Category: Mayor Wilson

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police

Councilmembers Blame Mayor For Delayed SPD Press Conference, Criticize Removal of Former Chief Barnes

By Erica C. Barnett

When interim police chief Andre Sayles, mayoral public safety director Alison Holcomb, and SPD Captain Randy Hunt came to this week’s City Council public safety committee meeting to provide a “quick look” at the city’s response to the  recent shooting at Seattle Center, the briefing was scheduled for 15 minutes. It ended up taking well over an hour, as council members grilled Holcomb about why a press conference on July 26 didn’t happen until almost five hours after the shooting.

The meeting—which began with Rob Saka repeatedly bellowing, “Is there a killer on the loose?”—was largely political theater: The council wants the public to see them as tough and concerned with public safety.

But the tense session also revealed how eager some council members are to blame the mayor for any P.R. screwups on the night of the shooting—and absolve the police, including former chief Shon Barnes, who was out of town when gunfire broke out at the Bite of Seattle, as were Sayles and his fellow deputy chief Yvonne Underwood.

Debora Juarez, who was appointed to Cathy Moore’s seat after Moore quit the council last year, hammered away at Holcomb in a Court TV-style interrogation.

“I can call you Alison? Thank you,” Juarez began. “Because I want to be clear, I don’t want to do a gotcha moment. I’m not trying to humiliate anybody. I just want to understand.” Juarez then attempted to get Holcomb to agree that “the communication problem was between the mayor’s office and SPD,” that Wilson was “not allowing” an SPD public information officer, Brian Pritchard, to testify before the council, and that Wilson’s office “was not communicating with Seattle City Council” on the night of the shooting.

A timeline Kettle released this week shows that Wilson’s office was in touch with the council within less than a hour. That timeline also includes a text from Barnes saying he was working to get a conference call together shortly after 8, followed by a conference call that ended around 9:23, more than three hours after the shooting.

“I’m going to submit to you, Alison, and we both know how this works: I don’t think we need an investigation,” Juarez said. “I think you could tell us right now why there was a five-hour delay.”

Juarez also suggested that no one had any idea where Wilson even was, because she had her camera off during a Teams call the night of the shooting. “I’m not trying to create some cloak and dagger, but if I were the mayor, I would have [turned my camera on],” Juarez said. Then she suggested that Wilson asked the city’s Office of Inspector General to review the events of July 26 as a distraction from the fact that Wilson herself delayed the press conference five hours so that “dignitaries”—Senator Pramila Jayapal and Governor Bob Ferguson—could get there.

“We’re hearing… that some of the people in the mayor’s office didn’t know the difference between a mass hysteria, ‘we need a press conference now to calm people down’… and then later on you do the fancy political press conference and wait for dignitaries to arrive,” Juarez said.

PubliCola’s own reporting on the incident suggests the delay had multiple causes. Initially, SPD still considered the area an active crime scene with a potential shooter at large. Barnes, who was at a conference in Dallas, reportedly wanted a full briefing before he would allow SPD officials on the ground to address the press. Several of SPD’s media relations staffers were out of town, leaving one detective, Brian Pritchard, to answer questions at the scene. And finally, Ferguson and Jayapal wanted to be at the press conference, even if—as both have said—they did not ask the city to wait for them to get there. The balance of these forces, and any other reasons for the delay, will be among the subjects of the OIG’s report and a more detailed committee briefing on September 22.

Holcomb said the mayor’s office and public were less interested in why a press conference was delayed than “why didn’t the public receive more information sooner. … That’s a very different question about why didn’t a press conference happen on site at a certain time. Which, frankly, because you and I both know what’s happening here, is a political question. We’re concerned about public safety right now, and that’s what we’re focused on.”

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Councilmember Dan Strauss then jumped on the anti-Wilson bandwagon, echoing Juarez’ claim that Holcomb could easily tell the council what happened the night of the shooting if she really wanted to. “We don’t need to have an OIG investigation. We could answer those questions right now,” Strauss said.

“No, we can’t, because in fact I don’t know the answer to that question, and as I indicated in my answers to Councilmember Juarez, there were dozens of people who were texting and calling each other with lots of information that evening,” Holcomb responded.

A casual observer might wonder why the city council is making such a big deal out of a press conference that took place more than two weeks ago. After all, both SPD and the mayor put out information about the shooting on social media and via press release prior to the press conference and kept Kettle in the loop in real time.

But as the council monologues went on, it was clear that the council believes the mayor isn’t communicating sufficiently  with them before she makes major decisions, including executive decisions like firing the head of city departments.

“I’m going to talk now about the police chief being asked to resign, because it was similar in the way that [former Seattle City Light director] Dawn Lindell was asked, was fired, was asked to resign,” Strauss said as the brief passed the one-hour mark. “That same set of experiences that I had with Dawn Lindell being let go from the city occurred with Chief Barnes last week.”

As far as he could tell, Strauss continued, Wilson asked Barnes to step down as a fall guy for communication issues after the shooting. “The mayor asked the police chief to resign with very little information, and so the best that I can do is surmise that because there was some communication difference or difficulty, that the chief was asked to resign,” Strauss said.

Wilson signed a settlement agreement with Barnes that included a mutual nondisparagement clause, which almost certainly limits the extent to which she can badmouth the former chief’s performance. Instead, she has said that she has more insight into what’s going on at SPD, an executive department, than the council and outside observers.

That comment rubbed some councilmembers the wrong way. “When the mayor says, “You know, we have I have a better window” into the police chief’s performance, Kettle said, “what’s clear here is that she does not have a better window. She does not have a better window than I do. She does not have a better window than probably the majority of the council.”

As we’ve reported, there are many potential reasons Wilson may have let Barnes go, beyond his frequent trips to his family home in Chicago or his inappropriate response to a question about his travel schedule.

City Council, Elections, Mayor Wilson

Greater Seattle: Primary Election Edition

By Josh Feit

Mayor Wilson > Theories of Mayor Wilson’s Demise

As the mainstream media and the Seattle Times pounce on Mayor Wilson, please keep their bias (and incoherence) in mind.

As fans (and endorsers) of former mayor Bruce Harrell, the Seattle Times hasn’t liked Wilson from the start. Long before the brouhaha over now-former police chief Shon Barnes, they were hyperventilating about Wilson’s supposed gaffes. What that meant was that they didn’t agree with her support for State Sen. Jamie Pedersen’s millionaires tax. (Of course, they now love it because Pedersen is Exhibit A in their argument that last week’s election amounted to a backlash against progressives.)

If you can overlook the contradictions in that line of thinking, can I interest you in a victorious peace deal to open the Strait of Hormuz?

I also don’t follow their objection to firing Barnes in the first place. Or did they do a 180 on that one too, now that Erica has made any defense of  the OOO chief laughable thanks to the comprehensive reporting she did on his schedule?

It’s true that the city council is steamed at the mayor—and has been, as PubliCola has reported, for a host of reasons that date back to well before Wilson pushed Barnes out earlier this month. But tension between the second and seventh floors is hardly new—and certainly not grounds for the kind of hyperventilating at the Seattle Times.

The premature death notices are wishful thinking. And I must say: If wacky temporary councilmember Debora Juarez —who went on KOMO recently to say she had “no confidence in this administration”—is your champion, you don’t have a bead on the Seattle electorate. P.s. The progressive candidate in last week’s primary running to fill Juarez’s open D5 seat, Nilu Jenks, is currently beating the establishment choice Julie Kang, 54 to 33 percent.

Get a bead on this, though: Last week, popular lefty council member Alexis Mercedes Rinck turned to supposedly down-and-out Mayor Wilson for backup on her new, progressive Mamdani-esque legislation to stop supermarkets from gouging poor people with what amounts to surge pricing for groceries.

15,288 > 7,327, 11,085, or 6,635

In more evidence that we aren’t looking at a reversal of 2025’s progressive sweep, those are the number of votes cast for the winner of each District 5 council primary, in reverse-chronological order going back to 2015 (the first year of district elections.) That’s Nilu Jenks’ vote total this year, followed by Cathy Moore in 2023 and Debora Juarez in 2019 and 2015.

In addition to getting more votes than any previous primary winner, Jenks also got the highest percentage of any primary winner, and is the first D5 candidate to ever come out of the primary with a firm majority of the vote—currently 54 percent to her more conservative challenger Julie Kang’s 33 percent. (Not all ballots have been counted).

Granted, the field in D5 was smaller this year than previous primaries, with four candidates rather than the six, eight, or ten that showed up in previous elections. But this year’s D5 turnout was higher than usual, too—around 29,000 voters so far, more than any previous primary in the district—and Jenks’ vote is larger than the combined total of the top two contenders (Moore and Christiana ObeySumner) in 2023’s 10-way primary. Jenks ran in that primary but only got 19 percent, so her showing this year represents a real and significant growth in support.

Jenks was endorsed by council member Rinck, while Kang has support from the council’s centrist bloc—including Maritza Rivera and Bob Kettle alongside former conservative council president Sara Nelson.

Progressive Challenger > Longtime Incumbent

We can also look to South Seattle for evidence of progressive primary results. In the race for Position 1 state representative in the 37th District, newcomer Kelabe Tewolde is leading 28-year incumbent Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos 51 to 48 percent. Tewolde—a progressive, density advocate, and current member of the Seattle Planning Commission—was endorsed by Tech for Housing, The Urbanist, and Rinck.

City Council, labor, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

This Week on PubliCola: More Details on Barnes’ Absences and Departure, KOMO May De-Unionize, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, August 3

New Column! Introducing Greater Seattle

PubliCola co-founder Josh Feit has a new column based on a simple premise: X > (is greater than” Y, as in “The Case for Firing SPD Chief Shon Barnes > The Case for Keeping Shon Barnes,” the first of three Greater Than items this week.

Tuesday, August 4

Issues With Former Police Chief Barnes Weren’t Just About His Travel or Where He Lived

A lot has been made (appropriately so) of former police chief Shon Barnes’ outsize response when reporter Connor Nash asked him about my reporting on his frequent absences from Seattle. But Barnes’ tenure in Seattle was already tenuous, thanks to a litany of other issues ranging from SPD’s treatment of the LGBTQ+ community under his leadership to his seeming lack of interest in partnering with the city’s team of trained mental health first responder.

Wednesday, August 5

Kettle Blames Mayor for “Unconscionable” Delay in Surveillance Expansion

When City Council President Joy Hollingsworth introduced a proposal to spend $250,000 in funding for surveillance cameras that can’t be used this year to hire violence interruptors from We Deliver Care, Councilmember Bob Kettle had a bit of a meltdown, saying he would vote against the entire midyear budget if they didn’t set the money aside for cameras (which the budget director had just explained could not be spent on cameras this year).

SPD Puts Former Chief’s Calendar in “Lockdown”

We would finally get a (mostly) complete copy of former chief Barnes’ camera later in the week, but as of Wednesday, SPD told us to file a records request and wait. Last week, they said they’d be able to provide Barnes’ schedule no problem, but after he left, they said it was “locked down” in some way and no longer accessible. 🤔

Thursday, August 6

Former Police Chief’s Payout Will Be Higher Than Previously Known

PubliCola reported exclusively that former chief Barnes’ would get an even larger payout than the $700,000 package that was previously known. Read on down the list for more details on the extra bonus he received when he signed a no-sue agreement.

KCRHA Still at Full Staffing as Contract Transition Begins

The city and county announced this week that they’ll be hiring 23 and 11 new staffers, respectively, to manage the transition of homeless service contracts as the King County Regional Homelessness Authority shrinks down to just a few “core” functions. Although the “rightsizing” was announced more than a month ago, the KCRHA has not made any layoffs, and still has 73 employees.

Friday, August 7

A More Complete Calendar Shows Former Police Chief Was Out of Office Almost 40 Percent of the Time This Year

Remember how a bunch of local commentators went on KIRO, KUOW, and other local shows to call my reporting dishonest, unfair, and false last week (and how one of them said I should be “ashamed”?) Hopefully they saw this post, which confirms that Barnes was, or planned to be out of town or otherwise off duty, including at his family home in Chicago, at least 12 weeks this year—including three weeks from late July to mid-August.

Barnes Got An Additional $41,000 Payout

On Friday, PubliCola exclusively obtained the details about Barnes’ vacation payout: Despite being out of town 40 percent of the time, he still somehow had 29 days’ paid time off accrued, according to the city. The additional money—a little less than a minimum wage worker makes in Seattle, btw—brings Barnes’ total payout to more than $741,000.

KOMO Reporters Will Vote on De-Unionizing

Reporters and anchors at KOMO filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to end their representation by SAG-AFTRA; the vote’s next week. One likely factor behind the push is that the staffers all negotiate their own contracts individually, and SAG-AFTRA’s guarantee is reportedly far below what any of the on-air talent makes.

Also this week: I made the rounds of local podcasts, talking about Barnes’ resignation, Tuesday’s election results, and other news from this week with City Cast Seattle, KUOW’s Seattle Now, and as always, our weekly podcast, Seattle Nice.

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labor, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

Barnes Got An Additional $41,000 Payout; KOMO Reporters Will Vote on De-Unionizing; PubliCola Makes the Podcast Rounds

KOMO News Logo Vector (.SVG + .PNG)

1. On August 12, the reporters, anchors, and other on-air staff at KOMO TV, a station owned by the conservative media company Sinclair, are scheduled vote on a proposal to leave their union, the Screenwriters Guild/ American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). The action, known as a decertification petition, was filed with the National Labor Relations Board last month, with reporter Jeremy Harris submitting the paperwork.

The group of KOMO staffers who want to leave the union is represented by the National Right to Work Foundation, a national anti-union organization.

It would be easy enough to characterize Sinclair staffers as anti-union activists politically aligned with their bosses and a controversial national anti-labor group. KOMO’s anchors and high-profile “talent,” including vocal Katie Wilson critic Chris Daniels and “Seattle Is Dying” creator Eric Johnson, who’s now retired, skew conservative.

But the issues at play in KOMO’s union debate seem a bit more complicated. On-air reporters and editors typically negotiate their own individual contracts with management, rather than working through the union, and the minimum union guarantee for reporters is reportedly in the mid-five figures—far below what most on-air reporters and anchors actually make. The group already gets its health care through Sinclair, rather than the union. Union dues cost money. All of that has prompted a robust internal debate at KOMO about whether union representation is worth it.

Holding a decertification vote requires a petition signed by at least 30 percent of represented staff; the KOMO petition reportedly received more than 60 percent support.

Patrick Semmens, a spokesman for the NRWF, said the KOMO staffers reached out to the group for legal representation. Semmens didn’t offer specific details about why KOMO’s reporters and anchors wanted to de-unionize, but said typical reasons include the union’s responsiveness—”sometimes they aren’t around except when it comes time to pay dues”—the cost of dues, and political objections to unionization.
No one from the anchors’ and reporters’ group was authorized to speak with PubliCola on the record. SAG-AFTRA’s local representative did not respond to a call and email Thursday.

2. Former police chief Shon Barnes will receive 29 days of additional full pay, on top of his previously reported $700,000 payout, PubliCola has learned—a total additional payout of $41,653. Mayor Katie Wilson’s office confirmed this additional payout on Friday.

The total Barnes will receive in exchange for signing a settlement, which includes a stipulation that he won’t sue the city, now tops twice his annual salary. Barnes was police chief for just over 17 months.

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It’s unclear how much official time Barnes took off during 2026; we’ve asked SPD and the mayor’s office how much paid time Barnes got off each year and whether it rolled over from year to year. As we’ve reported, Barnes had planned to be out of town for 12 weeks through August 10 of this year; that includes time spent at his family home in Chicago as well as vacation time and conferences.

3. I talked about Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to part ways with former police chief Shon Barnes, Tuesday’s election in legislative and local races, and more news from this week on three different shows this week, two of them with my Seattle Nice co-host Sandeep Kaushik. In roughly descending order of spiciness, they are:

  • Seattle Nice (in which Sandeep, David, and I debate how Wilson handled the Barnes decision and whether anyone pays attention to which legislative candidates the mayor endorses—also embedded below);
  • KUOW’s Seattle Now (Sandeep and me again, talking with Patricia Murphy about the same topics, with a dash of public radio politesse and zero cusses!
  • City Cast Seattle (with host Jane Hu and the Seattle Times’ tech reporter Alex Halverson, also about elections and the police chief, plus what’s really going on with the big local companies’ AI spending).

 

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police, Privacy, public disclosure

Kettle Blames Mayor for “Unconscionable” Delay in Surveillance Expansion, SPD Puts Former Chief’s Calendar in “Lockdown”

1. A council committee meeting about midyear changes to the city budget went briefly off the rails on Tuesday, after Joy Hollingsworth proposed using $250,000 in unused funding for police surveillance cameras to pay for community violence interruptors from the group We D eliver Care for the rest of the year. The money is a one-time expenditure; starting next year, the city expects King County to pick up the tab as part of its”mitigation” for a mental health crisis center the county is opening in Hollingsworth’s district.

Nine surveillance-related SPD positions are sitting vacant while the NYU Policing Project completes a privacy and security audit of the cameras. City budget director Aly Pennuci said any money from the unfilled positions may be needed to fund a “significant request” for more spending on SPD, which appears to have once again overspent its budget this year.

Council budget hawk Maritza Rivera, who had already questioned some of the other midyear adds, seemed satisfied with that explanation. But public safety chair (and camera fanatic) Bob Kettle was not, taking the mic to bellow that he found it “unconscionable” that Wilson would not simply expand the camera system without finishing the study.

“I am confident how the NYU report is going to come out, and then the mayor should push forward on the CCTV cameras, and SPD can obligate those funds here in this calendar year,” Kettle said. “And I would note that is unconscionable in terms of what the mayor has been doing with this program, because we vetted this program, we built in so many protections in this program, we built in so many safeguards, protocols from top to bottom. So the fact that she hasn’t done anything on those nine positions is unconscionable.”

In fact, the city council rushed a second round of cameras through last year before any study could be done, asserting at the time that there was no way they could be used to violate people’s privacy. The Policing Project is doing the review the council declined to do in its haste to get cameras up before Bruce Harrell left office.

After he finished criticizing Wilson for doing basic due diligence before unleashing police surveillance citywide, Kettle said that even though he supported violence interruption programs  “110 percent,” he would vote against funding this violence prevention program—and oppose the whole supplemental budget—if it used a penny of  2026 camera funding for anything other than cameras.

The midyear budget also includes funding to pay for universal school lunches during the upcoming school year, announced last week in a joint statement by Mayor Katie Wilson and city councilmembers. The money will come from $5 million the city no longer plans to spend on Northgate Commons, a mixed-use Seattle Housing Authority project near the Northgate light rail station (the city’s contribution will go from $20 million to $15 million).

2. Last Monday, several days before Mayor Katie Wilson asked then-police chief Shon Barnes to resign, I (and other reporters) requested Barnes’ calendar. The version I received begins abruptly on March 29, and has been color-coded and altered to remove Barnes’ original plans for the last week of July and first week of August, when he returned to Seattle from planned time off to respond to a shooting at Seattle Center.

Each time I followed up to request Barnes’ full calendar last week, SPD assured me they were “working on it” and would have the missing months’ schedule to me shortly.

But this Monday, a week after I originally requested Barnes’ calendar, an SPD spokesman told me that because Barnes resigned, his schedule is now “locked down” and can only be accessed through a public disclosure request. As I’ve reported, getting records out of SPD often takes months or years, meaning that a document SPD could have simply handed over last week won’t be public until their public disclosure office gets around to providing it.

Despite this newly imposed delay, we do know a little about Barnes’ calendar for the first few months of the year. Between information SPD provided reporters last week, PubliCola’s previous reporting, and Barnes’ social media, it’s clear that between late last December and the end of March, Barnes took a 15-day vacation, was in Chicago with his family for at least nine additional days, and spent five days doing recruitment at a basketball tournament held by a conference of small HBCUs that includes Barnes’ 2,300-student alma mater.

As with his calendar we reviewed in 2025, Barnes’ weekends were mostly empty, with several Fridays preceding unscheduled weekends marked as “unavailable,” “out of office,” or “focus time,” with nothing specific on the calendar.

Mayor Wilson, Police

Issues With Former Police Chief Barnes Weren’t Just About His Travel or Where He Lived


By Erica C. Barnett

Mainstream media outlets and many Seattle City Councilmembers have expressed outrage over Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to remove Shon Barnes as police chief after he confronted a reporter who asked him about my stories on Barnes’ frequent absences from Seattle. (Barnes, as I reported in 2025, rented an apartment here and regularly visited his family home in Chicago; he also attended frequent conferences, like the one he was attending when shooting broke out at Seattle Center on Sunday, July 26).

Critics have overwhelmingly suggested that Wilson made the decision to remove Barnes rashly, with no real justification other than his outsize reaction to the South Connor Nash’s question and the fact that he spends time out of town. A typical complaint came from the editorial board of the Seattle Times, which insinuated that Wilson fired the chief to create a “distraction” to hide her own incompetence, and not for any actual reason.

Wilson, as I pointed out on Seattle Nice last week, signed a binding settlement with Barnes (he got a total of $700,000) that almost certainly includes a mutual nondisparagement clause that prevents her from saying exactly why she asked him to resign. But Barnes was only police chief for 19 months, so the current collective shortsightedness about the controversies that arose during his tenure feels almost deliberate.

When Wilson came into office, Barnes’ future at SPD was very much in doubt, and questions about his performance as chief had not receded in the seven months since Wilson took office. But for those with short memories, here are just a few of the issues that had been swirling around Barnes prior to last week’s events.

No girls allowed: Although Barnes’ supporters touted the high percentage of female oficers at the department where he was previously chief, in Madison, WI, skeptics noted that the progress happened mostly before he took over. Under Barnes, SPD’s progress toward the “30 by 30” goal of having a 30 percent female recruit class by 2030 has stalled and even reversed.

In April 2025, for example, SPD had only managed to hire five women, compared to a total of 12 women in 2024. By the end of the year, the department had added just 12 more women to that total. Women accounted for just 10 percent of new police hires in 2026, a year when SPD spent millions of dollars on a macho ad campaign featuring burly, tattooed men fighting in a ring, male cops racing around on motorcycles and boats, and men busting down doors, SCUBA diving, and defusing bombs. The toxic culture at SPD preceded Barnes, but it persisted, and may have gotten worse, during his brief time in Seattle.

Anti-LGBTQ accusations: Not long after taking over the department, Barnes oversaw a dramatic crackdown on nude sunbathers at Denny-Blaine Park, a historic LGBTQ+friendly nude beach that former mayor Harrell previously tried to shut down by siting a playground there. (The planned children’s play area would have been funded by a wealthy neighbor and Harrell donor who has continued to campaign relentlessly against the people who use the beach.)

In a later tort claim, it would come out that Barnes’ chief of staff Alex Ricketts allegedly responded “we’re not here for the gays” when a top staffer raised concerns about the chief’s apparent indifference to Seattle’s LGBTQ+ residents.

Barnes also passed over a gay lieutenant who was a fixture in the Capitol Hill community and had been serving as acting captain of the East Precinct, Doug Raguso, in favor of an infamous officer named Mike Tietjen.

Tietjen’s name was synonymous with his misconduct during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the neighborhood, when he drove his SUV onto a sidewalk full of protesters, likening them to “cockroaches” as they ran out of his path. Tietjen was also disciplined for an incident that same year, in which he was among a group of officers who harassed a trans woman, asking if she “had a dick under” her skirt.

When PubliCola broke the news about Tietjen’s promotion and Raguso’s reassignment, Barnes launched an internal search to find out who had “leaked” the information, which was posted on SPD’s own social media. Barnes eventually replaced Tietjen—not with Raguso, but with Jim Britt, another straight white man. Raguso was reassigned to the department’s Real-Time Crime Center.

Under Barnes, SPD also badly blundered its response to a pro-LGBTQ counter-protest at an anti-trans event by a religious-right group at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill. Instead of maintaining a distance (as they did at the much larger No Kings protests), police pepper-sprayed, tackled, and arrested counter-protesters, behaving—as a subsequent review by the city’s Office of Inspector General concluded—like security for the religious group, even referring to counter-protesters as “transtifa.”

SPD officers repeated the performance during a second event by the same group at City Hall, blocking off access to the public plaza to everyone except the anti-trans activist group and escorting the activists from place to place. At the same time, police on bikes mobilized repeatedly against a small group of counterprotesters, using their bikes as weapons and shields.

Discrimination lawsuits: Raguso, the former East Precinct acting captain, and detective Anna Fishel filed discrimination claims against SPD earlier this year, alleging the department denied them promotions because of their sexual orientations and, in Fishel’s case, her gender. Fishel, who had a young child, was the only woman up for promotion to sergeant; in her claim, she said Barnes refused to promote her in place and instead offered her an overnight shift she couldn’t take because she needed to be home with her daughter. The position went to a straight man.

An earlier tort claim, from two department veterans Barnes fired in 2025, also accused Barnes of retaliation and discrimination. Barnes fired Brian Maxey, the department’s chief operating officer, and Rebecca Boatright, SPD’s general counsel, after the two disagreed with some of his decisions, including an initiative to send embarrassing letters to men the department suspected of paying women for sex on Aurora. Barnes replaced Maxey with Sarah Smith, a staffer with a slim resume who had risen through the ranks at Harrell’s office.

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Alternative response stymied: Before Barnes came on board, the Seattle Police Officers Guild negotiated a generous contract with Harrell and the City Council that—in addition to giving officers huge raises—put limits on the ability of the CARE Team, a group of social workers that is supposed to respond to crisis calls that don’t require an armed response, to do its job. The restrictions prevent CARE from responding at homeless encampments, residences, businesses, or to calls where a person is using drugs or being “confrontational.”

The CARE Team has been expanded repeatedly, but can’t be dispatched even in situations where the contract’s restraints don’t apply unless a police sergeant agrees to let them go to a call.

Despite these restrictions, CARE Department Chief Amy Barden hoped to negotiate some wiggle room with Barnes that would allow her team to respond to 911 calls involving people in crisis. Instead, she said earlier this year, the constraints actually tightened under Barnes, to the point where CARE was told it couldn’t respond to someone having a mental health crisis in a QFC parking lot, because the person was technically on private property. The team has also been prohibited from responding to calls where a child is present, which Barnes said has resulted in a gender disparity in the team’s responses, since women are more likely to be accompanied by their kids.

Barnes appeared at times to reject the entire concept of allowing social workers to respond to mental health crisis calls, suggesting that every type of 911 call can easily escalate into violence. This contradicts national research showing that most 911 calls do not involve any crime and could be handled by someone other than a police officer. It’s also contrary to the city’s own policies on unarmed first response.

“I’ve been to calls before where it was ‘dementia,’ but when I got there, there was a gun stuck in my stomach,” Barnes said. “So it is unpredictable. … Just because we have a badge and a gun doesn’t mean that we should be relegated to certain types of calls.”

Bloated staff, big bonuses: As I reported exclusively last year, Barnes and two of his new chiefs, deputy chief (and now interim police chief) Andre Sayles and assistant chief Nicole Powell, took $50,000 bonuses that were created explicitly to recruit more trained rank-and-file police officers during a staffing shortage.

This $150,000 payout was on top of the $3,000 Barnes and his other deputy chief, Yvonne Underwood, took after Barnes hired new executive staff. Barnes got two $1,000 payouts for hiring Powell and Sayles, while Underwood got $1,000 for Sayles. These bonuses, like the $50,000 “lateral” hiring incentives, were explicitly created for SPD employees to recruit new rank-and-file police officers.

Sayles and Powell were just two of several new executive hires Barnes made when he started, expanding SPD’s command staff substantially at an additional ongoing cost of more than $1,000,000 a year. Those new positions included a second deputy chief (Sayles), a new executive director of crime and community harm reduction (Lee Hunt), a chief communications officer (Barbara DeLollis, and a chief of staff (Alex Ricketts). Ricketts, Hunt, and Sayles had worked with Barnes previously.

Ricketts was the only one of Barnes’ new executive hires that technically counted as a replacement; previous chief Adrian Diaz, who was appointed and fired by Harrell, appointed Jamie Tompkins to a job with the same title, but she was the first SPD chief of staff since 2001.

Barnes’ top staff got top perks to go with their top salaries, which in most cases topped $300,000. Hunt, for instance, got at least one month’s free stay at the four-star Arctic Club Hotel in downtown Seattle, at a cost of more than $6,000, while he looked for a place to live. And Barnes himself got a $60,000 relocation bonus to move to Seattle. As we’ve reported, Barnes kept an apartment here while he traveled back and forth to his permanent home in Chicago; under his settlement, he gets to keep that money.

Barnes presented this graph at community events, minus the Madison, WI branding.

Policy by buzzword: Barnes frequently touted two ideas he claimed were innovations, and featured them in his PowerPoint presentations to community meetings that were mostly attended by SPD and city staff. Both ideas faced criticism inside and outside the department as not particularly innovative or unique. “Stratfied policing”  consisted of focusing on crime “hot spots” and focusing higher-ranked officers on more serious crimes, and “Seattle-centric policing” seemed to involve working with communities to come up with solutions to crime.

Although Barnes’ defenders have given him credit for reducing crime and recruiting more police to the city, both those trends are explained by other factors. Crime of all kinds is down in cities nationwide compared to the relative highs of the pandemic, so it’s unsurprising that Seattle’s crime rate has followed the national trend. And hiring spiked as soon as the police guild signed a new contract that guarantees brand-new officers a minimum salary of $126,000 after a six-month training period.

And, OK, all that travel: Not only did Barnes’ defenders treat Wilson’s decision as an out-of-nowhere shock, they also made light of his travel, even misrepresenting his time out of town as no different than that of previous police chiefs. On KUOW’s “Week In Review” last Friday, KIRO’s Angela Poe Russell and KUOW editor/reporter Catherine Smith ripped my coverage, calling me an “influencer” who “hung out a shingle” and called myself a “news person” (Poe) and asserting, “”It’s not quite fair to criticize him for that when other chiefs travel like that.” (Smith).

Smith’s co-bylined story said that according to an SPD spokesman, “Barnes’ level of travel is consistent with past chiefs of police.” Since that contradicted all of my own current and past reporting on the subject, I contacted the same spokesman. He told me he told KUOW that all police chiefs go to conferences held by groups like the International Association of Chiefs of Police, but that he never said Barnes’ overall travel, including his trips home to Chicago, was typical. That’s because it isn’t: While other police chiefs went to conferences, too, Barnes traveled more. For example, Barnes was out of town nearly 40 percent of the time during the 17 weeks for which SPD provided his schedule.