Category: podcasts

Mayor Wilson, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: Does Mayor Wilson Really Believe Police Surveillance Enhances Safety?

By Erica C. Barnett

Was Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to audit the safety and security of police surveillance cameras a classic “split-the-baby” compromise, a pro forma move with a foregone conclusion, or a thoughtful approach to ensure public safety for Seattle residents? That’s our topic of discussion on Seattle Nice this week.

As I reported last week, Wilson announced she would leave all the existing cameras up and recording while the Policing Project, out of New York University, does a “privacy and data governance audit” to determine whether outside entities, such as federal immigration authorities, could access camera footage and use it to target people caught on camera in Seattle. (There’s no such thing as privacy in public places, but until lthe cameras were installed last year, Seattle residents were not under routine camera surveillance by police.) Assuming the report says the cameras are reasonably safe from outside access, Wilson said, her administration will work to strengthen city laws restricting access to the footage.

Wilson also said the city would hold off on installing new cameras in the Central District and Capitol Hill, but will install dozens of new cameras around the stadiums south of downtown, where six World Cup games will take place in June. For now, these new cameras will only be turned on if there is a “credible threat.”

In justifying her decision to keep existing cameras rolling and install new ones, Wilson said she trusts SPD to use the cameras wisely to solve crimes. “I know that cameras can be, have been, and will be useful tools to solve crime in Seattle and in countless other cities across the world,” she said. (Indeed, police cameras cover every in across the UK and China, but the United States has its own traditions and values that, at their best, have prioritized individual rights like privacy).

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“There’s no doubt that these cameras make it easier to solve some crimes, including serious ones like homicides, but also, cameras are not the one key to making our neighborhoods safe,” Wilson said. “And on the other hand, there are legitimate concerns about privacy over surveillance and potential misuse of surveillance technologies. But also, these cameras are not the primary threat to immigrants, trans people or people seeking reproductive health care in our country right now.”

At Wilson’s press conference last week, I asked a question about how her values were guiding her decision on whether to expand the police department’s ability to surveil Seattle residents. Say the audit comes back golden, and she says, “Great, let’s expand the program.” That’s not just an endorsement of a particular camera system’s safety; it’s a statement of Wilson’s values, and one where her position has flipped since the campaign, when many voters were excited to support a candidate who didn’t want to give SPD even greater powers.

Maybe Wilson’s values have shifted. Maybe SPD has convinced her that crimes really will go unsolved without 24/7 video surveillance, despite the fact that the cameras have only existed for nine months. Or maybe the camera supporters she’s talking to in neighborhoods with high crime rates have convinced her that surveillance is a form of safety and social justice, as the mayor has often suggested. In any case, my guess is that more police surveillance cameras are coming, and that Wilson will expand them again in the future. Once you’ve decided that it’s simply unsafe not to have surveillance in some places, it’s very hard to justify not providing the same level of “safety” to other neighborhoods, and eventually the whole city.

Development, podcasts, Police, Transit

Downtown Seattle Association Leader Discusses Density, Return-to-Office Mandates, and Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

Jon Scholes, head of the Downtown Seattle Association, had a lot to say about the present and future of downtown when he came on Seattle Nice late last week—most of it surprisingly positive.

Yes, the DSA is still focused on filling up vacant office space with people who may prefer working from home, a goal that seems at odds with the group’s stated commitment to reducing climate change. (The most recent Commute Seattle survey found that drive-alone commutes into downtown grew at twice the rate of trips by transit.) According to the State of Downtown economic report, 32 percent of the office vacancies in the central business district remains vacant six years after the start of the pandemic, suggesting a long-term trend.

And yes, Scholes had plenty to say about how taxes are supposedly driving companies out of Seattle and into Bellevue, where employment has grown 12 percent.

But there were parts of our conversation that may surprise some listeners—starting with Scholes’ apparent optimism that at least some existing office buildings could still be converted into housing . “I think there’s great public good to be gained from more of us living more closely together,” Scholes said.”And if we care about climate change and protecting the environment and driving down carbon emission, we need to live more closely together, and we need to live close to transit, and we need to live where we’re maximizing the investment we’ve already made in utilities and sidewalks and parks.”

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Scholes isn’t wide-eyed about the potential for new housing downtown, however. In fact, I was amused to hear the skepticism in Scholes’ voice when we talked about former county executive Dow Constantine’s big plan to create a whole new office and residential district centered around Sound Transit’s future light rail station two blocks west of the King County Courthouse. (Current County Executive Girmay Zahilay briefly mentioned the plan in his remarks at the DSA’s State of Downtown event last week).

“The reality,” Scholes said, is that despite decades of robust development downtown, “we somehow still have a hole in the ground” across the street from City Hall and the county courthouse. “But I commend the executive for continuing to advance it and to figure out what is possible, what can be phased, what might be more incremental. It’s the right thing to do.”

We were wrapping things up when Scholes told us we were being too polite, and asked if we were going to talk about the city’s police surveillance cameras—an issue Mayor Katie Wilson has hedged on after expressing strong opposition during her campaign. Unless Wilson reverses course, the city will install many more cameras in the downtown stadium district for the World Cup games in June.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Go Big on Shelter. Will She Succeed—and If She Does, What Then?

By Erica C. Barnett

This week’s episode of Seattle Nice was all about shelter—specifically, Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to allow larger tiny house villages, spend $5 million up front funding them, and—boring but potentially most significant—put the city itself in charge of leasing land for new tiny house villages, RV safe lots, and sanctioned encampments. Currently, any organization that gets city approval to set up a village or sanctioned encampment still has to get permits and approvals from a long list of city departments, which can add as much as a year of delay.

With the city itself in charge of stuff like approving and connecting utilities, signing leases with property owners, and making sure tiny house village locations are up to code, Wilson is betting the city can dramatically cut the timeline from a shelter proposal to opeming day.

Wilson, as we discussed this week, vowed during her campaign to add at least 1,000 new shelter beds in her first year, with a goal of 4,000 new beds by the end of her term. This ambitious goal marks a philosophical shift away from strict housing-first principles (the idea that people need permanent housing before they can tackle their behavioral health issues) toward a shelter-first approach that emphasizes mandatory case management and individualized services to stabilize people after they leave the streets.

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Listening back to our conversation, I was struck by how familiar much of the conversation sounded—not to our usual Seattle Nice bickering over whether Seattle NIMBYs treat homelessness as an aesthetic problem (but—last word—they totally do), but to the last 15 years of debate over how to fix homelessness. Over time, the political pendulum has swung back and forth between a focus on new housing for almost everyone (which costs millions and often takes years), housing vouchers for almost everyone (the concept behind the short-lived Partnership for Zero) and shelter for almost everyone (as a “front door” to housing). The pendulum currently rests on shelter, this time with mandatory case management and bespoke services that will, the Wilson administration hopes, be a more successful approach than past shelter efforts.

Wilson will probably propose a local capital gains tax, or some other kind of progressive revenue, to supplement $5 million her team found in two underutilized city funds. (Note/clarification: This post, and my comments on the podcast, were both a bit flip about the funding source. Around $3.3 million comes from two funds in the Office of Housing that were being underutilized. Both are revolving loan funds paid for by Community Development Block Grants.) And she seems likely to propose using unspent Office of Housing funds to pay for shelter, a prospect that could mean less money for permanent housing in the future, money being fungible. But actually solving homelessness—no one talks anymore about ending it, but making it “brief, one-time, and rare”—has eluded every mayor since Ed Murray declared an official state of emergency on homelessness in 2015.

My biggest concern is that Team Wilson will address unsheltered homelessness by getting thousands of people in shelter, and people for whom homelessness is primary an aesthetic problem—we have to clear those tents near my house, it isn’t compassionate to let them live that way!—will oppose efforts to fund housing for all those people in shelter because they consider the problem solved. My modest hope is that she’ll find a way to build all the shelter she wants and create more pathways to permanent housing, because no matter how warm or colorful, a 100-square-foot shelter is not a home.

Business, podcasts

Seattle Nice Interviews Progressive Legislator-Turned-Chamber Leader Joe Nguyen

By Erica C. Barnett

Our guest on Seattle Nice this week isn’t a politician—he’s a former politician-turned-Seattle Chamber leader, and he says he sees no contradiction between his past as an pro-tax progressive legislator and his present job as the head of the city’s anti-tax business lobby group.

Joe Nguyen, the former state senator from West Seattle, defeated his opponent Shannon Braddock in 2019 by emphasizing his progressive bona fides, exemplified by a commitment to take no corporate contributions. Elected on that anti-corporate agenda, Nguyen went on to propose or support a payroll expense tax on big businesses, an excise fee on businesses that pay executives more than $1 million a year, and the statewide capital gains tax. “Tax the rich,” he wrote in the Stranger, which lauded him (pretty excessively, even at the time) as the “AOC of Washington state.”

 

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As head of the Chamber, Nguyen leads an institution historically opposed to business and capital gains taxes, and he talks like it, too—telling Seattle Nice that while he thinks “we need to have a more equitable tax structure in the United States, in Washington State, I worry that we’re putting all of our eggs in one basket” by taxing big tech businesses over and over. Already, Nguyen said, businesses have started to move jobs from Seattle to Bellevue because of the JumpStart tax, a payroll tax on Seattle’s biggest companies that the city now relies on to backfill its annual general fund shortfalls.

“Politically, it is very popular to say, ‘Tax the rich.’ Politically is very popular to say, ‘Go after the large companies.’ But the hard part that we’re going to put ourselves in is: If you want to tax the rich, you got to have rich people to tax,” Nguyen said.

“I was the architect and then sponsor of a lot of these policies,” Nguyen continued. “However, you’re concentrating a lot of that [taxation] into one specific area. And when you start to get some of this volatility, like you mentioned in your in your post [about social housing revenues] the other day, that’s the worry that I have.”

Listen to a preview of our conversation‚ in which David and I rant about the money pit that is the new downtown Convention Center, and subscribe to Seattle Nice to hear the full episode.

Editor’s note: During our interview, I said the Chamber has supported moving oversight of some parts of the homelessness system to the city’s Human Services Department. The Chamber has not taken a position on this issue. 

 

City Council, podcasts

New Councilmember Dionne Foster Tells Seattle Nice: Police Cameras “Should Be Turned Off and Come Down.”

By Erica C. Barnett

Our guest for this week’s episode of Seattle Nice (don’t worry, we’ll get back to our traditional bickering format soon) is new Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster, who beat Position 9 incumbent Sara Nelson in a blowout last year. Foster, like fellow newcomers Eddie Lin and Alexis Mercedes Rinck (who’s been there a year), is a progressive, with a resumé and policy priorities to match.

Since Foster heads up the council’s Housing, Arts, and Civil Rights committee, we started out by talking about homelessness: How’s new Mayor Katie Wilson doing so far, and does Foster want to see fewer encampment removals?

Wilson is expected to release plans for a “shelter surge” in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the city has continued moving unsheltered people from place to place, though now—according to Wilson’s office—in a way that attempts to “minimiz[e] harm.”

We also talked about laws passed by the previous council that increase penalties for using or possessing drugs in public, which include “stay out” orders banishing people from certain “drug areas” before they’re found guilty of any crime. Foster affirmed that she doesn’t plan to propose repealing the law, but did say she expects police to limit arrests to situations where someone poses a threat of harm to themself or others—a concept that’s codified in the law, but that remains troublingly vague.

We turned next to the Seattle Police Department’s use of 24/7 surveillance cameras, which Foster unequivocally said “should be turned off and come down.” Wilson’s office hasn’t made an announcement about the cameras yet, but Foster noted that the ones installed most recently have not been turned on yet. In addition to concerns about police surveillance generally, opponents have pointed out that the federal government can easily demand access to camera footage, putting immigrants and other vulnerable people at risk.

SPD claims the cameras deter and help them solve crimes, but has not presented specific, compelling evidence that camera surveillance helped them solved a crime that could not have been solved using other methods, including private surveillance cameras and traditional police work.

Nor, Foster noted, do they seem to address violent crime, one of SPD’s most frequent justifications for putting them around the city. “When we’re thinking about the technology matching the challenge, that’s where I see sort of a misalignment,” she said. “I do want to make sure that we’re … making sure our tools match the issues that we are trying to solve.”

We also squeezed in time to talk about the upcoming library levy, the new neighborhood centers, and former mayor Harrell’s “deeply unsustainable” budget, which sets up Wilson and the council for budget cuts—and potentially new revenue options, like a local capital gains tax.

 

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.