1. The Seattle Police Department’s Before the Badge program, a five-week program for police recruits, is supposed to help familiarize new officers with the history of various Seattle communities, including those who’ve been victimized by police. But one Before the Badge trainer’s controversial views on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights have reportedly led at least one program leaders, Assistant Chief Lesley Cordner, to leave the program, which also includes trainings on the relationship between the police and Seattle’s LGBTQ+ community.

The trainer, Pastor Harvey Drake of Emerald City Bible Fellowship, said his primary reason for participating in the program “is because I have a deep desire to see the relationships improve between the Black community and law enforcement.”

In the mid-2000s, Drake signed on as a pro-Defense of Marriage Act co-defendant in a lawsuit filed by gay and lesbian couples who wanted to get married. In an op/ed for the Seattle Times defending DOMA, Drake and a co-author argued that that “[C]hanging marriage sends both boys and girls the message that a mom or a dad isn’t necessary,” adding, “No small group has the right to dictate to government, society, children and future generations that marriage has changed.”

More recently, Drake co-signed a letter defending a private school in Shoreline that taught children that homosexuality is “unnatural” and “a result of the failure to worship God.” The letter came in response to a Seattle Times story about teachers who said they were pushed out of their jobs for refusing to disavow same-sex relationships; in the letter, Drake and other religious leaders wrote that the school was “simply teaching what societies throughout history have accepted for millennia, that marriage is between a man and a woman. … Without heterosexual marriage, societies would no longer exist.”

Drake told PubliCola he isn’t “anti” LGBTQ+. “I’m pro-original marriage, period; that doesn’t make me anti-anything.”

“I have family members… I’ve had friends who are all in the lifestyle and they’ll tell you I never said a cross word to them,” Drake added.

Cordner, who reportedly left the program because she did not feel comfortable with Harvey’s participation, did not respond to a request for comment.

In the Before the Badge program, individual trainers lead discussion section with new recruits; Drake is one of several trainers who focus on Seattle’s African American community and their fraught history with police.

“We talk about the history and what we can do to change that,” Drake said. “We’re trying to say, listen, we now have an opportunity to correct some of the misunderstandings, and then we talk about some of the responsibility that we need to have as African Americans when we engage with police officers—for example, teaching young people to be respectful … not to be huffy and puffy, but how to cooperate if you get stopped.”

Police Chief Adrian Diaz told PubliCola he was aware of the letter about the school, and said “that is one of the things that I’m talking to [Drake] about. He also has a perspective of his family being targeted as far as police brutality.” Diaz said it’s important to learn about the experiences of Black Rainier Valley residents, “while also making sure he isn’t putting that perspective on our officers, of an anti-LGBTQ stance.”

2. Former TV reporter Jonathan Choe, fired by KOMO-TV last year after encouraging viewers to come to a rally held by the Proud Boys, a seditious white supremacist group that helped lead the January 6 insurrection, has continued to insist he is a “journalist” entitled to attend events open only to members of the media. Choe is currently a “senior fellow”—a position held by Choe and 17 other men—at the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank that helped launch the career of far-right provocateur and activist Chris Rufo.

Choe showed up at a press conference about the opening of a new mental health crisis center in Kirkland and claimed to be representing several different outlets, according to witnesses, including KIRO Radio, the Mill Creek View, and the Lynnwood Times.

Choe has no previous bylines at either of the two Snohomish County publications, and his only recent affiliation with KIRO consists of appearing as a guest when podcaster  Brandi Kruse was filling in as an on-air host earlier this year. In an email to Constantine’s office, a KIRO news editor confirmed, “Jonathan Choe is not an employee with KIRO Radio, and outside of his association with some of our fill-in hosts, he is not affiliated with our news division.” He did not publish a story or create content for any of the three outlets for which he claimed to be covering the press conference.

In fact, the only video Choe produced of the event was branded content for the Discovery Institute.

Although Choe appears to believe that because he was once employed as a journalist, he should be admitted to press events in perpetuity, this is not standard practice. In fact, many journalists go on to work other jobs outside journalism, including for government entities, private companies, and activist groups like the one Choe represents, and forego their status as members of the media as a result.

Independent media matters, and that includes journalists with conservative views as well as left-leaning publications like the one you’re reading now. But the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group didn’t fire Choe because of his conservative bias; they fired him for behaving unethically, by promoting a white supremacist group that led the attack on the US Capitol. In his work for the Discovery Institute, Choe has continued to violate bare-minimum ethical standards.

A widely used code of ethics for journalists in Washington State, for example, notes that journalists are not supposed to invade people’s privacy (in just one recent example, Choe published video and the full name of a child in crisis who he demonized as “deranged”), attack or provoke others (Choe frequently tapes himself taunting and mocking protesters) or engage in dishonestly—for example, by falsely claiming affiliation with a legitimate news outlet.