With the second phase of the city’s comprehensive plan well underway (and the next two planned), the city is starting to implement the zoning that makes the new comp plan, designed under former mayor Harrell, a reality. And there’s still time for Harrell’s urbanist replacement, Katie Wilson, to put a pro-housing stamp on the city’s main planning document.
The Seattle Police Department complied with a court ruling by giving people with more than one open public disclosure request an actual (if moveable) date when they plan to provide records for each request. Previously, SPD discouraged people from filing more than one records requests by placing every request but one in “inactive” status.
After okaying Mayor Wilson’s decision to hire Purpose Dignity Action director Lisa Daugaard as a temporary advisor on homelessness, the city’s ethics director reversed course, advising Daugaard that the hire represented a potential conflict of interest. As a result, Daugaard—an influential member of Wilson’s transition team—left her new position just 10 days into her planned six months at the mayor’s office.
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Police Chief Shon Barnes was out of town over the weekend, when a spate of shootings left three dead and three injured. SPD wouldn’t say where he was (we asked), but his family lives in Chicago and he visits them at home regularly on weekends while renting an apartment in Seattle.
In his latest Maybe Metropolis column, Josh Feit reports on a Washington state proposal that would make accessible housing more affordable by reforming elevator standards that too often result in no elevators in new buildings at all.
Late last month, a King County Superior Court judge ruled that the Seattle Police Department’s policy of considering no more than one public disclosure request from the same person at a time, leaving subsequent requests in an indefinite “inactive” status, violates the state Public Disclosure Act.
The policy, called “grouping,” has been allowed in Seattle since 2017, when then-mayor Ed Murray and the City Council passed legislation aimed at preventing people from using bots to file dozens or hundreds of requests at a time.
In practice, SPD has been the only city department to deploy grouping on a mass scale, allowing the police to delay or deny disclosure for years by responding to every request by the same requester, in full, before even starting on subsequent requests. The Seattle Times sued to stop the practice, secured an agreement from SPD that they wouldn’t group requests from any requester that were more than eight weeks apart, and sued again when SPD failed to abide by their agreement. (PubliCola filed a declaration in support of the Times’ position).
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This week, SPD finally took action to comply with Superior Court Judge Sandra Widian’s ruling, sending notices with actual dates when the first (or next) installments of records will be available. PubliCola has nine outstanding requests with SPD, including some that SPD had been working on before they stopped responding to all our requests but one in November 2024; on Tuesday, SPD sent us new dates for all of our stalled requests. Each response said that SPD was providing these estimates “pursuant to a court order.”
SPD, of course, can push back these dates individually in the future, delaying disclosure in a way that appears more transparent than its previous practice of providing end-of-year “placeholder” dates for every request that move forward at the end of every year.
And in PubliCola’s case at least, SPD’s responses will still be far from timely: SPD now says they’ll provide new records for our oldest outstanding request, from June 2023, by July 2026, and we won’t see a single document from our most recent request, from December 2024, until June at the earliest. (That request, appropriately enough, is for correspondence between the public disclosure office and other records requesters about “grouping” in 2024). But perhaps it’s a sign of progress that SPD appears to be complying with this court order, so far. We’ll let you know in June.
King County Superior Court Judge Sandra Widian ruled on Monday that the Seattle Police Department routinely “violates the PRA”—the state Public Records Act—by refusing to work on more than one public disclosure request by the same requester at a time.
The ruling was a partial win by the Seattle Times, which sued SPD after the department slow-walked reporter Mike Carter’s requests by Times by choosing to respond to a single request while providing end-of-year “placeholder” dates the other six. As they have done with all but one of PubliCola’s outstanding records requests, SPD bumped this generic December 31 date forward a year at the end of each year without doing any work on any of the “inactive” requests or providing an actual date when records would be available.
In 2023, SPD signed a pre-litigation agreement with the Times in which they committed to stop grouping multiple requests that were more than eight weeks apart. Although the agreement applied broadly to all requesters, SPD later told PubliCola that it only applied to the Times, and decided it applied to as few as two requests made by any requester, including the Seattle Times, over any period of time—so that, for example, a person who filed two requests over two years could have their second request placed in inactive status indefinitely with no actual estimate date for disclosure, which is required by law.
At a hearing at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent last Friday, SPD’s outside attorney, Jessica Goldman, argued that SPD is “inherently different” than an agency at a smaller city, because they get thousands of requests; for that reason, “we’re not going to make requesters happy sometimes. And I want to say on behalf of the Seattle Police Department that every single one of them wishes they could they had more resources and could provide responsive records the day they’re requested. Who doesn’t? This is not an issue of trying to hide the ball.”
By making five records requests in one day, Goldman added, Carter was “gaming the system”—asking for too many things at once to cause “excessive interference with [the] agency’s functions” and make it harder for them to respond to other requesters. As we’ve reported, SPD’s media relations office frequently directs reporters to file records requests for extremely basic information, such as a full police report or a person’s Outlook schedule, the subject of one of Carter’s long-delayed requests.
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The Times’ attorney, Kathy George, countered that SPD can’t simply complain that it has too many records requests. “And this notion that somehow, if you actually process every request when it comes in, that’s harmful, that’s backwards. It’s not harmful to actually fulfill your duties under the PRA—it’s exactly what the PRA requires.”
One fact that came out in discovery is that SPD’s public records office does treat media requests differently than other requests, by assigning them to “analysts” with lower records production requirements, rather than the “assistants” to whom non-media records requests are assigned. This raises the possibility that media requests get answers more slowly because they’re assigned to people who move through records requests at half the pace of lower-level public records employees, an especially troubling possibility if public records officers are also giving preferential treatment to “friendly” media, as the Times’ lawsuit alleges.
Judge Widian wrote that SPD’s defense of its “grouping” policy—that “because the requests are all grouped together … providing installment updates as to one request fulfills SPD’s obligation to provide reasonable installment estimates as to all the other requests it has declared ‘inactive’—is a novel argument that has not been endorsed by the PRA or caselaw.” In other words, SPD can’t just pick one request to work on, ignore all the others, and fail to give real estimates of when the others will be fulfilled.
But the judge declined to overturn the 2017 administrative rule, adopted at the behest of then-mayor Ed Murray, that allows grouping in the first place, saying that was something the city would have to determine on its own.
Nor did she determine SPD showed preferential treatment to KOMO, a TV station owned by the conservative Sinclair network, when it quickly provided a KOMO reporter with travel records for former police chief Adrian Diaz and his chief of staff Jamie Tompkins within a month after failing to provide the same records to Carter for nearly two years. Whether SPD showed favoritism to KOMO and deliberately ignored the Times, and when SPD must change its public records practices, is still on the table.
PubliCola was unable to find the original hearing or rationale for the administrative rule that allowed city agencies to “group” multiple records in the first place, but the language of the rule itself makes clear that it was intended to address bots, DDoS attacks, malware, and malicious “extraordinary requests,” none of which apply to the media requests SPD has been de facto denying.
Mayor Katie Wilson has the unilateral authority to repeal the “grouping” rule through an administrative rulemaking process that requires a public hearing but no legislation.
Brian Maxey and Rebecca Boatright, two long-serving civilian employees fired by Police Chief Shon Barnes last month
Fired SPD employees allege retaliation by police chief, Harrell pre-election request sent Seattle Channel staffers scrambling, and more news to close out 2025.
Police Chief Shon Barnes took a nearly two-week vacation over the holidays, leaving various deputies in charge while he was off duty. Barnes, whose family lives in Chicago, has previously come under scrutiny for spending many of his weekends out of town.
The Seattle Police Department claims two recent operations targeting a strip club and men who pay for sex successfully targeted human trafficking and sexual exploitation. But they wouldn’t answer questions seeking more detailed information about the two announcements, such as whether the strip club sting led to any actual charges and a request for police reports.
Former Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office said his 2025 budget video was nothing unusual and didn’t cost the city any extra money. But records reveal that the multi-location video was a last-minute request that required Seattle Channel staffers to drop what they were doing and work overtime on a weekend to film and produce a 15-minute film with virtually no notice, just a few weeks before ballots dropped for the 2025 mayoral election.
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In recent years, the police department’s policy toward public disclosure requests has ossified into a kind of tacit refusal via delay. “Grouping,” SPD’s practice of refusing to respond to more than one request from the same person or outlet at a time, is the subject of at least one lawsuit, but SPD also now forces the media and public to file records requests for information that used to be easy to obtain, exacerbating the problem. Mayor Wilson should seek an audit to get to the bottom of SPD’s intrasigence, and make them follow the public records act in practice, not just in theory.
Two top civilian SPD employees who were fired by Police Chief Shon Barnes, Rebecca Boatright and Brian Maxey, have filed tort claims seeking $11 million for what they describe as retaliation. The tort says they advised Barnes against decisions that were widely perceived as anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ, and Boatright also says she was discriminated against because of her gender.
A few of PubliCola’s records requests that have been “grouped” by the Seattle Police Department. SPD’s public disclosure unit will not begin (or resume) responding to any of these requests until they’ve completed the one they’re currently working on. We filed that one, for information about SPD’s use of generative AI, in September; so far, we’ve only gotten only a delay notice in response.
SPD has shown they won’t comply with the state Public Records Act on their own. So make them.
Erica C. Barnett
It’s time for the city to audit the Seattle Police Department’s public disclosure office—and, if they ignore the auditor’s recommendations, for incoming Mayor Katie Wilson to force SPD to follow the law.
The state Public Records Act makes it clear that the government’s obligation to disclose information is no trivial responsibility. “The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them,” the PRA says. “The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”
For years, SPD has failed to comply with this bedrock premise. Instead, they’ve evaded disclosure by delaying responses until the records they’ve held back are no longer timely, refusing to work on more than one request at a time, and using the public disclosure process to conceal information that used to be public as a matter of course, including police reports and responses to basic factual questions.
Public disclosure of public information is in everyone’s interest, but for PubliCola and other media outlets, the availability of public records also affects our ability to keep our readers informed. Currently, PubliCola has 10 open records requests with SPD, with the oldest dating back to mid-2023. (We had older unfulfilled requests, but closed them in an effort to triage requests that were still relatively timely).
In all of 2025, SPD provided a single document in response to one of our public disclosure requests—a one-page Excel spreadsheet showing the total compensation for police officers in 2024.
Not only did SPD fail to meaningfully respond to our outstanding requests, they will no longer respond to more than one request at a time from individuals or entities with multiple requests. This practice, known as “grouping,” violates a 2023 agreement between the city and the Seattle Times, which is currently fighting SPD in court to eliminate grouping entirely. It also appears to violate the Public Records Act, which requires agencies to respond to individual requests “promptly,” with specific estimates for the time it will take to respond to each request.
As the Times’ recent motion for summary judgment puts it, “The Grouping Policy denies prompt responses to those disfavored requesters who cannot wait for an old request to slowly emerge from SPD’s backlog before making a new request. … Nothing in the PRA authorizes an agency to choose which requests to process and which ones to leave on a dusty shelf.”
I’ve filed a declaration in support of the Times’ latest lawsuit, describing the ways in which SPD has thwarted PubliCola’s requests for public records and how these actions have affected my ability to keep the public informed about what SPD is up to—from former chief Diaz’ alleged coverup of an unethical affair with a staffer he hired into a specially created position, to the investigation into a police union official who whooped it up over the killing of a pedestrian by a speeding cop. Times reporter Mike Carter’s own declaration shows a similar pattern of selective inaction by SPD—including one request for which he waited 19 months, only to receive the documents unexpectedly because SPD fast-tracked a similar request from a KOMO reporter.
If the Times prevails over SPD, it will directly benefit those in the public and independent press who can’t afford to fight years-long legal battles against the deep-pocketed police department. Meanwhile, though, SPD is still claiming the right to effectively deny records requests by putting them off for years. Earlier this month, the department moved its generic “placeholder date” for PubliCola’s nine inactive “grouped” requests from December 31, 2025 to December 31, 2026. Unless something changes, the remaining unfilled requests will get pushed forward to 2027 at the end of next year.
The single PubliCola records request SPD says it is working on—for information about SPD’s use of generative AI—has already been delayed by three months, until January, and could move again. Until SPD has finished responding to this one request, they will do no work at all on our other nine requests.
Because SPD refuses to process more than one request at a time, I have stopped filing records requests with them. It’s pointless. In effect, their obstructive decisions have succeeded—whether I go through the motions of filing a request or not, SPD will never respond “promptly,” as required by the PRA, or provide the “fullest assistance” the law requires.
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So, in addition to conducting a formal audit, Mayor-elect Wilson should send down legislation to eliminate “grouping,” which has not accomplished its purported goal of weeding out bot requests and those that are excessively burdensome or “extraordinarily broad.” If bots are a problem, separate legislation can address that issue; if a huge number of people are filing harassing or unreasonable requests, the burden should be on SPD to prove this is happening, and to work with the mayor and city council on legislation to address that narrow problem. SPD is currently using city dollars in a legal battle to use “grouping” to conceal public records. It’s long past time (and should not require a lengthy legal battle) to take this tool away from them.
SPD’s lack of compliance with basic public disclosure standards has gotten worse in recent years. But it isn’t new. In 2015, the City Auditor’s Office audited SPD’s public disclosure unit and found serious problems with how the office handles public disclosure requests.
That audit recommended that SPD hire more public disclosure officers, implement a centralized system for managing records requests, and streamline the response process by handling simple requests before more complex ones and prioritizing timely responses. It also recommended some basic best practices—like asking requesters for clarification when necessary and “proactively communicat[ing]” with people who ask for records—something that currently does not happen consistently, if at all.
SPD did not concur with most of the 13 recommendations in the 2015 audit, agreeing explicitly with just two—the recommendation to hire more public disclosure staff, and the one suggesting they set up a new records management system. Over the past 10 years, SPD has added nine new positions to the public disclosure unit to keep up with the increasing pace of requests, up from just five in 2014. That’s a positive step on paper, but it doesn’t actually help if public disclosure officers are steeped in SPD’s current culture of concealment.
Another practice SPD uses to evade public disclosure is expanding the type of records the department refuses to hand over without a public disclosure request.
In the recent past, for instance, SPD put ordinary police reports online as a matter of course—an extension of the department’s earlier practice of printing out copies of police reports and making them available at police precincts. (Yes, you could just walk in to any precinct and grab the day’s police reports!)
Today, police reports are no longer available to the general public through SPD’s website and the reports SPD provides to media (when they choose to do so) consist of heavily redacted and edited “narratives” that omit important information that the public generally has the right to know, such as the names of the officers who respond to calls and write the reports.
Additionally, SPD sometimes refuses to provide police reports, including those cleaned-up narratives, without explanation. Although SPD’s policy manual says explicitly that “Media Representatives May Obtain Copies of Police Reports Through the Public Affairs Unit,” that unit frequently directs PubliCola to file a records request for police reports.
This “file a records request” brushoff applies not just to written reports but to questions of all kinds. If SPD’s communications office—headed, under Police Chief Shon Barnes, by a former corporate PR representative with no prior experience in government—doesn’t want to answer a question, “file a records request” is a polite synonym for “fuck off.” Too far? Not when you consider that even the simplest records requests often take years—if I want to know about a crime that took place downtown last night, the Wilson administration could be halfway over before I find out.
The police, in short, are getting away with refusing to follow the letter and spirit of our state’s strongly worded public disclosure law—a law explicitly designed to ensure that the public has access to information that isn’t mediated and managed by government agencies and their press offices.
SPD has made it very clear that they won’t meet their legal obligation to provide public records unless they’re forced to do so—by legislation, a court order, or a directive from the mayor, who has the ability to fire for reprimand the police chief if his department is failing to comply with expectations.
It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the Seattle Times will prevail in its current attempt to get SPD to stop grouping records requests, taking away one of the department’s current methods for withholding public documents.
But undoing a culture of obfuscation could require forcing, rather than asking, SPD to meet its obligation to provide records that ultimately belong to us, the public.
An audit laser-focused on these tactics will outline the problem and lay out solutions and a timeline for compliance. Mayor Wilson can then show she’s serious about transparency by requiring SPD to show progress on public disclosure, and holding Chief Barnes directly accountable if his department fails to act. SPD has had plenty of chances (and received plenty of public funding) to fix a broken process. It’s time they face consequences for their inaction.
During the holidays, a rotating group of deputies will take over for Police Chief Shon Barnes, who’s out of town.
1. If you’re wondering who’s in charge at the Seattle Police Department during the historically busy holiday season, including New Year’s Eve, it isn’t Police Chief Shon Barnes, who’s been taking a two-week vacation since December 20. Barnes’ family lives in Chicago, and he has not bought a home in Seattle, continuing a practice from his days as police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, when his family remained in Chicago.
During Barnes’ absence, the role of Acting Chief of Police will rotate between Deputy Chief Yvonne Underwood, Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis, and Deputy Chief Andre Sayles. Underwood and Davis were at SPD prior to Barnes’ arrival; Sayles was previously police chief in Beloit, Wisconsin, a small town outside Madison with a population of 36,000.
Police chiefs are generally expected to be on call for incidents that happen outside regular working hours, including on weekends, evenings, and holidays, and typically show up in person at events that involve a major police response, which isn’t possible when the chief is out of town.
SPD’s communications office did not respond to a list of questions about Barnes’ lengthy absence. Earlier this year, when PubliCola asked why Barnes was spending almost every weekend out of town, a spokesperson told us that crime was down and that Barnes was “tirelessly working to protect the Seattle community.”
Historically, Seattle’s police chiefs have lived in or near Seattle full-time, as have other high-ranking SPD officials, making Barnes’ administration an outlier. At least three of Barnes’ top staffers reportedly rent apartments in Seattle while their families live in their permanent homes out of state.
During Barnes’ time out of the office, he will earn just under $12,500.
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2. SPD’s communications office also declined to respond to questions about two recent operations—one involving alleged “human trafficking” at a strip club on Aurora, and one about the “Dear John” letters SPD sends to men whose cars they photograph during sting operations targeting menwho pay for sex. The department announced both anti-prostitution operations with blog posts claiming success at fighting sexual exploitation, the legal term the city uses to describe any exchange of money for sex, but said they could not answer any questions about either announcement because “This [sic] is an open investigation.”
Another spokesperson declined to provide copies of the three police reports related to their strip club sting, telling us to file a records request. (In the past, SPD put police reports online, but they have made these public records increasingly inaccessible). PubliCola does not file records requests with SPD because they do not meaningfully respond to them. In 2025, SPD provided a single one-page document in response to one of our 10 unfulfilled requests, which go back to 2023, giving us a new “placeholder date” of December 31, 2026 for the rest of our requests.
A spokesperson for the King County Prosecutor’s Office said the city has not referred any cases from the strip club sting for charging or a first appearance, despite the seriousness of SPD’s allegations—human trafficking is a Class A felony.
As for the “Dear John” notices, which are designed to embarrass men who pay for sex and potentially sprak explosive conflicts with their partners,, SPD did eventually provide the sample letter we requested. It says the women and girls who work on Aurora are “almost always the victims of criminal trafficking” and that prostitution “is not a victimless crime.”
The letters include photos taken by police conducting the stings and note that any vehicle used when buying sex is subject to impoundment, with fees that “often exceed $2,000” to get a vehicle back.
SPD’s legal counsel reportedly argued against sending the letters on the grounds that people have a right to privacy in their own homes, opening the department up to potential lawsuits.
