1. The manager of Seattle’s Equitable Development Initiative, Ubax Gardheere, and EDI staffer Boting Zhang sent out an open letter today denouncing Mayor Jenny Durkan as “a dictator posturing as a Mayor” and leading a city in which “women and people of color step up inside the institution” to do emotional labor for others.
“We’re done working for a dictator posturing as a Mayor,” the letter says. “We’re done feeling increasingly out of touch with our communities and friends. And we’re done being women of color bearing a disproportionate emotional labor burden in our civilization’s collective reckoning with our mid-life (or is it end-of-life?) crisis.”
The Equitable Development Initiative exists within the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, which answers directly to Mayor Durkan. The purpose of the EDI is to fund and promote projects that prevent displacement in communities of color.
However, in their letter, Gardheere and Zhang suggested their jobs had become more about taking on emotional labor and “producing” on deadline than helping the communities EDI is supposed to serve.
“When we each took our jobs, we were afraid that we’d get pulled away from the values and people we hold most dear,” the letter reads “To an extent, we have. Our bodies have been weaponized in an institution that historically and presently has actively fought against [community], and you have sensed this.”
“There is an ongoing joke about the Seattle Process, this notion that when you bring too many people together, we don’t get anything done. Fuck that. It’s not bringing together too many people that makes us slow. It’s bringing together so much trauma that gets us trapped in gridlock. And time and again, we have seen women and people of color step up inside the institution to massage at the knots.”
Contacted by email, Gardheere and Zhang declined to comment or elaborate on their letter, which says both are “taking some time off to regain our mental health” before deciding what’s next.
Prior to working at the city, Gardheere was a program manager for Puget Sound Sage, the Seattle-based race and social justice advocacy group. Zhang was named “one to watch” in Seattle Magazine’s 2018 list of the city’s most influential people.
The best way to prevent disease outbreaks, county public health officer Jeff Duchin emphasized, is to ensure that people have access to soap and running water so that they can actually wash, not just sanitize, their hands.
2. At a meeting of the Seattle/King County Board of Health last week, King County Public Health director Patty Hayes described new outbreaks of shigella (a bacterial infection that causes diarrhea, fever, and vomiting) and cryptosporidiosis (a diarrheal disease caused by a parasite.) Both spread through fecal matter on unwashed hands. In the latest shigella outbreak, 84 percent of 142 cases were among people experiencing homelessness. (Sixty-three percent of those people had to be hospitalized, according to Hayes).Among 47 people with cryptosporidiosis, about half are homeless, Hayes said.
The best way to prevent the spread of such diseases, county public health officer Jeff Duchin emphasized, is to ensure that people have access to soap and running water so that they can actually wash, not just sanitize, their hands. “Handwashing is definitely superior to” hand sanitizer, Duchin added. The city of Seattle, under Durkan, is considering what multiple people familiar with the conversations called “Purell on a pole” as an alternative to the handwashing stations that the city council funded in its budget last November.
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Hayes did praise the city for turning on 12 water fountains in downtown Seattle, which the city had turned off in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “One of the top priorities was to get potable water, drinking water, out there—that was a super concern,” Hayes said. “We’re exploring more safe water options with Seattle Public Utilities and Parks. In the coming weeks, we’ll make additional recommendations for high-priority areas and we’ll continue to talk to the city about these hygiene issues.”
PubliCola’s has asked SPU how many water fountains are still out of commission across the city.
The department is holding an online seminar for groups interested in submitting a proposal for its handwashing station pilot—now expanded to include food waste disposal and rebranded the “Water and Waste Innovation Funding Program”— tonight at 6.
3. A blog post the Seattle Police Department published Monday announcing reforms to the department’s crowd control and use-of-force policies caught the Community Police Commission off guard, according to a letter from commission’s co-chairs. SPD’s post said the CPC’s “feedback” had contributed to the reforms. In a public response to SPD posted on the CPC’s website, co-chairs LaRond Baker and Erin Goodman wrote that the new policy changes largely do not reflect their recommendations and will “not do enough to keep protesters and other members of the community safe.”
SPD first announced plans to re-work its crowd control and use-of-force policies last October in response to widespread criticism of how the department handled Black Lives Matter protests and recommendations from the city’s police oversight agencies, including the CPC. SPD said the policy changes would reduce the visible police presence at protests “when safe and feasible”; ensure that journalists, legal observers and medics can work freely during protests; to prioritize de-escalation; and create “new strategies to address individuals taking unlawful actions in otherwise lawful crowds.”
Later, the department published a list of proposed policy revisions to solicit feedback from oversight agencies and the public. Those proposed changes included the creation of a special team to investigate use of force at protests and allowing officers to use pepper-ball launchers to target individual protesters they believe are breaking the law as an alternative to blast balls, which can hurt people standing nearby.
When the department initially presented its plan to the CPC in December, many commissioners criticized the gaps in SPD’s proposed changes, pointing out that there was little overlap between SPD’s proposals and the lists of policy recommendations they issued in August. For example, the CPC recommended banning blast balls and raising the requirements for SPD to issue a dispersal order at protests, neither of which appeared in SPD’s proposal.
SPD’s announcement on Monday did not include details about specific revisions, nor did it identify any outside recommendations that the department adopted in full or in part.
Despite their frustration, the CPC’s co-chairs said they remain willing to work with SPD on policy revisions in their response letter and during a press conference with Interim SPD Chief Adrian Diaz and other city officials on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the CPC unveiled a new online tool to track SPD’s responses to the commission’s recommendations, including whether SPD declines or delays the implementation of a recommendation.