The city and King County are both passing temporary bans on new ICE detention facilities in areas under their jurisdiction, but only one’s—Seattle’s—does not apply to local jails. As emergency legislation, the Seattle moratorium needs seven of nine votes to pass, and some councilmembers reportedly balked at language temporarily prohibiting new jails, even though no new jail is planned in Seattle.
In his latest Maybe Metropolis column, Josh Feit argues that urbanists should look inward to create new density in neighborhoods, by focusing on changes to buildings themselves (rather than zoning) that could allow more apartments. “Like rearranging how you pack your suitcase rather than buying a bigger suitcase, affordable housing advocates should change the construction equation inside apartment buildings themselves.”
Mayor Katie Wilson announced the first part of her big push to add thousands of new shelter beds in her first term. Under the proposal, the city would lease land for new tiny house villages directly, reducing red tape for nonprofit shelter providers, and the city would allow much bigger villages—up to 250 units. The city council still has to approve (and potentially amend) Wilson’s plan, which she rolled out without securing a council sponsor or feedback from council members.
The head of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, Derrick Wheeler-Smith, and his deputy are both on paid leave after the city launched an investigation into allegations of discrimination, harassment, and bias by his staff. PubliCola detailed the employees’ claims in a story last week. The union that represents SOCR employees has filed an EEOC complaint challenging the neutrality of the investigation, after Wheeler-Smith notified a city HR investigator about PubliCola’s forthcoming story in February, saying his employees’ claims were specious and part of an effort by the deputy mayor to oust him by planting false stories in the press.
Legislative assistants for City Councilmembers have voted to unionize. While previous unionization efforts went nowhere, this one has strong support, thanks to reportedly poor working conditions in some council offices and growing dissatisfaction with the pay disparity between council aides and people doing similar jobs in other departments.
During a presentation on the Seattle Police Department’s plans for responding if federal troops or ICE descend on Seattle, Police Chief Shon Barnes said SPD is neutral during protests, arguing that social media videos and the press use sound bites or misleading photos to misrepresent SPD’s actions.
1. Legislative assistants for City Councilmembers have voted to unionize, filing a petition for recognition with the state Public Employee Relations Commission last week. The filing means that organizers have collected signatures from more than half the 30-plus employees who would be represented by PROTEC17 if the effort is successful.
Previous efforts to organize legislative assistants, or LAs, have failed, but this effort received well over 50 percent support. This is reportedly for two reasons: Poor working conditions in some council offices that have contributed to extremely high staff turnover, and low pay for legislative assistants compared to people who do similar jobs in other departments, including the mayor’s office.
Historically, Seattle has treated the legislative branch as a lower-value institution than the mayor’s office and the executive-branch departments. City Council members themselves make far less than the mayor and many department directors: a majority of councilmembers earn around $165,000 a year, compared to $272,334 for the mayor, $373,000 for the police chief, and $530,000 for the head of Seattle City Light.
Pay disparities between legislative assistants have also grown significantly since council members instituted more hierarchical office structures starting around 2024. That was the year that five newcomers joined the council (thanks to appointments and elections, several more have joined since then) and Sara Nelson, defeated by Dionne Foster last year, became council president. Suddenly, legislative assistants had fancy internal titles like “Chief of Staff” and “Director of External Relations.” (One result of these new, unofficial titles is that nearly everyone on a typical three-person council staff is a “Director” or “Chief” of something, and almost no one is a mere council staffer.)
The new titles solidified (and may have worsened) the pay structures that already existed between junior and senior staff. The wage gap between the highest- and lowest-paid legislative has grown pretty dramatically over the past several. For instance, the lowest-paid LAs currently make around $38 an hour, while the highest-paid LAs make around $68 an hour—a 79 percent gap. Back in 2019, according to city wage records, the lowest-paid LAs typically made about $28 an hour while the highest-paid made around $44 an hour, a 57 percent gap.
City council members themselves get to divvy up their own staff budget, which may contribute to pay disparities between offices as well as people within each office. Woe betide the staffers going through the revolving door at a council office where the chief of staff is the council member’s best friend!
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2. During a presentation on the Seattle Police Department’s plans for responding if federal troops or ICE descend on Seattle, Councilmember Bob Kettle took a moment to observe—rather preemptively, when it comes to how SPD will respond to a hypothetical ICE incursion—that SPD is sometimes unfairly maligned for appearing to take one side or another during protests, and to assure Police Chief Shon Barnes that the council knows this is frequently a misrepresentation based on a single photo taken out of context.
Kettle said “let’s put Cal Anderson to the side”—a reference to SPD’s over-the-top response to a counterprotest against a far-right rally on Capitol Hill—and focus on “what can we do that shows that you’re looking to support the rights of Seattleites, and it’s not being something that may visually look one way or the other?” (Kettle said the Cal Anderson protest, at which police collaborated with security for an anti-LGBTQ group and referred to protesters as “transtifa,” will be the subject of an upcoming committee meeting.)
Barnes agreed that social media videos and the press misrepresent SPD’s actions at protests. “[P]erception sometimes is people’s reality,” he said. “And you know, one photo of your back turned to the wrong person could give the impression that we are supporting one side or the other. In regards to your question, when it comes to protests, we are neutral in the protests, and we don’t take sides. … I want to make it clear, that we do not, support federal immigration enforcement at any time. We’re there to keep the peace. If we have to talk to people, that doesn’t mean that we are on their side… and we’ll try to explain that, should that one second clip or photo be given to the community.”
As for the recommendations from the city’s Office of Inspector General, which included many proposals SPD has promised, then failed, to implement in the past, in the past, Barnes said they’re on it. “We have a captain that will be implementing those things,” he said.
Staff call for civil rights office shakeup, CARE chief says police contract hobbles her team’s ability to respond to crises, state elevator reform bill advances, and much more.
Through their union, PROTEC17, staff at the city’s civil rights office have asked Mayor Katie Wilson to remove and replace their boss, Derrick Wheeler-Smith, saying he sent misogynistic texts to staffers, ignored LGBTQ+ rights inside and outside the office, and dismissed their efforts to focus on non-Black racial minorities, including Asian Americans facing xenophobia during COVID and Latino residents under threat of ICE detention.
Amy Barden, head of the city’s Community Assisted Response and Engagement Team, talked candidly at a council meeting this week about how a police union contract has made it impossible for the team of social workers to respond to most behavioral health crisis calls. Police Chief Shon Barnes, sitting next to Barden, jumped in several times to defend police, saying he didn’t want them “relegated” to responding to just some kinds of calls. The CARE Team was created specifically to respond to crises that don’t require, and may be exacerbated by, the presence of armed officers.
In response to our story on Monday, Seattle Office for Civil Rights Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith sent an email to city leaders and reporters (though not PubliCola) accusing Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt of sending “a few disgruntled staff” our way in order to defame him. Surratt was not a source, much less “the source,” for our story.
Friday, February 27
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Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes sent recruitment teams to several small HBCUs in the South, including his alma mater, Elizabeth City State University, and spent $25,000 of the city’s money to sponsor a basketball tournament for the conference of schools. Most of the colleges in the conference have around 2,000 students or fewer; SPD said the value of the sponsorship can’t be measured in the number of direct recruits.
Late last year, while in town on SPD business, Barnes attended a concert at NPR’s studios, bringing his two security guards with him to the show. SPD has not told us how much it cost to provide Barnes with security at the event.
Josh Feit reported that a state bill to allow developers to build apartment buildings with smaller elevators is moving forward, but no longer includes a provision that would have directed the state to support harmonizing national and international elevator size standards. The rest of the world allows smaller elevators, making it more affordable to build accessible apartments.
The state Public Disclosure Commission ruled that the former director of the Seattle Office of Economic Development violated election law when he used the city’s Teams system to solicit the personal email addresses of department heads on behalf of Bruce Harrell’s campaign, but declined to fine the ex-OED director.
The Friends of Denny Blaine, a group of LGBTQ+ advocates who organized after learning that Harrell was working with a wealthy homeowner to shut down the longstanding nude beach on Lake Washington, called for Wheeler-Smith’s resignation this week in response to PubliCola’s reporting on what the group called the “repeated dismissal and minimization of LGBTQ+ civil rights issues within the department.”
A 41-year-old man died from chronic alcohol use inside the Rainier Beach branch of the Seattle Public Library last week after staff and paramedics tried to resuscitate him. It’s extremely rare for a person to die inside a library branch, and staff who were present have access to counseling and can transfer to other branches if necessary.
On the podcast this week, we discussed three local stories that all have links to local unions: The organized backlash to Mayor Wilson’s decision to replace the head of Seattle City Light; CARE Team Chief Barden’s frustration over the police guild’s contract; and the efforts by SOCR staff to get Wilson to remove Wheeler-Smith, which, according to employees, came together after a survey by their union made staffers realize they weren’t alone.
1. Seattle Police Department officers are traveling across the country on a college recruitment tour, including a five-day trip this week to the Central Intercollegiate Athletics Association (CIAA) basketball tournament in Baltimore. The CIAA includes a dozen Division II Historically Black Colleges and Universities, including Police Chief Shon Barnes’ alma mater, Elizabeth City State University in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
A spokesperson told PubliCola last week that the department also “plans one coordinated annual recruitment trip that includes multiple universities in close geographic proximity, including several Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Consolidating multiple campus visits into a single trip allows for efficient use of travel resources while expanding outreach to historically underrepresented populations in law enforcement. These efforts are intentional, strategic, and aligned with our long-term workforce diversity goals.”
The SPD spokesperson said the inclusion of Barnes’ alma mater, which has about 2,300 students, was coincidental.
“The department prioritizes events that provide demonstrated applicant yield, and broad and diverse candidate pools,” the spokesperson said. “Our goal is to use our finite recruitment resources where they will produce measurable impact while expanding awareness of opportunities in Seattle.”
A majority of the CIAA colleges have fewer than 2,000 students, and several have student bodies in the hundreds. The spokesperson said SPD has no specific metric for measuring whether a recruitment event was an effective use of city resources, such as the number of people who applied after an event.
“Recruitment success is measured through overall applicant pipeline growth, diversity metrics, and long-term hiring outcomes rather than a single-event numeric target,” the spokesperson said. “Since implementing a more strategic and dedicated recruitment approach, SPD has seen applicant numbers reach historic levels.”
In fact, recruitment spiked shortly after the city signed a labor agreement with the police guild that boosted starting salaries to nearly $120,000, and more than $126,000 after a six-month training period, making Seattle one of the highest-paying police departments in the country. The raises represented a 42 percent pay boost over just five years.
The recruitment tour has included other stops outside the Pacific Northwest. This month alone, according to SPD’s recruitment events page, SPD has sent recruitment teams to a women’s softball tournament in Clearwater, Florida, as well as a Rutgers University event in Piscatawy, New Jersey; the University of Idaho; Brigham Young University; Utah Valley University; and Utah State University.
With the exception of the CIAA schools and Rutgers, most of the colleges and universities where SPD is holding recruitment events, including those in the Pacific Northwest, have student bodies that are more than 70 percent white.
The spokesperson said Barnes did not participate directly in the recruitment events.
Conservative talk show host Jason Rantz reported today that SPD was the “corporate sponsor” for the CIAA tournament and wrote the group a $25,000 check. We have reached out to SPD to ask whether they believe this sponsorship complies with state law prohibiting gifts of public funds.
Screenshot via YouTube.
2. Barnes did take a trip to Washington D.C. recently, accompanied by his security detail, where he attended a recording of a Tiny Desk Concert by Jill Scott, part of the long-running NPR series. A photo Barnes posted on Facebook shows him in the crowd, along with two members of his security.
SPD did not immediately respond to a question about how much it cost to provide Barnes with security while he attended the NPR concert. A spokesman told us late Wednesday afternoon that Barnes was in D.C. last November to attend the Active Bystander for Law Enforcement conference, “a nationally recognized program that trains officers to intervene when they spot officer misconduct and provides resources for officer health and wellness.”
During a tense meeting of the Seattle City Council’s public safety committee on Tuesday, Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department chief Amy Barden said a labor agreement between the city and the police guild has prevented the CARE Team, a group of social workers trained to respond to mental health crisis calls, from doing their jobs effectively. “It is unacceptable to not fully maximize this important team, and it’s also unacceptable to waste even one dollar in such a challenging budget environment,” Barden said bluntly.
As PubliCola has reported, the CARE Team has to operate under the limitations of a Memorandum of Understanding adopted as part of the Seattle Police Officers Guild contract last year.
But the contract also includes many restrictions that result in police, rather than CARE, continuing to respond to most 911 calls. (A police sergeant determines which calls get routed to CARE—another way in which the team’s work remains directed and constrained by the police department.) Those limitations prohibit the team from responding to calls if “drug paraphernalia,” such as foil or a pipe, is visible; if a person seems likely to be “confrontational”; if a person in crisis is inside a building or car; or if there is an “indication” that the person has committed any crime, among many other restrictions.
The new rules also prohibit CARE from responding if a minor is present—a factor that could be contributing to a gender imbalance in the type of people CARE assists. “Perhaps we are not serving women as often as we should, because they have children with them,” Barden said.
CARE is not a party to that contract, and Barden did not see the new restrictions on her team until after labor negotiations wrapped up and the contract became public.
Last week, Barden said, the CARE team was told 911 would not dispatch the team, with or without police officers present, to any “private property where someone could be trespassed” for a crime, such as shoplifting. “What this means—and this actually happened last night—is that someone can be in a QFC parking lot, clearly struggling mentally or emotionally, and when that QFC employee calls 911 and asks if we can send someone to provide resources, our only option is to send an officer. We are not even permitted to send an officer and dual dispatch the CARE responders at the same time.”
The way Seattle’s 911 system is set up, a police sergeant decides in the moment whether calls can be dispatched to CARE, effectively putting police in charge of a separate public safety department. In the incident Monday night, an SPD sergeant determined that CARE couldn’t respond to a crisis call on the sidewalk outside a QFC in the North Precinct because they were near the QFC door; a 911 dispatcher sent police instead.
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The CARE Team is the only group of non-SPD first responders that is explicitly prohibited from responding to crises in specific locations and scenarios. The Fire Department, Health One (operated by SFD), and SPD’s civilian Community Service Officers have no similar restrictions. Under the restrictions, Barden said, CARE can only respond to between 10 and 20 of the 2,400 calls 911 receives on a typical day. “Today, we estimate that the 24 responders are, on average, fulfilling only 28% of their capacity due to the constraints described,” Barden said.
When the city first started discussing whether a team of unarmed social workers could respond to 911 calls, back in 2020, police argued that they needed to be on hand in case the situation escalated and suddenly became dangerous.
After a lengthy public debate, CARE began as a “dual-dispatch” system in which CARE responders would have to wait for police to accompany them and confirm that the scene was safe before letting them proceed. The SPOG contract adopted last year allowed CARE, for the first time, to respond to certain 911 calls without a police escort, and lifted restrictions on the size of the team. This year, the CARE Team is supposed to expand to 48 people.
On Tuesday, Chief Barnes resuscitated many of the same talking points police made in the years leading up to the latest contract, arguing that it’s risky to send social workers out on calls that might start as something that seems innocuous, like trespassing, and escalate into violence. For instance, Barnes said, he once had a gun pointed at him while responding to a call that was originally reported as “dementia.” You just never know, Barnes suggested, when a situation might go off the rails. But according to Barden, the CARE team has only had to call police for additional assistance 16 times since 2023, and never because a team member was in physical danger, because they only respond to calls that are unlikely to escalate, based on the analysis of 911 call outcomes that preceded CARE’s deployment,
Barnes seemed particularly affronted at the idea (which, to be clear, no one had suggested) that police don’t care about the communities where they work,
“Most police officers that I have learned from and work with, they want to serve their community, too, and simply having a badge and gun doesn’t mean that we don’t care,” Barnes said. “Doesn’t mean that we don’t have children with autism. Doesn’t mean we don’t have parents that are suffering from dementia. And we want to serve our community just like everyone else. Just because we have a badge and a gun doesn’t mean that we should be relegated to certain types of calls.”
CARE, like the other 130-plus unarmed first-responder teams that exist across the nation, was created in response to community outcry against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and local killings by police, including Charleena Lyles, a woman experiencing a mental health crisis who was shot by two officers after she called 911 in 2017.
The demand for unarmed first responders, in other words, originated with Seattle residents who demanded an alternative to police response. By design, programs like CARE “relegate” police to other types of calls. The fact that Barnes seems eager to relitigate this settled question seems to suggest the former Madison police chief hasn’t fully bought in to the way alternative response works in Seattle.
It’s unclear if the city can change the agreement that restricts CARE from responding to most calls without reopening the entire SPOG contract, which isn’t up for renewal until 2028. Barnes said he talked to the new head of the SPOG, Ken Loux, recently, and Loux “informed me, and he said I could say this publicly, that they support CARE, but they want to abide by the MOU or the agreement, that’s it.””
Alison Holcomb, Mayor Katie Wilson’s public safety advisor, told the council that Wilson’s office “is actively consulting with the city attorney’s office on the proper interpretation of the collective bargaining agreement and this particular addendum, referred to as the CARE MOU, and we hope to have an answer about what potential next steps could look like in the near future.”
To read my live reporting on Tuesday’s meeting, which includes reactions from city council members and more comments from Barden and Barnes, check out my Bluesky thread.
Mayor Wilson walks back opposition to surveillance cameras, Councilmember Lin wants to repeal stadium district housing law, state commission deals a blow to public defense, and more.
A state commission ruled that King County was not required to bargain with unionized staff for the county’s Department of Public Defense (DPD) before moving inmates from the King County jail in downtown Seattle to the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), a decision with potentially serious implications for caseloads and staffing levels at DPD and other public defense agencies.
A $29,011,000 settlement in the 2023 killing of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck in a crosswalk by a Seattle police officer driving 74 miles an hour in a 25-mile-an-hour zone, maxed out the city’s insurance policy, which has a $10 million deductible and a maximum of $20 million. Rising insurance claims, including from settlements with SPD, are putting a strain on the city’s budget.
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In her first State of the City speech, Mayor Katie Wilson outlined a policy agenda that was still short on details—and punted on major issues, such as how she plans to add 1,000 new shelter beds this year and whether she will expand police surveillance cameras into more Seattle neighborhoods.
Our first guest on Seattle Nice this week was former Democratic state legislator-turned-Seattle Chamber leader Joe Nguyen, who told us 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.
Seattle City Councilmember Eddie Lin is introducing legislation to repeal a law that would have allowed apartments in the Stadium District just south of downtown, undoing a longstanding priority of housing developers and handing a significant win to the Port of Seattle and unions representing port workers.
In an exclusive interview, Mayor Katie Wilson elaborated on her plans for her first year, telling us how her position has changed on police cameras since taking office and how she plans to balance her campaign commitment to add 1,000 new shelter beds by the end of the year with a budget deficit and the need to build permanent housing.
