Category: podcasts

legislature, Mayor Wilson, podcasts, Police

This Week on PubliCola: January 18, 2025

SPD Is Still a Boys’ Club, the Wilson Era Begins, and More.

Monday, January 12

Seattle Homelessness Programs Get Temporary Reprieve as Anti-Trump Lawsuit Moves Forward

Seattle’s permanent supportive housing programs got a temporary reprieve from federal funding cuts, when the US Department of Housing and Urban Development walked back its new rules limiting the kind of housing programs that are eligible for federal assistance. But uncertainty remains about this year’s funding; and in 2027, all bets are off.

Seattle Nice: City Attorney and LEAD Founder Set the Record Straight on Drug Diversion

On the first of two Seattle Nice episodes this week, we talked to City Attorney Erika Evans and LEAD diversion program founder Lisa Daugaard about Evans’ plans to divert misdemeanor drug defendants into services instead of jail. Last week, the head of the police union falsely claimed that Mayor Katie Wilson had declared amnesty for all drug defendants.

Tuesday, January 13

Legislation Would Give Prisoners Serving Long Sentences a Path to Release

Washington state has no parole, meaning that people must serve out their entire sentences before they can be released. State Rep. Tarra Simmons has proposed a bill that would allow some incarcerated people to ask a judge to reconsider their sentences, something only prosecutors currently have the authority to do.

Wednesday, January 14

In 2025, 90 Percent of New SPD Hires Were Men

The Seattle Police Department hired only 17 women in 2025—just 10 percent of 165 new hires last year. That’s a significant dip from SPD’s already dismal numbers in 2024, when just 14 percent of the 84 people SPD hired were women. It’s also less than half the average for police departments across the US.

Thursday, January 15

Bills Would Crack Down on City Efforts to Banish Homeless People, Shelter, and Housing

Pro-housing state legislators want to stop cities from taking advantage of loopholes that have allowed them to prohibit market-rate and emergency housing, and to revent cities like Seattle from banning ground-floor apartments, among other proposals to crack down on local NIMBY policies.

New Police Directive: “Be Respectful,” “Don’t Interfere” When Responding to Calls About ICE Raids

A new Seattle Police Department directive tells officers to exercise caution and beat a quick retreat if there’s any possibility they may be in danger from ICE in Seattle, adding that cops should in no circumstances “interfere in federal immigration enforcement actions.” It’s a far cry from Police Chief Shon Barnes’ headline-grabbing statement, back in July, that he would probably be arrested for resisting federal intervention in the city.

Wilson Issues Orders to Speed Up Transit and Shelter, Will Replace More Harrell Appointees

Mayor Katie Wilson issued two executive order on Thursday. The first is aimed at speeding up the production of shelter in the run-up to this year’s World Cup games and beyond. The second will help speed up the city’s slowest bus, the 8, by finally painting a long-planned bus lane on Denny Way.

Also this week, Wilson replaced the directors of City Light, Labor Relations, and other city departments.

Friday, January 16

Scott Lindsay, Deputy for Ousted City Attorney Ann Davison, Doesn’t Mince Words

Voters soundly rejected Republican city attorney Ann Davison last year, but her deputy, Scott Lindsay, says her policies cracking down on drug users and shoplifters were popular, sound policies that helped neighborhoods that are being “destroyed” by people with addiction and “prolific offenders” who commit a large percentage of the city’s misdemeanor crime.

 

Courts, Crime, podcasts

Scott Lindsay, Deputy for Ousted City Attorney Ann Davison, Doesn’t Mince Words

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we spoke to former deputy city attorney Scott Lindsay. Voters soundly rejected Lindsay’s former boss, Republican Ann Davison, last November, but Lindsay argues that many of her prescriptions for addressing crime and disorder were sound—including “stay out” zones for people accused of using or possessing drugs in public, extra penalties for people who commit misdemeanors like shoplifting over and over, and the elimination of community court, which Lindsay called “a complete disaster and shame and stain on the record of city attorney [Pete] Holmes.”

Although the city has arguably been ruled by a moderate-to-conservative supermajority for at least the last four years, Lindsay says they failed to accomplish all their goals, in part, because former mayor Bruce Harrell wouldn’t always get with the program. Seattle, Lindsay argues, still has “radically too few police officers,” “no consensus about what to do about our most pressing public disorder problems,” and neighborhoods that have been “destroyed” by people using and selling drugs in public.

PubliCola has frequently pushed back on the notion that cracking down on so-called “prolific offenders”—the subject of a report Lindsay wrote for the Downtown Seattle Association in 2019—is a solution to the problems facing neighborhoods like Little Saigon that have faced decades of neglect and disinvestment. Lindsay agreed—and said that isn’t the point.

“More people will die every year of fentanyl and meth overdose than will be successful in getting out of the life and getting into treatment and turning their lives around,” Lindsay said.

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“I’m not saying give up, but I’m saying we need to balance our treatment approach with, how do we stop the havoc that these folks create? And one effective way at stopping the havoc that they create is to constantly disrupt. Use legal tools to disrupt their behavior. Convince them that being on the streets at 12th and Jackson smoking fentanyl is going to get you incarcerated. Even if that’s for eight or 12 hours that is in effect, can be an effective tool at disrupting the problem behavior and saving neighborhoods. Little Saigon is gone, but others are on the brink.”

Listeners will probably have strong feelings about this conversation, which also includes a discussion of Police Chief Shon Barnes, community court, and the “radical abolitionists,” in Lindsay’s words, at King County’s Department of Public Defense, which provides attorneys for indigent defendants.

Crime, Drugs, podcasts

Seattle Nice: City Attorney and LEAD Founder Set the Record Straight on Drug Diversion

By Erica C. Barnett

Sandeep and I sat down with new Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion founder Lisa Daugaard on this week’s episode to talk about changes Evans is making to the way the city handles low-level drug cases.

Under Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, people arrested for simple drug possession or using in public were either jailed and prosecuted or sent to a “drug prosecution alternative” where they have to get an assessment to confirm they have an addiction and stay out of trouble for six month.

Evans directed her prosecutors to go back to the pre-Davison policy of reviewing people’s cases to see if they’re eligible for LEAD, the city’s pre-filing diversion program. In response to this reasonable directive, Police Chief Shon Barnes told his officers that going forward, officers had to refer every drug case to LEAD—an overstatement that led to a right-wing media freakout when police guild director Mike Solan claimed Mayor Katie Wilson had ordered an end to all drug arrests.

Evans and Daugaard set the record straight, explaining what LEAD does, who it’s for, and how they believe this policy shift will actually help people addicted to fentanyl who use in public—which, they both reminded is, is encoded in the 2023 “Blake fix” law that empowered the city attorney to prosecute minor drug cases in the first place.

“What we’re doing is not anything inconsistent with what the law has already recommended for our office to be doing,” Evans told us. “But nothing’s off the table. If someone is not making meaningful progress with LEAD or in diversion, then we do reserve the right to do traditional prosecution.”

We also discussed ICE’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis and what the city can do if Trump sends masked shock troops to Seattle. And we asked Daugaard, who co-founded Purpose Dignity Action and started LEAD, why she’s taking a leave of absence to work inside the Wilson administration.

podcasts

Seattle Nice: Our Hopes and Predictions for Seattle In 2026

 

By Erica C. Barnett

For the final Seattle Nice show of 2025, we brought in our returning special guest, PubliCola cofounder Josh Feit, to talk about what we’re hoping (or expecting) will happen in Seattle in 2026.

Josh and my New Year’s wishes included a lot of the items we included in our 14-Point Plan for incoming Mayor Katie Wilson, including Josh’s proposal for Funded Inclusionary Zoning—an idea for boosting housing development that involves giving developers a break on their taxes if they build affordable housing on-site at their new buildings. And to encourage more density in areas that have suburban-style housing—including Seattle’s actual suburbs—Josh wants to see Wilson pass a sprawl tax on people who park in Seattle’s densest neighborhoods.

In tandem with those ideas, I talked up my hope that Wilson and the City Council will get ambitious about the city’s comprehensive plan, which was supposed to be done in 2024 but still isn’t finished, grabbing at the opportunity to upzone more of Seattle, allowing renters to live anywhere in the city, not just on polluted arterial roads.

David predicts that the price of pizza won’t go down, referring to the (at this point, old) viral video in which Wilson explained what the lack of affordable housing in Seattle has to do with the cost of food in Seattle. (Notably, she did not say she would lower the cost of pizza.) And he says he expects Wilson will be far more pragmatic than her biggest detractors have predicted—noting that, despite opponents’ (including, at times, Sandeep) attempts to paint her as a radical leftist, the mayor-elect is surrounding herself with subject-matter experts and people with deep experience at City Hall.

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We also discussed the future of two teams with the word “Care” in them—the 116-person Unified Care Team, which removes homeless encampments and tells their displaced residents about available shelter beds—and the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Team, a team of social workers that responds to some 911 calls instead of police.

The latest police contract, which raises police recruits’ salaries to $118,000 ($126,000 after six months), allows CARE responders to go to some calls without a police escort, but also dramatically restricts what kind of calls they can respond to—requiring a police response if drug paraphernalia or a weapon is visible, if there is evidence someone violated a law, if a person in crisis is inside a building or car, or if a person in crisis is exhibiting “extreme” behavior, such as nudity.

The two dads on the show, Sandeep and David, bemoaned the current state of Seattle Public Schools. David said maybe it’s finally time for the city to take over the public school system, and Sandeep said Washington should be embarrassed by the fact that Mississippi showed so much improvement on school test scores over the past few years while our state fell behind.

I hadn’t heard of this dramatic turnaround when we recorded (again, not a parent!), so I looked it up. Turns out it’s either mostly or at partly a fiction—while requiring low-performing students to repeat the third grade may (or may not!) have improved their fourth-grade test scores, the performance boost disappears in later years, returning Mississippi to its regular position near the bottom of the barrel.

 

Mayor Wilson, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: New Police Contract, Wilson Keeps Police Chief, and We Celebrate our Four-Year Anniversary!

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Nice celebrated our fourth anniversary this week, and to celebrate, we’re… bringing you the same spicy, insightful content we’ve been putting out week after week since 2021! (And encouraging you to donate to our Patreon, which pays for editing, hosting, and other expenses.)

This week’s topics: Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson’s decision to retain Police Chief Shon Barnes, the generous new police contract that had police guild president Mike Solan gloating that the “socialists” had lost (Mike, are the socialists in the room with you right now?)   and the Trump Administration’s latest erratic moves on homelessness funding.

The Barnes news was pretty big. Mayor Bruce Harrell announced Barnes was his pick for chief year ago, foregoing the usual public process for selecting such a high-profile (and high-paying) position. In the past year, Barnes has stacked his office with people with no experience at SPD (including people who worked for Barnes in previous positions in North Carolina and Madison, Wisconsin), pushing out longtime civilian insiders and listening primarily to his inner circle. Fresh insights from elsewhere can be a breath of fresh air, but the lack of people with knowledge of how SPD functions and what Seattle residents expect from police reportedly contributed to some of Barnes’ high-profile early missteps.

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None of your podcast cohosts— that’s me, Sandeep Kaushik, and David Hyde, if you’re not a regular listener—could really speculate on what Wilson will do if Barnes fails to “make SPD a place where professionalism, integrity, compassion, and community partnership are at the center of every action,” as she put it in a statement announcing she would retain Barnes along with CARE Department Chief Amy Barden, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, and Office of Emergency Management director Curry Mayer.

However, we did agree that Wilson’s decision made sense–given that the alternative would have been firing Barnes, appointing an interim, and going through a search process that could be internally disruptive and externally divisive. If Barnes’ leadership style and commitment to creating an inclusive (and, specifically, woman- and LGBTQ-friendly) department don’t live up to Wilson’s standards, it’s likely she’ll launch a search (PubliCola has heard the name of a woman who may have the inside track), but with more direct knowledge of what’s working and what isn’t at SPD.

 

Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice Interviews Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson!

By Erica C. Barnett

We had Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson on Seattle Nice this week for a wide-ranging interview about her priorities as mayor—as well as how she plans to deal with the massive budget deficits set up by Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council and the constraints the council has placed on her administration.

As PubliCola has reported, Harrell’s budget—which the council will pass in final form tomorrow—plunges the city into nine-figure deficits starting in 2027, which will force Wilson to act quickly to address budget shortfalls her predecessor failed to address. The budget also seeks to force Wilson to preserve some of her predecessor’s pet projects, including the encampment-sweeping Unified Care Team and a squad of graffiti removal staff, through restrictions that prohibit her from spending city funds on anything other than sweeps and anti-graffiti efforts.

We discussed those issues and much more, including many questions submitted by readers, in a wide-ranging 45-minute discussion with the mayor-elect.

A few highlights:

On whether she plans to replace Harrell’s police chief, Shon Barnes:

I’m going to respectfully decline that question at the moment. It’s a very sensitive question, and I am looking forward to meeting with Shon Barnes in the near future and having conversations with a lot of people about how things are going at the police department. And this is not just about the police chief, but this is about department leadership across the city, because there’s the question, when a new mayor comes into office, of potentially appointing new department heads.

For me, this is really not a political question. I don’t care what department head supported Harrell or campaigned actively for him. For me, this is really about getting the best people in place to lead those departments, and obviously there needs to be a certain amount of kind of vision alignment for someone to want to work with me. But beyond that, the thing that I really care about is that they’re a good leader that their, you know, employees respect them and can work for them. … So I’m hoping to retain in department leadership folks who are dedicated public servants doing a great job, and then yes, I’m sure there will be some, some turnover. So that applies across the board, including our police department.

On whether she’ll be Seattle’s “urbanist mayor”

Seattle’s a big city, and I love living in a big city, and I want Seattle to become a bigger and better city, where it’s possible, for example, for someone to live like I do right now, which is raising a child in in an apartment. And that means that the city kind of becomes your your backyard or your living room. And I think that urban lifestyle is something that we need to promote, and we need to make it possible for more and more people to live in this city without owning a car. And that’s not just for the sake of the people who don’t own cars. I mean, as more people continue to move to Seattle in our region, we just have limited space, and it’s just not possible to keep adding cars to the road. …

We deserve a world-class mass transit system. I think that’s just a very, very important thing to be working towards for all kinds of reasons. And we need great public space. We need more car -free public space. We need great parks, great playgrounds, all of those urban amenities. And so I am going to be very focused on making sure that Seattle is Seattle is a great, big city that can continue to grow in that direction.

On breaking Seattle’s 16-year streak of one-term mayors:

Despite the fact that I challenged an incumbent, I think it’s not great to just have one-term mayor after one-term mayor. So I do hope to govern in a way that leads to me being able to serve another term.

One of the things that I understand about Mayor Harrell is that I do believe that he stepped into office wanting very much to be a two-term mayor. And I think that his approach, and his consultants’ approach to governing over the last four years, has been to really focus on building that coalition of interests that could get him reelected for a second term. … It’s a kind of a transactional style of politics where he was trying to kind of gather together those interests that could get him reelected. I don’t think that’s a good way to govern. Because you’re doing favors for people, you’re building those relationships, but that’s not a vision for the city, you know? That’s not a vision of delivering for the people of Seattle. And so for me, I do want a second term, but I do not want to govern to win a second term.I want to govern to do the right thing, and if I’m lucky, that means that I will get a second term.

On restoring the longstanding nude beach at Denny Blaine Park, which Harrell repeatedly tried to shut down:

Yes, I do want to do this, and I want to work closely with Friends of Denny Blaine and others. I mean, there are some legitimate issues that need to be solved to make sure that the park is good for all the folks using it. But yeah, I would like to restore the park to its historic use as a queer nude beach.