By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle Nice celebrated our fourth anniversary this week, and to celebrate, we’re… bringing you the same spicy, insightful content we’ve been putting out week after week since 2021! (And encouraging you to donate to our Patreon, which pays for editing, hosting, and other expenses.)
This week’s topics: Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson’s decision to retain Police Chief Shon Barnes, the generous new police contract that had police guild president Mike Solan gloating that the “socialists” had lost (Mike, are the socialists in the room with you right now?) and the Trump Administration’s latest erratic moves on homelessness funding.
The Barnes news was pretty big. Mayor Bruce Harrell announced Barnes was his pick for chief year ago, foregoing the usual public process for selecting such a high-profile (and high-paying) position. In the past year, Barnes has stacked his office with people with no experience at SPD (including people who worked for Barnes in previous positions in North Carolina and Madison, Wisconsin), pushing out longtime civilian insiders and listening primarily to his inner circle. Fresh insights from elsewhere can be a breath of fresh air, but the lack of people with knowledge of how SPD functions and what Seattle residents expect from police reportedly contributed to some of Barnes’ high-profile early missteps.
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None of your podcast cohosts— that’s me, Sandeep Kaushik, and David Hyde, if you’re not a regular listener—could really speculate on what Wilson will do if Barnes fails to “make SPD a place where professionalism, integrity, compassion, and community partnership are at the center of every action,” as she put it in a statement announcing she would retain Barnes along with CARE Department Chief Amy Barden, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, and Office of Emergency Management director Curry Mayer.
However, we did agree that Wilson’s decision made sense–given that the alternative would have been firing Barnes, appointing an interim, and going through a search process that could be internally disruptive and externally divisive. If Barnes’ leadership style and commitment to creating an inclusive (and, specifically, woman- and LGBTQ-friendly) department don’t live up to Wilson’s standards, it’s likely she’ll launch a search (PubliCola has heard the name of a woman who may have the inside track), but with more direct knowledge of what’s working and what isn’t at SPD.