Civil Rights, LGBTQ+, Police

Interim Police Chief Based Complaint Against Detective on Right-Wing Characterization of Anti-Trans Initiative
Now-interim Police Chief Andre Sayles at a press conference earlier this year with Mayor Katie Wilson.

In his interview with a city investigator, interim Chief Sayles said he still hadn’t read the initiative and appeared unfamiliar with SPD’s policy on political speech.

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle’s interim police chief, Andre Sayles, acknowledged that his misconduct complaint against a veteran detective was based, at least in part, on right-wing podcaster Brandi Kruse’s characterization of a statewide initiative that would ban trans girls from playing girls’ sports. The detective, Beth Wareing, faced a backlash from Kruse and other right-wing activists after she spoke at a press conference opposing two anti-LGBTQ initiatives.

Sayles, who was deputy police chief when he filed his complaint, also confirmed that he didn’t read the initiative or seek out other sources of information about it before or after accusing the detective, Beth Wareing of dishonesty and insubordination—both potentially career-ending allegations.

The new revelations come from a recording of Sayles’ interview with an Office of Police Accountability staffer investigating his complaint, which OPA dismissed as unfounded. PubliCola obtained the recording through a records request.

As we reported last month, Wareing retired from SPD over Sayles’ complaint against her, calling it a “poorly considered, unprofessional, and an attempted violation of my First Amendment rights.”

After hearing the details of Sayles’ interview with OPA, Wareing said it was that “Interim Chief Sayles retaliated against me at the direction of a far-right podcaster to damage my hard-earned professional reputation, despite my nearly 30 years investigating child abuse, domestic violence, hate crimes, and other threats.

“He did not read the policies, the language of the initiatives, or endeavor to understand my comments prior to filing what was effectively a career ending complaint. A simple Google search would have revealed the broad availability of analysis regarding these initiatives, which are likely to have extraordinary collateral impacts on children. I am deeply concerned for the LGBTQ+ community and for SPD’s diverse workforce under his leadership. SPD and the City of Seattle can and should do better.”

Kruse, whose claims about the initiatives Sayles parroted in his complaint, is actively involved with the campaign for two initiatives from billionaire Brian Heywood’s group Let’s Go Washington. As a campaign volunteer, Kruse has headlined campaign rallies and raised money for the campaign and used her podcast as a campaign platform

Wareing spoke, with SPD’s permission, at a rally for No Hate in WA State, which is opposing the two Let’s Go Washington initiatives. The first would require school employees, such as counselors, to turn over notes on confidential conversations with students to their parents, raising concerns that students will no longer be able to confide in trusted adults at school about issues like sexuality, gender, and reproductive health care.

The second would ban trans girls from playing girls’ sports. To verify that girls meet the criteria, the initiative would require either proof of an athlete’s sex from a girl’s “personal physician” or—for girls who lack a personal physician—a genital exam or DNA test. Initiative supporters have claimed that girls already have to prove their biological sex to participate in sports, but that isn’t true; the initiative would add proof of sex to the state’s sports physical requirements for girls.

Wareing, a former hate crimes detective who worked on cases involving child sexual abuse, said at the press conference that “sexual predators often set themselves up as authority figures to give themselves more power and access to their victims. I believe this initiative would increase the risk of sexual abuse for girls participating in sports.”

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In his interview, Sayles strongly disputed this, saying that he has three boys who played sports and “I know [that] having to take a physical doesn’t expose you to a high potential for sexual abuse. I think that was an inaccurate statement, and I believe that statement, obviously, it created some angst among people in our community.” Wareing, Sayles continued, was “saying these things without actual factual proof.” (The initiative would not apply to boys’ sports, and the high prevalence of sexual abuse in girls’ sports is not a matter of  serious debate.)

Sayles confirmed in the interview that his concerns about Wareing’s “accuracy” and “stance” were initially sparked by an email containing questions from Kruse about Wareing’s comments in which Kruse characterized Wareing’s statements as inaccurate. Kruse (who calls herself a “real girl” and refers to trans girls as “boys”) followed up on these questions with a barrage of podcasts and social media posts calling Wareing a “liar” promoting an “insane ideology” and demanding that SPD fire her.

Sayles filed his complaint against Wareing a few days after Kruse sent over her questions. By then, SPD was receiving more complaints, according to Sayles.

In his interview, Sayles initially called the pro-LGBTQ rally “not my cup of tea” before clarifying, “I didn’t know what it was about.” Once he “skimmed” a transcript of Wareing’s comments, however, he believed her remarks were “basically fearmongering” about “people’s sexual orientation and potentially being exposed to sexual assault due to potentially having to do physicals to participate in sports.”

If she had wanted to be “accurate,” Sayles said, Wareing should have included specific data points in her remarks.

“[She said] there’s ‘high potential'” for sexual assault, Sayles said. “Is [that] 10 cases, and seven of those 10 cases you can identify that because a person had to do a physical with an adult, that sexual abuse occurred for that child, or that person who identifies as LGBTQ plus or whatever a person may identify?” Sayles said. “And then, when she said, ‘increases the risk of sexual abuse for girls participating in sports,’ how is that accurate? Does it increase it just for girls, or can it increase sexual abuse for boys as well,  or whatever they may identify as? So, I think those statements and those comments were inaccurate.”

The OPA investigator also asked Sayles about the other allegation in his complaint—that Wareing had disobeyed a direct order by representing herself as an SPD officer after agreeing in advance not to do so, in compliance with SPD rules for political advocacy. Sayles acknowledged that Wareing never identified herself as a Seattle police officer, but said that was a “tricky line” to navigate in the modern world when anyone can look up information online, and where a member of the media might have asked Wareing where she works.

“There’s probably someone here at this police department or in the city that probably says the police department should have never let her [speak],” Sayles said. “I’m not going to tell people what they should be doing on their off duty time. But my thing is, if we’re gonna speak and we’re gonna say that we’re law enforcement, knowing that somebody can just Google our name unless we paid the money to have our stuff scrubbed on the internet, we have to give them factual information because they’re going to take it and people are going to run with it.”

Wareing, Sayles elaborated, should have been more careful about expressing such a strong political “stance” because people tend to believe anything a police officer says. “I think a majority of our country cherish the work that we do, and they take what we say and they take it, they take it as as gospel.,” Sayles said. “So they … are going to say, ‘Holy smokes! … This person is an expert in this, and what they’re saying is what’s going to occur.'”

Sayles’ complaint was dismissed after the OPA found that Wareing had not violated any policy  and was expressing her right to express her opinions as a private citizen, which is protected by both the Constitution and SPD’s internal policies. At one point, the investigator asked if Sayles, who was previously police chief in Beloit, Wisconsin, whether he had read SPD’s policy on political participation. Sayles said, “I have not.”

After reading the policy and saying Wareing seemed to have followed it, Sayles appeared to backtrack. “It’s that sticky and uneven line that we have to walk,” Sayles said. “Just as much as she’s giving her opinion… with this OPA complaint, is it me giving my opinion as well?” When weighing whether to submit the complaint, he said, it came down to “Well, I think some of the comments were not objective.”

City Council, Elections, LGBTQ+, Mayor Wilson

Council Learns What “One-Time Funding” Means; Podcaster’s Advocacy for Anti-Trans Campaign Didn’t Violate Election Law

1. City council members who funded an unsustainable budget last year by using one-time dollars to fund tens of millions in new spending are finding out this year what “one-time funding” means.

For years, the council has used a combination of one-time spending and magical thinking to approve new budget adds every year, without creating any kind of plan to pay for them in the future. Last year alone, the council added $78 million in one-time spending to a budget that was already deeply unsustainable. (If you search the budget they approved, you’ll see that the phrase “one-time funding” appears no fewer than 107 times!)

One-time does not mean “actually forever, but we’ll find money for it later (wink).” It means one-time—as city budget director Aly Pennucci repeatedly had to remind outraged councilmembers, who complained that programs they failed to fund for more than one or two years had somehow vanished in Wilson’s budget. These included subsidies for private inpatient rehab, a “district fund” for each councilmember, and a long list of small-business assistance programs. (The budget does include between $10 million and $15 million to make some of the council’s 2026 additions permanent.)

Well into the third day of departmental budget presentations, Rob Saka wanted to know why Wilson was not funding a homeownership program the council funded with one-time dollars last year. Pennucci gave the same explanation she’d been giving for days. Saka, using his oratorical shouting voice (if you watch council meetings, you know the one), responded: “So I hear you saying, it’s not technically a cut, because it was a one-time add!”

To his credit, unlike other councilmembers, Saka did not follow up this comment by continuing to refer to the reduction in one-time funds as a cut.

There was one instance when a council member objected not to the end of one-time funding, but to Wilson’s decision to find money for a priority the council and Harrell previously paid for with one-time funds. Dan Strauss zeroed in on $$4 million for food banks and hot meal programs the council funded on a one-time basis this year. These funds, Strauss said, should be closely scrutinized, because unlike public safety, “providing food is not a charter responsibility.”

Bob Kettle brought up a similar objection when he suggested that the Office of Housing could address some of its own significant budget shortfall by building less affordable housing and counting projects built by the Seattle Social Housing developer, which is separate from city government, toward Seattle’s total number of affordable housing units.

Thinking of affordable housing in the city as one big thing, Kettle said, could help the council “ameliorate” some of Wilson’s “wrong choices”—like setting theoretical caps on police hiring after 2028—by freeing up funding for other council priorities. Counting those units as Seattle affordable housing “could provide some flexibility in the budgeting process because, hey, you know, [the social housing developer has] also got their shoulder in and they’re working hard to contribute to the overall process,” Kettle said. 

Social housing (which the council’s centrists tried to stop) is funded by a dedicated payroll tax, and was designed to create a new kind of mixed-income public housing in which higher-income renters subsidize lower-income renters. It is quite different than the subsidized affordable housing OH funds and builds, and the two aren’t fungible. Getting rid of some low-income subsidized housing would actually eliminate housing for low-income people,

(As an side: Elected officials who support more funding for police often raise this claim about “charter responsibilities,” as in “public safety is our number one charter responsibility.” But actually, the charter lays many other basic responsibilities city government is supposed to address, and “health” actually comes before “safety,” followed by “environment” and “general welfare.”)

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There was also a lot of—what’s the technical term?—nonsense and grandstanding from the council, particular when the Seattle Department of Transportation presented its budget. Struass, in particular, took the opportunity to gripe about hyperlocal issues in his neighborhood, including the fact that King County Metro cut hours on his bus route, which he has consistently characterized as the only bus route from Ballard to downtown Seattle. (It is not). You can read about more of those on my Bluesky.

One other exchange I do want to highlight is Strauss’ suggestion that the city is wasting money by allowing the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to serve as the Continuum of Care for the region. “A bureaucratic system from the county” is “creating inefficiencies for us,” Strauss asserted, adding “I don’t think we have time for that.”

While there have obviously been massive financial problems at the KCRHA—which is why the city is reasserting control over the homelessness contracts it funds—the continuum of care is a federally mandated system that oversees applications for federal funding for programs across King County and its 39 cities. It has never been at the city of Seattle, and a recent forensic audit did not identify it as a source of financial issues.

2. As a few others reported last week (when I was out of town), the state Public Disclosure Commission dismissed a complaint against Let’s Go Washington, the group behind two initiatives targeting children’s rights at school, on September 23. The complaint was filed by Washingtonians for Ethical Government, a nonprofit established in 2015. I reported on the initial complaint back in May

The first initiative would ban trans girls from playing sports in school and require children to prove their sex assigned at birth, through a medically unnecessary physical exam if they don’t have a longtime pediatrician willing to attest that they possess a vagina. The second would give parents access to any notes teachers or counselors make about conversations with students, including conversations about sensitive topics they may feel uncomfortable or unsafe broaching at home, like gender, abortion and birth control, and sexuality.

The complaint alleged that right-wing podcaster Brandi Kruse, who has served as a de facto spokesperson for the campaign, was doing official campaign work when she spoke on the campaign’s behalf. In short, WEG argued that Kruse’s speeches at campaign rallies and fundraisers constituted work on behalf of the campaign, and the campaign should have either compensated her for that work or reported it as an in-kind contribution. The PDC disagreed, agreeing with Kruse and the campaign that the podcaster is just a regular campaign volunteer expressing her personal opinions, and distinguishing her “keynote” speeches to Republican Party groups from her campaign speeches because she does “significant advance planning” for the former.

Kruse argued that the promotion does for the campaign on her own podcast isn’t political advertising either, because the campaign does not directly “control” what she says there. (In theory, she could say something that cast the campaign in a poor light, though she never has). The PDC didn’t address that defense.

Police, Privacy, Tech

Seattle Cop Used Chinese AI Smart Glasses to Film Inside SPD Facilities, Creating Video for Company

By Erica C. Barnett

A Seattle Police Department officer, Adam Sun, is on administrative leave after using a pair of AI smart glasses to record a promotional video for a Chinese company, Rokid Global. The film, taken from Sun’s POV while wearing the glasses, showed scenes inside of a police precinct, at a police investigation, in and around the department’s weapons lockers, and inside Sun’s police car while he’s driving, among other locations. The footage is frenetic and Sun hypes the glasses throughout. At one point, Sun daps a man holding a tiny goat.

Rokid posted the video next to other promotional videos on its Facebook page and other social media sites earlier this month. Since then, the post has been removed, and I was unable to locate another version of it online; my description is based on my own recollection from multiple viewings. On September 10, someone filed a complaint against Sun with the city’s Office of Police Accountability and SPD put him on administrative leave—a reaction that shows SPD considers the incident serious.

Security experts have identified specific concerns about Chinese smart glasses (as well as those produced in the US by companies like Meta.) If a police officer in the US received money to promote a Chinese company, that could raise additional concerns. China, politically a US adversary, heavily surveils its citizens in what has been described as a surveillance and digital “police state.”

Rokid has hyped the glasses’ thermal facial recognition function as an important tool for police, allowing cops to identify offenders almost instantly. State law currently prohibits this use of facial recognition, but it’s an integral element of how police use the glasses in China, and a big selling point for Rokid, which previously pitched the glasses and their thermal capabilities to US companies and consumers as a COVID detection tool.

Several city and SPD policies appear to collectively prohibit police officers from using smart glasses to film nonpublic areas of police precincts and posting those videos online. These include a policy that says “Sworn employees may not wear any personally owned camera device.” restrictions on what officers can post on their own social media, and citywide prohibition on the use of unapproved AI.

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SPD’s policy manual prohibits the use of smart glasses to record “enforcement activity while on duty.” Nonetheless, department management felt the need to clarify. Within days, Assistant Chief Robert Brown sent out this edict to SPD staff:

Effective immediately, no Seattle Police Department personnel will utilize any type of personally owned recording devices (such as Meta glasses, Rokid glasses, digital recorders, etc.) to record video and/or audio while on duty. Posting of any video or audio clips obtained in this manner is prohibited. Any such posts that currently exist must be removed immediately.

Exceptions may be granted at the executive level (assistant chief or above) for a specific need to use such a device for a legitimate law enforcement purpose where the use of Body Worn Video would not suffice. This order does not alter the use of recording devices routinely used to conduct Investigations.

SPD did not answer our questions other than confirming that Sun is on administrative leave. They referred us to the Office of Police Accountability, which confirmed the existence of the complaint against Sun.

 

City Council, homelessness

KCRHA Consultant Finds the “Missing” $8 Million; Strauss’ RV Ban Moves Forward (But Won’t Ban Sprinters, to Saka’s Dismay)

1. Earlier this month, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority dropped a bombshell: That “missing” $8 million the financially battered homelessness agency couldn’t account for in a recent forensic audit? Turns out it never actually went anywhere. Instead, according to recently promoted KCRHA Chief Operating Officer William Towey, the money amounted to a “one-time” ledger error by an unidentified person or people.

Towey spilled the details—eventually—during an update on the corrective action plan that’s being implemented by the consultant Turning Point Strategies at the city council’s human services committee meeting September 18. I was on vacation, but reported the news on Bluesky, thinking other media outlets that reported breathlessly on the missing money would be just as interested in reporting that it showed back up. Strangely, no one covered it, so I’m doing it again here.

As Towey initially (and confusingly) explained the situation, of “the approximately $8 million in receivables identified in the forensic evaluation as not reconcilable from the records available at that time, Turning Point has substantially advanced the balance sheet reconciliation and identified historical accounting entries and reporting practices that contributed to that balance.” 

After another minute or so of impenetrable accountant-speak, committee chair Alexis Mercedes Rinck jumped to the public’s rescue, dragging it out of Towey that—contrary to his previous, alarming assertions—the city does not  actually”owe” KCRHA any money. It took some more tooth-pulling (and several terse answers from Towey) for Rinck to get a somewhat clarifying explanation. Basically the money looked like it was missing because of a one-time “transactional entry error in our financial accounting system,” Towey said.

It’s possible, Towey continued, that while “that particular item was discovered and resolved successfully,” there still might be “other transactions of a similar nature.” 

For now, though, the $8 million question has been answered.

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2. The council’s public safety committee passed a package of bills from Dan Strauss last week that would, over time, prohibit people from parking an RV for more than two hours on any public street in Seattle, including in the industrial areas where they can currently park for up to 72 hours.

The legislation, as PubliCola reported in August, would require everyone currently living in an RV in Seattle to get a special license and agree to participate in homeless services. Eventually, each licensee would be required to leave their RV behind and accept “appropriate shelter” (a term the legislation does not define; anyone living in a licensed RV who fails to comply with “all laws” could lose their vehicle sooner.

A key element of Strauss’ plan is that the city would only count existing RVs a single time, and anyone who arrives in Seattle after that census, or was living in an RV when it took place but wasn’t counted, would be ticketed and towed. To allow any leeway for current but uncounted residents, or to do another census in the future, would be tantamount to telling every homeless RV dweller in “Western Washington, Oregon, [and] Idaho that they should come to the city of Seattle because we will allow you to stay here,” Strauss said last week.

Without a strict, forward-looking RV ban, Strauss argued, Seattle will become a magnet for a particularly visible kind of homeless person.

Each of the six bills and accompanying resolution passed out of committee unanimously or nearly so, with Maritza Rivera voting against one bill that allocated capital funding for the proposal.

One amendment that didn’t move forward was a proposal from Rob Saka to expand the RV ban to Mercedes Sprinters and other large vans that can be tricked out for long, #Vanlife-style road trips. Saka called his amendment both a “modest” and “hyper-technical” change, arguing that a ban on RVs but not Sprinter vans could “create a market” for people to “circumvent” the RV ban by tricking out a Sprinter instead and living on the street.

“Having done this work extensively alongside our Unified Care Team”—the city’s encampment removal and outreach team—Saka said he was confident plenty of people were living in Sprinter vans in his district. Apparently, there’s at least one such van perennially parked not far from Saka’s house.

The rest of the council didn’t buy it—Bob Kettle noted that in his district, most people who park Sprinters on the street are well-off road-trippers— and rejected Saka’s amendment before voting for Strauss’ overall RV banishment plan.

Business, Development, Economy, housing, Mayor Wilson

Greater Seattle: Inclusionary Zoning, Part 2; Amazon as a Percentage of the Budget; Permitted, but Struggling

By Josh Feit

Last week, I featured Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster in an item headlined “Inclusionary Zoning > No Inclusionary Zoning” to reflect her progressive affordable housing stance. However, according to a comprehensive new academic study, she has it backward.

No Inclusionary Zoning > Inclusionary Zoning

So says the study released this summer by an economist at UC Irvine about inclusionary zoning (IZ), a policy that requires builders to couple any market-rate housing they build with affordable housing. Seattle’s version of this—as in Foster’s resolution calling for inclusionary zoning requirements in residential areas where the policy doesn’t currently apply—uses a “fee in lieu” model where developers can pay into an affordable housing fund instead of including the affordable housing in their own projects.

Unlike other (inconclusive) research on IZ, the UC Irvine study had a clean before-and-after look at the policy, thanks to California’s unique history of going through a period when inclusionary zoning (including the fee-in-lieu model) was legal, illegal, and then legal again.

The study indicates inclusionary zoning does the opposite of what it’s intended to do, finding that IZ makes it more expensive to rent. California renters paid approximately $6.97 billion in additional rent in areas with IZ mandates. So, even as IZ funds some affordable units, it comes at a steep cost to renters, including low-income renters, who aren’t “lucky enough to get an IZ unit,” according to the study.

But the real zinger: The study then compared that rent increase to the number of affordable units created and found that it wasn’t worth the tradeoff. As the author bluntly states in the opening summary: “I estimate the cost of generating an affordable unit with inclusionary zoning to be approximately $800,000 [per the 8,990 units created] in ‘excess rents’ paid by market rate renters as a result of the policy’s constraint on supply. This exceeds the cost of directly incentivizing the creation of low-income housing [~$441,00 per unit] in California through existing programs.”

Seattle’s Budget = Amazon’s Stock Price

Speaking of being blunt, Erica didn’t hold back in her report on Mayor Wilson’s $2.5 billion budget proposal last week. And I quote: “JumpStart is Basically Just a Slush Fund Now.”

JumpStart, of course, is the 2020 tax on high-end salaries proposed and passed by former lefty city councilmember Teresa Mosqueda to pay for affordable housing and other progressive priorities. Now, according to a recent economic study commissioned by Seattle’s own Office of Economic Development, it increasingly covers the city’s regular budget shortfalls. Since 2024, when a newly elected city council majority changed the law to eliminate the original JumpStart spending plan, more than half of JumpStart revenues are used to cover the gap between city budget expenditures and general fund revenue.

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I’m not here to cry about that. True believers like me have lost that fight. But here’s a problem with  budgeting-by- JumpStart that everyone should note: The report found that “Seventy-five percent of JumpStart revenue comes from just 10 companies.”

This is emblematic of Seattle’s worrisome status as a one-crop town (big tech). “In summary,” the report states, “the city’s fiscal health now depends on the marginal location and compensation decisions of a handful of employers. It also depends, indirectly, on the stock prices of those employers.”

Zeroing in on the city’s largest company, the report continues: “When Amazon’s stock rises, Seattle’s tax base rises with it; when it falls, the base contracts. (Amazon’s stock price alone has ranged from roughly $85 to $245 over the past three years.) But it means that a fiscal base already concentrated in a few firms is further exposed to the single most volatile attribute of these firms—one the city has no ability to forecast or influence.”

Existing Third Places > New Startups

Wilson explicitly acknowledges the challenge by incorporating her recent “Resilient Economy” executive order  into her budget proposal. Seattle has “become increasingly concentrated on the tech sector,” the EO states. It commits the city to convene a task force “to develop and implement strategies for diversifying and growing Seattle’s economy.”

And while the specifics of the order focus on making it easier to permit and establish startups in tech-adjacent fields, that strikes me as being more top-down than middle-out. As I noted a few weeks ago, the thing that makes Seattle attractive to the talent needed for new startups are third spaces—i.e., existing businesses.

I wish Wilson’s proposal did more for the bars and restaurants and coffeeshops that are already permitted, but increasingly struggling: 67 percent of brick-and-mortar, small, independent businesses told OED they are under more financial stress than during the pandemic. “[Seventy-one] percent reported lower foot traffic than a year earlier, and only 12 percent said customer demand was sufficient to cover their cost structure.”

Josh@Publicola.com

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police

On Wilson’s Budget, the Council Parts Ways With Reality
This is the first year the police budget has exceeded the half-billion dollar mark, reflecting a new contract that boosts starting salaries for newly minted officers well into the six figures. Officers with college degrees get additional premium pay.

An early look at how the council is reacting to the mayor’s deficit-busting budget.

By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, I described Mayor Katie Wilson’s first budget as “small-c conservative,” because it eschews most of the budget tricks of recent years and achieves balance through 2030 not by raising taxes, but by eliminating positions and deferring spending. It also relies heavily on the JumpStart payroll tax—originally created as a source of additive spending on affordable housing and other progressive priorities—to backfill the general fund.

Business groups agreed with my assessment, praising the budget as “a thoughtful approach to a difficult fiscal challenge” (Joe Nguyen, head of the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce) and an “important” example of “fiscal discipline” (Jon Scholes, head of the Downtown Seattle Association). The head of the Washington Hospitality Association, quoted in the Seattle Times, said the group was “pleased to see no tax increases, and we’re also pleased to see an increase in the number of police we’ll see on the streets.”

But there’s one group that seems to absolutely hate the mayor’s budget: The centrists on the City Council, who spent last Friday’s daylong public safety budget meeting painting Wilson as a “screaming” police abolitionist, obtusely mischaracterizing efforts to cut spending by not funding vacant positions, and suggesting that Wilson should have dramatically boosted police spending to levels completely inconsistent with budget realities.

The biggest of those realities: A $175 million deficit built into the budget these same council members approved last year. As I reported at the time, that budget, proposed by former mayor Bruce Harrell and expanded by the council, “relies heavily on budget tricks to remain balanced for 2026, tumbling immediately into nine-figure deficits in 2027 and beyond.”

Even as it eliminates those annual deficits, Wilson’s budget fully funds 66 new police officers who were hired in 2026 but whose positions were not funded in Harrell’s 2026 budget.

It also includes funding, in 2027 and 2028, to get SPD to a total of 1,250 officers, the goal set by SPD’s own staffing plan. Wilson’s budget office director, Aly Pennucci, told me last week that she expects SPD will hit that number on schedule sometime in 2028 and stick to roughly the same number over the two years after that. SPD will lose some vacant civilian positions—unfilled but funded jobs they’ve historically used to pay for other priorities. And they aren’t slated to gain net new officers beyond those 1,250 after 2028, although that could change two years from now, when the 2029 and 2030 budgets are actually on the table.

Despite some headlines characterizing Wilson’s budget as an almost 14 percent “expansion” of SPD, new hires represent a fraction of the added spending. Most of the new obligation—$56 million—is mandated by the police union contract negotiated by former mayor Harrell and signed by a majority of the current council. Another chunk, nearly $13 million, pays the full cost of new officers hired in 2026 (most of whom didn’t work a full year last year, since they were hired at various times), plus any additional officer hires needed to get SPD staffing up to the 1,250 goal.

Though modest compared to some councilmembers’ expansionist ambitions, those new hires are real, and represent a commitment to adding more police to get the department to the goal it established for itself.

To listen to the tirades coming out of City Hall on Friday, though, you’d have though Wilson was taking a chainsaw to the police budget, or perhaps going across the street and yanking badges and guns away from officers herself.

Public safety committee chair Bob Kettle kicked things off, fulminating that Wilson’s budget really should have funded 150 more officers a year, since the city will “have to have 1,800 officers in our city with population growth” by 2050. (As an aside, although this simplistic officers-per-capita ratio is popular among politicians and many individual police chiefs, the International Association of Chiefs of Police does not recommend calculating police spending this way, because it can lead to redundant and unnecessary hiring.)

“It seems like we’ve given up on the goal of reaching 1,400 plus, which is really the minimum that we need to have for officers,” Kettle said, directing his comments at Pennucci. “In fact, the proposed budget for 2028 is a sustaining budget that has zero new net hires. And should we, as a council, interpret this to mean the mayor’s office no longer wishes to grow the size of the appointment long term?” Pennucci, in what would become a refrain, explained that hiring 150 net new officers over the next to years is not a goal “grounded in financial reality.”

Put another way, if the city council wants to spend another $30 million or so hiring an additional 150 cops, they’ll have to come up with $30 million in cuts to other departments and city services. Where is that going to come from? No one who complained about the proposed police budget on Friday, including Kettle, Rob Saka, Debora Juarez, and Maritza Rivera, offered any suggestions. 

Nor did councilmembers explain how (or why) the city should continue funding nine long-vacant parking enforcement officer positions, which Wilson’s budget eliminates—while retaining funds for six other vacant PEO positions. Both Rivera and budget chair Dan Strauss were optimistic that a new contract with the PEOs, who start out at around $36 an hour, will result in filling the vacant positions; Rivera said PEOs are necessary to enforce the law against “illegal activity” going on inside RVs (actually SPD’s job), while Strauss said a lack of parking enforcement will lead to lower “turnover” in popular areas as people overstay parking limits designed to ensure plenty of spots are available.

Another item councilmembers said should have been somewhere in the budget, but isn’t, was police surveillance cameras in Seattle Center. Harrell himself never proposed adding police cameras at Seattle Center. Instead, it focused on surveilling areas with high rates of specific crimes, including violent crime, drug sales, and prostitution. Despite councilmembers’ insistence that only cameras can prevent (or help police investigate) the next Bite of Seattle-style tragedy, Seattle Center is not some murder hot spot. In fact, in searching the Seattle Public Library’s online media database, I could find only one homicide at Seattle Center, in 1967; two other shootings, at Folklife Festival in 2008 and on another occasion in 2012, resulted in nonfatal injuries.

Nonetheless, council members demanded to know why Wilson’s budget failed to fund cameras all around Seattle Center in anticipation of the next mass shooting there. As I noted on Bluesky, politicians tend to be very good at responding to the last crisis as if the exact same scenario is likely to occur again. This is why we all have to take our shoes off and dump out our water at the airport, even as the TSA fails to detect actual weapons the vast majority of the time.

Rob Saka led the charge. After a little Socratic back-and-forth with Sayles to confirm that, yes, the police chief agreed that more police cameras would have helped the still-ongoing investigation into the July shootings, Saka—who talked uninterrupted for 18 minutes—said he found the “omission” of new cameras at Seattle Center “extraordinarily difficult to understand and incredibly disappointing.”

Specifically, Saka continued, he was shocked that the police had to rely on footage from bystanders and businesses as part of their investigation.

“Here’s the key contradiction,” Saka said. “After a deadly shooting at one of the city’s most important civic campuses, the Seattle Police Department had to to seek video evidence, footage from tenants, businesses, visitors, and people—pulling cell phones! We’re asking our investigators to essentially pass the hat for simple video evidence after tragedy strikes! Begging, borrowing, pleading, passing the collection plate for simple, simple evidence. Apparently, everyone can have a damn camera in the city, except the city itself!”

Two quick fact checks. First, there are cameras at Seattle Center and they were on. Second, asking for cell phone footage has been a routine aspect of police investigations since at least the advent of the iPhone two decades ago. More on that in a moment.

This was the second time that Saka had demanded to know why the city wasn’t funding cameras at Seattle Center. The first time was at a Parks budget briefing the previous day, when he demanded to know the department’s “plan to install the permanent infrastructure and keep those cameras on at all times, given the main-event threat at Seattle Center?” As chair of the council committee that oversees the Seattle Center Department, it was a little strange that Saka addressed these questions to a staffer in a department with no control over Seattle Center or its budget.

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On Friday, Saka said the city couldn’t say “with a straight face” that “we’re advancing a responsible budget and carrying out our charter responsibility to keep people safe without funding for critical CCTV cameras at the Seattle Center. … When we do that, the public understandably feels like they’ve been hoodwinked. They feel like they’ve been bamboozled, snookered, hornswoggled, duped, swindled, played, hustled, tricked, fooled, misinformed, led, punked, sold a bill of goods.”

Rivera, piling on, said it was “embarrassing that we have to ask the public for their camera footage because we’re refusing to put cameras in places where they need to be, so that when crime does happen, we’re able to solve crime and provide answers to the folks that have been hurt by these crimes.” Whether cameras “need to be”

“We do ask people for their personal footage in order to solve crime. That does not make any sense.”

As I mentioned, asking the public for video footage and using footage from nearby businesses is a routine, standard, and probably universal practice among police departments investigating major crimes committed in public. It’s impossible for police to replicate the near-total coverage of public events that smartphones and business security cameras provide access to; attempting to do so would involve a Panopticon of surveillance cameras so total it would blow the current police budget out of the water.

No Seattle elected official has ever publicly proposed eliminating this essential investigative practice, to my knowledge, until Saka and Rivera did last week.

But the council’s departures from reality didn’t end there. (And I’m not even counting Dan Strauss’ repeated comments about how he “reinflated” his collapsed lungs when he was hit by a car in 2004, something he said he learned to do after falling off the monkey bars a bunch as a kid. This came in the context of a later discussion about a proposed reduction to Fire Department overtime, which—you know what, let’s just keep it moving)

First, Rivera clocked a $500,000 reduction in spending on three (of nine) vacant analyst positions at the Real Time Crime Center, where police monitor surveillance cameras and analyze footage, and said it looked like Wilson was “eliminating” the RTCC altogether. In fact, SPD budget director Dan Eder explained, the six new positions would still enable SPD to expand RTCC staffing from the current 15 positions to 21, enabling the center to operate 24/7 for the first time.

Not to be outdone, Debora Juarez—a former elected councilmember who was appointed to serve out Cathy Moore’s term when Moore quit the council less than two years into her term—accused Wilson of submitting a “political” SPD budget aimed at “defunding” SPD.

“I’m not trying to make this political. I’m trying to make it factual,” Juarez said. “I want SPD to know that we support you and what you’re doing. … And yes, we all invest and will continue to invest and support all upstream programs, diversion, absolutely.”

“But again,” Juarez continued, “I have a hard time believing—because I watched this mayor scream ‘defund,’ come here, in here, and scream ‘Defund the police! Abolish the police!’ So I have a hard time believing that somehow some of this on the executive branch is not political, and I think that’s offensive, and it’s not fair, and it ain’t right. So I’ll leave it at that.”

Wilson did not scream “abolish the police” (or anything else) at the council in 2020; despite efforts to portray her as “angry” and “loud,” she is congenitally quiet and low-key. She did testify in favor of the Solidarity Budget, which her group, the Transit Riders Union, was supporting. In her testimony (around 37:30), she expressed support for hand-washing stations, a women’s shelter, funding for sidewalks, and “extending the police hiring freeze through 2021.”  She did not “come in here”—council chambers—to say any of these things, because in 2020, all the council’s meetings were virtual because of COVID.

During the afternoon half of Friday’s meeting, Rivera said repeatedly that Wilson’s proposal to fund focused deterrence—a strategy that combines resources for young men likely to commit gun violence with swift arrest and punishment for those who do—was not actually focused deterrence at all, and that the mayor was using the term incorrectly to describe a “random” suite of gun violence strategies.

But her claim, like Juarez’ recollection of Wilson standing in council chambers and screaming “Abolish the police!,” was untrue. Wilson’s office confirmed that the mayor’s focused deterrence commitment will absolutely include both service providers and police; the divergence between the mayor’s plan and Rivera’s is that Wilson wants to consider other vendors besides the consultant Rivera has been aggressively pushing, the National Network for Safe Communities, to do that work. Rivera’s plan would add $414,000 to the two-year budget.

Friday’s budget meetings, which also included discussions of deferred hiring for the CARE Team and cuts to overtime at the Fire Department, felt like a turning point for the city council. No longer are they merely griping that the mayor’s office doesn’t consult them before making decisions (a legitimate, if overused, complaint). Now, they’re making up their own facts to fit a narrative that’s out of step even with the city’s conservative business community—painting Wilson as a radical, screeching leftist in the face of a budget characterized by fiscal discipline.

Maybe the council has just gotten too comfortable signing blank checks, and forgotten that even the city eventually has to balance its checkbook. What remains unclear, because no one on the council has even broached the topic, is how Kettle, Strauss, Hollingsworth, Saka, and Rivera plan to add tens of millions in new spending to this year’s budget without decimating departments that are already taking cuts. It’s early for predictions, but I’m guessing they’ll rely in part on the same strategy they used throughout Harrell’s term—pushing the budget pain just past the horizon, by piling up deficits in “out” years when they may be somebody else’s problem.