Category: Crime

City Council, Crime, Economy, Mayor Wilson

This Week on PubliCola: Building a Less “Fragile” Seattle Economy, Addressing Gun Violence, and Is It Selfish to Live Alone?

By Erica C. Barnett

Tuesday, September 8

Greater Seattle: Late Press Conferences, On-Time Buses, Selfish Housing

In this week’s column, Josh tackled the media-generated narrative that blamed Mayor Katie Wilson, rather than SPD, for a delayed SPD press release; praised the new Denny Way bus lane for turning the L8 into the Gr8; and wondered whether he should take on several new roommates, in response to a Seattle Times column that blamed people who live alone (rather than Seattle’s endless refusal to densify) for the housing crisis.

Investigation Report: Trip to Strip Club on Civil Rights Office Trip Was Sexual Harassment

An investigation into some of the employee allegations against Seattle Office for Civil Rights director Derrick Wheeler-Smith found that going to a strip club with an employee on a city-sponsored trip constituted sexual harassment, but that misogynistic and transphobic texts did not. Employees accused Wheeler-Smith of discrimination and harassment earlier this year, and he has been on paid leave since March.

Wednesday, September 9

Saka’s Messy Transportation Bill Gets Messier

City Councilmember Rob Saka’s mostly nonsubstantive transportation safety legislation—rolled out hastily one day before the mayor announced executive orders on the same subject—became more bloated over council recess, but would still have very little real-world impact.

Controversial Group We Heart Seattle Makes City’s Official Volunteer Day Roster

We Heart Seattle, a group whose leader films vulnerable homeless people to promote a punitive, staunchly conservative agenda, got city approval to include one of its encampment “cleanups” in this year’s citywide day of volunteerism. The group is under state investigation for allegedly failing to properly train volunteers to pick up and dispose of needles and other potentially dangerous items.

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Thursday, September 10

Consultants, New Staffers Fill Out Mayor’s Communications Team

Mayor Katie Wilson, whose communications staff has seen high turnover through most of her term so far, has hired a permanent communications director and press secretary—along with a number of consultants, including one who’s getting$10,000 to write this year’s budget speech.

Maritza Rivera Overstates Gun Violence, Pushes Mayor to Pre-Commit to Handpicked “Focused Deterrence” Contractor

City Councilmember Maritza Rivera is insisting that Mayor Wilson commit in advance to hire a specific contractor, at a cost of $418,000, to implement a “focused deterrence” approach to gun violence. This approach has been successful in places where most shootings involve a small group of people, which may or may not be the case in Seattle—a city where fatal shootings are much rarer than in other cities.

Friday, September 11

Report Recommends Diversifying Seattle Economy; Wilson’s Plan Would Initiate that Process, But Slowly

A report from Brookings-affiliated researchers concluded that the city is far too reliant on a tiny handful of massive tech companies, and has failed to nurture startups and mid-size companies that could sustain the economy here even if the big tech firms shrink or move to Bellevue. The report, which includes counterintuitive data on Seattle’s economy and tax base, was the basis for a Wilson executive order that directs the city to figure out ways to implement its recommendations.

Also this week: I was on City Cast Seattle with guest host Brett Hamil and Seattle Times reporter Claire Bryan on Friday. Claire got us up to speed on what’s happening with Seattle Public Schools’ budget (and I went off about AI in schools). Then, Brett and I discussed my reporting on the real reason for the communications breakdown after the Bite of Seattle shooting in July. I’ll be a regular guest on City Cast in the future, so tune in!

This week’s episode of Seattle Nice features returning guest Daniel Malone, from the Downtown Emergency Service Center. He got us up to speed on how DESC’s Opioid Recovery and Care Access (ORCA) center is doing one year in (so far, they’ve had more than 10,000 post-overdose encounters), the 95-bed STAR shelter downtown that replaced the Navigation Center in Little Saigon, and the status of the Trump Administration’s efforts to defund the kind of permanent supportive housing DESC provides.

Note to readers: I will be out of town for most of the next two weeks, so look for my stories on the mayor’s new gun violence reduction strategy, further discussion of Dan Strauss’ proposal to ban unregistered RVs from Seattle, and the mayor’s budget announcement after I get back on Thursday, September 24!

Meantime, my birthday is coming up next week, and I would appreciate nothing more than a contribution to PubliCola, the independent news source you’re reading. Lots of options, from one-time or ongoing Paypal contributions to a P.O. box where you can send a check, can be found right here.

City Council, Crime

Maritza Rivera Overstates Gun Violence, Pushes Mayor to Pre-Commit to Handpicked “Focused Deterrence” Contractor

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Maritza Rivera misrepresented the number of fatal shootings in Seattle by an order of magnitude earlier this week, claiming at a council public safety committee meeting that “fatal shootings in 2012 were 211, and in 2024 there were 541. And post-pandemic, it increased exponentially.”

Councilmember Rob Saka chimed in, saying that gun violence was “the one unique outlier” among crimes that has continued to increase year over year.

In reality, according to King County data, there were 19 firearm homicides in 2012 and 21 in 2024. (Between 2012 and 2024, there were a total of 120 such homicides in Seattle.) Although that is an overall uptick of two deaths, the actual homicide rate was lower in 2024 than in 2012, despite a post-pandemic upswing, because Seattle’s population grew by nearly 200,000 in those 12 years.

The numbers Rivera cited appear to come from this March 2025 city audit, which found that there were 211 and 541 reports of shots fired citywide in 2012 and 2024, respectively.

So why does Rivera’s alarmist overstatement matter? Because she’s using those numbers, and other claims about the rising danger of living in Seattle, to pressure Mayor Katie Wilson to bypass ordinary contracting processes and sign a $418,000  gun violence prevention contract with Rivera’s handpicked consultant, the National Network for Safer Communities.

NNSC, a project of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, pioneered the concept of “focused deterrence,” in which teams of police officers, social service providers, and community leaders focus their efforts on young men deemed most likely to engage in gun violence, with services on the front end and the threat of increasing consequences, including jail, if they commit violent crimes.

Wilson has said she plans to make focused a key component of her gun violence strategy, which she plans to announce next week. But NNSC is not the only consultant the city could choose to contract with to implement focused deterrence, a concept that has been around for decades; Seattle has used versions of focused deterrence off and on since at least 2009, when the city first launched a “drug market initiative” that offered low-level drug offenders the choice of treatment or jail. 

The reason Wilson must hire this specific contractor, Rivera explained, is because unlike “some organizations” King County has partnered with, NNSC “includes law enforcement” by design. King County’s Regional Peacekeepers Collective focuses on preventing gun violence through public health interventions.

Rivera credited NNSC with reducing violent crime in cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, Stockton, CA, and Chicago. On KUOW this week, she explicitly credited NNSC with reducing gun violence in Baltimore.

But Baltimore, as Rivera surely knows, actually stopped contracting with NNSC after two efforts at reducing gun violence in partnership with that contractor failed to show results. The current, successful model is a more comprehensive approach that includes a type of focused deterrence developed at the University of Pennsylvania, but also “community violence intervention, victim services, improved investigations, and sustained leadership from City Hall,” according to this overview.

It’s unusual, though not unprecedented, for a city council member to insist on hiring a specific contractor for such a large contract. (NNSC facilitated a symposium Rivera convened on gun violence earlier this year.) Rivera has continued to flog the issue, castigating Wilson via press release for telling KUOW that the city needs to be methodical in its approach to gun violence rather than rushing forward with a single “premature, very large investment in an out-of-state organization.”

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Failing to contract with NNSC, specifically, Rivera said, would send a message to “the people of Seattle” that the city doesn’t want to “stop future tragedies.”

Rivera’s resolution passed out of committee 3-0, with Eddie Lin abstaining.

Crime, King County, Mayor Wilson, Police, public safety

King County Enlists Uncanny AI Videos for Ethics Training; Drop in Mayor’s Approval Rating Follows Anti-Wilson Media Frenzy

1. King County is using what it calls an “innovative tool” to train 4,000 executive branch employees on how to prevent waste, fraud, and misuse of public dollars: A series of short videos in which an uncanny AI avatar, wearing a tech CEO-style quarter-zip fleece, recites scripts about various training topics in front of shelves filled with leather-bound books.

According to a King County spokesperson, the videos are part of a new training protocol the county instituted “as part of Executive Girmay Zahilay’s Better Government actions,” after an audit found potential fraud, waste, and abuse of funds in youth contracts overseen by the Department of Community and Human Services.

A quick reverse image search found dozens of identical-looking videos produced for a wide range of small companies, from a “dental AI” company to a rare-earth metal dealer to a flower shop.

Usually, the AI speaks with a plummy British accent, but occasionally it speaks in other languages, like German, or in the American accent King County’s IT department chose for the training videos.

The King County spokesperson said the AI videos are based on an anti-fraud training DCHS launched in April, and said the content was generated by humans at DCHS, “in consultation with King County’s Finance and Business Operations Division.”

King County IT put together the videos using a company called Synthesia, which costs the county about $900 a year. According to the spokesperson, the IT department approved the use of the company under the county’s AI policy.

“King County embraces the use of innovative tools, including AI,” the spokesperson said. “The training went through multiple reviews internally to ensure accuracy, the AI-generated presenter has been disclosed to staff, and no prohibited County data was provided to the AI service.”

We think they dost protest a bit too much. Our question was, “Does DCHS believe this kind of AI talking head video is an effective training tool, and if so, why?”

​

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2. The Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce released another batch of poll results on Thursday. (The first poll, done in collaboration with Challenge Seattle and released earlier this week, purported to show overwhelming support for police camera surveillance in Seattle neighborhoods). One poll question found that Mayor Katie Wilson’s approval rating has slipped 20 percentage points, to 37 percent; the other showed broad public support for a long list of potential public safety strategies and interventions.

Local media outlets interpreted the results as bad news for Wilson, which is certainly the case with her approval rating. But it’s worth noting, as my friend and colleague Marcus Harrison Green did on Bluesky, that approval ratings don’t exist in a vacuum: The same media that’s dutifully reporting on the mayor’s drop in support has also spent the last several weeks falling over themselves to blame Wilson for a delayed press conference after a shooting at the Bite of Seattle last month and suggest that she fired former police chief Shon Barnes on a baseless whim. (Marcus, citing his podcast co-host Nora Kenworthy, also pointed out that the backlash is transparently gendered, and I’ll add that it’s also ageist—no one would say Bruce Harrell had no right to fire his department heads or tell them what to do.)

As we’ve noted, Wilson had many pre-existing reasons for letting the police chief go—beyond his embarrassing explosion at a reporter who asked him a question, arguably a fireable offense in itself. And many in the mainstream press have done a disservice to their profession by failing to ask basic questions Barnes’ role in delaying his own department’s press conference while he waited to be briefed from his hotel room in Dallas. The press, as much as any official action or press release, create public opinion, and they’ve been working overtime to make Wilson look feckless, incompetent, and out of bounds.

The responses to the public safety questions, which the Chamber characterized as a sign of  “growing concern among voters about public safety,” are not so much… that, as they are a sign that people continue to support a combination of punishment (arrests and jail) and services (treatment and housing). Although the Seattle Times (which ran the news under the headline “Seattle voters are done waiting on public safety, new poll finds”) was “staggered” by the fact that people like ideas like foot patrols and drug treatment, these concepts generally poll well, as do ideas like banning encampments near schools and in public parks.

None of the coverage I’ve seen added much context to the poll results. Context like: SPD has said it lacks the resources to do regular foot patrols , or the fact that the city already prohibits sleeping in parks. The wording of questions like these is both misleading (suggesting that the mayor could do these things but is refusing) and designed to elicit a positive response. They are, in other words, predictable. But to a mainstream press invested in promoting a narrative of “socialist failure” (Wilson, who’s overseen steady improvement in public safety and increased police hiring, is hardly Leon Trotsky), the results of a business poll are just more evidence the mayor is refusing to give voters what they want.

 

Crime, Police

SPD Dedicates Three Officers to Magnuson Park, Citing Success with “Disorder” and Property Crimes During Pilot
City Councilmember Maritza Rivera and Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes

By Erica C. Barnett

Citing a “double-digit” reduction in crime since the launch of a pilot that added police patrols in and around Northeast Seattle’s Magnuson Park last summer, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes announced that SPD will assign three full-time officers to the park. The officers will report to the North Precinct, and will essentially be on call there if needed, but otherwise, their jobs will involve patrolling the park and doing what Barnes calls “neighborhood-oriented policing.”

PubliCola first reported on the pilot expansion in January.

Barnes said SPD chose Magnuson Park, which is surrounded by some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, “because it’s the second largest park in our city [and] we have housing on the property”—hundreds of low-income and affordable units run by Mercy Housing and Solid Ground.

“We also chose this location because I heard from the community about … the rise in disorder crimes” such as noisy parties and street racing, Barnes said.

In the expanded program, SPD will assign three full-time officers, working in pairs to do bike and foot patrols in and around the park, getting to know people who live in the area and “fulfilling our obligation of problem oriented policing and community policing, which is the hallmark of my leadership philosophy,” Barnes said. The officers will be assigned to the North Precinct and will still be expected to respond to calls from other areas if necessary.

Asked why the city didn’t expand the Magnuson pilot into neighborhoods that have experienced more crime, like Rainier Beach or Little Saigon, Barnes said, “It’s not always about [putting resources in] the highest-crime area. One of the reasons we chose this particular location [is that] it’s our second biggest park. It has homes here as well. We’re hearing from the community. It just seemed like a good place to start and kind of work through some of those bugs.”

SPD has assigned new police academy graduates “who are not quite ready for patrol” to the area around 12th and Jackson, Barnes added. Additionally, “We’re looking at a space now, I believe at Third and Pine, that could be available for us” in the future. An SPD spokeswoman declined to provide additional details about the space Barnes mentioned.

City Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who represents Northeast Seattle, said there are “people living in the park that I very much care about, and I want to make sure that our families and the kids that are living here at Mercy Housing and Solid Ground are living in a safe environment, as well as the surrounding neighbors and all the people that come to visit the park.”

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The “double-digit” crime reduction Barnes mentioned appears to refer to a drop in reported crimes during the 90-day pilot period compared to the same period in 2024.

SPD’s public crime database shows that the number of reported crimes in the Sand Point neighborhood, which includes Magnuson Park, shows that there were 113 fewer reported crimes during the pilot period than the same period in 2024. However, a broader look at crime trends in the area and in Seattle as a whole shows that crime was lower across the city last year, and continues to trend lower in 2026 than in 2025, indicating a more general reduction in crime than the success of a specific pilot in one area.

One of the most infamous incidents of police violence in Seattle happened in Magnuson Park several years ago, before former mayor Bruce Harrell hired Barnes away from his previous position in Madison, Wisconsin. In 2017, officers shot and killed Charleena Lyles, a Black mother of four who called 911 during a mental health crisis, in her apartment. Lyles’ killing was one of the incidents that spurred calls for unarmed first responders with social work backgrounds to assist people in crisis. Although the city never admitted liability, Seattle paid $3.5 million in 2021 to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit by Lyles’ family.

SPD’s press event took place about 700 feet from where Lyles was killed.

When a TV reporter asked about past “officer-involved shootings” (shootings by police) in the park, Barnes appeared confused. “Officer-involved shootings?” he said.

After the reporter, who did not mention Lyles by name, attempted to elaborate— “there have been some tense events that have happened in the past”— Barnes responded: “I think no matter if it’s Magnuson Park or any other area in the city, we want to make sure that we’re policing in a way that’s procedurally just and that’s according to the expectations of our community. … That’s what policing is to me—knowing the people who may be dealing with issues, the people who may be dealing with mental health crisis, because when you know them and you can communicate with them, you have better outcomes.”

Crime, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

This Week on PubliCola: March 14, 2026
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes at SPD’s Real Time Crime Center last year

A criminal case backlog, the mayor’s big shelter push, the state of downtown Seattle, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, March 9

Facing Thousands of Backlogged Cases, New City Attorney Says She’ll Reorg Her Office for Faster Results

After taking office, new City Attorney Erika Evans discovered a backlog of thousands of cases left over from her predecessor, Ann Davison. The reasons for the backlog are complex, but Evans says she’s taking one step she believes will help: Reorganizing the city attorney’s office so that each case is handled by a single attorney from the beginning.

Tuesday, March 10

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Go Big on Shelter. Will She Succeed—and If She Does, What Then?

This week’s podcast was all about Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to add 1,000 shelter beds—primarily by building more, and larger, tiny house villages—before the end of 2026. We talked about what it will mean if Wilson is successful, particularly for those living in tiny houses while they wait for actual housing, which is expensive and challenging to site.

Wednesday, March 11

SPD Claims “300% Increase In Justice” Due to Surveillance Camera HQ

The Seattle Police Department announced a still-unreleased report showing that when its Real Time Crime Center (home to SPD’s controversial surveillance cameras) is involved in a criminal case, SPD is three times as likely to make an arrest. Although SPD framed an increase in arrests as “victims getting justice,” they did not respond to our questions about whether these were justified arrests or if they led to prosecutions or convictions.

Judge Rules Against Activists in Press Pass Case

Three local right-wing activists (including one, former FOX13 reporter Brandi Kruse, who has posted repeatedly on X, “I am not a journalist”) got big mad when they were denied access to a special press area in the state House chamber. They sued, and are currently losing. The guidelines for press credentials in Olympia are content neutral, but they do require that reporters are primarily engaged in news gathering and not working on behalf of political campaigns or for advocacy groups—a low bar all three activists failed to meet.

Thursday, March 12

KIRO Radio Ran a Segment Attacking My Reporting. They Still Haven’t Responded to My Efforts to Correct the Record.

KIRO Radio’s “Gee and Ursula” invited guest Angela Rye on their show to attempt to discredit my reporting about staff complaints against the director and deputy director of the city’s Office for Civil Rights. In a 10-minute segment, Rye claimed, inaccurately, that I had written an “unsourced” story with false information as part of a broader effort by Mayor Wilson and her deputy mayor, Brian Surratt, to remove Black leaders and other Bruce Harrell appointees from city departments. (Both Harrell and Wilson, like all mayors, replaced some of their predecessor’s department heads.) This week, KIRO ignored all my efforts to correct the record and explain my reporting process.

Mayor Wilson Defies Convention at Annual Downtown Business Event

During the Downtown Seattle Association’s event celebrating the annual State of Downtown Seattle report yesterday, Mayor Wilson cheerfully defied expectations for political speeches at this glad-handing event—framing a commitment to good government as an explicitly left-wing priority.

 

 

Courts, Crime

Facing Thousands of Backlogged Cases, New City Attorney Says She’ll Reorg Her Office for Faster Results

By Erica C. Barnett

When former city attorney Ann Davison started her term in 2024, she pledged to swiftly eliminate a “backlog” of some 5,000 cases she said her predecessor, Pete Holmes, had carelessly allowed to pile up during his final term. And while she did clear out much of that backlog, largely by dropping thousands of older cases, her strategy for eliminating future case pileups—a “close-in-time” policy that required attorneys to decide whether to file cases within five days of receiving police reports—was largely unsuccessful.

When she left office at the end of last year, Davison left behind a backlog of thousands of unresolved cases—between about 4,700 and 5,100, depending on which DUI cases are included in the backlog. The larger number, from City Attorney Erika Evans’ office, includes nearly 400 DUI cases that have been reviewed, but not filed, because of testing delays at the state toxicology lab, while Davison’s office did not count that type of case as part of the backlog.

“My predecessor, former city attorney Davison, also inherited a backlog from former city attorney Pete Holmes,” Evans said. “It seems like it’s common to have [a backlog], and it shouldn’t be at all.”

Scott Lindsay, the former deputy city attorney, told PubliCola his own team had identified about 1,000 cases they believe shouldn’t count toward the backlog, including the DUI “tox hold” cases as well as around 200 cases where attorneys made filing decisions before December 31 but the filings didn’t go through until this year.

“We have some real questions about how they’re doing the math,” Lindsay said. But, he added, “It’s absolutely true that there was a backlog at the end of the Davison administration, and it was growing.”

In addition to the DUI cases that are sitting in tox-lab limbo, the backlog includes around 800 criminal traffic cases, 1,700 domestic violence cases, and more than 1,000 other misdemeanor cases, such as shoplifting, trespassing, and public drug use.

The total also include around 1,000 cases that are unclassified—meaning they could be anything. This problem apparently emerged last year during a long-overdue migration from a case management database, called DAMION, to a modern replacement called JusticeNexus. The new system is designed to handle more complex case files than DAMION, but the transfer has been rough. Apparently, whenever a case category didn’t fit the new system’s parameters, JusticeNexus gave it a blank, or unclassified, status; for example, incoming cases that were previously classified under “review”—as in, ready for the filing unit to review—got categorized as blank in the new system, which didn’t have a corresponding “review” category, according to Lindsay.

“I think it’s much better, as you can imagine, to be using a system that’s not from 1999,” criminal division director Jenna Robert said during a joint interview with Evans on Friday, “but there are definitely growing pains that are going to take  while for us to resolve.”

Evans is a former federal prosecutor; Robert worked in the domestic violence division under former city attorney Pete Holmes before joining the state attorney general’s office in 2021. Evans said this experience gives them an important perspective that her predecessors lacked. “I think that perspective matters, when we’re talking about … understanding that not every case that comes in should be filed, and we really need to be looking at cases that affect public safety,” she said.

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Davison, a Republican, supported new laws cracking down on sex work and drug use and believed in treating “prolific offenders” more harshly than other misdemeanor defendants. But Evans acknowledged that despite her “weird fixations” on certain types of crimes, Davison “did have a lot of cases in diversion, including quality of life crimes” like shoplifting and trespassing.

Evans says there are a few key changes that could help her office address the backlog. First, legislation that just passed the state House, after sailing through the Senate, will allow cities to use private labs to analyze blood samples in suspected DUI cases. Evans testified in favor of the legislation in Olympia last month.

Second, she says the city needs to fund more prosecutors to review and handle increasingly complex cases, which often involve hours of video evidence. Evans is well aware that any request for additional funding will probably fall on deaf ears this year, when the city is facing a $148 million budget deficit. Although Davison managed to squeeze around $300,000 out of the city for two additional domestic violence prosecutors in 2022, Mayor Katie Wilson has asked each department to propose cuts between 5 and 10 percent, and Evans acknowledged that this year’s budget fight will be about preserving her office, not expanding it.

Third, Evans and Robert are restructuring the department so that a single attorney will handle each case from filing to resolution, a “vertical” structure Evans said would give prosecutors a greater sense of “ownership and responsibility” over their cases and prevent a situation where the city attorney’s filing unit is simply “filing for numbers.” Evans said that in her experience as a federal prosecutor, “there’s a different mentality when you’re like, ‘Okay, yeah. This is mine all the way through.”

For crime victims, “just getting the quality they need up front is really important, and I think that that naturally happens when you get a case, it’s yours and it’s not going to just be handed off to someone else to go and try,” Evans said.

These proposals don’t address other factors that could be contributing to chronic case backlogs, such as slow filings or the difficulty of hiring highly qualified lawyers to relatively low-paying government positions. By this time next year, we should have some sense of whether the changes Evans is implementing have started to make a dent in the city prosecutor’s workload, or if this recurring problem is due to other, more intractable forces.