Brian Maxey and Rebecca Boatright, two long-serving civilian employees fired by Police Chief Shon Barnes last month
Fired SPD employees allege retaliation by police chief, Harrell pre-election request sent Seattle Channel staffers scrambling, and more news to close out 2025.
Police Chief Shon Barnes took a nearly two-week vacation over the holidays, leaving various deputies in charge while he was off duty. Barnes, whose family lives in Chicago, has previously come under scrutiny for spending many of his weekends out of town.
The Seattle Police Department claims two recent operations targeting a strip club and men who pay for sex successfully targeted human trafficking and sexual exploitation. But they wouldn’t answer questions seeking more detailed information about the two announcements, such as whether the strip club sting led to any actual charges and a request for police reports.
Former Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office said his 2025 budget video was nothing unusual and didn’t cost the city any extra money. But records reveal that the multi-location video was a last-minute request that required Seattle Channel staffers to drop what they were doing and work overtime on a weekend to film and produce a 15-minute film with virtually no notice, just a few weeks before ballots dropped for the 2025 mayoral election.
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In recent years, the police department’s policy toward public disclosure requests has ossified into a kind of tacit refusal via delay. “Grouping,” SPD’s practice of refusing to respond to more than one request from the same person or outlet at a time, is the subject of at least one lawsuit, but SPD also now forces the media and public to file records requests for information that used to be easy to obtain, exacerbating the problem. Mayor Wilson should seek an audit to get to the bottom of SPD’s intrasigence, and make them follow the public records act in practice, not just in theory.
Two top civilian SPD employees who were fired by Police Chief Shon Barnes, Rebecca Boatright and Brian Maxey, have filed tort claims seeking $11 million for what they describe as retaliation. The tort says they advised Barnes against decisions that were widely perceived as anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ, and Boatright also says she was discriminated against because of her gender.
Mayor Bruce Harrell stands in front of an affordable-housing building in his 2025 budget video
By Erica C. Barnett
Back in September, outgoing Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his annual budget not with an in-person speech, in keeping with longstanding custom, but in a slickly produced video, filmed at multiple locations around Seattle. The timing, as well as the content—an upbeat preview that emphasized new spending while failing to mention the looming budget cliff—looked more like a campaign video than an informational announcement. It has been viewed on YouTube around 1,400 times.
Asked about the timing and expense of the video earlier this year, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Information Technology said, “The Seattle Channel supports the Mayor’s office for various requests, including producing the recent budgetvideo,” the spokesperson said, adding, “This work was completed in-house using staff time.”
While this was technically true, records PubliCola obtained through a public disclosure request show that Seattle Channel staff had to work overtime to comply with Harrell’s last-minute pre-election request, postponing work on regular Seattle Channel shows and working over the weekend to complete the project.
According to an email, 11 staffers were involved in producing Harrell’s budget video.
A review of the emails that flew back and forth before and during production of Harrell’s video suggest a frantic rush to fulfill a last-minute demand from Harrell, who had just lost the primary election to Katie Wilson.
On Monday, September 15, Seattle Channel production manager Ed Escalona sent out an email to staff letting them know about a “last-minute request” from Harrell’s office for a budget video, with multiple takes at three to five locations, filmed “on the mayor’s schedule” and due in a week. “The details are sketchy,” the email noted; another exchange said the mayor planned to “ad lib” without a teleprompter.
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The timeline sent producers scrambling to reschedule other projects and find people who could take on extra work on very short notice. But Harrell’s office took their time coming up with a plan. That Thursday, a staffer described the lack of information from the mayor’s office as “inefficient and not best practices,” and the filming didn’t happen until Friday, with producers still asking Harrell’s office for a script at 2:00 that afternoon.
Work on other Seattle Channel shows appears to have been upended by the last-minute production, and staffers worked through the weekend to finish filming and editing—a situation that prompted grousing from some staff. “Looks great… all except for the part of having to work the whole weekend!” one staffer wrote.
Emails show that Seattle Channel staff tried to limit the number of shooting locations, but Harrell’s team insisted on four—the Green Lake Community Center, a low-income housing complex in the Central District, and the downtown waterfront, plus City Hall.
Harrell’s office also requested a long list of B-roll, including new drone shots, to serve as segues between locations. On the day before the video was due, a Sunday, Seattle Channel general manager Shannon Gee described the work in an email as “very rough going. I don’t know if I’ve been of any help at all trying to hunt down footage that doesn’t exist. … There are sections where there is no way to illustrate what is being said and there are still a lot of edits that need to be covered.”
As we noted at the time, it’s unusual for a Seattle mayor to introduce the annual budget with a video rather than a live speech; the only mayor who has done so in recent memory was Jenny Durkan, who was halfway out the door when she announced her final budget with a perfunctory six-minute video taped at a North Seattle College classroom in 2021.
Image by Kyah117, via Wikimedia Commons. CC-by-4.0 license
By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle’s parking enforcement officers have been engaged in a work slowdown since mid-November, after failing to reach an agreement on a contract that would raise their pay and allow them to take paid lunch breaks, among other union demands.
Jake Sisley, the head of the Seattle Parking Enforcement Officers Guild (SPEOG), said that on November 18, the parking enforcement officers started a “realignment of enforcement priorities” that will result in fewer tickets and more warnings for people who violate on-street parking rules.
“The city makes money off PEOs going out and doing their job, and while I maintain that’s not the primary purpose, I think the city sees it as the primary purpose,” Sisley said. “We don’t want to diminish the level of service we provide the public—like, if someone calls and says there’s a car blocking their driveway, we’ll still cite that person and tow them. But for everything else that’s kind of benign, like pay to park or if there’s a no parking zone, maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe you don’t give them a ticket, but just give them a warning.”
SPEOG represents the city’s 85 or so parking enforcement officers, who are part of the Seattle Police Department but operate under a separate contract. (Mayor Bruce Harrell just signed a new police contract giving rookie officers a starting salary of $118,000, rising to $126,000 after six months, plus bonuses for having a two- or four-year degree).
Currently, PEO salaries max out at just over $37 an hour—an amount SPEOG President Jake Sisley says is far too low, especially compared to civilian Community Service Officers and License and Standards Inspectors, who make up to $52 an hour. “Parking enforcement officers do a lot,” Sisley said—from ticketing and towing cars that are blocking driveways and roads to directing traffic at special events to knocking on the doors of RVs where people are living as part of the abandoned vehicles team.
The PEOs have been working without a contract since the end of 2023, the same year that six new people joined the city council, shaking up the Labor Relations Policy Committee, which votes on labor contracts. (A five-member council majority serves on the LRPC.) SPEOG agreed to put the contract, which would go through the end of this year, off until the fall of 2024, Sisley said, when the union asked for a “robust” 32 percent pay increase that would to put parking enforcement officers’ pay in line with CSOs and licensing inspectors. The city countered with an offer of 2 percent.
“Our response was essentially, ‘Get real,’ because there were so many other things that were on the table,” Sisley said. “The fact that they came back with essentially [just] 2 percent— it was like, you aren’t even trying. You’re trying to delay.”
Since then, Sisley said “they’ve slowly clawed back up to a real proposal”—one that would increase PEO pay by at least 11.5 percent—but a number of issues are still outstanding and the contract is currently in mediation, with no clear path to consensus.
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The PEOs are asking for a half-hour paid lunch, rather than their current unpaid lunch breaks, because they often get calls during lunch and have to leave. Sisley said the city’s labor negotiators said they could just turn their radios and phones off during their breaks, but SPEOG argued that would create a safety issue.
They’re also opposing the city’s effort to make service on specialty teams, like the abandoned vehicles squad, a mandatory part of the routine “bid” for shifts, instead of something people sign up for on a voluntary basis; they argue that if not enough people are signing up to work these shifts, the city should pay a premium to those who volunteer. SPEOG has filed a grievance over this issue, Sisley said.
For years, the parking enforcement division has had high turnover and about 20 vacant positions. Moving the PEOs back to SPD from SDOT, where they were moved in 2021 (the only sense in which SPD was meaningfully “defunded”) was supposed to improve hiring and reduce turnover, but it didn’t, leaving about 18 perennially vacant positions.
This year, Mayor Bruce Harrell tried to defund these positions and move their funding, almost $3 million, to pay for his other priorities. After learning that PEOs actually bring in more money than they cost, in the form of fines, the council rejected that proposal. SPEOG argues the hiring and turnover issues will persist, however, as long as parking enforcement officer wages and working conditions remain worse than similar jobs, like CSOs.
“It’s not so much about the money—it’s about the principles,” Sisley said. “But the money does matter.”
The city’s lead negotiator on the contract and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing negotiations.
The Seattle Police Department’s use of overtime has continued to increase year after year, rising to around 500,000 hours last year. Despite multiple midyear budget increases, SPD has run out of overtime funding, and will deprioritize property crimes and other types of investigations in an effort to get a handle on its budget for 2025.
King County Executive Girmay Zahilay has portrayed his decision to lay off the majority of people who fall under his direct purview as a standard part of any transition process. But many employees who will lose their jobs in January told us their positions aren’t political; they’re bureaucrats who the county running, like regional planners, contract managers, and economists.
Regional economic growth leader and city of Seattle veteran Brian Surratt will be Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson’s sole deputy mayor, a pick that seems likely to assuage at least some concerns from business leaders who worried Wilson’s team would consist of socialist radicals. Former council central staffer Aly Pennucci, former Puget Sound Sage director Nicole Soper, and ex-Futurewise policy director Kate Kreuzer are also at the top of Wilson’s org chart.
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Sources confirmed this week that incoming Mayor Katie Wilson is still waffling over whether to keep Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes, a Bruce Harrell appointee who has come under scrutiny for some of his external and internal decisions.
At Barnes’ direction, the department will pay a consultant from North Carolina to do a media training for SPD command staff and executive-level employees. Although command staff and executives just got media training from a different consultant last year, an SPD spokesperson said the new training is needed to make these officials more comfortable talking to the press.
The department will also pay another consultant, this one from California, to do an assessment of how the police chief’s office is organized. Barnes just hired several new high-level staffers and reorganized the office this year. The consultant is the same one who did two previous national searches that resulted in the selection of internal candidates for top roles at SPD, including former police chief Adrian Diaz.
Three weeks before leaving office, Mayor Harrell announced the latest round of Equitable Development initiative grants. For the second time in his administration, the Royal Esquire Club, a private Black men’s club to which Harrell has longstanding ties, will receive money to pay for a renovation. Although Harrell’s office says the EDI committee funded the club based purely on its value as a cultural institution, the mayor’s work on behalf of the group—including alleged attempts to quash a wage-theft investigation and the use of city staff time to do administrative tasks for the club—calls that claim into question.
Newly filed election finance reports for November show that the Harrell campaign paid Eastside for Hire taxi company founder Abdisalam (Abdul) Yusuf more than $46,000, the equivalent of $5,000 a week (based on reports that connect payments to specific weeks of work) to do unspecified “outreach” in the final days of the campaign. Yusuf’s consulting firm has never reported any previous paid work on any campaign.
This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed the changes that are taking shape at King County and the city of Seattle, as County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson start filling out their staff, including Zahilay’s layoffs and internal discussions on Team Wilson about whether to retain SPD Chief Barnes.
Mayor Bruce Harrell on election night at the Royal Esquire Club
1. On Thursday, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced $27.8 million in new grants through the city’s Equitable Development Initiative—the city’s largest anti-displacement program. On the list, for the second time in Harrell’s term: The Royal Esquire Club, a 78-year-old private social club on Rainier Avenue South where Harrell served as board president (and where he held his election-night party this year).
This year’s $184,000 grant serves as a kind of bookend to the Harrell Administration. In 2022, shortly after Harrell became mayor, the city granted the club $800,000 for renovations to its building—one of the largest grants that year. This year’s grant will also go toward that renovation.
Back in 2022, Harrell’s office said the EDI program chose all grants based on objective, merit- and equity-based criteria and that the mayor had no influence over the process. When we asked about this year’s award, Harrell’s office referred us to the same statement they sent three years ago when the club got its first EDI grant: “Decisions on which organizations received funding were determined by the EDI Advisory Board and community panel through a competitive community-based process. The mayor had no role in deciding which organizations would receive the awards and did not receive or score the applications.”
Harrell’s longstanding connection to the Royal Esquire Club has been the source of controversy, and the subject of a formal ethics complaint, in the past. In 2018, when he was city council president, Harrell intervened in an investigation into wage theft allegations by five women who worked as servers at the club.
When the city’s Office of Labor Standards began looking into the allegations, Harrell contacted the city employee who was investigating the case to remind him that the council and mayor had the power to cut OLS’ budget. At various council meetings, Harrell called OLS’ investigators “extremely unprofessional” and their treatment of the Royal Esquire Club “horrible.” (The women eventually reached a financial settlement).
This year, KUOW reported that Harrell had directed his city council staff to do administrative work for the Royal Esquire Club, which lacked secretarial support at the time, including tasks like filling out insurance paperwork, collecting membership dues, and sending out invitations to fundraising events. (Harrell characterized this work as “constituent services.”)
The EDI program funds organizations “working on anti-displacement efforts in high displacement risk neighborhoods.” According to a spokeswoman for Harrell, the club “is a historically significant gathering space for Seattle’s Black community, which has experienced well-reported displacement from the city and the loss of culturally significant spaces.”
2. On Sunday, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s reelection campaign filed its campaign finance reports for the week leading up to the November 4 election. The reports show that Harrell reported paid the one-person consulting firm owned by Eastside for Hire founder Abdisalam (Abdul) Yusuf more than $21,000 on election day.
Combined with the payments PubliCola reported last month, the Harrell campaign has paid Yusuf more than $46,000 for unspecified outreach work. Yusuf’s firm, FF and J Consulting, has never reported any previous paid work on any campaign.
Yusuf is a prominent member of the Seattle-area Somali community who has frequently advocated on behalf of rideshare drivers. During the final weeks of the campaign, Harrell was reportedly eager to drum up votes from Seattle’s tight-knit East African communities. The nature of Yusuf’s outreach and engagement is unclear—neither he nor the Harrell campaign responded to our questions just before the election‚‚but whatever it was, Harrell considered it extremely high-value. His consultant, Christian Sinderman, received the same amount in a month that Yusuf got from the campaign every week, and his campaign manager made around $1,200 a week, according to campaign finance reports.
Harrell lost the election to Katie Wilson by a margin of 2,011 votes.
D. Williams, a LEAD program participant, in his tiny home in North Seattle.
While Seattle’s outgoing mayor and city attorney credit drug arrests and prosecutions, public health evidence suggests other causes.
By Andrew Engelson
Fatal overdoses have declined for two years in a row in Seattle—a sliver of hope in the ongoing opioid epidemic. Mayor Bruce Harrell has claimed greater enforcement of the city’s drug laws has saved lives. Others, including health experts at King County, argue that evidence-based public health approaches should get the credit.
According to Public Health Seattle & King County, the number of fatal drug overdoses in King County has declined 31 percent since hitting a peak in 2023. So far in 2025, the county has confirmed 796 fatal overdoses, including 564 that involved fentanyl—a slight dip since this time in 2024, following a decline of about 22 percent between 2023 and 2024.
Harrell’s office credited a 42 percent increase in felony drug dealing arrests by the Seattle Police Department, along with new programs that have increased access to treatment and buprenorphine, for lowering the number of overdoses.
“Our comprehensive approach to the fentanyl crisis is showing real results, helping keep our neighborhoods safe,” Harrell said in a statement. “We are aggressively targeting and arresting the drug traffickers and dealers who bring these deadly poisons into our city, and I am grateful for our strong partnership with King County prosecutors in holding offenders accountable.”
But Brad Finegood, who leads the public health department’s opioid and overdose response, said the drop in fatal overdoses in King County is likely due to a multi-pronged public health effort across the county that includes increasedaccess to injectable buprenorphine, a drug that helps suppress cravings for more dangerous opioids like fentanyl, and a massive campaign to distribute the overdose reversal drug naloxone.
While the decrease is encouraging, Finegood said the numbers are “still at an unacceptable number, and they could go back up real easily.”.
Data as of November 25, 2025.
It’s been two years since the city of Seattle passed a law making it a misdemeanor to possess illegal drugs or use them in public (previously, possession was a felony that the King County Prosecutor’s Office generally declined to prosecute). SPD has used the law to refer about 800 people arrested for minor drug offenses into the LEAD diversion program, which offers people accused of low-level offenses a way to avoid charges and access services. About 500 of those referrals 500 came about as the result of an arrest; the other 300 were “social contact” referrals, in which police officers refer someone to the program without an arrest.
Meanwhile, outgoing City Attorney Ann Davison’s office prosecuted 215 people under the new drug law between October 2023 and January 2025. Last month, the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD) published a report critical of the law, finding that of the 215 people prosecuted using the law since October 2023, only six completed treatment or received a substance use assessment.
Drug policy in Seattle will likely look much different in the next four years under progressive mayor-elect Katie Wilson, who campaigned on a public health-focused approach to the fentanyl crisis, and under former prosecutor Erika Evans, who will be replacing Davison, a Republican, as city attorney. Evans says she wants to significiantly reduce the number of people prosecuted for drug use and possession and to “bring back a reimagined community court”—a therapeutic court Davison dismantled in 2023.
Evans called the fact that just six people prosecuted under the drug use law went through treatment or evaluation a “huge failure.”
“As the next city attorney, [I’m] going to be working to expand our partnership with LEAD to make sure folks that are dealing with substance use disorder are getting connected with services and treatment,” she said.
D. Williams is just one of many people who turned his life around thanks to LEAD.
Williams, who asked PubliCola to use only use his first initial and last name, lives in a cozy 10 foot-by-10 foot shelter at Catholic Community Services’ Junction Point tiny house village in north Seattle. After serving jail time for convictions on possession charges and violating a no-contact order, Williams was in a bad state.
“It was all bad: homeless, addiction,” Williams said. “Lack of self-worth. A lot of hatred.”
After five people close to him died in close succession, Williams decided he needed to make a change.
In the summer of 2024, Williams asked an officer for a social contact referral to LEAD. He was connected with Casey Pham, a case manager at Evergreen Treatment Service’s REACH program, and started treatment. But like many drug users, Williams only stayed for a few days before leaving the program and going back to using. “I was really sick, real bad,” Williams says of his experience of withdrawal. “But I kept pushing. I kept being persistent.”
Williams said that each time he relapsed, he regretted it. “Every time I did it again, it was with that much more hatred inside of me, and that’s a heavy burden to carry.”
Another time when he sought treatment, William was told he’d need to wait 14 days for an opening. He told the organization, “I don’t know if I’ll even be here. I can’t wait that long.”
Despite the barriers, Williams eventually completed treatment, and though his path to recovery still has its ups and downs, he has a roof over his head and is attending computer science classes at North Seattle College. “I feel much better. I can lift my head up now,” he said. “I don’t have to walk around with that shame on my back.”
But the fact that the city attorney’s office still prosecuted 215 people was a waste of resources, DPD contends.
Katie Hurley, special counsel for criminal practice and policy at DPD, said many of the people who end up getting prosecuted for drug misdemeanors were arrested for possessing “incredibly small” amounts of drugs.
In April, according to Seattle Municipal Court records, SPD arrested a man at 12th Ave. S and S Jackson St.—a longtime hot spot for drug activity—and was charged him with possession based on traces of drugs, tin foil, and a straw. The police report did not mention any attempts at diversion.
Also in April, a man who had previously been found incompetent to stand trial on an unrelated charge was arrested for smoking an unidentified substance. Despite his previous evaluation, Davison’s office charged the man, and two weeks later he was found incompetent to stand trial. He received no referral to LEAD or services.
Last September, another man was arrested at 12th and Jackson for allegedly smoking an illegal substance. He was booked into jail and charged, but later the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.
“It’s an obscene use of resources,” Hurley said. “It’s very dehumanizing that we’re going to lock a person like this up, considering the amount of resources it takes.”
Tim Robinson, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, pointed to the city attorney’s new Drug Prosecution Alternative (DPA) program that debuted in August, which offers people a chance to avoid prosecution if they get evaluated for substance use disorder. So far, 34 out of 70 people who received offers to participate in the program have chosen to do so, Robinson said.
DPA participants must agree to a “stay out of drug area” (SODA) order, which banishes a person accused of breaking the city’s drug laws from specific areas; violating a SODA order is a separate misdemeanor.
Evans, the incoming city attorney, said that Davison’s drug prosecution alternative is “pretty ridiculous” because it requires people who are using fentanyl to get an evaluation to see if they have a drug problem. “If they get charged with smoking fentanyl, all that’s required is for them to agree to a SODA order placed on them, and then having to get an assessment that tells them whether or not they have a fentanyl addiction. That is wasting our public dollars.”
The city attorney’s office disagrees, claiming the approach has improved public safety. “Drug overdoses in Seattle have declined since the law was enacted and the areas hit hardest by open-air drug markets have seen some meaningful improvement,” Robinson said. “There is more work to be done, but Seattle is safer today than it was four years ago as measured by crime statistics and public opinion polls.”
Items SPD recovered from a felony drug bust (photo via Seattle Police Department).
In September, SPD’s blog featured a flurry of posts about drug seizures and arrests, with accompanying photos of baggies of drugs, cash, and confiscated guns—part of the surge of felony arrests that Harrell said contributed to the recent reduction in overdose deaths.
But a closer look at the cases reveals that many of these arrests were for small-time deals by people who are likely drug users themselves.
A post on September 29 celebrated SPD arresting a 34-year old man found with a “handgun, $203 cash, and 0.9 grams of Fentanyl.”
A post on September 24 described the arrest of a man on First Hill who had a gun and about 147 grams of cocaine, meth, fentanyl and heroin (about the weight of a deck of cards) who was booked into jail on gun and narcotics violations.
Another September post officers nabbing a suspect and confiscating a whopping $62 in cash, 4 grams of meth, and a set of brass knuckles.
SPD did not respond to requests for comment on the increase in drug distribution arrests.
Evidence suggests that disrupting the illicit drug supply can actually lead to an increased risk of overdose, as drug users switch to lesser-known dealers who may be selling a more toxic supply.
Nabarun Dasgupta, a senior scientist at the University of North Carolina whose work on harm reduction earned him a 2025 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, said attributing the decline in overdoses to arrests “seems really naive.”
“There’s no reliable evidence that drug seizures of this magnitude lead to declines in overdose,” Dasgupta said. A peer-reviewed study of trends in drug arrests and overdose rates in Indianapolis, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2023, found that on average, one week after a police drug seizure, the number of fatal overdoses doubled within a 500 meter radius of the arrest.
“I think the way to interpret these data [about overdoses in Seattle] more scientifically is that overdoses are dropping despite the felony arrests,” said Dasgupta, who was involved in the Indianapolis study. “It’s not the other way around.”
Lisa Daugaard, the co-director of Purpose Dignity Action and creator of the LEAD program (for which she, too, received a genius grant) said it’s ineffective to focus on small-time drug dealers, pointing to research by Dasgupta and other scientists.
“Disrupting harmful dynamics has an obvious superficial appeal, but in a time of ultra-toxic illicit drug supply, many interventions that seem appealing actually are counterproductive,” Daugaard said.
Dasgupta, who worked with harm reduction experts in Seattle while conducting his research, says the decline in Seattle’s fatal overdose rate is likely the result of four trends that are happening across the country. First, he says, illicit drug manufacturers are making the drug supply less toxic by improving quality. “This is a market correction, independent of any law enforcement action,” Dasgupta said.
Second, Gen Z is less inclined to use opioids than its predecessors. “We have a million and a half kids who lost parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents to an overdose in the United States,” Dasgupta said. “That experience of going to those funerals, I guarantee you, is way more likely to change their behaviors and attitudes towards opioids than any educational campaign.”
Third, Dasgupta said, drug users have learned not to use alone, and when they have the resources available, to get their drugs tested for potency.
And fourth, Dasgupta credits “all the community-based interventions that are going on. Clinic-based interventions have greatly expanded availability of addiction treatment as well as naloxone, especially having that be accessible with as little red tape as possible.”
The county public health department is on pace to double the amount of naloxone it distributes through community-based organizations in 2025 over last year, with 30,000 doses distributed in the first half of this year. The department has also trained more than 2,700 people in how to administer naloxone since 2024. In addition, the agency has installed vending machines with free naloxone at five sites across the county.
Finegood says community groups have reported back to Public Health that naloxone from those vending machines have reversed at least 800 overdoses, and 85 percent of drug users told county researchers that they now keep naloxone around when they use.
Making treatment and medications available to those who want to quit using or reduce their drug use has also been a priority, Finegood said. “We’re continuing to work on lowering those barriers so people can provide access.”
A fleet of methadone vans run by the county are helping bring treatment closer to where people typically use drugs.
And in August, the Downtown Emergency Service Center opened the Opioid Recovery & Care Access (ORCA) center, which provides 24/7 care to people recovering from overdoses.
Public Health, Finegood said, has also made an injectable version of buprenorphine much more accessible by setting up a hotline where users can easily and immediately get a prescription when they’re ready. Finegood also praised the city’s first-in-the-nation pilot buprenorphine program, in which Seattle Fire Department paramedics can administer the drug after overdose to anyone who requests it.
Kristin Hanson, a spokeswoman for the Seattle Fire Department, said first responders have administered 160 doses of buprenorphine since the program began in 2024.
Finegood says continuing to focus on making access to treatment easier has been a key pillar in Public Health’s efforts to stop the deaths. “We need to continue to do what we know is working, and what evidence shows is working: which is lowering barriers to care,” he said. “Because people want care, people want help. We should be giving people access to care when they’re in a place where they’re willing to receive it, and giving them what they want.”
