet”

 

By Erica C. Barnett

FOX 13 anchor Han Kim interviewed Wilson last night at an event sponsored by City Club Seattle, hitting the mayor repeatedly with bad-faith questions such as “why should we increase the sales tax for transit when so many bus seat are empty” and “why is eating out still expensive when you said you would lower the cost of pizza?”

Kim even posed a couple of questions Wilson has answered ad infinitum at this point: Why did she dismiss the idea that rich people will leave Seattle over the statewide high-earners’ income tax (a story that made international news , thanks largely to nonstop, breathless coverage by right-wing local news outlets in Seattle) and is she still boycotting Starbucks (shortly after the election, Wilson appeared at a workers’ rally and said people shouldn’t buy from the anti-union company)?

Wilson did say she bought a disgusting-sounding “blueberry muffin” coffee drink the other day when she went to the Pike Place Market Starbucks to talk to workers about their labor concerns—hardly breaking news. but now we know.

I live-posted the entire event on Bluesky, including questions from a parade of angry audience members who wanted to know why homelessness and crime haven’t been fixed and seem to have gotten worse. Wilson had some nuanced responses to these perennial rhetorical questions, but she also seemed a bit frustrated with her interrogators, who interrupted her repeatedly mid-answer in a way that—I AM JUST SAYING—I never saw the public address former mayor Bruce Harrell.

Kim also spent several minutes demanding that Wilson respond to comments by former reality TV star and current LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, who claimed recently that a third of LA’s homeless population was “bused in from other states” by “body brokers” and would move 1,200 miles north to Seattle once he cracks down on their ability to access social services. Pratt also wants to force people with addiction into 72-hour mental health holds, which he referred to as “mandatory rehab.” None of this is worth dignifying.

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With the World Cup games just a few days away (and City Councilmember Bob Kettle insisting that the mayor had no right to place a “pause” on the new cameras under the camera expansion legislation the council adopted last year), Wilson was asked again about what circumstances would constitute a “credible threat,” which she has said would trigger the city to turn on cameras already installed in the stadium district.

“A credible threat is if we get information, as our law enforcement agencies often do, that someone has the intention to cause harm to people or property… and it is believable that they might be able to carry it out. That is a credible threat for us,” Wilson said.

The mayor also noted that to the extent that surveillance cameras are useful, it’s generally to provide evidence after a crime has been committed, not to stop crimes in progress. And she pointed out, as PubliCola has, that there are already many city-operated and private surveillance cameras around the stadiums.

Camera proponents have generally been more interested in anecdotes than quantitative data. Last year, Kettle opposed an amendment to the police surveillance plan that would have required an analysis to determine whether the cameras were accomplishing their stated goals before any additional expansions. The council approved new cameras just two weeks after the first set was installed.

 

housing, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Is Seattle’s Housing Market In Trouble?

By Erica C. Barnett

On the latest episode of Seattle Nice, we talked to Redfin’s chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, about the recent slowdown of Seattle’s housing market and what it means for the future of our economy.

When we talk about a “decline” in the housing market, that refers to a slowdown or reversal of housing price increases because more people are selling than buying—in other words, it’s bad news for people who already own houses that they are trying to sell, but potential good news for those trying to buy or rent here.

That’s an important distinction I tried to keep in focus as we talked about what a “slowdown” means for the city. Renters, who make up more than half of Seattle residents, bear the brunt of an increasingly expensive housing market; although buying a home in Seattle has become much more expensive than renting, anyone who does manage to buy a house has their monthly housing costs more or less locked in place, apart from annual tax increases, while rent generally increases unpredictably every year.

For those who already own houses, it’s true that the equity they gain through monthly mortgage payments only comes to fruition when they sell, which may not make sense if they plan to stay in Seattle, since they would have to buy a new place in the same expensive market. However, longer-term Seattle house owners whose mortgage is, say, $3,000 a month are exponentially better off than renters who would have to pay thousands more for the same house, since rent goes up so much faster than property taxes.

All of which is to say: If the pace of job growth continues to stall, as Fairweather predicts it will, affordability will improve somewhat. But, Fairweather noted, “we’ve already gotten to this place where affordability has gotten so bad that I don’t know if people will really feel like things are getting better for them” even if housing prices decline a bit. For renters, “if you’re going from $2,000 a month rent to $3,000 a month rent, and then I’m telling you, ‘Oh, but next month or next year it’s going to be $2,995, it doesn’t really feel like things are getting meaningfully better,” Fairweather said.

Fairweather also threw some cold water on David’s belief that AI could be a tool to meaningfully lower the cost of housing. Both she and David are more techno-optimistic than I am, but Fairweather noted that most of the factors that have increased the cost of housing development have nothing to do with brainstorming or permit times (two things David and Fairweather said AI might help with) but construction materials and human physical labor, which can’t be digitized.

Sandeep also brought up his “heretical view” that the region should expand its growth boundaries to allow much more housing outside current growth limits, which already allow significant amounts of suburban sprawl. The argument against sprawl isn’t so much an anti-housing argument, in my view; it’s that sprawl is energy-intensive and destroys natural resources (in our region, forests) and farmland while requiring huge investments in infrastructure that contributes to climate change, like the freeways and feeder roads to move people from the suburbs to their jobs in Seattle by car.

In addition, Fairweather said, moving the urban growth boundary outward “results in longer commute times … and if they’re paying for gas on top of their mortgage, then maybe they’re not actually doing any better, or maybe their quality of life isn’t any better” than it would be if they paid for a more expensive house closer to the city.