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.
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.
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.
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.
On the final Seattle Nice episode before Tuesday’s election (look for our post-election show in your feed later this week!), the guys and I debated the two mayoral candidates’ closing arguments. Bruce Harrell, the incumbent, has argued that his opponent Katie Wilson lacks his experience in government and is a privileged brat because she dropped out of college and her parents have helped her pay for child care as she campaigns. Katie Wilson has argued that Harrell’s policies cater to his corporate backers and leave working and poor people behind; also, “he’s bad at the budget.”
David said no one he knows is enthusiastic about either Wilson or Harrell; I said he probably isn’t talking to younger people, or not-so-younger renters, who can’t afford Seattle’s ever-rising rent. Sandeep said Wilson’s supporters are part of the “movement Left.” That’s not how I’d describe Wilson’s base, which seems motivated by a candidate whose chief focus has been making Seattle more affordable, rather than maintaining the status quo.
We also discussed a story I wrote last week about Abdul Yusuf, the Eastside for Hire owner who’s getting $5,000 a week from the Harrell campaign for unspecified “outreach” in the Somali community. David and Sandeep both said it didn’t seem that unusual to them (Sandeep compared it to “walking-around money” distributed before elections in the 20th century South; David wanted to know how a campaign giving an individual $25,000 for “outreach” is any different than the way labor unions and business PACs spend money supporting candidates.
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As the author of the story, I argued that the two things have little in common. Unlike PACs, which put out campaign materials like ads and mailers, the nature of Yusuf’s work is unclear (although rumors abound). According to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, he isn’t registered to collect democracy vouchers (worth up to $100 per voter) on behalf of any campaign, which anyone gathering vouchers is required to do. Nor has he ever done any consulting work for any campaign in the state prior to Harrell’s; his main lobbying work has been on behalf of rideshare drivers as the vice president of Drive Forward, the Uber-backed group that recently advocated against higher minimum wages for delivery drivers.
As I noted in my story, Yusuf’s weekly pay is the same amount his campaign consultant, Christian Sinderman, makes in a month. It’s also more than any full-time Harrell campaign staffer earns in a month, according to campaign finance reports.
This week’s special guest on Seattle Nice, Purpose Dignity Action’s Director of Outreach and Special Initiatives Nichole Alexander, spoke with Sandeep and me about the work PDA’s CoLEAD program is doing with drug users at a longtime “hot spot” in the Chinatown International District.
Centered on 12th and Jackson, the area has been a frequent target for police operations, encampment removals, and city-led outreach efforts over the past decade.
The PDA’s CoLEAD program, formed during the pandemic to relocate people from encampments on state highway rights-of-way into hotel-based lodging with intensive case management, saw results—according to Alexander, 95 percent of people they worked with moved into hotel-based shelters funded by the state, and 70 percent ended up in permanent housing. That program, known as the Encampment Resolution Program, lost state funding, and now CoLEAD is focusing its much more limited resources helping people around 12th and Jackson by offering them a safe, private place to stay—something Alexander says is a prerequisite for longer-term stability.
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Unlike the city’s Unified Care Team, which moves people from place to place while offering shelter referrals to some, CoLEAD spends weeks getting to know people individually and listen to their needs before moving them inside.
“I hear a lot of people say folks don’t want to come inside, and that is not what we find,” Alexander told us. “We find 95% of folks really do want to come inside. They just want something that’s going to be safe for them. They want to be able to close the door, use a toilet safely, have case management that cares—and have that long-term care, not just a quick answer.”
We also talked to Alexander about her personal story, the debate over whether jail and involuntary treatment lead to lasting recovery, and the misconception that low-barrier shelter or housing is inherently chaotic and destabilizing.
David was out this week, but we’ll all be back together next week for a special election episode!
