Category: Mayor Harrell

Mayor Harrell, Police

New Police Contract “Does Not Appear to Address Accountability at All,” Reform Advocates Say
SPOG’s logo and motto. The union’s proposed contract includes big raises and few accountability improvements.

By Andrew Engelson

A copy of the tentative contract between the city of Seattle and the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) obtained by PubliCola includes raises of 23 percent (retroactive to January 6, 2021 and active through 2023) and offers only minor changes to existing accountability measures in return.

“After my quick read of it, there are barely any changes in here,” said Shannon Cheng, chair of People Power Washington, a group advocating for increased police accountability. Of the 23 percent retroactive raise, Cheng said, “That’s very generous. There’s a giant gaping deficit in our budget coming up and what we’ve been hearing from every other employee—whether it’s firefighters to the coalition of city unions—is that there isn’t money. Everybody is taking smaller pay raises.”

SPOG sent the contract to police officers, who will be voting on whether or not to approve it, on Friday.

Joel Merkel, co-chair of the Community Police Commission, said that the organization has not been formally presented with a copy of the contract. But based on what Merkel read in the document (which was briefly posted online this morning by SPOG and then replaced with a photo of union leader Mike Solan) he believes this may be only an interim agreement meant to address the issue of pay raises and recruiting, since it’s only effective through the end of 2023.

“What’s been posted on the police guild’s website does not seem to address accountability at all,” Merkel said, noting that the biggest changes in the contract concern pay raises—an issue Mayor Bruce Harrell and the new centrist-majority city council have said are necessary to deal with lackluster recruiting efforts and attrition. 

The few changes to accountability in the contract include:

  • The Office of Police Accountability (OPA) must provide officers being investigated for misconduct, along with the police guild, with a full “copy of the complaint,” rather than “basic details” of the complaint.
  • The tentative contract removes a requirement that OPA inform officers and SPOG about an investigation within five days—a mandate the accountability office has said can cause unnecessary stress for office and unnecessary work for the OPA. If the OPA closes a case without further investigation, the office would now have 30 days to tell SPOG and the officer about it. OPA would also be required to notify the union when an active investigation is being referred to criminal investigation and to supply the union with the case number in that instance.
  • The proposal allows for up to a 60-day extension of the 180-day deadline for OPA to wrap up investigations, but only in cases involving “Type 3” force—the most serious type of excessive force OPA investigates—and only if SPD’s force review board refers the case to OPA within seven days after they review it.. 
  • The contract adds two more civilian investigators (for a total four) to OPA, which mostly includes sworn officers.
  • On the issue of arbitration, which has often resulted in SPD officers who have been fired for misconduct being reinstated, new wording in the contract states that “an appointed arbitrator will give deference to the Chief’s judgment as to the appropriate disciplinary penalty so long as the disciplinary penalty is reasonable and consistent with just cause,” a fairly vague change in wording.

Of these limited changes to accountability, Merkel said,  “If there are no [additional] changes to the accountability section of the contract, moving forward, then we would absolutely have some pretty strong concerns. And we believe that Judge Robart will as well.”

Since 2012, US District Judge James Robart has been managing SPD’s consent decree, which requires reforms to police accountability and use of force. In 2019, Robart ruled the that Seattle was out of compliance with the consent decree after the city approved the most recent contract with SPOG, which failed to incorporate many of the measures that were included in a 2017 police accountability ordinance. In 2023, Robart lifted most of the remaining restrictions from the consent decree, but said SPD still had more work to do on crowd control and accountability.

During negotiations over the contract, which has been stalled for three years, the CPC wrote a letter urging negotiators to fully implement the accountability reforms measures in the 2017 legislation. The letter noted that “the current contract makes it harder to fire an officer for misconduct if that misconduct is … ‘stigmatizing’ to a police officer and makes it harder for them to get another police job.” That provision about officer stigmatization remains in the new contract.

The contract does not go as far in terms of accountability reforms as the Seattle Police Management Association contract, which covers about 80 lieutenants and police captains, and which the city council approved in 2022.

Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said in a statement, “The tentative agreement we have reached with the union reflects a commitment to our Charter responsibility to create a safe Seattle. We have focused on building an excellent police service through strong accountability measures and staffing, improving the recruitment and retention of officers through fair wages and benefits, as well as building out a comprehensive public safety response system by increasing options for civilian response.”

City Councilmember Bob Kettle, who chairs the public safety committee, and Council President Sara Nelson did not respond to requests for comment. SPOG also did not respond to a request for comment on the contract.

Council member Tammy Morales, who has sought more police accountability measures in the past, said, “I’m not on the negotiating committee, so this is the first time I’ve seen the contract. Due to confidentiality requirements, I am very limited in what I can say before SPOG votes on this tentative agreement. However, I am reviewing it line-by-line and will have a lot to say when it comes before [the] council.”

“When the last contract passed,” Cheng said, “it was made very clear by Judge Robarts that we were out of compliance due to how the accountability system operates. And [this contract] doesn’t make any fundamental changes to that. So in my mind, I don’t see how this gets us out from under the consent decree.”

The contract also gives officers more generous medical and dental benefits, and adds two more paid holidays – Juneteenth and Indigenous People’s Day. 

“Those are two holidays for populations they’ve been biased against in the past,” Cheng noted.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Police

Police Contract Offers Big Raises, No Significant Accountability Improvements
This image of SPOG president Mike Solan replaced the tentative contract SPOG posted briefly this morning.


By Erica C. Barnett

The most notable thing about the tentative contract between the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild and the city of Seattle is how little it has changed since the most recent contract, signed in 2018; that contract superseded key provisions of a police-accountability ordinance adopted and signed into law in 2017. The proposal, which (as PubliCola reported exclusively on Tuesday) includes retroactive wage increases of 23 percent, includes almost none of the accountability measures from the 2017 ordinance, which was, at the time, considered a baseline for future contracts, not a goal to work toward in a piecemeal fashion in future years.

The Seattle Police Officers Guild posted the contract, which Mayor Bruce Harrell’s labor relations team negotiated with the police union, on Friday morning, then removed the document after PubliCola posted it exclusively on X. The contract, and an accompanying summary, were replaced by images of SPOG President Mike Solan and the message, “Thank you for your support.”

The contract includes some gestures at reform, though it makes none of the major changes demanded by police accountability advocates back in 2018. For example, the contract removes a requirement that the Office of Police Accountability, which investigates police misconduct allegations, notify an officer within five business days that they are under investigation for misconduct. It also clarifies that when an officer takes a discipline decision made by the police chief to an outside arbitrator, the arbitrator is supposed to give “deference” to the chief’s decision.

Some of the changes that were included in the 2017 law, but are still not incorporated into the police contract seven years later, include:

The elimination of arbitration as an option when officers disagree with a disciplinary decision. Arbitration, conducted by randomly chosen attorneys from across the country, often results in a reversal of discipline, undermining both OPA and the police chief.

Giving the Office of Police Accountability subpoena power in investigations and more say in criminal investigations into officer misconduct. Under the tentative contract, OPA will continue to have no authority to conduct investigations into possible criminal activity by officers—the most serious allegations; instead, SPD will continue to conduct criminal investigations into its own officers without oversight from the accountability office.

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The “purpose” section of the contract, which outlines the reasons for the contract between the city and the police guild, includes no references to accountability; instead, the section refers to pay and working conditions for officers without any reference to what the public gets in return.

Officers can still present “new” evidence after the OPA has determined that they committed misconduct and recommended appropriate discipline, even if they were aware the evidence existed earlier but did not disclose it.

Firing an officer over misconduct still requires a vaguely defined “elevated standard of review”—as opposed to the lower “preponderance of the evidence” standard— if being fired would be “stigmatizing” and make it hard for a former SPD officer to get a job as a police officer elsewhere.up

The standard for proving that an officer was dishonest—a major violation of SPD policy—includes proving not just that they lied, but that they did so intentionally. The 2017 legislation would have required officers to be truthful in all situations, whether or not OPA or a court can prove that they did so intentionally, including when testifying in court, filling out police reports, and reviewing use of force incidents.

The tentative contract, which runs through the end of 2023, is dated retroactively to January 6, 2021—the day of the national insurrection and attempted takeover of Congress by rioters attempting to overturn the election for Trump. SPD officers made up the largest known contingent of police who attended the January 6 rally; police chief Adrian Diaz later fired two officers who participated directly in the insurrection.

The ordinance still requires requires the OPA director—a civilian—to use sworn investigators to conduct any investigation where the alleged misconduct could result in termination. The accountability ordinance would have given the OPA director the ability to decide who investigates these cases.

The 2017 law also called for an internal office to manage secondary employment because of the potential for conflicts of interest and persistent problems with officers abusing their authority during off-duty work—for example, by using companies they control to fix prices for off-duty work directing traffic at parking garages.

The city and SPOG reached the tentative agreement on Saturday, starting a 30-day countdown for the city to file an update with the federal judge overseeing a consent decree between SPD and the Department of Justice, informing him how the new agreement impacts the city’s accountability system, if at all. The city council has repeatedly identified hiring more police officers as their top priority, even pushing an independent commission to adopt an easier test for police recruits so that fewer potential officers will be disqualified during this initial weeding-out phase.

The federal, James Robart, lifted most of the consent decree last year, but found the city still had work to do on accountability, along with racially biased policing and crowd control. The vice president of SPOG, Daniel Auderer, was recently caught on body-worn video joking with SPOG president Solan about the death of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck in a crosswalk by a speeding officer in 2023. Meanwhile, as PubliCola reported last month, the department has ignored a 2021 law that restricted their use of certain “less-lethal” weapons for crowd control.

City Council, homelessness, King County, Mayor Harrell

After Series of Hurried Meetings, Homelessness Authority Decides to Continue Search for Permanent Leader

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has decided to continue its search for a new CEO, PubliCola has confirmed, after two high-level meetings in the past week at which agency officials and search committee members discussed whether to continue the hiring process or begin “winding down” the agency.

Last week, as PubliCola exclusively reported, former governor Christine Gregoire and Seattle Metropolitan Chamber director Rachel Smith wrote a letter to other members of the CEO search committee urging the committee to pause the hiring process until the agency’s future is clear; in their letter, Smith and Gregoire cited “challenges the agency has faced and/or been unable to respond to” along with ongoing questions about the agency’s governing structure. The KCRHA is headed up by an implementation board of subject-matter experts who make policy and budget decisions, and a governing committee made up mostly of elected officials board that is supposed to approve the implementation board’s decision.

The CEO search committee met on Friday. The original plan for that meeting was to whittle down a list of a dozen candidates for the permanent CEO position, currently filled by interim CEO Darrell Powell, who has reportedly applied for the permanent job. The agency has been without a permanent leader since its first CEO, Marc Dones, resigned last May.

There’s an existential issue at play here: Can the KCRHA can be successful if it’s directly controlled by political actors at King County and the city of Seattle, which together provide most of the authority’s funding?

Instead of talking about the candidates, the search committee discussed the broader future of the agency. Some committee members, reportedly including Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore, argued that the KCRHA needs to come up with a new governance structure before appointing a CEO in order to create a sense of stability at the agency. This, the theory goes, could lead to a deeper pool of more qualified applicants.

Moore declined to comment for this story, citing an NDA, and others involved in the internal conversations about KCRHA’s future did not respond to questions or declined to speak on the record. (The NDA, as described to PubliCola, pertains to the appointment itself, including the list of applicants. It does not restrict people from talking about the process in general or about other questions we had for Moore, such as how she would like to see the KCRHA’s governance change.)

The second meeting, held earlier this week, was called to discuss those governance concerns. It’s unclear whether the group reached any consensus about how the agency will be governed in the future. However, sources familiar with the discussions say representatives for Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Dow Constantine expressed their strong support for the KCRHA and its “regional approach” to homelessness. Last month, Harrell’s office announced the city was stripping KCRHA of its authority over encampment outreach and homelessness prevention, but Harrell’s office suggested it it might consider handing these responsibilities back to the authority at some point in the future.

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Many Seattle officials have argued that the KCRHA’s two-board structure (three if you count the federally mandated Continuum of Care board) is confusing and grants too much power to unelected experts who aren’t directly accountable to voters. Those with long memories will recall that this was also a heated debate back in 2019, when the KCRHA was created; at that time, the non-elected implementation board was seen as a bulwark against political influence.

One possibility, according to sources close to the discussions, is that the KCRHA will eliminate the implementation board and incorporate a handful of homelessness experts into the governing board, which would become the agency’s main decision-making body. There’s an existential issue at play here: Can the KCRHA can be successful if it’s directly controlled by political actors at King County and the city of Seattle, which together provide most of the authority’s funding?

Last year, the KCRHA was supposed to re-bid the entire homelessness system—a huge undertaking that could mean ending longstanding contracts and opening new ones with first-time providers—but that was put on hold to give the agency time to address immediate problems, including late payments to service providers.

Powell, who was Harrell’s pick to lead the agency, has been on the job for just over two months; earlier this week, the authority hired King County Department of Community and Human Services’ emergency response director, Hedda McClendon, as Powell’s interim deputy, after the mayor’s office proposed her name to Powell by email in January.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Police

Tentative Police Contract Includes 23 Percent Retroactive Raise, Raising Cops’ Base Salary to Six Figures

SPD West Precinct

By Erica C. Barnett

The tentative Seattle Police Officers’ Guild contract includes retroactive wage increases for the past three years that add up to a 23 percent pay increase, PubliCola has confirmed. The raises would increase the starting pay for new officers, before overtime, from just over $83,000 to nearly $103,000. Officers who have worked at SPD for six months would see their base pay increase to $110,000, and so on up the seniority line. Officers’  overtime pay, which is 1.5 times their hourly wages, would also increase commensurately. The new pay scale would make the starting salary for Seattle police the highest in the region.

The Seattle Police Officers Guild has not released the details of the tentative contract, which has to be approved by the city council and would only apply through 2023. The city approved a contract with the Seattle Police Managers Association last year that included new accountability measures, but SPOG’s contract reportedly fails to replicate many of these measures, and the new city council has said its priority is making police feel welcome and appreciated, not “micromanaged” by the city. The next SPOG contract after the tentative agreement, which will begin in 2024, is currently in mediation.

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The Community Police Commission, one of the city’s three “accountability partners” (along with the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Police Accountability, which is housed in SPD), issued a statement on Monday raising concerns that the tentative contract will lack key accountability measures and urging state lawmakers to pass legislation taking accountability measures out of the bargaining process. As long as the police union has the ability to bargain away accountability measures, the CPC argued, they will do so.

“True police accountability requires a robust, transparent, and independent system for adjudicating misconduct,” the CPC wrote. “This includes basic accountability tools such as subpoena power for police oversight bodies; public transparency into the disciplinary process; a balanced and proportionate burden of proof standard for assessing misconduct; and a system of review perceived as credible, including as it applies to private arbitrators who have the authority and ability to overturn a police chief’s disciplinary decision.”

Currently, if an officer is fired and the firing could be “stigmatizing to the officer” (making it hard for him to get a job elsewhere, for example), the misconduct finding is subject to an “elevated standard of review,” making it harder to prove than the ordinary “preponderance of the evidence” standard. Continue reading “Tentative Police Contract Includes 23 Percent Retroactive Raise, Raising Cops’ Base Salary to Six Figures” →

Business, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

Put Homelessness Agency CEO Search on Pause, Former Governor and Seattle Chamber Leader Say

By Erica C. Barnett

Former governor Christine Gregoire and Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce director Rachel Smith sent an email asking the committee charged with hiring a new CEO for the King County Homelessness Authority to pause the search process, citing “many unanswered questions” and “challenges the agency has faced and/or been unable to respond to.”

Another issue, Gregoire and Smith wrote, is that the city is in the middle of “ongoing conversations about making potentially significant changes to the organization, including the structure of the Authority’s governance. And finally, based on our conversations with various leaders, we have not heard confirmation of how and when the Authority will be reauthorized.”

Gregoire and Smith serve on the committee, which was scheduled to get an initial list of about a dozen candidates from a search firm today.

As PubliCola reported earlier this week, the search for a new CEO has been rocky, and the list of applicants has reportedly inspired little excitement on the search committee. The agency’s last permanent director, Marc Dones, left in May 2023, and the position has since been filled by two interim directors—former deputy CEO Helen Howell and, since January, former United Way chief financial officer Darrell Powell. Powell, an ally of Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell (and Harrell’s pick for the interim position), reportedly put his name in the running for the permanent position.

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Gregoire and Smith carry weight on the committee. Gregoire leads Challenge Seattle, a business coalition that helped marshal millions of dollars for the failed Partnership for Zero public-private partnership, and Smith controls the most influential business group in the region at a time when the mayor and most of the city council are strongly aligned with business interests.

Seattle elected officials have expressed dissatisfaction with the KCRHA’s current governance structure, which includes an “implementation board” of subject-matter experts and a “governing board” of elected officials, and will likely propose a single board made up of, or at least dominated by, elected officials. Changing the KCRHA’s governing structure would require changes to the interlocal agreement that created the authority, which is up for reauthorization at the end of the year. Seattle and King County are the major parties to that agreement; if either pulled out, it would effectively mean the end of the authority.

“We–along with all of you–are committed to securing the most experienced and qualified individual to lead the Authority,” Gregoire and Smith’s letter concludes. “Under the circumstances, nothing short of that can meet the needs of the organization and the community it serves. Thus, we strongly recommend a pause in the search until we, as a Committee, can ensure we are attracting the highest caliber candidates and also clearly represent the organization’s status to the candidates.”

 

City Council, homelessness, human services, Mayor Harrell

As List of Finalists for KCRHA Director Comes Together, Council Raises Questions About Agency’s Future
A breakdown of the KCRHA’s budget, which could face additional cuts this year.

Erica C. Barnett

The future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority came under scrutiny during a council meeting on Wednesday, just two days before a selection committee is scheduled to get its first look at a list of finalists to head up the embattled agency.

One name that may be on that list is that of KCRHA interim director Darrell Powell. Powell, the former chief financial officer for United Way of King County and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s pick for the interim role. Powell has reportedly applied for the permanent position, which has been vacant since the last CEO, Marc Dones, resigned last year. He replaced Helen Howell, who became interim CEO last May, in January.

The company that’s leading the search for a new CEO, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group (NPAG), has narrowed the list down to about a dozen candidates, whose names have not been made public, and will present the list to a search committee for further narrowing on Friday. The search process has been slow and opaque; NPAG only got around to posting a job description in January, eight months after Dones announced their resignation, and the search committee was reportedly uninspired by an early list of potential candidates.

If Powell—who did not respond to a request for an interview—became the permanent director, Harrell would have a long-term ally at the very top of an agency whose work he has frequently criticized and whose authority he recently reduced, by removing the KCRHA’s authority over encampment outreach and homelessness prevention and returning those contracts to the city’s Human Services Department.

The city council, including many of its six new members, appears to agree with Harrell about the need to claw back control over the KCRHA, which receives a little less than half its funding from the city. During a presentation by Powell and KCRHA staffer Jeff Simms on Wednesday, council members expressed support for Harrell’s decision to take over KCRHA’s outreach and prevention contracts and suggested the primary problem with the agency is that its governing structure is too confusing and unaccountable.

Specifically, council members said the KCRHA has too many boards—”three, plural?” Councilmember Rob Saka confirmed with Simms—and that one solution might be eliminating the implementation board, which is made up of unelected homelessness experts. “When you reference plural, rather than singular, I think therein lies the problem,” Saka said.

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Council President Sara Nelson also criticized the implementation board and suggested that as “non-elected people,” they had little incentive to spend city funding wisely.

“These are non-elected people, who are not accountable to their constituents for resources, that are making the budget, and then the governing committee is expected to basically essentially rubber stamp so that the providers—very important—can get paid,” Nelson said. “And so that really does need to be cleaned up. And that’ll be quite a process and that can only take place in the interlocal agreement,” which established the authority and created its governing structure.

Nelson wasn’t on the council at the time, but there was actually a huge debate over the two-board structure when the council was helping to craft the interlocal agreement; the original plan, proposed by city and county leaders, was to set up a public development authority governed by an 11-member board of homelessness experts, overseen by a separate “steering committee” made up of elected officials.

Through compromises over time, elected officials gradually secured some direct control over the authority, eventually landing on a structure in which co-equal governing and implementation boards, made up of elected officials and people with policy expertise and experience, respectively, make decisions about the KCRHA and adopt its budget. The implementation board is made up of 13 experts on various aspects of the homelessness system, including people with direct experience of homelessness. The third board, which oversees the local continuum of care, is required by federal law and serves as a subcommittee to the implementation board.

“We are looking at the this being up for renewal at the end of the year, and I think we all want it to work, but we have to be honest about where it didn’t work and how we’re going to make it work going forward. When we look at what’s happening on the street, we don’t see any improvement. We only see things getting worse.”—Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore

The original justification for leaving most decisions in the hands of experts, rather than elected officials, was that they would be less influenced by prevailing political winds—less inclined, for instance, to make major budget changes based on voter complaints about encampments or media reports suggesting the agency is in disarray. (Like this column by Danny Westneat questioning the wisdom of the regional approach, which two councilmembers cited during Wednesday’s meeting.)

The KCRHA’s interlocal agreement expires at the end of this year, a date human services committee chair Cathy Moore called a “juncture” for the agency. “We are looking at the this being up for renewal at the end of the year, and I think we all want it to work, but we have to be honest about where it didn’t work and how we’re going to make it work going forward,” Moore said. “When we look at what’s happening on the street, we don’t see any improvement. We only see things getting worse.”

Simms pointed out that the agreement (and thus KCRHA) will continue automatically unless the city decides to unilaterally withdraw from the authority. If that happened, it would effectively end the agency and trigger the return of all homelessness contracts back to the government entities that oversaw them before 2020, including the city.

Before the KCRHA was created, homelessness contracts were under a division of the Human Services Department called Homelessness Strategy and Investments, which was subsequently (and messily) disbanded. HSD recently created a new homelessness division with its own director, suggesting a potential return to the old model.

It’s unclear how this would be an improvement (one reason for the whole “regional approach” concept in the first place was that it would consolidate city and county contracts under one authority) but a number of current elected officials seem to believe it might be—egged on, perhaps, by the mayor’s office, which has been bearish on the KCRHA since Harrell took office.

On Wednesday, several council members expressed the view that suburban cities need to “step up” and contribute financially to the regional authority so that Seattle can reduce its contribution; Saka, previously an attorney for Meta, likened Seattle’s initial heavy investment to a round of “seed funding” that would eventually lead to greater investments from other cities and a “draw down” in investments from Seattle.

This is a baked-in issue with the regional approach—why would a suburban city that disagrees with KCRHA’s progressive approach to homelessness give money to the authority when they could be spending it on encampment sweeps?—but suburban contributions were never going to make up a huge chunk of the KCRHA’s budget anyway, since their budgets are so much smaller than either Seattle or King County.

Although the council will soon be making major decisions about the KCRHA’s budget—which could face cuts this year to help close an estimated $230 million budget gap—it’s clear they still have a steep learning curve. (The meeting was one in a series of City 101-style briefings that have filled the council’s schedule since six new members took office in January).

After Simms told councilmembers that there is currently about one housing unit available for every 34 homeless people “nominated” for housing, for instance, Nelson suggested that “part of the problem is the demand, because people aren’t moving on from permanent supportive housing, perhaps because they don’t have the supports to be able to do so” from the agencies that provide their case management, she said. Permanent supportive housing, Simms pointed out, is a specialized housing type set aside for people with severe, usually lifelong, disabilities; “permanent” is a key part of the concept, and people aren’t expected to “move on.”

Other council members appeared unaware that people don’t generally flock to an encampment once they hear it’s being removed; that KCRHA gets people into housing, not just shelter; that the city’s Unified Care Team holds near-monopoly access to tiny house villages; and that the KCRHA doesn’t decide how to spend the city’s money, but administers a list of contracts that remains largely unchanged since the city was in charge of them.