Left image: Previous Alternative 5, with neighborhood centers represented by purple circles. Right image: Proposed One Seattle Comprehensive Plan, with neighborhood centers represented by blue circles.
By Erica C. Barnett
Mayor Bruce Harrell finally released a draft Comprehensive Plan for the next 20 years this week, outlining a growth plan for the city that continues to concentrate housing around busy arterial streets while allowing some four-unit buildings in most areas—an upgrade of one unit from what’s currently allowed in Seattle’s “neighborhood residential” areas. Developers could build six units in these areas if two of the units are affordable, or if the location is within a quarter-mile of a frequent transit stop.
According to the city, the plan would make it possible to build at least 100,000 new homes in Seattle between now and 2044—a period when the city itself estimates about 250,000 new people will move here. Unless those new residents live in households that average 2.5 people—defying current trends toward smaller household sizes and solo living—those units will not be enough to accommodate everyone who wants to live here.
Seattle is already experiencing a well-documented housing shortage—one data point: You now have to earn $214,000 a year to afford a house here—so the plan, if implemented as-is, will also do little to address the current shortage by relieving upward pressure on housing prices. If you can’t afford to live here now, you probably won’t be able to do so in the future.
Importantly, none of the changes to formerly single-family areas were optional; legislation passed last year requires all cities, including Seattle, to allow up to four units per lot in formerly single-family areas. (Currently, Seattle allows up to three—a single-family house plus one attached and one detached accessory unit.) And there’s a real question about whether four-unit buildings will pencil out; other cities that have allowed this kind of extremely low-density multifamily housing have found that developers aren’t interested in building it.
Compared to the old Alternative 5, the new map nixes potential new density near Alki Beach, Fauntleroy, North Capitol Hill, Magnolia, and Laurelhurst, along with Harrell’s own neighborhood, Seward Park. None of these areas is on the city’s list of neighborhoods with a high risk of displacement or low access to opportunity.
The plan would also re-legalize corner stores and some home-based businesses, but only on corner lots—a hyper-literal interpretation of the colloquial term “corner store.”
Harrell’s proposal, which remains light on certain details, would exempt up to 15 percent of the city from the new zoning rules—less than the 25 percent HB 1110 allows. In areas where there is a “high risk of displacement,” including parts of Southeast Seattle, the plan would adopt new zoning that effectively preserves the current three-unit limit, preventing new housing as an anti-displacement strategy for existing property owners. The plan does not identify all the areas the city plans to exempt from the new density mandates, so it’s unclear exactly how much of the city would remain under existing “neighborhood residential” zoning rules.
The proposal also modestly expands the areas where apartments (renters) are allowed, creating a new “neighborhood center” category in all areas within 800 feet of frequent transit stops, where developers could buildings between three and six stories tall. These “centers” are tiny compared to a 2022 proposal from Sen. Marko Liias (D-Edmonds), which would have allowed up to six-story buildings within three-quarter of a mile of major transit hubs, and within a half-mile of frequent bus stops. According to the plan, they were chosen based on “local conditions” and intended to provide more. housing within a three-minute walk of transit.
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Comparing the proposal to the five options the city put forward for discussion last year, Harrell’s proposed comprehensive plan update is most similar to Alternative 5, although it reduces potential density in many areas by eliminating a significant number of “neighborhood centers,” and not just in areas whose residents are at high risk of displacement.
For example, the new map nixes potential new density near Alki Beach, Fauntleroy, North Capitol Hill, Magnolia, and Laurelhurst, along with Harrell’s own neighborhood, Seward Park. None of these areas is on the city’s list of neighborhoods with a high risk of displacement or low access to opportunity; in fact, the majority of the neighborhoods that would have received modest upzones under Alternative 5 but will retain Seattle’s lowest-density zoning under Harrell’s proposal are in wealthy areas with low displacement risk, as defined in the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability plan.
Like the existing comprehensive plan, Harrell’s proposal would place most density along busy arterial streets and highways, renaming the city’s “urban villages” but preserving the same basic residential patterns the city has followed since the 1990s, when the city adopted the urban village strategy. In these areas, now known as “urban centers,” buildings will continue to be capped at eight stories, with potential exceptions near light rail lines.
The plan also adds a new urban center around the 130th Street future light rail station and slightly expands the boundaries of other existing urban villages. The term “urban center” previously referred to the city’s densest areas, like downtown and First Hill, where greater density is allowed; these areas will be rebranded as “regional centers,” and a new one—Ballard—will be added to the list. According to the plan, Ballard is expected to gain 5,000 new housing units over the next 10 years.
Seattle is supposed to adopt the comprehensive plan update this year, a process that will require the new city council (whose six new members all said on the campaign trail that they would support some version of Alternative 5) to approve it. Before that happens, the city will hold seven open houses—one in each council district—beginning on March 14 in North Seattle.
Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington and staffers discuss the city’s homelessness programs last week.
By Erica C. Barnett
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Human Services Department told the King County Regional Homelessness Authority that it is taking control over contracts for outreach and homelessness prevention, clawing back a total of about $11.7 million from the regional authority. HSD director Tanya Kim informed the KCRHA of the decision in a letter last week.
Programs to prevent homelessness—for example, by helping people pay their rent—will move back to the city this summer, Kim wrote. “This shift aligns with HSD’s role in leading upstream housing and community stability efforts, while RHA continues leading the emergency homelessness response system.”
Outreach programs will follow at the beginning of next year, as part of “an effort to carefully examine how outreach investments align to the evolving needs of the city and ensure effective use of City funding in meeting desired outcomes.”
According to mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen, KCRHA informed the city in April that “due to their focus on Partnership for Zero, the system re-bid, outreach coordination for the state’s Right-of-Way Safety Initiative, and implementation of their Five Year Plan, they did not have capacity to fulfill the outreach, coordination, and referral roles” the city council outlined in a budget amendment in 2023.
Last week, deputy mayor Tiffany Washington, who oversees homelessness, touted the UCT’s transition to a “neighborhood team”-based model last year, with discrete groups of city workers doing outreach, trash removal, parking enforcement, and encampment removals in five different geographic areas. During that briefing, Washington presented a slide that showed outreach as a joint responsibility of the city and KCRHA.
Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, said the Harrell Administration’s “unilateral decision” to take over two areas of the homelessness response system “fractures our homeless service system deeply and ill serves people who are homeless.” Separating outreach from the rest of the system is “not effective,” Eisinger continued, and “undermines the necessary regionalism Mayor Harrell and other Seattle officials say they are committed to.
“It’s not legitimate for Seattle to insist it can pick and choose which system functions it wishes to politicize and control and withdraw millions from the regional entity it helped to create, and then cry about other jurisdictions needing to do their part, any more than it’s legitimate for Des Moines, Federal Way, Kenmore, and Burien to block and delay housing and shelter and then claim they support regionalism.”
Harrell has expressed increasingly open skepticism about the KCRHA and its ability to forge a “regional approach to homelessness,” given the fact that many cities in King County have not “bought in” by helping to pay for agency operations and are actually passing laws to prevent housing and shelter in their cities.
A spokesperson for the KCRHA said the agency has “been made aware of the upcoming changes to the City’s funding of KCRHA. We’re working to understand likely impacts on our provider community, unhoused neighbors, and how we address the homelessness crisis in King County.”
The KCRHA oversees two broad categories of outreach—geographically based outreach, in which outreach workers focus on a specific area, and population-based outreach, which focuses on different population groups (such as veterans or families with children) throughout the region. The KCRHA’s privately funded in-house outreach and case management program, Partnership for Zero, shut down last year.
REACH, a longtime outreach provider that has moved toward a geographic model in collaboration with the Unified Care Team, will see $2.4 million in contracts move back to the city. REACH director Chloe Gale told PubliCola, “We’ve spent the last year designing the model,” Gale said, and “I think this is the year that we’re really going to see if we can we produce some better results to move people inside and also maximize resources when there are not places for people to go inside.”
Housen said that by bringing outreach back to HSD, the city will be able to identify “the most appropriate and efficient ways to meet neighborhood outreach needs across the city, in conjunction with the budget exercises currently underway to optimize funding and ensure effective services.”
The city shut down HSD’s Homelessness Strategy and Investments division, which Deputy Mayor Washington previously headed, as part of the protracted transfer of all homelessness contracts to KCRHA in 2021. From the beginning, the city resisted giving up control of outreach contracts—arguing that city’s own outreach staffers, now part of the UCT, needed direct access to outreach workers with groups like the Chief Seattle Club and REACH. Washington was the deputy mayor overseeing homelessness for Jenny Durkan while that debate was going on.
According to Housen, “HSD will be assessing whether current staff can effectively administer outreach contracts and determine if additional supports are needed.”
PubliCola first reported the decision, and posted Kim’s letter, on X earlier this afternoon.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s third State of the City speech was an oddly muted recitation of accomplishments and proposals he has touted many times before, from the addition of six staffers to the city’s 911 response department to the future opening of at least one opiate overdose recovery site to the Seattle Restored program, launched two years ago to help fill vacant storefronts downtown.
Far from running a “lofty victory lap,” as the Seattle Times put it, Harrell seemed deflated, even starting one round of applause himself after several notably silent minutes from the crowd. Impromptu sports jokes, a mainstay in Harrell’s speeches, elicited polite applause, What is the state of Seattle in 2024? “Persistent,” Harrell said.
The mid-term speech, though long (49 minutes) and full of buzzwords (variations on “innovation” showed up at least 15 times; “data,” five; and “silos,” three), lacked the energetic optimism Harrell has projected in previous speeches, and was light on concrete examples of both new initiatives and past achievements—unless you count an “83 percent increase” in shelter referrals at encampment sweeps (and here’s why you shouldn’t.)
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Harrell is fond of saying that with a new council friendly to his priorities in place, he’ll be able to really start getting things done, but the old council didn’t exactly say no to his priorities—hell, they even funded the ridiculous Shotspotter surveillance program—and he only vetoed one of their bills, a proposal that would have required landlords to provide basic data, including rents, about the units they own. In describing how he and the council will work together to implement policy—including the 10-year Comprehensive Plan update, a draft of which Harrell said will finally be released “within the next two weeks”—he brought up two primary examples: Public safety and the budget.
Referring to new public safety committee chair Bob Kettle’s plan to address the city’s “permissive environment” toward drugs and crime, Harrell said, “His six-pillar approach is a strong and good foundation.” But it was the previous council that passed a local drug criminalization law that is an essential element of that approach, and they hardly got in the way of Harrell’s efforts to remove graffiti or shut down nuisance buildings —in fact, former council member Lisa Herbold, replaced by Harrell-endorsed Bob Kettle, sponsored legislation to make it easier for the city to shut down nuisance properties, another one of Kettle’s six pillars.
In the absence of new taxes, the only way to close Seattle’s budget gap cut the budget or raid the one highly lucrative tax the city has managed to pass in the past few years—the JumpStart payroll tax, which is supposed to fund housing, economic development, and small businesses.
Harrell also pledged to make “changes to how we think about budgeting,” “press reset,” and “revise our budgeting practices” to close a $220 million-plus budget deficit without raising new taxes. “While there are some who would suggest that the answer lies in new revenue, the fact is that passing a new or expanded tax would not address the fundamental issues needed to close this gap,” Harrell said. Instead, the city will need to do a “systemwide analysis of every expense stream and line of business as well as a granular analysis of every dollar spent,” he said. Shades of “audit the budget“? If so, the criticism is—to use a sports reference!—a bit of an own goal, since Harrell is in charge of the budgeting process and has been for the last two years.
Of course, going over every line of last year’s budget won’t actually fix the structural problem that started the city down the path toward the deficit in the first place—starting during COVID, the mayor and council have decided to pay for a lot of ongoing programs with one-time funds, including COVID relief dollars from the federal government. This happened as recently as last year, when Harrell’s proposed budget included nearly $50 million in new ongoing expenses that lacked long-term funding. The profligate use of one-time funds is a huge contributor to the deficit that city budget planners have been screaming about for years.
In the absence of new taxes, the only way to close Seattle’s budget gap cut the budget or raid the one highly lucrative tax the city has managed to pass in the past few years—the JumpStart payroll tax, which is supposed to fund housing, economic development, and small businesses. The JumpStart spending plan is now enshrined in law, but the council can change the law; look for the council, with Harrell’s approval, to start arguing that it’s important to be “realistic” about the budget situation and use this dedicated fund for any and all purposes—just as soon as they finish their City 101 orientations, which are still taking up most of the time at committee meetings four months after last year’s election.
Arrow goes up: Seattle touts metrics that advocates, service providers, and a two-year-old auditor’s report have said are deeply flawed.
By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington told reporters last week that the city has made impressive progress on removing encampments and referring their displaced residents into shelter, and that new, data-driven criteria for prioritizing encampments now prevents “the loudest voices” from dictating which encampments get removed.
Although incomplete identification data means that any numbers are likely an undercount, Washington said, “we’re happy to say that shelter referrals are up” 20 percent over last year, and shelter enrollments are also on the upswing. “I’m encouraged by the progress we’ve made over the last few years,” she said.
Harrell cited similar numbers in his State of the City speech on Tuesday, crediting a new “state-of-the-art system that informs a data driven, objective and equitable approach to resolving to resolving encampments” for the increase.
In reality, the main component of the city’s “state-of-the-art system” is a frequently updated database of encampments (which replaced an earlier spreadsheet-based system), combined with a prioritization matrix that helps inform which encampments the city removes. That matrix is essentially the same as the one Harrell’s office created back in January 2022, when he first took office.
For years, homeless service providers, advocates, and elected officials have asked the city to stop touting shelter referrals, since that number only refers to the number of people who were told that a specific bed was available, not how many actually slept in a shelter bed for even one night—much less accessed meaningful services or ended up in housing.
The deputy mayor said getting other parts of the region to allow new shelters or housing will be “a challenge. If you were them, and you saw what we were dealing with, would you want a shelter in your city?”
Enrollments—in which a person living in a swept encampment shows up at a shelter for at least one night—totaled 970, up from 746, across all encampment removals last year. While enrollments are a slightly better measure of success than referrals, staying in a shelter for a night or more—perhaps because it’s cold outside—is not a measure of success or progress toward housing.
Because the amount of available shelter space is a fraction of the thousands of people sleeping in tents, vehicles, and doorways every night, the fact that several hundred people a year are “accepting” the city’s shelter offers, and even “enrolling” in shelter, is less an impressive achievement than an indictment of the city’s perennial lack of shelter and housing. Asked about the possibility of siting more shelter and parking for people living in their vehicles, Washington said it was time for other communities besides Seattle to step up.
“I may get in trouble for this, but I think Seattle’s exasperated,” Washington said. “What happens when we go to site anything? The neighbors are like … ‘No, put it somewhere else.’ …Homelessness doesn’t just reside in Seattle, it’s a regional problem. And Seattle needs to not hold the majority of all shelters.” But, Washington added, getting other parts of the region to allow new shelters or housing will be “a challenge. If you were them, and you saw what we were dealing with, would you want a shelter in your city?”
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The Harrell administration has made a lot of adopting a “data-driven approach” to homelessness, suggesting that this distinguished them from the Durkan Administration. Last week, when I asked Washington when the city stopped using complaints as their primary basis for encampment removals, mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen jumped in and responded, “When Mayor Harrell took office”—that is, after Mayor Jenny Durkan left.
Washington, however, is a holdover from the Durkan administration, where she held several roles overseeing the city’s homelessness response including as the deputy mayor overseeing homelessness—her current role. As the head of the city’s homelessness division under Durkan, Washington vigorously defended the city’s strategy for prioritizing and removing encampments. In 2019, when the Durkan administration was forced to acknowledge they had no idea how many unsheltered people were actually ending up in housing, Washington said the exact number didn’t really matter, because “no matter how you look at it, it’s getting better.”
The city’s homelessness data still doesn’t include that information. Nor does the Harrell Administration’s “state-of-the-art” encampment dashboard appear to include most of the information a report from the City Auditor’s office said the city should provide about homelessness back in 2022, at the beginning of Harrell’s term.
That audit recommended the city create a “data dashboard” that would show whether and how the city’s encampment removal were performing based on a wide array of measures, including health and safety outcomes for people living unsheltered (like deaths from hypothermia, overdose deaths among unsheltered people, and the spread of infectious diseases) as well as other measures beyond shelter referral rates, such as outreach workers’ ability to maintain engagement with their clients after a sweep, access to mental health care and addiction treatment, and the availability of public restrooms with running water.
The city’s public-facing dashboard includes data points related to shelter referrals and public safety (such as shots fired and reported encampment fires), and a “snapshot” map, updated four times a year, showing encampments the city has removed.
During his State of the City speech, Mayor Harrell noted that “there have been bumps in the road” since the city and county created the KCRHA in 2020. “So this year, we will drive needed changes to improve oversight and accountability and foster stronger regional collaboration and solutions,” he said.
Harrell has frequently been critical of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, and recently nominated a friend and ally, Darrell Powell, as its interim CEO. (Prior to accepting the new position, Powell was the chief financial officer for several nonprofits, including the local YMCA and an agency, the Scholar Fund, at the center of a dispute with King County over alleged fiscal mismanagement.) He also asked the agency to come up with potential cuts to help the city close its $220 million budget deficit this year.
Those moves, and the increasingly high priority of the encampment-removing Unified Care Team, has led to speculation that the mayor may move to shut the agency down. During his speech on Tuesday, Harrell noted that “there have been bumps in the road” since the city and county created the KCRHA in 2020. “So this year, we will drive needed changes to improve oversight and accountability and foster stronger regional collaboration and solutions,” he said.
Last week, Washington said that the city wasn’t considering such a move, and wouldn’t unless “they fail, which we really hope they do not.” If that happens, she said, “we would have to have a discussion with all of the partners at the table and determine whether we revamp it, change it, restructure it, or completely pull out and everybody goes back to their corners.”
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The Seattle Police Department (SPD) is a toxic workplace for women, according to a damning internal report commissioned by SPD that was first reported by KUOW last week.
One woman who’s been an SPD officer for more than 15 years echoed the findings of the report, saying she’s been passed over multiple times for promotions by less-qualified male officers, and has seen this happen to many other female officers over the years.
“I’ve experienced men getting jobs with a lot less experience than me specifically, and other females not getting jobs,” said the officer, who requested anonymity. “I’ve seen this throughout my career,” which has included both patrol and office jobs, she said.
The internal report, by Washington State University Professor Lois James, was a part of the 30×30 Initiative—a nationwide effort to increase gender equity in policing. As part of the initiative, police departments across the country have pledged to boost the number of women in their departments to 30 percent by 2030. SPD signed on in 2021, with the goal of increasing the number of female recruits to 30 percent by 2030.
SPD isn’t close to reaching those goals. In 2023, out of 61 new officers hired, just five were women, according to Jamie Housen, a spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell. Currently, just 16 percent of SPD officers are women.
James conducted focus groups and interviews with about a dozen women, who described a toxic, hyper-masculine culture in which women are often passed up for promotions and lucrative assignments because of their gender.
Women recalled watching less-qualified men get promoted because they had “connections” with other men in the department, or because they could work shifts that weren’t accessible to women, who often had family obligations men didn’t have.
One female officer said she told her supervisor she could work any shift but the night shift, “because frankly, there was nobody home to look after my kid… [And the response was]… this is the only one we have available… So I guess I’m not getting promoted. But then I’ll turn around and I see a counterpart who is going through a divorce, and he gets a hardship transfer assignment.”
Stories of sexual harassment and casual misogyny were also common. “I had a sergeant [tell] told me I look yummy in front of a bunch of officers,” one woman recalled; on another occasion, she said she was introduced at roll call by lieutenant who “was like, ‘don’t worry, guys, she’s married.’ It’s like, is that necessary?”
The officer who spoke with PubliCola said that while most of her interactions with male colleagues have been positive, she has personally experienced many of the situations women described in James’ report. Once, she said, a male officer was complaining about an officer who was pregnant. “He said that’s why he didn’t like women in his unit—because they go out on maternity leave and then everybody else has to scramble to cover for them,” she said.
James said harassment and discrimination are common across all police departments. “Unfortunately, my impression is that this is very, very typical and representative of police departments,” James said. “It’s clear that there’s a lot farther to go.”
Ivonne Roman, one of the founders of the 30×30 Initiative and a former New Jersey police officer, said female officers often cope with toxic work environments by keeping their heads down. “These women say: ‘I don’t complain, because I don’t think that it will be taken seriously.’” Roman said. “So there’s this disconnect between what the chiefs think is happening and what’s actually happening on the ground.”
In response to the report, Housen said the mayor was planning to arrange a meeting with female officers within SPD to hear their concerns. “Ensuring women at SPD attain positions of leadership, feel welcome and supported, and can serve free of bias or harassment is paramount for creating a representative department and building a culture at SPD that fully reflects the values of our city,” Housen said.
James’ report follows news of a lawsuit filed against Police Chief Adrian Diaz in King County Superior Court in January. Deanna Nollette, a 27-year veteran of the force and a former assistant chief of police, was demoted to captain—along with another assistant chief, Eric Greening—in July. In her lawsuit, Nollette claims that Diaz has “a history of misogyny. He is demeaning to women in the police force, articulating his bias that women should not hold leadership positions in the police force.”
“I am heartbroken to have been placed in an adversarial position against a department that I have loved and given 100 percent to for almost 28 years,” Nollette told PubliCola. “I have a responsibility to try to ensure that women who are with or join SPD have a fair and equitable opportunity.”
Diaz’s attorney, Ted Buck, said “Chief Diaz is disappointed that a routine personnel decision has led to these demonstrably false claims. The chief’s overt support of women in departmental leadership has been clear and consistent.”
Nolette’s attorney, Judith Lonnquist, was blunt in her assessment of Diaz: “It is reprehensible that an organization responsible for law enforcement is headed by a man who regularly violates the laws against discrimination,” Lonnquist said.
When asked if she thought Nolette was more qualified for the job of chief than Diaz, the current SPD officer replied, “Oh, definitely.” She said she was disappointed to see both Nolette and Greening passed over (and Diaz hired instead). “Both of them blow Diaz away,” she said.
The lawsuit—covered by the Seattle Times and other outlets last month—is the second high-profile gender discrimination case brought against the department in the past year. In February 2023, detective Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, known for promoting chess among young people in south Seattle, filed a $10 million complaint against SPD, citing “race and gender discrimination on a daily basis.”
Housen insists SPD is making progress toward the 30×30 goal (which SPD interprets as having 30 percent of its graduating recruit class of 2030 consist of women) and said the department has made gains hiring women into leadership positions. “SPD currently has four women captains and six women lieutenants,” Housen said. “Half of the department’s command staff are women.” In fact, five of SPD’s 13 command staff are women, and only one—assistant chief Lesley Cordner—is a sworn officer. The other four women on the command staff are civilian employees in budgeting, legal, and administrative or advisory roles—roles that are, in turn, held almost exclusively by women.
SPD’s lack of progress toward overall gender diversity comes at a time when the department faces what elected officials and Diaz have characterized as a hiring crisis. (It’s a familiar term.)
In 2020, SPD had 1,339 trained officers; by mid-2023, that had dropped to 1,029 – a 23 percent decline. The number of “deployable” officers—those who are fully trained and able to patrol—is lower; according to data provided by Housen, SPD had 921 deployable officers last year, down from and 1,094 in 2020.
The city began raising alarms about the declining number of SPD officers most recently during the Durkan administration, which instituted a short-lived hiring bonus program back in 2021.In 2022, Bruce Harrell announced a recruitment and retention plan that included bonuses of $7,500 for new officers and $30,000 to people transferring from other police departments. But Harrell’s office has seen lackluster results in its goal to boost SPD’s active force to 1,400 officers.
The numbers are part of a nationwide trend; in every region of the country, police departments are shrinking as retirements and separations outpace new hiring. A 2023 report found that total police force staffing in the US was down 4.8 percent from 2020.
Overall, according to SPD spokesman John O’Neil, 151 of its SPD’s officers are women, or about 16 percent, down from nearly 18 percent in 2021, but still above the national average for municipal police departments. According to the most recent data from the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the FBI, that rate ranges from 13.5 to a little less than 14 percent. According to the mayor’s office, 42 percent of the officers hired in 2023 were Black, Indigenous, or people of color and 9.6 percent were women.
Last year, 91 officers left the department, which, when combined with the 61 new hires, represents a net reduction of 30 officers.
City council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, one of six new council members elected last November, said SPD’s called those hiring numbers disappointing. “The number of women that were hired in 2023 was not acceptable,” Kettle said. “We need to have a representative force where women are well represented. We need to be creating that culture and an environment of inclusion. And also the idea that you can advance, you can be promoted, you can move forward in the organization.”
One police department that has made strides toward a more representative force is Madison, Wisconsin’s, where 28 percent of officers are women. The department makes a point of recruiting women and places women in prominent roles as teachers in its academy, as well as providing female mentors to new recruits.
San Diego’s police department, where 23 percent of officers are women, actively recruits women and is working to make its force more welcoming, including creating the nation’s first on-site child care center within a police department.
Policies like these can help attract women to police departments and encourage them to stay, 30×30 Initiative cofounder Roman said, adding that lactation rooms and generous family leave policies can also help with retention.
The benefits of hiring women are measurable. “We did a literature review on women in policing,” Roman said, “and we found that there are all these benefits associated with having a high representation of women: they reduce lawsuits, reduce use of force, they have a calming effect on their partners, and they have better outcomes for victims of crimes.”
Statistically, female officers generally have fewer incidents of excessive use of force and tend to use force less often than their male counterparts, and Roman notes that women who are victims of domestic violence are more likely to report it to a female officer.
The officer who spoke to PubliCola said that, in her opinion, conditions were better for women under Kathleen O’Toole, who served as chief between 2014 and 2018.
“O’Toole was very focused on career development and very supportive of women,” she said. Under former chief Carmen Best, who stepped down amid criticism of the department’s violent response to protests in 2020, “You saw women being promoted, you saw minorities moving into [positions of] deputy chiefs and assistant chiefs,” the officer said, but the 2020 controversy “kind of derailed what she might have brought to the table on that end of things,” the officer said.
Roman said physical fitness requirements pose a common hurdle for women seeking jobs as officers. SPD uses standards set by the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, which include 20 pushups, 25 sit-ups, and 35 squat thrusts. Roman said that while these might not seem excessive, analyzing how many women consistently pass or fail the test is the best indicator of whether it’s discriminatory.
“I’ve noticed there’s an almost knee-jerk reaction that [some women] weren’t qualified to be cops because they can’t do 24 pushups within the first two weeks of the academy,” she said. “There’s no research that shows doing 24 pushups can make you a better, more effective officer.”
SPD has taken some steps toward improving its reputation and attracting more diverse recruits. Diaz frequently touts SPD’s Before the Badge program, a five-week pre-academy course designed to introduce potential recruits to members of the community and provide them with skills for dealing with on-the-job stress.
Brandon James, a lieutenant who’s part of the Before The Badge program, said he’d like to see more women officers.
“Recruiting is a challenge for everyone, and police departments are going after the same applicants,” James said. “We do see a good share of female recruits coming through. But absolutely, I wish it were more.”
Last year, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office pursued charges against 30 men accused of “sexual exploitation,” or patronizing a sex worker. Most people charged with this misdemeanor are men of color, and many are immigrants; of the 30 prosecuted la required a court interpreter.
By Erica C. Barnett
Shortly before dark one evening last April, a young woman stood outside the Lowe’s hardware store at the corner of 125th and Aurora, looking for customers. Clutching a silver fanny pack, she stood alone near the entrance to the parking lot, dressed in eye-catching moon boots, a reddish cropped tank top, and a black skirt she later described as “a very, very short skirt that barely covered my rear.”
According to her later account, a young man driving a decades-old sedan honked his horn, made a U-turn, and pulled into the driveway of the parking lot, blocking traffic in his haste. After a quick negotiation, the woman later testified, the man said he would give her $80 for “quick sex,” prompting the woman—Seattle police officer Kortney North—to give a signal.
Within moments, the parking lot became a blur of activity, as teams of uniformed officers swooped in. Simultaneously, a detective driving a vehicle filled with other “decoys”—more female officers, also dressed up as sex workers—arrived to whisk North away. Four surveillance officers remained just out of sight, as did a second surveillance vehicle nearby. Once police had the man—we’ll call him James— in handcuffs, an officer drove him a nearby precinct, where still more officers awaited to process and release him.
A few weeks later, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office charged him with one misdemeanor count for soliciting a sex worker—a crime that carries a maximum of 90 days in jail, plus fines that can add up to several thousand dollars..
Most men charged with sexual exploitation—the city’s official term for soliciting a sex worker—end up agreeing to a deal with prosecutors. Last year, according to the Seattle Municipal Court, the city attorney’s office brought sexual exploitation charges against 30 individuals. Only one, James, insisted on his innocence.
And so, late last month, North found herself testifying before a jury as a witness for the prosecution in a courtroom on the 11th floor of the Seattle Municipal Court building in downtown Seattle.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a white, English-speaking client charged with this.”—Northwest Defenders attorney Virginia Branham
Because undercover officers don’t wear video cameras or carry recording devices—and don’t collect money from the men they target—the outcome of prostitution cases depends almost entirely on whose story the jury believes. Without tangible evidence proving that James was guilty, the prosecutors tried to tell a story about a hypothetical woman forced into sex work by circumstances beyond her control.
“Eighty dollars. That’s how much [he] thought sex with Officer North was worth that day,” assistant city prosecutor Alisa Smith said in her closing argument. “There is no question about what [was] going on. [He] was out to buy sex with … someone whose life circumstances had brought her to a place where she needed some quick cash.”
The jury took four hours to find James not guilty.
Criminalizing sex work is broadly unpopular; during jury selection, echoing national sentiment, 23 of 25 potential jurors said they didn’t think sex work should be illegal. But the city remains deeply invested in penalizing the practice—and pouring resources into prosecuting men who patronize sex workers.
Like James, most of the people prosecuted for patronizing prostitutes are men of color, and defense attorneys say many are immigrants—mostly Latino—who don’t speak English fluently or at all.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a white, English-speaking client charged with this,” Northwest Defenders attorney Virginia Branham, the supervising attorney on James’ case, said. “Often, with clients who are charged with [sexual exploitation], English is not their first language and they often have immigration issues, so this charge is not a good one for a client of be convicted of.”
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Publicly available police reports don’t usually indicate defendants’ race or immigration status, but it’s suggestive that a large majority of the men prosecuted for sexual exploitation last year had Hispanic, African, or Asian surnames, and that half requested an interpreter from the court. Because solicitation stings are based entirely on an officer’s claim that she made a verbal agreement to exchange sex for money, a defendant’s ability to understand what an officer is saying could be a strong argument against a guilty verdict—if any of those cases ever went to trial.
To understand why the city puts so much energy, effort, and money into chasing down men for a low-level misdemeanor that most people think should be legal, it’s helpful to know that under city law and SPD policy, sex work is virtually synonymous with human trafficking—one police source described women being sent around the country on a circuit, which—police argue—prevents women from developing ties or getting help.
This view is reflected in the language of the law itself; in 2015, then-city council member Bruce Harrell sponsored a bill, which passed unanimously, changing the crime of “patronizing a prostitute” to “sexual exploitation.”
The idea, backed strongly by then-city attorney Pete Holmes (who later vacated all outstanding charges against sex workers) was to focus on the demand side of the equation by focusing on the men buying sex rather than the people, mostly women, selling it. As Harrell summarized in 2015, “we will now refer to [solicitation] as a crime relative to sexual exploitation [because] that’s what actually occurs when people are being forced to use their bodies in the commerce of prostitution.”
In about eight years of representing defendants in such cases,” Branham countered, “I’ve never seen a case where there has been any link to sex trafficking.”
A spokesman for the city attorney’s office said there has not been any “greater emphasis on sex work” since Davison took office in 2022. “However, the City Attorney is very aware of the continuing problem and the tragic impact on women and girls who are preyed upon by criminals engaged in human trafficking,” he said.
Since taking office in 2022, Davison has emphasized the need to make filing decisions quickly so that cases involving serious misdemeanors, like driving under the influence and domestic violence, can take top priority. But a look at any weekly municipal court docket shows that many of those more serious cases are languishing.
Pursuing men who buy sex is time-consuming and expensive, although it’s surprisingly difficult to determine just how time-consuming and how expensive. SPD did not respond to questions about what its sting operations cost and how they operate, and a spokesman for Davison’s office said “there is not a cost tracking system in place for criminal trials.”
But with the median SPD employee making well over $150,000 —and with a three-day trial that required, at minimum, dozens of hours of preparation for both prosecutors and defense attorneys—it’s easy to see how the costs can add up. According to data from the city, in 2022, SPD arrested 28 people for “purchasing prostitution” on Aurora over the course of five operations. In 2023, that number was 41, in six operations. Those numbers were down significantly from 2019, when police arrested 87 people, and up dramatically compared to earlier in the decade, when SPD stings were aimed at sex workers, not their customers.
Testimony at the trial provided a closer look at the scale of these stings, which can involve as many as 20 officers. In addition, before going undercover, officers have to go through “decoy school”—a two-day training where they learn the “language” of sex work, act out various scenarios they might encounter, and practice hand signals to let observing officers know if they’re in distress and when it’s time to make an arrest.
“There was probably 10 pages of acronyms that we went over, just so that we would be familiar with those kinds of terms and not be thrown off if somebody approached us,” North said.
“The trial really highlighted the immense expense involved in these stings and the resources that are thrown at them, and I just can’t see what value they are getting,” said Branham, who, along with lead attorney Claire Beckett, worked on James’ defense over several months and appeared in court during all three days of his trial..
Since taking office in 2022, Davison has emphasized the need to make filing decisions quickly so that cases involving serious misdemeanors, like driving under the influence and domestic violence, can take top priority. But a look at any weekly municipal court docket shows that many of those more serious cases are languishing.
Last week, for example, the domestic violence arraignment calendar included six assault cases—cases in which women described being punched, beaten, and strangled by intimate partners—that sat around for 60 days or longer before Davison’s office filed charges. According to a 2017 report by the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the longer it takes to file charges in a domestic violence case, the less likely a victim is to cooperate with prosecutors, and the harder it becomes to track down witnesses; delay also “diminishes the quality of DV cases as its sends a message to victims and courts that the case is not a priority.”
DUI cases are also stacking up. Out of 14 cases on the docket for the first week of February, 11 involved cases from early 2022 for which the two-year statute of limitations was about to run out. Delays at the state toxicology lab, which examines blood samples in DUI cases, are only responsible for about half of this two-year delay, which has been consistent for much of the last year. With two years’ lag time, successful prosecutions are rare; in 10 of the 11 cases on last week’s docket, court records indicate the defendant could no longer be found.
Should the city be spending time, money, and court resources prosecuting men who pay for sex? The question is especially relevant at a time when both the police department and the city attorney’s office say they’re short-staffed and stretched thin.
At a time when SPD claims it doesn’t have enough officers to respond to 911 calls promptly, it’s worth looking at the sheer quantity of resources they pour into apprehending sex buyers on Aurora. At a time when the city attorney’s office says it’s having trouble staffing its criminal division with qualified attorneys, it’s worth questioning why they have chosen to use those scarce attorneys prosecuting men for buying sex, rather than the “serious” misdemeanors, like DUIs and domestic violence, that Davison has said are among her top priorities.
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