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”” →

Business, City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: February 21, 2026

Mayor Wilson walks back opposition to surveillance cameras, Councilmember Lin wants to repeal stadium district housing law, state commission deals a blow to public defense, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Tuesday, February 17

State Ruling Represents a Blow to Public Defense

A state commission ruled that King County was not required to bargain with unionized staff for the county’s Department of Public Defense (DPD) before moving inmates from the King County jail in downtown Seattle to the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), a decision with potentially serious implications for caseloads and staffing levels at DPD and other public defense agencies.

Settlement In SPD Killing of 23-Year-Old Will Cost Taxpayers Millions

A $29,011,000 settlement in the 2023 killing of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck in a crosswalk by a Seattle police officer driving 74 miles an hour in a 25-mile-an-hour zone, maxed out the city’s insurance policy, which has a $10 million deductible and a maximum of $20 million. Rising insurance claims, including from settlements with SPD, are putting a strain on the city’s budget.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Wednesday, February 18

In State of the City, Wilson Punts on Key Issues—Including Sweeps and Police Surveillance

In her first State of the City speech, Mayor Katie Wilson outlined a policy agenda that was still short on details—and punted on major issues, such as how she plans to add 1,000 new shelter beds this year and whether she will expand police surveillance cameras into more Seattle neighborhoods.

Seattle Nice Interviews Progressive Legislator-Turned-Chamber Leader Joe Nguyen

Our first guest on Seattle Nice this week was former Democratic state legislator-turned-Seattle Chamber leader Joe Nguyen, who told us he sees no contradiction between his past as an pro-tax progressive legislator and his present job as the head of the city’s anti-tax business lobby group.

Thursday, February 19

City Council Proposal Would Repeal Law That Allowed Housing Near Stadiums

Seattle City Councilmember Eddie Lin is introducing legislation to repeal a law that would have allowed apartments in the Stadium District just south of downtown, undoing a longstanding priority of housing developers and handing a significant win to the Port of Seattle and unions representing port workers.

Friday, February 20

Mayor Katie Wilson: “If We Turned Off the Cameras, It Would Become More Difficult to Solve Many Crimes”

In an exclusive interview, Mayor Katie Wilson elaborated on her plans for her first year, telling us how her position has changed on police cameras since taking office and how she plans to balance her campaign commitment to add 1,000 new shelter beds by the end of the year with a budget deficit and the need to build permanent housing.

Mayor Wilson, Seattle Nice

Mayor Katie Wilson: “If We Turned Off the Cameras, It Would Become More Difficult to Solve Many Crimes”

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Nice went in-depth with Mayor Katie Wilson this week, in a packed interview about her first six weeks in office. Supporters who have been disappointed by her lack of decisive action on police surveillance cameras will definitely want to tune in, as will those who are interested in how she plans to add 1,000 units of shelter by the end of this year.

This must-listen interview is full of newsworthy moments, including Wilson’s confirmation that the city’s approach to encampments has not changed since last year, when her pro-sweeps predecessor Bruce Harrell was in office.

Wilson recently paused an encampment removal in Ballard so that five people living there could get into housing—an achievement Wilson mentioned in her State of the City speech this week. But that outcome isn’t one the city can easily replicate—a permanent supportive housing provider, DESC, had just opened a new building nearby and had a few vacant spaces, which won’t be the situation during future sweeps. And very little of this type of housing is in the development pipeline.

Wilson acknowledged that it’s “absolutely true that this is not something that we are going to be able to repeat again and again and again, and that is really because of the lack of availability of emergency housing and shelter with services that match people’s needs.” Which, she said, “is precisely why a very, very high priority for my administration is working to open up new emergency housing and shelter, and we have aggressive goals for that this year.

In the meantime, Wilson added, “we’re not going to be able to make earth-shattering changes to the way that the Unified Care Team operates.”

Wilson also confirmed that the city is continuing to use the “encampment scoring system” Harrell implemented shortly after taking office—a fairly inflexible rubric that doesn’t account for conditions at individual encampments, such as whether the people living there are at the top of a wait list for housing.

We also pressed the mayor on her equivocal comments about police surveillance cameras, which police claim are necessary to solve crimes, including homicides. On the campaign trail, Wilson strongly suggested she opposed this kind of always-on police surveillance, and would not support installing new cameras in the two additional neighborhoods where they’ve been approved.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

During our conversation, though, Wilson repeated talking points from the Seattle Police Department about clearance rates and crime, arguing that cameras have helped police solve more crimes than before the cameras were installed.

The cameras, Wilson noted, only cover 1 percent of the city where about 20 percent of crime occurs (a talking point that may be familiar to Seattle Nice listeners, since Sandeep used it to justify the cameras during our conversation with City Councilmember Dionne Foster two weeks ago). Wilson said she still has concerns “around the potential misuse of our CCTV camera cameras and the possibility that that data could get into the wrong hands and be abused to target vulnerable populations,” but she’s weighing that against what she sees as compelling evidence that the cameras help solve crimes and may even prevent racial profiling.

“I think it is fair to say that if we turned off the cameras, it would become more difficult to solve many crimes, including some violent crimes and homicides, and some might not get solved,” Wilson told us.

We also talked about the conflict between funding shelter and funding housing at a time of federal budget cuts and local budget deficits; Wilson’s citywide renter survey; and how she plans to tackle “open-air drug markets” in neighborhoods like Little Saigon.

City Council, housing, land use

City Council Proposal Would Repeal Law That Allowed Housing Near Stadiums

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Councilmember Eddie Lin will introduce legislation later this week to repeal a law that would have allowed apartments in the Stadium District just south of downtown, undoing a longstanding priority of housing developers and handing a significant win to the Port of Seattle and unions representing port workers.

The legislation, sponsored by former councilmember Sara Nelson, would have allowed more than 900 new housing units in the area (half of them affordable “workforce” units), which is largely occupied by warehouses, vacant lots, and businesses like the Showbox and a Showgirls strip club. It’s also home to the current (and future second) SoDo light rail station, which gets minimal use because the area has few businesses and very little housing.

Opponents of the bill argued it would irreparably harm the city’s industrial businesses, and said the city should not build housing near busy, polluted freight corridors; proponents countered that the stadium district hasn’t been in industrial use for many years, and said the city needs more housing everywhere, including near the stadiums.

The Port sued the city, and late last year, the state’s Growth Management Hearings Board invalidated the ordinance as written on both substantive and procedural grounds. Among other “procedural” findings, the board ruled that the city had done a sloppy job of reviewing the proposal, failing to conduct a separate environmental analysis and bypassing public feedback requirements to push the zoning change through last year. The city appealed on the substantive issues but not the procedural ones.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Lin told PubliCola the ruling effectively gives the city no choice other than repealing the ordinance; to do otherwise, he said, could put the city at risk of being found out of compliance with the Growth Management Act, threatening transportation and housing funds as well as the city’s Comprehensive Plan. “In my opinion, we have a Growth Management Hearings Board order and there were procedural and substantive issues that they invalidated our ordinance on,” Lin said.

The city, Lin conceded, could try to fix the issues the hearings board identified by a May deadline for compliance. Lin suggested the current council has little interest in taking on that battle, which was contentious enough the first time. The council could also include language in the city’s ongoing comprehensive plan update that leaves the door open to more housing in areas with “urban industrial” zoning, a kind of mixed-use zoning that underlies the stadium overlay.

Lin, who chairs the council’s land use committee, said he’s “open to having that discussion later, although I’m not sure how much anybody else wants to have that discussion,” adding, “It’s not my first priority to put housing [in the stadium district.] I think we should be focused on centers and corridors.” The council will start working to upzone those two types of areas—”neighborhood centers” where lower-density apartments will be allowed within 800 feet of existing commercial nodes or frequent transit stops, and “corridors” where apartments can be built directly on arterial roads—this year.

Business, podcasts

Seattle Nice Interviews Progressive Legislator-Turned-Chamber Leader Joe Nguyen

By Erica C. Barnett

Our guest on Seattle Nice this week isn’t a politician—he’s a former politician-turned-Seattle Chamber leader, and he says he sees no contradiction between his past as an pro-tax progressive legislator and his present job as the head of the city’s anti-tax business lobby group.

Joe Nguyen, the former state senator from West Seattle, defeated his opponent Shannon Braddock in 2019 by emphasizing his progressive bona fides, exemplified by a commitment to take no corporate contributions. Elected on that anti-corporate agenda, Nguyen went on to propose or support a payroll expense tax on big businesses, an excise fee on businesses that pay executives more than $1 million a year, and the statewide capital gains tax. “Tax the rich,” he wrote in the Stranger, which lauded him (pretty excessively, even at the time) as the “AOC of Washington state.”

 

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

As head of the Chamber, Nguyen leads an institution historically opposed to business and capital gains taxes, and he talks like it, too—telling Seattle Nice that while he thinks “we need to have a more equitable tax structure in the United States, in Washington State, I worry that we’re putting all of our eggs in one basket” by taxing big tech businesses over and over. Already, Nguyen said, businesses have started to move jobs from Seattle to Bellevue because of the JumpStart tax, a payroll tax on Seattle’s biggest companies that the city now relies on to backfill its annual general fund shortfalls.

“Politically, it is very popular to say, ‘Tax the rich.’ Politically is very popular to say, ‘Go after the large companies.’ But the hard part that we’re going to put ourselves in is: If you want to tax the rich, you got to have rich people to tax,” Nguyen said.

“I was the architect and then sponsor of a lot of these policies,” Nguyen continued. “However, you’re concentrating a lot of that [taxation] into one specific area. And when you start to get some of this volatility, like you mentioned in your in your post [about social housing revenues] the other day, that’s the worry that I have.”

Listen to a preview of our conversation‚ in which David and I rant about the money pit that is the new downtown Convention Center, and subscribe to Seattle Nice to hear the full episode.

Editor’s note: During our interview, I said the Chamber has supported moving oversight of some parts of the homelessness system to the city’s Human Services Department. The Chamber has not taken a position on this issue. 

 

Mayor Wilson

In State of the City, Wilson Punts on Key Issues—Including Sweeps and Police Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

In her first State of the City speech at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute on Tuesday, Mayor Katie Wilson outlined a policy agenda that was still short on details—and punted major issues, such as how she plans to add 1,000 new shelter beds this year, to the near future.

The speech, which Wilson wrote herself with assistance from staff, was characteristically nerdy. Wilson did not use a basketball as a prop or shout out invited guests who served as symbols for particular priorities. She thanked the city employees who toil in obscurity to keep the city running. And she paid tribute to the city’s diversity, noting that February simultaneously marks Black History Month, the Lunar New Year, Ramadan, and Lent.

At times, Wilson sounded like she was equivocating on campaign commitments after talking to people who opposed her agenda; for example, speaking about neighborhood surveillance cameras, Wilson said she “continue[s] to have concerns” about data security and the use of cameras to target vulnerable communities, but had been “moved by what I’ve heard from families and communities impacted by gun violence.”

Any mayor’s first State of the City speech, traditionally delivered in mid-February, will be necessarily short on policy achievements. But given Wilson’s mandate to undo some of the excesses of her predecessor—who utilized fear of violent crime and “disorder” to crack down on unsheltered people and expand police surveillance of Seattle residents—her speech was more equivocating than determined.

When we wrote about former mayor Bruce Harrell’s first State of the City speech four years ago, we emphasized the new mayor’s talking points on homelessness and the “unacceptable status quo” in the city, which was still recovering from COVID. Harrell committed in his speech to eliminate visible homelessness downtown through a public-private partnership known as Partnership for Zero, telegraphing a commitment to sweeping homeless people out of the downtown business district that continued relentlessly even as Partnership for Zero fizzled.

Harrell also telegraphed his intent to continue raiding the JumpStart tax, which had been earmarked for affordable housing and other progressive purposes, to pay for the city’s general budget—a commitment he would keep for four straight years, padding the budget with personal priorities while ignoring the reasons the city adopted the tax in the first place. Harrell also emphasized his desire to dramatically ramp up police hiring and crack down on “disorder.” Four years later, the speech looks like a preview for his entire term.

Will Katie Wilson’s first major speech as mayor prove similarly prescient about the priorities that will preoccupy her for the next four years? If so, she gave far fewer specifics. The speech was largely a reiteration of the mayor’s campaign priorities—affordable housing, child care, adding 1,000 shelter beds in her first year, and a potential public grocery store—combined with “wait and see” statements about some of the most controversial issues that came up on the campaign trail and were among the reasons voters elected her over the incumbent.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Wilson, to be clear, never claimed on the campaign trail that she would “stop the sweeps.” But supporters who believed she would dramatically slow down the breakneck pace of encampment removals have been disappointed to see sweeps continue around the city. Wilson noted that she ordered the city’s Unified Care Team, a massive, multidepartmental team that removes encampments, to take more time removing an encampment in Ballard earlier this month, which allowed the city to find shelter for five people who might have otherwise been swept. Most of the encampment residents, however, were told to move along, replicating a familiar pattern from previous administrations.

The incident emphasized for Wilson that “we simply don’t have enough housing, shelter, and services for everyone who is living unsheltered,” she said, promising to work on those issues as part of her “affordability agenda” and separate plan to “introduce legislation to city council to fund shelter expansion and make it faster and easier to build shelter in our city.”

But, she added, it’s also important to keep “public spaces open and accessible,” by “prioritizing encampment removals based on safety issues and neighborhood impacts.” None of this exactly contradicts Wilson’s pre-election positions on homelessness. But it also echoes the rhetoric of her opponent and predecessor, who justified the pace of sweeps (and the expansion of the UCT) on the grounds that all encampments, including those that consist of one or two tents, are dangerous and diminish the quality of life for housed people who have to see them.

Wilson also seemed to walk back her previous support for removing surveillance cameras from several Seattle neighborhoods where they are either already deployed or have been installed but not turned on. Conversations with families harmed by gun violence, Wilson said, had “moved” her to reconsider and slow down any announcement on the cameras.

Police often justify expanding surveillance by promising it will help them prevent and solve the most devastating crimes, including gun violence and human trafficking, and the argument has emotional resonance. That doesn’t mean these claims are true; in fact, there are now decades of evidence that police cameras do not prevent or solve violent crimes. (Police have long relied on private cameras for footage of public spacess; they’re everywhere, owned by businesses rather than law enforcement). It’s the job of elected officials to say no if the evidence argues against a policy (as Dionne Foster, elected to a citywide council seat last year,  already has)—even when constituents directly impacted by crime believe false promises that a new form of surveillance will make their neighborhoods safer.

Wilson did not address the “SOAP” and “SODA” banishment zones for sex buyers and drug users that former city attorney Ann Davison reinstated, with the help of the city council, in 2024. (People accused of using drugs or attempting to pay for sex can be arrested and jailed for being caught inside these areas, even if they haven’t been convicted of the underlying offense). This probably signals that the zones, a 1990s relic the city had long abandoned, are now just another accepted violation of people’s right to travel freely through the city. That fact alone should serve as a reminder that increased police surveillance can turn into dystopian background noise if elected officials fail to listen to constituents who raise valid objections.