By Erica C. Barnett
I was honored to be a fill-in host this week on “News, Views, and Brews,” a podcast on local news and politics hosted by Brian Callanan (probably best known to PubliCola readers as the host of “City Inside/Out” on the Seattle Channel.)
We talked at length about legislation proposed by Mayor Bruce Harrell (and sponsored by Councilmember Bob Kettle) that the city hopes will be the final step before federal judge James Robart releases the Seattle Police Department from the 12-year-old federal consent decree.
The proposal, which is likely to pass early next year, would repeal two previous crowd-control ordinances and lay out general guidelines for the police department to come up with its own crowd control policies; it also removes a private right of action for people injured by “less-lethal” weapons, like blast balls and 40-mm projectile launchers, to sue the city, and lifts restrictions on other police departments that SPD calls on to provide “mutual aid” when they don’t have enough officers to respond to a large event.
One fact that has gotten somewhat lost, or been deliberately obscured, in the current debate over SPD’s crowd control policies is the fact that there is currently a crowd control policy in place, and it sets clear parameters around what weapons SPD can use against the public and in what circumstances.
The current law, as I’ve reported, replaced an earlier ordinance that banned the use of all crowd-control weapons, which, indeed, never went into effect. (Judge Robart enjoined it). But the current law is in effect; SPD has just ignored it, preferring to create and operate under an “interim policy” that is much less prescriptive.
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The new ordinance will allow SPD to continue operating under a modified version of that policy, and will allow SPD to modify that policy in the future, subject to certain “values and expectations,” without the need for legislation. Although some councilmembers have raised concerns about this laissez-faire approach, particularly when it comes to the use of blast balls, most seem eager to be done with the crowd control issue and leave it in SPD’s hands.
One of those council dissenters, Tammy Morales, will leave the council next year, just one year into her four-year term. And Seattle Department of Transportation director Greg Spotts, who oversaw this year’s successful transportation levy proposal, has also announced he is stepping down after just two years on the job.
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