1. Two weeks ago after PubliCola reported that Police Chief Shon Barnes had picked controversial police captain Mike Tietjen to head up Capitol Hill’s East Precinct, Barnes announced internally that he was removing Tietjen, blaming our “recent article that has raised unease within the East Precinct, leading to a crisis of confidence among our LGBTQIA+ community members.”
As of Thursday, though, Tietjen was still in charge of the precinct, with no clear timeline for replacing him. An SPD spokesperson responded to a list of questions from PubliCola by saying, that “no movement has been made of yet. I do not have a timeline for completion at this time.”
Tietjen has been a high-profile, controversial figure at SPD since at least 2007, when he and his bike patrol partner were accused of planting drugs on a man and arresting him. City investigators later concluded that Tietjen and his partner lied about the arrest (and likely pocketed weed belonging to the suspect). The allegations raised questions about the two men’s credibility in 17 other drug and firearms cases.
More recently, Tietjen became notorious for his actions during the 2020 protests against police brutality after driving onto a sidewalk toward a group of protesters, calling them “cockroaches” when they fled the path of his unmarked SUV. (Tietjen was suspended for that incident and another in which he shoved a protester into a bus stop, slamming their head). During the same period, Tietjen failed to report an incident in which a group of officers, including one who was his direct report, allegedly harassed a trans woman in Capitol Hill, asking her if she “had a dick under” her skirt.
SPD did not respond to PubliCola’s questions about why Tietjen is still at the East Precinct and the process for replacing him.
2. During a recent meeting with restaurant owners at a West Seattle cafe, Mayor Bruce Harrell appeared to commit to considering the reinstatement of the “tip credit” for restaurants or other “exemptions” that could make it less expensive to run their businesses.
Seattle’s minimum wage law, passed in 2015, included a “tip credit” that allowed employers to pay sub-minimum wages as long as their workers made enough in tips to bring their overall “minimum compensation” to the city minimum.
The conversation was overheard by a bystander who provided a brief recording of the conversation to PubliCola. In the recording, Harrell can be heard saying that if reelected, “I fully commit, in January, to convene just restaurants” to discuss “what the city can do, from a policy perspective,” to help them deal with Seattle’s high minimum wage—”whether it’s exemptions, or re-discussion of the tip credit, I’ll have that discussion.”
Contacted by PubliCola, a spokesman for the mayor said, “Rolling back the minimum wage and reinstating the tip credit is not a policy we’re considering now or in the future. The mayor will always meet with small businesses to hear their ideas[.]”
The 2015 minimum wage law, passed unanimously by a city council that included Harrell, gave restaurants and other businesses that rely on customers to pay their workers’ wages through tips 10 years to adjust to the fact that they would have to pay the full minimum wage in 2025. Last year, Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth tried unsuccessfully to preserve the tip credit indefinitely.
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3. Harrell’s proposed budget preserves cuts made last year to the Department of Construction and Inspections’ tenant assistance program, which the city reduced from about $2.4 million to $1.6 million between 2024 and 2025. The tenant services program pays for counseling, legal aid, education, and other assistance to tenants facing eviction or navigating landlord-tenant conflicts. Some of organizations whose city funding was cut or remained flat this year include the Tenants Union, United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, Solid Ground, and the Housing Justice Project, along with half a dozen others.
Harrell’s 2026 budget proposal includes no inflation adjustments, meaning that in real terms, nonprofits whose funding stayed flat will continue to experience reductions in their ability to pay staff salaries and other costs that are funded through SDCI.
In a letter to the city council earlier this month, seven groups that depend on city funding to operate their programs asked the council to reverse the cuts made last year and add more funding to address inflation and augment programs at a time when evictions and homelessness are approaching record highs. The most cost-effective way to address homelessness is prevention, by helping people stay housed,” the organizations wrote. “When rental assistance is paired with tenant services it becomes far more effective, ensuring resources are used efficiently to keep people stably housed.”
Progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck reportedly plans to introduce a budget amendment that would add $1 million to the budget for tenant services, restoring last year’s cut and addressing some of the inflationary cost increases over the past two years.
Last year, then-councilmember Tammy Morales did manage to get $355,000 in the budget to reduce the mayor’s proposed cuts to tenant services, but failed to get support for restoring another $456,000 in cuts. The council is similarly constituted this year, with Rinck, rather than Morales, as the lone consistent progressive on a centrist council focused on boosting the police budget, not helping tenants access legal aid.
We’ve reached out to Rinck about her amendment and will update this post if we hear back.
Police Chief Shon Barnes, flanked by Council President Sara Nelson and Mayor Bruce Harrell
In theory, the new contract allows the CARE Team to respond to more call types. In practice, it says they can’t go to homeless encampments, residences, businesses, or calls where a person is using drugs or being “confrontational.”
By Erica C. Barnett
This morning, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Police Chief Shon Barnes announced the new police contract we reported on yesterday, including starting salaries of $118,000 for new recruits, rising to $126,000 in six months.
Sergeants’ pay will increase from a base wage of $140,000 ($146,000 after six months) to $159,000 ($167,000 after six months). After 18 months on the job, new cops and sergeants will make $132,000 and $177,000, respectively.
In 2021, the starting pay for a brand-new police officer was $83,000 a year. Last year, Harrell signed a three-year retroactive contract that raised Seattle police salaries to the highest in Washington state. Once the new round of raises go into effect, that number will have gone up by $35,000—a remarkable 42 percent pay increase in just five years. New officers also receive bonuses ranging from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for officers transferring from other departments.
“This contract ensures Seattle will remain competitive with other major city police departments and adds incentives for the skills that modern policing requires,” including a 1.5 percent or 4 percent salary boost for officers with two- or four-year criminal-justice degrees, Harrell said Wednesday.
“These recruitment improvements will allow us to build a police force that reflects our community’s diversity and meets the demands of 21st century public safety with respect to accountability. This contract delivers significant account accountability reforms that address concerns raised by the accountability entities and the community, and builds on the successful resolution of the federal consent period earlier this year. ”
In fact, the contract includes just two changes related to accountability. First, it simplifies a 180-day “clock” for disciplinary decisions, removing some carveouts that have contributed to very long delays between the time when someone files a misconduct complaint and when it gets resolved.
Second, it allows sergeants, rather than the Office of Police Accountability, to determine discipline for misconduct that doesn’t rise to the level of a fireable offense. Whether this is an improvement to accountability, as opposed to a simplification of OPA’s workload, remains to be seen; the federal consent decree SPD was under until earlier this year called precinct-level discipline “admittedly ‘appalling,’ quoting an OPA supervisor), so bringing this kind of discipline back inside SPD will have good or bad consequences depending on how sergeants use this new authority.
Bob Kettle, head of the city council’s public safety committee, said bringing discipline back in-house would produce better sergeants, which would lead to “better lieutenants, captains, assistant chiefs, deputy chiefs, and maybe chiefs of the future. We have to invest in our leaders early to get the return later.”
One accountability issue the contract does not address is arbitration—an outside process police officers can use to get disciplinary decisions overturned Harrell’s chief of staff Andrew Myerberg said the two sides remain at an impasse on arbitration because the Seattle Police Officers Guild does not want to make concessions on four separate issues related to discipline.
Under the current arbitration rules, officers can bring in new evidence and witnesses that the city hasn’t seen, and the arbitrator can use any standard of proof they want to decide whether a cop is guilty of misconduct. For example, arbitrators can require the city to present “clear and convincing” evidence that an person is guilty of misconduct that justifies the punishment they received. Arbitrators can also completely relitigate an officer’s case after the fact (known as de novo review).
Myerberg said the city couldn’t get SPOG to bend on changes to these requirements, as well as a request for a new standard saying that an arbitrator can’t overturn a disciplinary decision (such as firing) by the police chief unless the chief’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious.”
All those issues are now heading to interest arbitration between the city and SPOG, a secondary bargaining process overseen by the state Public Employee Relations Commission. If the city succeeds in placing more guardrails on arbitration, it will come at a cost—likely additional salary increases for officers in exchange for agreeing to restrictions on arbitration.
“The city had an opportunity to finally deliver on the promise of the 2017 accountability ordinance, to build a system where misconduct is investigated swiftly and discipline can stick. Unfortunately, this contract largely maintains the status quo,” Jazmyn Clark, smart justice policy program director for the ACLU-WA, said. “While some procedural clarifications are welcome, meaningful accountability reforms, especially around arbitration and disciplinary appeals, remain unresolved. Public confidence in the police cannot grow if the mechanisms for accountability are still subject to closed-door processes.”
As Harrell telegraphed earlier this year, the CARE Team, a group of social workers that currently responds alongside SPD to certain 911 calls, will be allowed to expand without restriction in the future and can respond to more types of calls, including behavioral-health calls from the public and requests for shelter and transportation from people on the streets.
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During Wednesday’s announcement—and before she had actually seen the new contract—CARE Department Chief Amy Barden said the changes would allow the CARE Team to respond to up to 47,000 calls a year.
However, the contract language actually places so many restrictions on what types of calls CARE can respond to that the true number of eligible calls is likely much lower. What’s more, the contract actually prohibits CARE from responding to exactly the kind of calls Barden has repeatedly said are more appropriate for social workers than armed police.
Under the new agreement (which CARE played no direct role in negotiating), SPD won’t allow CARE to respond to 911 calls on their own, and will instead send armed police officers, in the following circumstances:
If a person is anywhere besides a public space, such as a car, business, or residence;
If a person is in a homeless encampment, defined as four or more tents;
If there has been any report of “aggressive or threatening behavior towards others, destructive or confrontational behavior, or behavior posing a danger to others”;
If “drug paraphernalia” is present, indicating drug use;
If a minor is present;
If there is an “indication” that the person has committed any crime;
If the person is exhibiting “extreme behavior that might warrant investigation for a potential involuntary commitment (e.g., public nakedness accompanied by crisis.”
This list arguably covers most circumstances in which CARE might be called to respond to a person in crisis. Under these criteria, CARE can’t respond to a call about someone living in permanent supportive housing or staying in a shelter, or someone whose behavior stems from public drug use. They can’t respond to a person in their car or who has wandered into a business, or someone who lives in a tent that’s near other tents. Barden
Many of the terms in the list are subjective, leaving it up to officers to decide whether a person is being “confrontational” or if their behavior is “extreme.” (The example given in the contract, of someone who takes their clothes off while “in crisis,” is a good reason not to let SPD decide which calls require police—people who remove their clothes in public are often using drugs that make them hot, which doesn’t on its own mean someone needs to be involuntarily committed).
The contract still has to be lawyered and approved by the city council before it can go into effect. Historically, dissent on police contracts is rare, since rejecting a contract would force the city back into negotiations—a process that, with the exception of this year’s speedy approval, typically takes years.
Those new salary figures don’t include overtime, paid at time and a half, which accounted for about 500,000 police hours in 2025. In a budget paper, the city council’s central staff noted that SPD is proposing to include less than 500,000 hours in the budget for the second year in a row; last year’s initial budget funded 489,000 hours, but the council had to amend that during the year to add 11,000 hours at a cost of $1.2 million.
The salaries also don’t include recruiting bonuses that range from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for fully trained officers transferring from other departments (including Police Chief Shon Barnes, who accepted this “lateral” bonus on top of his $360,000 salary earlier this year.)
The retroactive contract the city approved last year did not include any meaningful new accountability measures, such as progress toward implementing a 2017 accountability ordinance that called for major changes in the way officers are investigated and disciplined for misconduct. At the time, supporters of the retroactive contract generally agreed that it was important to make sure officers got paid as soon as possible for the years they worked under an expired contract, and that significant new accountability measures would be part of the 2024-2027 agreement.
Because the new spending on officer salaries is retroactive to 2024, meaning that police officers will get back pay for 2024 and 2025 to bring their pay for those years up to the amounts in the new contract. Although the city sets aside reserves to pay for negotiated increases to officer pay, these increased costs become an ongoing part of the city’s budget, adding to projected deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars starting in 2027.
City negotiators have approved a new 2024-2027 contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild that will raise the starting salary for new police recruits to $118,000—a 13 percent boost over the current starting salary of $104,000. After six months, new officers will earn a base salary of more than $126,000, according to documents reviewed by PubliCola.
The new contract will increase officers’ pay retroactively for 2024 and 2025, plus additional increases in 2026 and 2027. Officers who were around in 2024 and 2025 will get retroactive (and cumulative) pay increases of 6 percent for 2024 and 4.1 percent for 2025, on top of a 2.7 percent increase next year. (The number for 2027 will be somewhere between 3 and 4 percent.)
Cumulatively, all those raises represent a huge increase that far outpaces the raises other city unions have negotiated for city employees over the past few years. In 2021, the starting pay for a brand-new police officer was $83,000 a year. As of 2026, that number will have gone up by $35,000—a remarkable 42 percent pay increase in just five years.
Sergeants’ pay, meanwhile, will increase from a base wage of $140,000 ($146,000 after six months) to $159,000 ($167,000 after six months). After 18 months on the job, new cops and sergeants will make $132,000 and $177,000, respectively.
Mayor Bruce Harrell is expected to announce the new contract tomorrow—an October surprise as voters decide between the mayor and his opponent, labor organizer Katie Wilson. SPOG was reportedly in a rush to get a new contract passed this year, in advance of a potential Wilson victory; Wilson has expressed her support for strong police accountability measures, including improvements to the police misconduct investigation process and the implementation of a 2017 police accountability law that has never gone into full effect.
In his announcement, Harrell will likely emphasize changes that will allow the CARE Team, a group of social workers that responds alongside SPD to certain 911 calls, to expand from 24 to 48 members and respond directly to more types of calls, a change the mayor telegraphed in September when he announced a new public safety sales tax to pay for the expansion and predicted the team would soon be allowed to go out on more calls without officers in tow.
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The mayor will also probably focus on the need for officers to earn enough to live in Seattle (which many of them do not). That was the argument for increasing police salaries by 24 percent just last year, when the city adopted a three-year retroactive contract that raised Seattle police salaries to the highest in Washington state. The new contract bumps salaries for new officers above the Seattle median, which includes people in every industry and at every stage of their careers.
Those new salary figures don’t include overtime, paid at time and a half, which accounted for about 500,000 police hours in 2025. In a budget paper, the city council’s central staff noted that SPD is proposing to include less than 500,000 hours in the budget for the second year in a row; last year’s initial budget funded 489,000 hours, but the council had to amend that during the year to add 11,000 hours at a cost of $1.2 million.
The salaries also don’t include recruiting bonuses that range from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for fully trained officers transferring from other departments (including Police Chief Shon Barnes, who accepted this “lateral” bonus on top of his $360,000 salary earlier this year.)
The retroactive contract the city approved last year did not include any meaningful new accountability measures, such as progress toward implementing a 2017 accountability ordinance that called for major changes in the way officers are investigated and disciplined for misconduct. At the time, supporters of the retroactive contract generally agreed that it was important to make sure officers got paid as soon as possible for the years they worked under an expired contract, and that new accountability measures would be part of the 2024-2027 agreement.
We’ll know more about any new accountability measures once the full contract is released. However, sources familiar with the contract said the improvements are fairly minimal. For instance, the new agreement reportedly reduces the burden of proof in arbitration proceedings from “clear and convincing” (editor’s note: corrected from “beyond a reasonable doubt”) to “preponderance of the evidence,” making it easier for the city’s Office of Police Accountability to demonstrate misconduct when an officer appeals their case to an outside arbitrator.
Because the new spending on officer salaries is retroactive to 2024, meaning that police officers will get back pay for 2024 and 2025 to bring their pay for those years up to the amounts in the new contract. Although the city sets aside reserves to pay for negotiated increases to officer pay, these increased costs become an ongoing part of the city’s budget, adding to projected deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars starting in 2027.
The contract agreement doesn’t represent a final contract, which still has to be lawyered and approved by the city council. A majority of the city council sits on the Labor Relations Policy Committee that signed off on the agreement with SPOG, so approval is a foregone conclusion. Historically, dissent on police contracts is rare, since rejecting a contract would force the city back into negotiations—a process that, with the exception of this year’s speedy approval, typically takes years.
1. Former Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz is trying to get a third King County Superior Court judge tossed from his lawsuit against the city, claiming that the judge, Nelson Lee, is biased against him. Previously, Diaz petitioned successfully to have Judge Suzanne Parisien removed; a second judge, Cindi Port, later recused herself, sending Diaz’ case to Lee’s courtroom.
Mayor Bruce Harrell removed Diaz from his role as chief last May, after several women accused Diaz of sexual harassment and of fostering a hostile workplace environment for women at SPD. Diaz remained on full pay at the city until seven months later, when Harrell finally fired him after a lengthy investigation. That investigation concluded that Diaz and his chief of staff, Jamie Tompkins, had lied about having an inappropriate workplace relationship and coordinated to cover their tracks.
Diaz’ lawsuit claims Harrell’s true reason for firing him was because he wouldn’t assent to the mayor’s preferred discipline for Daniel Auderer, the officer who was caught on tape laughing and joking about the death of Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old student, shortly after SPD officer Kevin Dave stuck and killed her in 2023. Interim police chief Sue Rahr fired Auderer in January.
Diaz’ motion to have Lee removed from his case claims Lee is biased against him based on the fact that he is overseeing a case filed against the city (though not against Diaz himself) by SPD officer Lauren Truscott, one of several women who have sued over alleged gender discrimination, sexual and racial harassment, and retaliation at SPD. “Although Chief Diaz is not a named defendant or party in that matter, as this Court is aware, the allegations against him in Truscott are both false and highly prejudicial,” Diaz’ petition says.
In addition, Diaz claims that because Lee “expressly admitted to following media coverage about Chief Diaz,” he is admitting bias, since the coverage of Diaz has been “overwhelmingly negative,” “salacious,” and “false.”
As one of several examples, Diaz pointed to PubliCola’s report on his firing, using an inaccurate version of a headline that appeared on the article only briefly, “Mayor Harrell Fired Diaz over ‘False’ Statements Denying ‘Intimate Relationship’ With Top Staffer.” (I shortened the headline in the interest of brevity, but the newsletter version of the post is subheaded, “Harrell said Diaz repeatedly made ‘false statements’ about an ‘intimate relationship’ with a top staffer to members of the media, to SPD’s command staff, and to Harrell himself.”
Diaz’ attorney altered our headline to remove the quotation marks, making it appear as if we were asserting his statements were false, rather than Harrell.
“Setting aside for a moment the false nature of these reports, the mere fact that Judge Lee has followed and commented on such coverage gives rise to a well-founded appearance of bias,” the motion claims.
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2. Planned Parenthood Votes Northwest (PPVNW) filed a complaint against King County Council candidate Peter Kwon, saying he falsely claimed to have their endorsement on a campaign mailing earlier this month.
Kwon, a SeaTac City Councilmember, is running against attorney Steffanie Fain for the South King County seat. The reproductive rights group rescinded their endorsement of Kwon on September 18 after learning he told the King County Republican Party that he supports banning trans girls from girls’ school sports and locker rooms.
This position was inconsistent with what Kwon told PPVNW in a written statement, according to the complaint.
The Republican questionnaire included the question, “What are your thoughts on allowing trans students assigned male at birth to play in girls’ school sports and use girls’ restrooms and locker rooms?” Kwon responded: “I believe students should compete in their respective biological category to preserve fairness and protect opportunities—especially for girls and young women. Competitive sports are often divided by sex for a reason: to ensure a level playing field and prevent physical advantages from undermining fair competition.”
In an email to Kwon rescinding the endorsement on September 18, PPVNW Washington State Director Courtney Normand wrote, “As we discussed on the phone last week and via email, there are inconsistencies between written statements you made to Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates and to other groups regarding your position on trans youth and their right to full inclusion and participation in all parts of school and community life.”
“We hold our endorsed candidates to the highest standards of integrity and any decision to rescind an endorsement is made with careful deliberation and due diligence,” Normand said in a written statement. “We have zero tolerance for the misleading or unauthorized use of our trusted name and respected brand.”
Kwon did not respond to a request for an interview.
1. Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future, the business-backed political action committee headed by Harrell’s deputy mayor Tim Burgess, sent out a condescending and misleading mailer featuring a résumé that his opponent, labor leader Katie Wilson, submitted as part of an application for a city transit board more than a decade ago.
The document, which includes Wilson’s former home address as well as the address and partially visible phone number of a long-ago employer, purports to show that Wilson has no experience. Ten years ago, Wilson included jobs going back to when she was 24 years old, including a stint at Julia’s Bakery in Wallingford.
At the time she submitted the résumé to the city, Wilson had just started her role as general secretary ot the Transit Riders Union, an organization founded in 2011 to fight for better transit. Since then, as the head of TRU, Wilson led three successful campaigns for higher minimum wages, helped craft the JumpStart payroll tax as a leader of the city’s progressive revenue task force, fought for free transit passes for youth, and led campaigns for stronger renter protections in Seattle and several other cities.
You wouldn’t know that from the misleading mailer from the Burgess-led PAC, though, which doubles down on Harrell’s strategy of pretending his opponent is an ineffective know-nothing. If one were eliminate the last 10 years from Harrell’s resume, his own most recent experience would include “two-term city council member (2007-2014)” and “failed candidate for mayor” (2013).
2. The Seattle Police Department’s budget for this year includes funding for a $3.3 million, two-year advertising contract with the firm Epic Productions of Phoenix, LLC aimed at recruiting new officers through online ads through the end of 2026.
This is just the latest of several recruiting contracts the city has funded amid annual deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As of this year, the city is hiring police at an unprecedented rate, according to a city council central staff analysis, a fact that almost certainly has more to do with new six-figure starting salaries than macho Youtube videos about “what gives us a rush.”
Interestingly, SPD’s budget counts those videos as part of its “30 by 30” effort to recruit more women, perhaps because there are women in the videos. The “30 by 30” initiative is a commitment by police departments to boost recruitment classes to 30 percent women by 2030 and to retain women through initiatives focused on improving police culture and meeting women’s specific needs. So far this year, SPD’s recruitment class has been less than 9 percent female.
While SPD was able to find $3 million for the Epic ads, they have not hired anyone for a position created in 2024 to oversee its 30 by 30 efforts, despite the fact that the city assumed funding for this position last year for both 2025 and 2026 would come from “salary savings that would accrue from vacant, funded civilian positions within the department.” According to a central staff memo, SPD chose instead to use this money for “civilian salary savings.”
“In response to the pessimistic revenue forecast in April, as well as threats of federal funding cuts, the Executive took immediate action to proactively prepare for significant negative impacts to the City budget. Additionally, given the unexpected increase in officer hiring, the department has had to take on an increase in expenses and has had to use the remaining civilian salary savings to balance the GF budget.”
SPD will also get nearly a million dollars from the JumpStart payroll tax to pay for live CCTV camera surveillance in the Stadium District, part of a permanent police surveillance program, and for unspecified equipment and security costs for the six FIFA World Cup games happening here next year. JumpStart was passed explicitly to pay for equitable development projects, affordable housing, and other programs to benefit low-income people and underserved communities. Last year, the council voted to remove all restrictions on the fund, allowing the city to use it as an all-purpose slush fund for any budget purpose.
Mayor Bruce Harrell speaks at the honorary designation of a portion of East Union Street as D’Vonne Pickett., Jr. Way in 2023. Image via Seattle Channel
By Erica C. Barnett
D’Vonne Pickett, the owner of The Postman mailing and shipping store and in the Central District, was just 31 when he was shot and killed outside his store three years ago. His public memorial service, at Climate Pledge Arena, drew thousands of mourners. Among them was Mayor Bruce Harrell, who broke down as he described learning from his son that Pickett had been killed.
“Whathappenedto D’Vonne— thishappenedtimeandtimeagainwhenIwaslittleboyinthe CD, goingto T.T. Minor, Meany, andGarfield,” Harrell said, naming his elementary, middle and high schools. “We have to do everything humanly possible to save our own community, because no one’s going to do it for us,” Harrell said. “We have to hold up the family. You don’t say, ‘What can I do?’ Do it.”
Three years after Pickett was kiled, his mother, Nicky Chappell, is planning an “angelversary” celebration of his life that will double as a fundraiser; his grave, at Lakeview Cemetery, still lacks a headstone. Despite Harrell’s comments about her family at the memorial, Chappell says the mayor didn’t acknowledge or speak to her at the event, and hasn’t reached out to her in the years since.
Over the past several weeks, PubliCola has spoken to the mothers of young men killed by gun violence who told us Harrell ignored their pleas for help during his years in office, reaching out to some of them only once he was running for reelection. We also spoke with Black business owners and advocates who are supporting Wilson because they’ve met with her and believe she’s willing to make a place for them at the table. Some wouldn’t go on the record, citing a fear of retribution if Harrell gets reelected. Others talked at length about their disappointment with a mayor they thought would stand up for their communities.
“Every time he starts talking, he talks about his roots, or ‘I grew up in the CD,’ ‘my family’ this and ‘my family’ that. That’s what he did at my son’s service and I didn’t like that,” Chappell said. “We’re not going to talk about you growing up in the CD or whatever schools you went to. My son’s service wasn’t for you to come here and talk about what you talk about on the news all the time.”
After the service, Chappell said, she reached out to the mayor’s office on social media and eventually secured a meeting, where she told him she was disappointed and hurt that he hadn’t reached out or offered help. “As the mother in a high-profile case, I think he should have done better with me. as as a mother. … We would have never talked if I hadn’t reached out to him about how he did me at my son’s service.”
“If he’s going to involve himself in situations like this, or these traumatic incidents, don’t come half-ass,” Chappell said.
Harrell is in a tough reelection battle against a challenger, Katie Wilson, who disagrees with him strongly on many major policies, from the decision to place surveillance cameras in neighborhoods around the city, including the Central District, to his support for putting police officers in schools— starting with his alma mater, Garfield High School.
In debates, Harrell has frequently tried to shut Wilson down by talking about his personal history as someone who grew up Black and biracial in the Central District; unlike Wilson, a white woman who grew up in upstate New York, “my parents weren’t college professors,” Harrell said at a recent forum.
“Race,” my colleague Marcus Harrison Green wrote in a powerful recent piece for the South Seattle Emerald, “has shadowed this race from the start.” Harrell has certainly used it, suggesting (falsely) that his white opponent “darkened” his skin on an Instagram post. (In fact, the post that gave Harrell’s skin an orange tint was created by a progressive group run primarily by people of color whose Black director called the claim “untrue and offensive.”)
At a press event to announce a housing reparations proposal, Harrell lashed out at critics, saying the people he sees on the streets are “people I grew up with. How dare they write that under this administration—which has, by the way, the most diverse set of leaders on the executive floor in our city’s history—how dare anyone question the compassion of this administration toward people who are underrepresented?”
Several mothers who lost their children to gun violence said they initially had high hopes for Harrell, but have spent the past four years trying in vain to get Harrell to listen to them and other women who struggle with grief, job loss, threats, and the financial burden of caring for grandchildren long after losing a child.
“What mothers go through in crisis is not a one-time opportunity—it’s ongoing, especially with gun violence,” said Donnitta Sinclair, whose son, Horace Lorenzo Anderson, was shot in the CHOP protest zone in 2020 and died at Harborview. Volunteer medics took Anderson to the hospital in a pickup truck as a Seattle Fire Department medic unit idled nearby.
Earlier this year, Sinclair and a group of about 20 other mothers who lost children to gun violence met for a healing circle that was coordinated by the nonprofit group RISE. About halfway through the event, they learned that a special guest would be arriving soon: Mayor Bruce Harrell. Several people who were present told PubliCola what happened next.
As a video of their children played in the background, Harrell walked in with his security and asked, “‘Do you guys want me to talk freely and keep it real?’ recalled Lonnisha Landry, whose son, 16-year-old Xavier Landry, was shot and killed in Auburn lsat July; Landry is currently petitioning the state to do advanced DNA testing on casings left at the scene of the murder, hoping they will help identify his killer. “We said, ‘Keep it real.’ And he was like, ‘Cut the cameras.'”
According to four accounts, a videographer who was filming the event turned off his camera and everyone put their phones away.
“He was just writing, kind of not paying attention—okay, that’s one thing,” Landry continued. “But then when he does get to talking, he wants to basically say, ‘I’m not one of you guys, I haven’t lost a child, but I am one of you guys because I grew up in the community. I went to Garfield and I knew Donnitta’s family and I remember when one of her uncles stole my father’s coat.’ And we were like, ‘What?'”
Sinclair confirmed that Harrell made the crack about the supposed coat incident, which would have occurred before she was born. It wasn’t the first time, she said. Harrell also mentioned it when they spoke shortly before his first election in 2021. At the time, Sinclair recalled, “I told him, ‘Mr. Harrell, I lost my son. I’m not really interested in no coat.”
After some heated back and forth with Sinclair, several people who were present recalled, Harrell slammed his hand on the table, told the women “I didn’t even want to come here,” and started walking toward the door. (Chappell, who was present, said she understood why he was mad: He and Sinclair don’t get along. On the other hand: Sinclair is a mother who lost her son; Harrell is, well, the mayor.) Landry said she asked Harrell to at least stay and talk to a woman who had been trying to meet with him for more than a year. “We’re kind of pleading and wanting him to hear us. It was cold.”
Keshia McGee, whose son, James Richardson (the hip-hop artist Tanaa Money) was shot and killed in 2019, said Harrell’s words about not wanting to be there “haunt me to this day. We finally got a chance to speak to him about our kids … and he told us he didn’t even want to come to our healing circle,” she said.
“The way he treated us was like we were little ants and he was the giant.”
It wasn’t the first time McGee had felt used by Harrell and people associated with the mayor. In 2023, Harrell held a “One Seattle Day of Remembrance for Gun Violence Victims” event but didn’t reach out to her to participate in the event itself. Instead, she said, she got an invitation to attend, which is how she found out the event would feature a slide show that included her son. (In fact, Richardson’s image was on the very first slide.)
“I said, ‘how dare you guys reach out to me to come to this event? You had my information all this time and you’ve never reached out to me before to ask me about my baby,” McGee said. By the time of the weekend retreat, “we were feeling like, ‘You’re on TV talking about our kids but never spent the time to talk to us, the mothers that carried these kids.'”
At the retreat, Harrell started speaking again, but was soon interrupted by a phone call from his daughter, which he took while still standing in front of the group. After hanging up, Sinclair recalled, “He’s grinning, laughing, saying ‘I’m glad she didn’t want no money.'” (Others who were there recounted the same story, although not everyone was offended he took the call). “I said, ‘I’m glad she’s okay and you could answer her,” Sinclair recalled. “We don’t get to answer our kids’ calls ever again.’ He said, ‘You don’t know what the hell she needed.'”
“If you were at a white meeting, you would have blocked [your phone],” Sinclair said, “but you’re here at a meeting of women of color, so you don’t.”
McGee, too, found it insulting that Harrell took his daughter’s call. “It didn’t matter why you picked up the phone. … When he was in that [televised] debate, up on the podium while millions of people were watching, I bet he had his phone off.”
Harrell’s appearance “shook up the whole room,” McGee said. They all came to heal together, “and we all left very hurt and upset and mad. Why the hell did he even come? This was supposed to be healing and then that man showed up.”
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PublCola sent Harrell’s campaign a list of 10 questions for this story. The campaign responded with the following statement: “Mayor Harrell is a champion for survivors of gun violence, and communities impacted by firearm tragedy. He is the first Mayor to hire an executive-level gun violence prevention coordinator (herself a survivor), and has the sole endorsement of the Alliance for Gun Responsibility. Under Bruce’s leadership, Seattle has seen a reduction in shots fired, thousands of guns have been removed from our streets, and we are investing in proven community violence intervention and youth engagement programs. Bruce meets regularly with families and victims of gun violence, respects the need for privacy and intensity of grief often expressed in these meetings, and out of respect for all involved will not comment on specific meetings or interactions.”
Many of the women who lost children to gun violence said they want the city to fund opportunities for them to meet and support each other, from healing circles like the one Harrell attended, to a community center with services such as child care, support groups, and direct connections to emergency resources.
“I’m tired of calling 211 for help,” Chappell said. “There’s so much funding going into [programs] for gun violence—they just passed a policy the other day for more funds to help this problem—but how are you helping families? How about helping moms get into a position where they’re able to do some healing?”
Most of the women PubliCola spoke to said they’re supporting Wilson. So does Chiif Ahmed Mumin, director of the Seattle Rideshare Drivers Association. He believes that, unlike Harrell, she’ll aid in identifying the culprit in the 2022 shooting of Uber driver Mohamed Kediye by helping his organization retrieve camera footage of the shooting, which took place in downtown Seattle.
Kediye, a father of six, was “someone people really loved and respected, and he really leaves a void in the community,” Mumin said.
Mumin also said Harrell has failed to create the rider safety task force they proposed two years ago to come up with solutions to help keep drivers safe, such as cameras in cars and a quick way to contact law enforcement if they find themselves in danger. He believes that Wilson, unlike Harrell, will listen to rideshare drivers who’ve asked to be included in conversations about transportation safety.
During a campaign forum in South Seattle last month, Mumin asked Harrell what he was doing to solve Kediye’s murder. Harrell responded by accusing Wilson of wanting to defund the police and suggesting that if he’s reelected, there will be enough police and detectives to solve the crime. “It has not been solved, and that’s exactly why I support having police officers, Harrell said.”That’s exactly why I’m not defunding the police department, because we need the resources to give that family justice.”
Mumin wasn’t convinced. “It seemed like the mayor was actually diverting the question to the police department, when to the best of our knowledge, the mayor is the head of the police department,” HE said. “He’s the one who names the chief of police, and he could have taken much more of a leadership role in making sure that this crime is solved.”
After the campaign forum, Mumin said, someone from Harrell’s campaign reached out to ask him, “Why did I ask that question in public?’ And my response was very clear—this crime has taken so long to solve. We will continue to ask every time we get an opportunity to ask the mayor this question.”
As of Thursday, though, Tietjen was still in charge of the precinct, with no clear timeline for replacing him. An SPD spokesperson responded to a list of questions from PubliCola by saying, that “no movement has been made of yet. I do not have a timeline for completion at this time.”
Mayor Bruce Harrell 
The document, which includes Wilson’s former home address as well as the address and partially visible phone number of a long-ago employer, purports to show that Wilson has no experience. Ten years ago, Wilson included jobs going back to when she was 24 years old, including a stint at Julia’s Bakery in Wallingford.